At the helm of key positions in the civil rights movement were socialists like A. Philip Randolph, who had cut his teeth in the Socialist Party and as the leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Bayard Rustin, whose activist life included stints in the antiwar movement, Communist Party, and Socialist Party. Even King called himself a democratic socialist. He had been recruited to the Montgomery Bus Boycott campaign by a labor organizer, E. D. Nixon, who had honed his politics and skills in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. King’s final speech, the night before he was murdered, was delivered to Memphis sanitation workers who were on strike.
The socialist traditions of mass action and of struggle from below were also integral to the civil rights movement’s strategy. That movement overturned the white-supremacist Jim Crow order not simply by electing politicians sympathetic to civil rights (though it did that, too), but also by marching, getting arrested in civil disobedience actions, launching boycotts, and going on strike. Sanders’s participation in the most important American social movement of the twentieth century helped shape his views on the necessity of mass movements to win social change.
“My activities here in Chicago taught me a very important lesson that I have never forgotten,” Sanders said at a 2019 rally in front of 10,000 people in the city. “Real change never takes place from the top on down. It always takes place from the bottom on up.”
In Chicago, Sanders’s activities were not restricted to the civil rights movement. He also joined the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), the youth section of the Socialist Party. “It helped me put two and two together, in my mind,” Sanders said later about his time in the YPSL. “We don’t like poverty, we don’t like racism, we don’t like war, we don’t like exploitation. What do they all have in common? … What does wealth and power mean? How does it influence politics?”
This early experience with the socialist movement clearly made a deep impression—so deep that Sanders persisted in calling himself a socialist for the rest of his life, through all the decades during which the term was toxic. That persistence in claiming the socialist label led many to write him off as an eccentric over the years, but by refusing to give it up, Sanders helped popularize socialism decades later. His political steadfastness and stubbornness paid off.
When Sanders left the University of Chicago, he never rejoined a socialist group (though he did occasionally give speeches, for example, at Democratic Socialists of America conventions). But you can see the perspective he gained from joining that group stamped on his entire subsequent political career.
One thing Sanders inherited from the socialist tradition is a fundamental belief that the rich are not your friends, that we need to combat the wealthy and powerful rather than cozy up to them to make social change happen. Because a small number of elites benefit from our political and economic system as it is, Sanders believes they will never voluntarily give it up. The way to advance the interests of the vast majority is through conflict, not around it.
His rhetoric identifies social problems, then names the small group of powerful people who are creating those social problems, and says we have go to battle against them. That rhetoric stands in stark contrast to the dominant approach of the Democratic Party, even of its “progressive” wing, which is reticent about that need to name and shame and fight and dispossess the great hoarders of wealth in our society. Consider the difference between Sanders and the progressive 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren. She said on the Democratic Party presidential debate stage in 2019, “I don’t have a beef with billionaires,” before suggesting they “pitch in.” The Sanders campaign, by contrast, made bumper stickers emblazoned with the words “Billionaires should not exist.” Warren’s approach assumes that the ultra-rich can continue to exist without distorting our politics or immiserating wide swaths of the country. Sanders says the ultra-rich can’t stay ultra-rich.
While Sanders clearly thinks he has an important and unique role to play in the fight for a better world as a high-profile politician, he also constantly emphasizes that the election of one person, even one who has solid political and moral commitments to fight for the many, not the few, isn’t enough to change the world. To do that, we need a mass movement of working-class people. The power of the capitalist class is immense; to overcome it, we need to not just win elections but collectively assemble as millions of people marching in the street, engaging in strikes and boycotts, pressuring politicians, and pushing back against the inevitable retaliation for our victories. This is the socialist argument about how progressive change happens under capitalism: not through the independent actions of benevolent leaders, but by the working class coming together as a class and fighting for itself.
Could Sanders have developed this kind of analysis about the way change occurs under capitalism without joining a socialist organization and participating in a mass grassroots movement? It’s possible, but highly unlikely. Both endeavors give their members and participants a political education about how the world works and a base of experience in making that social change happen that is not found elsewhere. These experiences shaped Sanders’s conception of power in society and sharpened his clarity about which side he was on.
Against the Current
In 1968, the zenith of the decade’s activism, Sanders moved to Vermont. The New Left felt like it was on the march forward; in hindsight, we know that it would soon go into decline. In some ways, Sanders was ahead of the curve. Before the rest of the movement petered out, he became “captivated by rural life” and headed northeast. Many would eventually follow suit, whether to other rural idylls, urban progressive enclaves, or just away from their previous lives as activists.
Bernie didn’t hold a “real job” for years—a biographical detail that opponents try to wield as a cudgel, but which probably resonates with rather than repels downwardly mobile young people today. He made documentaries that he sold to schools and universities, and occasionally wrote for alternative newspapers. Sanders gives a rosy, even petty capitalist gloss to those years in later tellings of his life’s story: in Our Revolution, he calls his radical filmmaking “a reasonably successful small business.”
His friends tell a different story. He was evicted from one apartment, his electricity turned off at another. A friend of his at the time told a journalist in 2015 that Sanders worked a bit as a carpenter, but “he was a shitty carpenter.” He was on unemployment benefits for a while, and was living “just one step above hand to mouth,” another said. Hardly the typical life plan of an aspiring future president.
Sanders eschewed material possessions, a “real job,” and a stable existence. This wasn’t much different than many of his generation post–New Left. The upsurges of the student, civil rights, and antiwar movements began to wane in the 1970s, and some former activists sought personal and political fulfillment by heading “back to the land,” trying to create new, egalitarian worlds by leaving mainstream society behind, sometimes on rural communes, in states like Vermont. Sanders was no hippie, but much as the 1960s movements shaped him into a socialist and activist, the disillusionment of the 1970s shaped him, briefly, as a kind of dropout.
But it is here that Sanders began swimming against the main currents of the Left at the time. At a time when many others in his demographic had begun swapping protest signs for fermentation cookbooks, Sanders’s passion for politics found its first electoral expressions. Shortly after arriving in Vermont, he decided to run for Senate and then governor on the ticket of a small, left-wing third party in Vermont, the Liberty Union Party, in 1972. He ran for Senate again on the Liberty Union ticket in 1974, and then for governor again in 1976.
This wasn’t the path chosen by someone who valued winning political power above all else. He never cracked double digits in these elections. But even while reflecting on