Would the assailants be held accountable without prisons ?

Ten years ago, while socialist Bernie Sanders was making his historic run for the Democratic presidential nomination that drew millions of supporters and promised a “political revolution” to live long past his campaign, I was part of a small revolutionary organization that pooh-poohed him as a faux renegade.

The socialist left at the time had been largely marginal to the American political landscape. This was not only because so few socialists sat in political offices. Organized socialists were unable to insert our ideas, strategies, or demands beyond small meetings and study groups, only occasionally influencing national discourse by being part of movements that showed themselves on the street in mass numbers. But movements naturally ebb and flow, and in their absence, much of the Left would retreat back into itself time and again.

In 2016, Bernie Sanders showed that socialists could be relevant to mainstream discourse, could move the needle on major policy issues, and could do so on the basis of a class politics that resonates widely and deeply around the country. Though he didn’t win that primary nor the following one in 2020, Bernie’s runs transformed the mainstream political landscape and, along with it, the organized left.

The section of the Left that threw itself in with Bernie’s campaigns — most significantly, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — grew exponentially in both numbers and influence and developed a deep well of experience and savvy. The section of the Left that scorned his campaigns in favor of independence from the Democratic Party and time-honored revolutionary principles stagnated or fell apart, leaving DSA and electoral projects at the forefront of an ascendant movement.

The Left was thus reorganized to take the lead from Bernie’s “political revolution,” where electoralism was one important piece of a broad strategy to contend for power and build a mass politics. Ten years on, that political revolution continues to grow, while the approach of smaller socialist sects that had characterized so much of the pre-2016 left has receded into the background. We need not return to the path of permanent outsiders ever again.

With DSA a powerful political force in the country and democratic socialist elected officials making concrete strides forward for working people, the intraleft debates that surfaced in 2016 are largely settled. They offer important lessons about the pitfalls of a sectarian approach that places organizational identity above building the biggest and most powerful left and holds rigidly onto traditional principles above shifting political realities.

Please look at this.