Bernie is attacking “corporate socialism” and hurting socialism
Why the best defense is not mediocre offense
You’ve been an ice cream enthusiast for years and now you’ve been given a surreal opportunity: to sell it to a community of people that’s never had it before. The people there are skeptical — milk, but frozen??? — but your pitch on the benefits are persuasive and practiced. It’s delicious, it’s rich in protein, and eating it is an enjoyable activity all by itself. As you go door to door, you get a mixed reception, but not an overwhelmingly hostile one: some people try a sample and place an order, others are intrigued by the look and sight of the stuff, others still are simply intrigued by the eccentric new visitor. As you gain new customers and friends, however, you come under attack from the longtime business owners who see how you’re threatening their way of life (what now, course after the meal?? Walks in the park???). They start a smear campaign against your product: it makes people fat and lazy, it costs too much, you have to have special tools to serve or eat it. You know, by this point, that you already have some die-hard ice cream converts, but they won’t be able to keep you viable here. It’s time to choose how you’ll respond.
Reader, Bernie is the ice cream salesman and the ice cream is democratic socialism. And he’s currently choosing to respond in a way that’s going to hurt his product, and could very well hurt him as well. As Sanders has gained popularity and notched victories, both the right-wing and center have seen his self-proclaimed democratic socialism as the failsafe opportunity to bring him down. And as they’re coming after ice cream, he’s not really talking about how delicious it is — he’s decided to attack Hard Savory Not-Ice Cream (i.e. butter). What? What indeed.
Whether it’s been pivoting from Billionaire Banking Goon’s attack on socialism or Billionaire Financial Services Goon’s recent debate appearance, Bernie’s primary approach to defending socialism has not been to defend socialism. It has been attacking an idea of “corporate socialism” or, less frequently, “socialism for the rich” that his opponents have benefited from or supported.
By this, the campaign is referring to tax breaks, subsidies, or bailouts that corporations and banks receive from the government. The strategy involves rebranding government support for profiteers as a form of socialism — never-mind the fact such support is distinctly not socialism — and thinking it will advance the socialist cause. It’s taking butter and calling it Hard Savory Not-Ice Cream and thinking that will make the public (a) like ice cream more and (b) like butter less. (Or at the very least, make the butter-zealot into a hypocrite).
Instead, Bernie’s insistence on attacking “corporate socialism” is going to undermine his own campaign message and muddle the public’s understanding of socialism itself. Instead of maintaining his unapologetic, straightforward posture as he usually does, he’s sowing confusion and complications exactly where he shouldn’t: the core ideology holding his movement together.
Under the current strategy, here’s a recap of the messages sent to the public about different types of socialism:
Since Republicans and centrist Democrats would never actually accept “corporate socialism” as a label for their oligarchy development program, the vast majority of time Americans are hearing the word “socialism” they’re hearing negative messages.
Given the word’s lineage, it’s not surprising that it doesn’t function well as a shield for socialism. It is borne from, or responding to a politics, that is avowedly anti-socialist. The turn of phrase seems to evolve from Estes Kefauver and other post World War II anti-monopolists who were critical of the government’s “private socialism” for corporate giants like U.S. Steel. The term was distinctly useful for them precisely because socialism was so disliked: to refer to socialism for corporations was to warn that socialism could then spread to the rest of society.
In to the 1960s, capitalists used the term to attack practices that were helping other types of capitalists or to lament that the US had abandoned free market principles.
Bernie isn’t the first to try to repurpose the concept for the Left, however. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights movement leaders in the 1960s used these phrases as a contrast against the absence of aid for poor Americans.
But the direct precedent for Bernie’s approach is most likely Ralph Nader. Described in a 1971 profile in Fortune as “a sort of latter-day Estes Kefauver,” Nader warned of the “radicals…taking us deeper and deeper into corporate socialism.”
More than forty years later, Nader has continued to talk about “corporate socialism” and now has the chance to make the case for it as an electoral messaging strategy.
Writing last June, in Common Dreams, Nader argued that Sanders should center his campaign on a battle of two socialism’s: democratic and corporate. “Sanders can effectively argue that people must choose either democratic socialism or the current failing system of corporate socialism.That choice is not difficult,” he wrote. “When confronted with the specifics of the corporate state or corporate socialism, people from all political persuasions will recognize the potential perils to our democracy. No one wants to lose essential freedoms or to continue to pay the price of this runaway crony capitalism.”
For Nader, leaning into a message “corporate socialism” is an opportunity for Bernie to detail the ills of government for and by the corporation. It’s not apparent to me why that is only made possible by using the word socialism, but it is apparent to me that relentless repetition of the negative traits people already hear about socialism (anti-democratic, oppressive, expensive) to describe something else people already dislike (greed, the 1%, corruption) will be bad for the idea of socialism.
For those who’ve deployed the phrase before, that didn’t matter so much: they either disliked socialism, too, or could continue their political project without relying on it.
None of Bernie’s predecessors were running on socialism to win national office; none had such an opportunity to (re)introduce Americans to socialism.
While there’s been appropriate hooplah over the Teens loving socialism, nearly 60% of adults have an unfavorable view. More importantly, perhaps, there’s no clear public understanding of what socialism actually is. If either of these things are going to change, there’s no better messenger than America’s most popular socialist.
If America is going to love the new ice cream salesman — if America is going to learn to love ice cream — it won’t be because he spends his time talking about Hard Savory Not-Ice Cream. It’ll be because when faced with criticisms of what he’s selling, he doubles down on its features, he finds new customers, he sells it in new ways.
While I do think that every invocation of “corporate socialism” hurts Bernie as a Democratic candidate because it muddles his message, I’m more concerned with how every mention hurts Bernie, and hurts the rest of us, as socialists. We’re generations away from a world, say, where corporate consultants need to invent something like “corporate socialism” (like “corporate responsibility” or “corporate greening”) in order to fit in to the hegemonic view. If we’re going to get to a place where socialism is the dominant frame, our vision should be clear and our enemy easily identifiable. We ought to attack oligarchy, plutocracy, corruption, and elite capture for what they are: antithetical to democratic socialism. We ought to stop arguing on their terms.
