The Socialists are Coming

[xoxoxoBruce]

To arms! To arms! The socialists are coming, the socialists are coming!
Truthout has an interesting take on the upcoming debate between socialists and capitalists.
With the history of Americans voting against their own interests it should be a beaut.

Now to we old timers, throughly steeped in freedom, democracy, truth-justice-and-the-American-way, will shudder at the thought of giving in to those commie bastards. That's because we've been brainwashed to equating Soviet communism and socialism. The Brits chuckle and roll their eyes at our ranting that notion. Actually there are seventy zillion different forms of government that could fall under the "socialist" banner.

But not all of us old timers are stupid, we can see what we have is fucked up, big time. It was fucked up until the Great Depression/World War II, when the "people" started to matter, and the "good life" started to get spread downward. Now the rich & powerful have seized control again, so what's the best way to "take back our country", not from socialists, but from the oligarchs.

Leading polling organizations* have found converging results among younger Americans. Two recent Rasmussen surveys, for instance, discovered that Americans younger than 30 are almost equally divided as to whether capitalism or socialism is preferable. Another Pew survey found those aged 18 to 29 have a more favorable reaction to the term "socialism" by a margin of 49 to 43 percent.

Note carefully: These are the people who will inevitably be creating the next American politics and the next American system.

As economic failure continues to create massive social and economic pain and a stalemated Washington dickers, search for some alternative to the current "system" is likely to continue to grow. It is clearly time to get serious about a different vision for the future. Critically, we need to be far more sophisticated about what a meaningful "systemic design" that might undergird a new direction (whether called "socialism" or whatever) would entail.

* I urge great caution when reading results from these organizations, as to the questions asked, how they were asked, and of whom they were asked.

In a nation in which a mere 400 people own more wealth than the bottom 180 million together, the point should be obvious. What is new in our time in history is that the traditional compromise position - namely progressive, or social democratic or liberal politics - has lost is capacity to offset such power even in the modest (compared, for instance, to many European states) ways the American welfare state once represented. Indeed, the emerging direction is to cut back previous gains in many areas - not to sustain or enlarge them. Even Social Security is now on the table for cuts.

Perhaps the most important reason for the decline of the traditional reform option is the decline of labor: Union membership has steadily decreased from roughly 35 percent of the labor force in 1954, to 11.3 percent now - a mere 6.6 percent in the private sector.

Along with this decay, and give or take an exception here and there, major trends in income and wealth, in civil liberties, in ecological devastation (and the release of climate-changing gases), in poverty and many other important indicators have been "going South" for several decades.

So what's it gonna be, boy... yes... or... no?

[be-bop]

That’s the mistake most right wing supporters make, they equate socialism with the Russian model of communism, which was not communist in the true sense as Russia never had a communist revolution but a Bolshevik one which evolved into a Stalinist dictatorship.

Lenin was an autocrat who did not abide criticism and the Bolsheviks struggled to retain power after the revolution and in the civil war that followed. What happened then and what is happening even today where left wing politics prevail is that there is constant flux and argument and splits and there is never any periods of consolidation to enable true communism/ socialism ideas to mature and make enough difference in peoples lives.

There was period in the Spanish civil war where true communism began to flourish and many ordinary peasant farmers managed to organise farming co-ops and citizen communes and it was starting to work but the Russian communist party fucked that up by taking over the local militias which resulted in splits and in-fighting which allowed Franco and his right wing allies to crush any real change.

Any one with any rational thought process must believe that capitalism has had it’s day and some other system surely should now be looked at,

[richlevy]

Just as there are many flavors of Socialism, what we have in this country now is nowhere near what Adam Smith envisioned as Capitalism.

Are Americans really voting in their 'rational self-interest'? Do current laws really favor what is good for society as a whole?

If we really were living in a "Wealth of Nations" society, and were truly a democratic republic, then everything would be self correcting and wealth would be more distributed.