Bernie Sanders believes the capitalist game is up. In his new and rather furious book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, he argues that until working-class people get organised in the face of corporate tyranny, they’ll exist for the sole purpose of exploitation by the rich and powerful.
The Vermont senator believes capitalism is eating itself and consuming democracy in the process. It’s a conviction Sanders holds deeply and couldn’t conceal beneath comforting centrist-dad platitudes, even if he wanted to.
“People remember the gilded ages where the rich were very rich and children were working in factories,” booms Sanders down the line, in that unmistakable Brooklynite baritone. “The fact is,” he assures me, “we have more income and wealth inequality than we did then.”
According to the World Economic Forum, since the onset of the pandemic, geopolitical turbulence and the resulting economic fallout, the richest one per cent have hoovered up nearly twice as much of the newly generated wealth as the other 99 per cent of humanity.
Unshackled by the constraints of a presidential campaign, Sanders is spoiling for a showdown with a US oligarchy that would sooner see a capitalist sociopath like Trump back in the White House than a mentally sound socialist of his own variety anywhere near it.
“In the United States we have a political system which is corrupt,” Sanders explains, “dominated by billionaires who can spend unlimited amounts of money trying to elect the candidates they’d like, and a media of which 90 per cent of what
