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Notes
1. Updated and modified version of a presentation at a panel discussion “Bernie, Capitalism's Crisis and Democratic Socialism: What Next?” with Rick Wolff, Harriet Fraad and Betsy Avila at the Left Forum, New York, May 22, 2016. A German version has been published in Das Argument 317.
2. I use the concept of “neoliberal capitalism” with the understanding that it would be premature and thus illusory to proclaim a hegemonic crisis of capitalism as such. On the other hand, it could be potentially misleading to talk about a crisis of neoliberalism as though neoliberalism were just a set of political ideas. In reality, it is a material political and ideological formation that has the function of managing the new mode of production of a transnational High-Tech Capitalism (see Haug Citation2003: 41). This “organic” connection might help explain why neoliberal economic policy emerged again and again in different political conjunctures, from Bush to Bill Clinton to Obama, from conservative to social-democratic or even red-green governments as in Germany (Rehmann Citation2014: 272–274, 296).
3. As confirmed by many polls, Sanders could probably have defeated Trump by a much higher margin than Hillary Clinton. See the compilation at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/h-a-goodman/bernie-sanders-will-save-democrats-from-a-trump_b_10255294.html; also the pessimistic forecast of Michael Moore, http://michaelmoore.com/trumpwillwin/.
4. See also Gramsci Citation1975: Q 10.II, §48; Q 11, §12; cf. Jehle Citation1994 and Citation2001.
5. See: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/bernie_sanders_phantom_movement_20160214 Hedges posted this condemnation of Sanders already on February 14, Citation2016, long before Sanders announced his support for Hillary Clinton.
6. Cf. Victor Wallis's nuanced analysis in: http://portside.org/2016-07-27/sanders%E2%80%99-campaign-balance.
8. Just a small section in his platform for racial justice -- http://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-racial-justice/
9. See e.g. http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=14958.
10. Regarding the role of “class” in the ensemble of intersectional discriminations, cf. Wallis Citation2015.
11. According to Cornel West, the co-opted Afro-American leaders and parliamentarians have given up on the “freedom train” of the civil rights movement and follow the “gravy train” instead. It also became clear that the Afro-American bloc began to experience fissures: geographically between southern states, where Clinton could get up to 85 per cent of the votes, and northern states. Among black voters under 30, Sanders won 52 per cent of the votes to Clinton's 47 per cent (http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/huge-split-between-older-younger-blacks-democratic-primary-n580996).
12. Note the nomination of Tara Houska as the new Native American advisor to the Sanders campaign.
13. See the analysis of Bill Fletcher: http://freedomroad.org/2016/08/crush-trump-build-our-movements/.
14. Referring to the European context, which of course has different electoral systems, Mimmo Porcaro has conceptualized such a strategic perspective with the concept of a “connective mass party,” which responded to two opposite shortcomings of progressive movements: on the one hand, the failure of the traditional communist model of a vanguard party; on the other, the limits of “horizontal” social movement networks loosely assembled under the umbrella of the World Social Forum. Instead of avoiding the contested question of political leadership, Porcaro re-conceptualized it as a democratically controlled cross-sectional leadership with the goal of reconstituting the left as a heterogeneous collective agent (Porcaro Citation2011; for the ensuing debate, Candeias Citation2013 and Rehmann Citation2013b).