Without disagreeing that electing Sen. Sanders would likely help — doesn’t the other organizing work look largely the same whether or not he’s elected?
It’s about constituencies, and the constituencies supporting the various programs of economic democracy, corporate regulation, single payer health care, subsidized education and housing, increased criminal penalties for profiteering, price controls, etc. need shared economic engines to supply their work and democratic organizations that execute more effectively than occupy and less fascistically than giant for-profit multinational corporations.
Doug Henwood’s generally pretty solid on economic questions, and I thought his response here was pretty good. As he quickly points out, he was arguing against this sort of reasoning when enthusiasm for the liberatory potential of the Internet was rapidly rising in the mid-1990s. Since then, we’ve seen robber baron empires built on FOSS, and “sharing economy” is now well established as an IT industry term for making people work without pay.
Expropriating the commons was one of the first tricks the bourgeoisie learned, and it hasn’t forgotten it.
