Bernie Sanders, BLM and the Politics of Intersectionality and Reform: Introduction

NOTE: I will be breaking up my essay on this matter in a series of separate posts that will go up over the course of the next few weeks. Enjoy.

Introduction

Electoral politics in contemporary American society are usually a drab spectacle to observe. The homogenized corporate banality of our two-party system almost beckons most citizens to maintain a comfortable distance from it. To the extent that most Americans are obliged to engage in the political process at all, it is typically in the role of the citizen-consumer — passively choosing between one of two ‘viable’ representatives, who have undergone a thorough process of political commodification.

In lieu of the traditional structural trappings of civic participation in the electoral process, influential ideological apparatuses play an increasingly important role in perpetuating the myth of self-governance in bourgeois democracies. The corporate media, for example, is adept at appealing to the proclivities and dispositions of millions of citizens. As such, its focus on such things as the pageantry of the electoral process, the logistical components of the campaigns, and the personalities of the candidates, is able to cultivate an identification with the political process that serves to obscure its utterly farcical nature.

Despite the complacency of large segments of the American public, disruptions in social accord still manage to find political expression in ways that challenge the status quo. The character of these political tendencies are themselves based on complex interactions between material and ideological forces that challenge the way in which said tendencies engage other political phenomena and ultimately govern their own emancipatory potential.

The Libertarian Deception

I find the so-called Libertarian (a shameful misnomer if ever there were one) movement to be one of the most foul ideological institutions currently undermining all efforts towards building a revolutionary consciousness.

What seemingly began as an effort to reinforce the false consciousness of the future petty bourgeoisie, political class, and professional working class [exposed to the traditional repositories of higher education] has, in recent years, snowballed into a mainstream phenomenon with pretty significant political and economic implications. Now, many workers throughout the West — who might otherwise have had the potential to develop a class consciousness — are being conditioned to base their opinions of economic phenomena on an irrational analytical framework (i.e., Austrian economics) that is just comprehensive and logically consistent enough to seem credible to many reasonably educated and intelligent people. Its broader political framework advances a populist narrative — e.g., ‘opposition’ to central banking, bailouts, and anachronistic/unpopular prohibitions — that even makes it appealing to the relatively apolitical segments of society.