I've heard this brought up many times but I don't really understand the implications of it. I can't really think of a system of government which hasn't killed large numbers of people. Even the USA's early wars like the civil war have death tolls >500k. We also lose ~7k homeless people every year.
Removing the contexts of those deaths makes it very difficult to evaluate the true causes and if the political ideology is to blame or if the centralization of power common across all governments leads to deaths.
He honeymooned in USSR. Which is a rather odd place to honeymoon in 1988. But yes, he never explicitly said he was a communist, but just someone that wants to seize the means of production.
The grocery store thing is a red herring, although its supported by nyc who by your logic is a communist? Thats hardly a definitive test. There are more relevant industries
In a 1976 interview, Sanders said, “I favor the public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries,” and when told that sounded like socialism, he replied, “Of course.”
“public ownership of the major means of production and their conversion into worker-controlled enterprises.”
More recently, Sanders has also been described as backing worker ownership plans, with reporting that he was encouraging workers to take control of the means of production.
How? He said he doesn't think the government should seize the means of production. That's directly relevant to what we're talking about.
> In a 1976 interview, Sanders said, “I favor the public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries,” and when told that sounded like socialism, he replied, “Of course.”
I don't really care what his economic beliefs were 50 years ago. We have a long political career we can draw from. We don't need to cherry pick quotes from when he was 30 to try and find hidden belief systems. He's been pretty consistent his entire career.
> More recently, Sanders has also been described as backing worker ownership plans, with reporting that he was encouraging workers to take control of the means of production
A work ownership plan in a company is completely different from what you implied, which was "Bernie Sanders wants to seize the means of production." You made it sound like he wants to nationalize everything under the sun.
> although its supported by nyc who by your logic is a communist? Thats hardly a definitive test. There are more relevant industries
My god dude. This is an opinion piece from the New York Post, which is a truly bottom of the barrel rag. Why are you posting this? You can plainly see how hard they are stretching the truth here. An actual anti-communist Republican already explained how stupid this article is [1].
They call the United Packinghouse Workers Union a communist organization, which is a flat out lie. The UPWA was a mainstream CIO (later AFL-CIO) union. It wasn't even among the unions the CIO purged in 1949 for being communist-led. By the time Bernie was involved in 1964, the union had formally banned communists from holding office under the AFL-CIO Ethical Practices Code, and Martin Luther King Jr. literally sat on the commission overseeing that compliance. The union is famous historically for its civil rights work, not for being a communist front.
They said Eugene Debs was "arrested for espionage" which is a lie. He was arrested for being critical of the Wilson administration. It was under the "Espionage act," but it was not espionage, just good old-fashioned arresting people for speaking their mind. They neglect to mention Debs refused to join the Communist party when they split off from the Socialist party.
They implied the Young People’s Socialist League was a communist organization, when it was extremely anti-communist.
They said the "American People’s History Society" was an organ for Marxist propaganda, but there's absolutely nothing to suggest that. They are implying this organization had a long history of spreading communist propaganda and that the Eugene Debs film is further evidence of that. But that's not the case. They just made a Eugene Debs film, which by itself, doesn't really rise to the level of Marxist Propaganda. He was a socialist, and an important figure in American History. Or is American History just supposed to cover the Carnegies of the world?
It's funny to watch people pearl clutch over a politician championing workers rights because it might overlap slightly with the politics of a distant revolution while we have a sitting President that kills citizens, bombs children's hospitals, jails journalists, and publicly salivates over the idea of inflicting retribution on anyone left of the alt-right. This is concern trolling at it's finest.
