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The Bernie Sanders Paradox: Murray Bookchin

 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bookchin-sanders

SANDERS’ CLAIM that he has created “open government” in Burlington is premised on a very elastic assumption of what one means by the word “open.“ That Sanders prides himself on being “responsive” to underprivileged people in Burlington who are faced with evictions, lack of heat, wretched housing conditions, and the ills of poverty is not evidence of “openness” — that is, if we assume the term means greater municipal democracy and public participation. What often passes for “open government” in the Sanders cosmos is the mayor’s willingness to hear the complaints and distress signals of his clients and courtiers, not a responsibility to give them any appreciable share in the city’s government. What Sanders dispenses under the name of “open government” is personal paternalism rather than democracy. After six years of Sanders’ paternalism, there is nothing that resembles Berkeley’s elaborate network of grassroots organizations and councils that feed into City Hall.

Sanders is a centralist and his administration, despite its democratic proclivities, tends to look more like a civic oligarchy than a municipal democracy. 

The administration brings greater revenues into the city’s coffers by modernizing the budgetary process, principally by investing its money in high-return institutions, opening city contracts to competitive bidding, centralizing purchasing, and slapping fees on a wide range of items like building permits, utility excavations, private fire and police alarms, and the like.

That Sanders has out-Republicaned the Republicans should not be taken lightly. Viewed in terms of its overall economic policies, the Sanders administration bears certain fascinating similarities to the Reagan administration. What Sanders has adopted with a vengeance is “trickle-down” economics — the philosophy that “growth” for profit has a spillover effect in creating jobs and improving the public welfare. 

 Apart from the condos and so-called “moderate-income” houses that have surfaced in part of the city, housing for the underprivileged is not a recurring theme in Sanders’ speeches except when the mayor is on an electoral warpath. After a tentative stab at some kind of “rent control” which was defeated at the polls on the heels of a huge propaganda blitz by well-to-do property owners, the administration has been reticent about raising rent-control issues generally, let alone making a concerted effort at educating the public about them. Burlington, in effect, is witnessing what one journalistic wag has appropriately called “gentrification with a human face.” 

(...) crucial issues as housing for the poor and elderly, unionization of the grossly underpaid, environmental deterioration, and the rapid attrition of old, socially useful, small concerns that can no longer afford the soaring downtown rentals — all have taken second place during the past year to big structural schemes like a waterfront plan. 

From a residential viewpoint, the “waterfront for the people” had become precisely an “enclave for the rich,” one of the verbal thunderbolts Sanders had directed at the Paquette proposal.

The privileges accorded by the waterfront plan to moneyed people are a reminder that only token aid has been provided to the poor. The methods employed by Sanders to engineer public consent for the plan have been especially offensive: the blitz of ads favoring the mayor’s and Alden Corporation’s version of the scheme, in which Sanderistas found their names listed with those of the most notorious union-busters in the state, stands in sharp contrast with the relatively weak campaigns launched by City Hall on behalf of rent control and improved housing. 

THE ULTIMATE EFFECT Of Sanders’ aging form of “socialism” is to facilitate the ease with which business interests can profit from the city. 

(...) extraordinary privileges Sanders hasprovided to the most predatory enterprises in Burlington — privileges that have been justified by a “socialism” that is committed to “growth,” “planning,” “order,” and a blue-collar “radicalism” that actually yields low-paying jobs and non-union establishments without any regard to the quality of life and environmental well-being of the community at large.

Whether it was because of a shallow productivist notion of “socialism” oriented around “growth” and “efficiency” or simply personal careerism, the Burlington mayor has been guided by a strategy that sacrifices education to mobilization and democratic principles to pragmatic results. This “managerial radicalism” with its technocratic bias and its corporate concern for expansion is bourgeois to the core  

 

 When productivist forms of “socialism” begin to resemble corporate forms of capitalism, it may be well to ask how these inversions occur and whether they are accidental at all.

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So... it's just "socialism" that serves capitalism.

What is Bernie then? Controlled opposition?