Of course he's a socialist

[MeeMie]

Of course he's a socialist

By James Lewis, An American Thinker


Of course he's a socialist. The real question is, how does he feel about America?

His favorite Sunday preacher for the last twenty years is simply obsessed with a frothing hatred for this country. His good buddies Bill and Bernardine have been expressing their rage loud and proud since the Sixties. As president, O tried to put Chas Freeman in charge of the National Intelligence Estimates, a man who is neither competent, nor temperamentally suited, nor emotionally able to restrain his animosity against American Jews who love Israel just as they love America (... because, for one thing, they love democracy, and can recognize fascists even in drag.)

Newsweek tells us we're all socialists now. That's an obvious lie, because the Newsweek socialists like Evan Thomas suffer from regular nightmares that American conservatives will find another Ronald Reagan. But that raised the question of socialism.

Obama danced away from it, of course, when a NYT reporter actually asked him. Whoooo me?

Well, anybody who reads the New Media knows the answer already; and anybody who doesn't know, doesn't want to know. None so blind as will not see.

Our socialists will tell us is that there are 57 varieties of socialism, so that dreaded word doesn't really mean anything after all. Well, tell that to 100 million dead people over the 20th century from Stalin to Mao. Tell it to people starving this very day in North Korea. Tell it to the thousands of Cubans who took to rubber rafts to get to this country. Tell it to the UN-ocrats who are enabling Sudanese genocide because Muslims have an alliance with European socialists at the UN.

Socialism is internationalist, and that means a genuine dual loyalty for a president of the United States. Marxists are convinced there is an inevitable contradiction between love of country and love of humanity. That's why it's called the Socialist International, and why the anthem is the Internationale. They haven't made a secret of it. Internationalist fervor controls their actions, including very successful efforts to whip up black feelings against whites, women against men, and everybody against capitalism, no matter how many billions of people it has raised out of poverty. The whole point about the global warming scam is to empower the internationalist Ruling Class.

All the divisions stoked up by our "idealistic" socialists cut across national boundaries, and the result is to weaken national identities. That's why liberals can't think of a good word to say for this country. That's why Britain is losing its identity to Brussels and the Euro-Soviet Union. When Hillary was running for president, one of her first moves was to drop the word "internationalism" into the media, as a code word to all the True Believers. They got the message, but she still lost because to the Left a young black man is sexier than an aging white female. The Democrats made their decision based on race and gender, and proudly so. That's what it means to be Progressive.

I think Obama is a Third World socialist. It's the basic story of his two autobiographies even before Bill Ayers rewrote them. It's what his runaway father boasted about, back in Kenya, and it's what O's Mercer Island mom encouraged him to become. Socialism was the "in" thing in the post-colonial world, and it led to one economic disaster after another. It took a whole generation for the undeveloped world to recover its common sense. India suffered under the British socialism of Jawaharlal Nehru -- who claimed to be post-colonial, but was in fact indoctrinated by British socialist imperialism himself; he was a victim of a particularly pernicious kind of colonialism. India suffered for decades from that ideological blindness.

India finally came to its senses when it rediscovered the amazing initiative and brains of its talented people, if they were just left alone to surf the web, read the books, learn and teach. South and East Asia have long scholarly traditions; Western math and science is no more difficult than the Sanskrit of the Bhagavat-Gita. While North Korea is still suffering under the Stalinist whip, with hundreds of thousands of people starving, right across the border their extended families prosper in South Korea.

Socialists never have to explain their failures; in the case of Obama, he has never even been asked the only relevant question: What do you say about the murderous failures of socialism wherever it's been seriously tried? None of our media heads will ever ask it, and the New Media, who might, are carefully being kept away from The One. And let's face it, O is not an independent thinker. He wouldn't figure out a way to ask that question himself.

So O apparently believes that the people of color of all races -- Chinese, Malays, Native Americans, Cubans, Hawaiians, Andaman Islanders, Indonesians, Eskimos, Philipinos, Africans, and even Muslims -- have been systematically persecuted by whites. That is bizarrely wrong as a point of fact, if you just look at the actual majority of Asian kids in some of the best American universities today; or if you look at the decades of foreign aid Americans have given to poor nations.

European historical dominance over people of color is purely a function of advanced technology. If the Industrial Revolution had happened in China before Europe, do you really think Imperial China would have been kinder to its colonies than the Brits were to theirs? Would Imperial China have spread democracy and the Enlightenment wherever it traveled? Imperial China was never known for its merciful actions, nor was Imperial Japan. China didn't bother to conquer foreign devils simply because it despised them.

But that's what our President evidently believes. So he owns up to a fundamentally race-based prejudice against hundreds of millions of human beings, including 80 percent of his own voters. That's what it means to be Progressive in the world of O, you see.

That's also apparently what his Attorney General means by saying that Americans are "cowards" on race. In fact, millions of white Americans have been bending over backwards to do the decent thing by black people since long before the Civil War. The abolitionists were nearly all whites; Abraham Lincoln had to face the fearsome prospect of the most destructive war in American history because of irreconcilable differences about slavery. It was the white British Navy that enforced the end of the slave trade across the Atlantic. And yet, African slavery by Africans has never stopped either in Africa or the Middle East.

Ever since the Civil Rights Laws, black politicians have engaged in endless race-baiting directed against whites, in an astonishing imitation of the thuggish racist Dixiecrats of old. J-Wright's Black Liberation Theology is defined as Marxism applied to race. Karl Marx advocated class struggle, the poor to bring down the rich; BLT advocates race struggle against whites. It's not a secret, and it does a lot more damage to black people, who have a much harder time escaping from its intellectual blinders.

So how does Obama feel about this country? Not "America After the Socialist Revolution," but the real America we live in?

I don't pretend to read his mind. But a lot of people are beginning to wonder whether he has different plans than protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States.

It won't be hard to tell, will it?

 

[KingOrfeo]

"Rising to the Occasion: Reimagining Socialism," Barbara Ehrenreich & Bill Fletcher Jr.:

Socialism's all the rage. "We Are All Socialists Now,"Newsweek declares. As the right wing tells it, we're already living in the U.S.S.A. But what do self-identified socialists (and their progressive friends) have to say about the global economic crisis? The following essay will, we hope, kick off a spirited dialogue, with four replies in this issue and more to come here at TheNation.com. --The Editors




If you haven't heard socialists doing much crowing over the fall of capitalism, it isn't just because there aren't enough of us to make an audible crowing sound. We, as much as anyone on Wall Street in, say, 2006, appreciate the resilience of American capitalism--its ability to regroup and find fresh avenues for growth, as it did after the depressions of 1877, 1893 and the 1930s. In fact, The Communist Manifesto can be read not only as an indictment of capitalism but as a breathless paean to its dynamism. And we all know the joke about the Marxist economist who successfully predicted eleven out of the last three recessions.

But this time the patient may not get up from the table, no matter how many times the electroshock paddles of "stimulus" are applied. We seem to have entered the death spiral where rising unemployment leads to reduced consumption and hence to greater unemployment. Any schadenfreude we might be tempted to feel as executives lose their corporate jets and the erstwhile Masters of the Universe wipe egg from their faces is quickly dashed by the ever more vivid suffering around us. Food pantries and shelters can no longer keep up with the demand; millions face old age without pensions and with their savings gutted; we personally are consumed with anxiety about the future that awaits our children and grandchildren.

Besides, it wasn't supposed to happen this way. There was supposed to be a revolution, remember? The socialist idea, prediction, faith or whatever was that capitalism would fall when people got tired of trying to live on the crumbs that fall from the chins of the rich and rose up in some fashion--preferably inclusively, democratically and nonviolently--and seized the wealth for themselves. Such a seizure would have looked nothing like "nationalization" as currently discussed, in which public wealth flows into the private sector with little or no change in the elites that control it or in the way the control is exercised. Our expectation as socialists was that the huge amount of organizing required for revolutionary change would create an infrastructure for governance, built out of--among other puzzle pieces--unions, community organizations, advocacy groups and new organizations of the unemployed and nouveau poor.

It was also supposed to be a simple matter for the masses to take over or "seize" the physical infrastructure of industrial capitalism--the "means of production"--and start putting it to work for the common good. But much of the means of production has fled overseas--to China, for example, that bastion of authoritarian capitalism. When we look around our increasingly shuttered landscape and survey the ruins of finance capitalism, we see bank upon bank, realty and mortgage companies, title companies, insurance companies, credit-rating agencies and call centers, but not enough enterprises making anything we could actually use, like food or pharmaceuticals. In recent years, capitalism has become increasingly and almost mystically abstract. Outside manufacturing and the service sector, fewer and fewer people could explain to their children what they did for a living. The brightest students went into finance, not physics. The biggest urban buildings housed cubicles and computer screens, not assembly lines, laboratories, studios or classrooms. Even our flagship industry, manufacturing autos, would require major retooling to make something we could use--not more cars, let alone more SUVs, but more windmills, buses and trains.

What is most galling, from a socialist perspective, is the dawning notion that capitalism may be leaving us with less than it found on this planet, about 400 years ago, when the capitalist mode of production began to take off. Marx imagined that industrial capitalism had potentially solved the age-old problem of scarcity and that there was plenty to go around if only it was equitably distributed. But industrial capitalism--with some help from industrial communism--has brought about a level of environmental destruction that threatens our species along with countless others. The climate is warming, the oil supply is peaking, the deserts are advancing and the seas are rising and contain fewer and fewer fish for us to eat. You don't have to be a freaky doomster to see that extinction may be what's next on the agenda.

In this situation, with both long-term biological and day-to-day economic survival in doubt, the only relevant question is: do we have a plan, people? Can we see our way out of this and into a just, democratic, sustainable (add your own favorite adjectives) future?

Let's just put it right out on the table: we don't. At least we don't have some blueprint on how to organize society ready to whip out of our pockets. Lest this sound negligent on our part, we should explain that socialism was an idea about how to rearrange ownership and distribution and, to an extent, governance. It assumed that there was a lot worth owning and distributing; it did not imagine having to come up with an entirely new and environmentally sustainable way of life. Furthermore, the history of socialism has been disfigured by too many cadres who had a perfect plan, if only they could win the next debate, carry out a coup or get enough people to fall into line behind them.

But we do understand--and this is one of the things that make us "socialists"--that the absence of a plan, or at least some sort of deliberative process for figuring out what to do, is no longer an option. The great promise of capitalism, as first suggested by Adam Smith and recently enshrined in "market fundamentalism," was that we didn't have to figure anything out, because the market would take care of everything for us. Instead of promoting self-reliance, this version of free enterprise fostered passivity in the face of that inscrutable deity, the Market. Deregulate, let wages fall to their "natural" level, turn what remains of government into an endless source of bounty for contractors--whee! Well, that hasn't worked, and the core idea of socialism still stands: that people can get together and figure out how to solve their problems, or at least a lot of their problems, collectively. That we--not the market or the capitalists or some elite group of über-planners--have to control our own destiny.

We admit: we don't even have a plan for the deliberative process that we know has to replace the anarchic madness of capitalism. Yes, we have some notion of how it should work, based on our experiences with the civil rights movement, the women's movement and the labor movement, as well as with countless cooperative enterprises. This notion centers on what we still call "participatory democracy," in which all voices are heard and all people equally respected. But we have no precise models of participatory democracy on the scale that is currently called for, involving hundreds of millions, and potentially billions, of participants at a time.

What might this look like? There are some intriguing models to study, like the Brazilian Workers Party's famous experiments in developing a participatory budget in Porto Alegre. Z Magazine founder Michael Albert developed a detailed approach to mass-based planning that he calls participatory economics, or "parecon," and one of us (Fletcher, in his book Solidarity Divided, written with Fernando Gapasin) has proposed a locally based network of people's assemblies. But all this is experimental, and we realize that any system for mass democratic planning will be messy. It will stumble; it will be wrong sometimes; and there will be a lot of running back to the drawing board.

But as socialists we know the spirit in which this great project of collective salvation must be undertaken, and that spirit is solidarity. An antique notion until very recently, it flickered into life again in the symbolism and energy of the Obama campaign. The Yes We Can! chant was the slogan of the United Farm Workers movement and went on to be adopted by various unions and community-based organizations to emphasize what large numbers of people can accomplish through collective action. Even Obama's relatively anodyne calls for a new commitment to volunteerism and community service seem to have inspired a spirit of "giving back." If the idea of democratic planning, of controlling our destiny, is the intellectual content of socialism, then solidarity is its emotional energy source--the moral understanding and the searing conviction that, however overwhelming the challenges, we are in this together.

Solidarity, though, is an empty sentiment without organization--ways of thinking and working together, and of connecting the social movements that are battling injustice every day. We see a tremendous opportunity in the bleak fact that millions of Americans have been rendered redundant by the capitalist economy and are free to dedicate their considerable talents to creating a more just and sustainable alternative. But if we are serious about collective survival in the face of our multiple crises, we have to build organizations, including explicitly socialist ones, that can mobilize this talent, develop leadership and advance local struggles. And we have to be serious, because the capitalist elites who have run things so far have forfeited all trust or even respect, and we--progressives of all stripes--are now the only grown-ups around.

 

[KingOrfeo]

"Follow Brazil's Example," Immanuel Wallerstein:

There seem to me to be two occasions, which require two plans for the world left, and in particular for the US left. The first occasion is in the short run. The world is in a deep depression, which will only get worse for at least the next one or two years. The immediate short run is what concerns most people who are facing joblessness, seriously lowered income and in many cases homelessness. If left movements have no plan for this short run, they cannot connect in any meaningful way with most people.

The second occasion is the structural crisis of capitalism as a world system, which is facing, in my opinion, its certain demise in the next twenty to forty years. This is the middle run. And if the left has no plan for this middle run, what replaces capitalism as a world system will be something worse, probably far worse, than the terrible system in which we have been living for the past five centuries.

The two occasions require different, but combined, tactics. What is our short-run situation? The United States has elected a centrist president, whose inclinations are somewhat left of center. The left, or most of it, voted for him for two reasons. The alternative was worse, indeed far worse. So we voted for the lesser evil. The second reason is that we thought Obama's election would open up space for left social movements.

The problem the left faces is nothing new. Such situations are standard fare. Roosevelt in 1933, Attlee in 1945, Mitterrand in 1981, Mandela in 1994, Lula in 2002 were all the Obamas of their place and time. And the list could be infinitely expanded. What does the left do when these figures "disappoint," as they all must do, since they are all centrists, even if left of center?

In my view, the only sensible attitude is that taken by the large, powerful and militant Landless Workers' Movement (MST) in Brazil. The MST supported Lula in 2002, and despite all he failed to do that he had promised, they supported his re-election in 2006. They did it in full cognizance of the limitations of his government, because the alternative was clearly worse. What they also did, however, was to maintain constant pressure on the government--meeting with it, denouncing it publicly when it deserved it and organizing on the ground against its failures.

The MST would be a good model for the US left, if we had anything comparable in terms of a strong social movement. We don't, but that shouldn't stop us from trying to patch one together as best we can and do as the MST does--press Obama openly, publicly and hard--all the time, and of course cheering him on when he does the right thing. What we want from Obama is not social transformation. He neither wishes to, nor is able to, offer us that. We want from him measures that will minimize the pain and suffering of most people right now. That he can do, and that is where pressure on him may make a difference.

The middle run is quite different. And here Obama is irrelevant, as are all the other left-of-center governments. What is going on is the disintegration of capitalism as a world system, not because it can't guarantee welfare for the vast majority (it never could do that) but because it can no longer ensure that capitalists will have the endless accumulation of capital that is their raison d'être. We have arrived at a moment in which neither farsighted capitalists nor their opponents (us) are trying to preserve the system. We are both trying to establish a new system, but of course we have very different, indeed radically opposed, ideas about the nature of such a system.

Because the system has moved very far from equilibrium, it has become chaotic. We are seeing wild fluctuations in all the usual economic indicators--the prices of commodities, the relative value of currencies, the real levels of taxation, the quantity of items produced and traded. Since no one really knows, practically from day to day, where these indicators will shift, no one can sensibly plan anything.

In such a situation, no one is sure what measures will be best, whatever their politics. This practical intellectual confusion lends itself to frantic demagoguery of all kinds. The system is bifurcating, which means that in twenty to forty years there will be some new system, which will create order out of chaos. But we don't know what that system will be.

What can we do? First of all, we must be clear what the battle is about. It is the battle between the spirit of Davos (for a new system that is not capitalism but is nonetheless hierarchical, exploitative and polarizing) and the spirit of Porto Alegre (a new system that is relatively democratic and relatively egalitarian). No lesser evil here. It's one or the other.

What must the left do? Promote intellectual clarity about the fundamental choice. Then organize at a thousand levels and in a thousand ways to push things in the right direction. The primary thing to do is to encourage the decommodification of as much as we can decommodify. The second is to experiment with all kinds of new structures that make better sense in terms of global justice and ecological sanity. And the third thing we must do is to encourage sober optimism. Victory is far from certain. But it is possible.

So, to resume: work in the short run to minimize pain, and in the middle run to ensure that the new system that will emerge will be a better one and not a worse one. But do the latter without triumphalism, and knowing that the struggle will be tremendously difficult.

 

[KingOrfeo]

"Together, We Save the Planet," Bill McKibben:

A few weeks after taking office, Steven Chu, Obama's Nobel Prize-winning energy secretary, gave his first interview, with the Los Angeles Times. The reporter asked him about climate change. "I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen," he said, describing the computer models that showed the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada would melt ever faster in the years ahead. Should that happen, he said, "We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California." And he added, "I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going" either. Well.

In Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher's very fine essay, the most important section is about what has changed: first, the economic carnage all around us, but second--even more important--the wave of environmental destruction crashing over our heads. I'm definitely not a laissez-faire, Ayn Rand, libertarian capitalist. (Is anyone anymore? Alan Greenspan is calling for nationalizing the banks.) But I'm not sure I'm much of a socialist either, because both those faiths seem to me rooted in an earlier moment--a moment when we had some margin. A moment when the problem was growth and how best to make it happen and share its fruits.

That's not our problem anymore. Our problem is how to deal with a crisis that will define our world for the foreseeable future. In November the International Energy Agency announced that all its earlier rosy forecasts about oil supplies were wrong--in fact, the world's oilfields are facing "natural declines" in yield of about 7 percent a year. The fuel for free-market fundamentalism and Marxism was fossil fuel, and we're not going to have it. (Or to the extent we do, and that extent would be coal, we're not going to be able to burn it without triggering even more climate chaos.) The atmosphere that birthed all our ideologies held about 275 parts per million CO2. Now that number is 387 parts per million, which is why the Arctic is melting. Our foremost climatologists tell us that the chief goal of any politics for the twenty-first century has to be getting that number back down below 350, because the current elevated levels are "simply not compatible with keeping a planet similar to the one on which civilization developed." All that is frozen melts into the sea, or something like that.

That world is necessarily going to be tougher. We will have to focus on essentials, like food and energy, far harder than in the past. I think we'll need to find our livelihoods more locally, reducing the inherent vulnerabilities that go with a heavily globalized economy. At the moment less than 1 percent of America works on the farm--that's a number that must rise. To the extent that government can help, it will be by pushing us away from the fossil fuel that underwrites our danger: a stiff cap on carbon will make the transition we require happen more quickly, though it will be tough to endure.

In fact, the only way to endure the transition will be with a renewed sense of community. The real poison of the past few decades has been the hyper-individualism that we've let dominate our political life--the idea that everything works best if we think not a whit about the common interest. In the end, that has damaged our society, our climate and our private lives. The first and final hope we have is a resurgence of a politics that calls on us to work together. We saw glimpses of it in the Obama campaign, which was at least as interesting as the man himself. I hope we'll see many more such glimpses in the years ahead.

 

[KingOrfeo]

"The Revolution Has Already Occurred," Rebecca Solnit:

Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher write mournfully that there was supposed to be a revolution--but there was and is a revolution, just not one that looks the way socialists and a lot of '60s radicals imagined it. The Sandinista revolution thirty years ago may well have been the last of its kind. The revolutions that have mattered since have been less interested in seizing and becoming the state than circumventing it to go straight to becoming other people doing other things without state permission. The fifteen-year-old Zapatista revolution, which never sought state power and (though badgered constantly) was never defeated, is the revolution for our times, or really only the most dramatic of countless thousands involving Native Americans and Indian farmers and South African cooperatives and Argentinian workplaces and European utopian communities.

In the United States the most obvious realm in which this has transpired is food and farming. Organic, urban, community-assisted and guerrilla agriculture are still small parts of the picture, but effective ones--a revolt against what transnational corporate food and capitalism generally produce. This revolt is taking place in the vast open space of Detroit, in the inner-city farms of West Oakland, in the victory gardens and public-housing of Alemany Farm in San Francisco, in Growing Power in Milwaukee and many other places around the country. These are blows against alienation, poor health, hunger and other woes fought with shovels and seeds, not guns. At its best, tending one's garden leads to tending one's community and policy, and ultimately becomes a way of entering the public sphere rather than withdrawing from it.

"Do we have a plan, people?" Ehrenreich and Fletcher ask. We have thousands of them, being carried out quite spectacularly over the past few decades, for gardens and childcare co-ops and bicycle lanes and farmers' markets and countless ways of doing things differently and better. The underlying vision is neither state socialist nor corporate capitalist, but something humane, local and accountable--anarchist, basically, as in direct democracy. The revolution exists in little bits everywhere, but not much has been done to connect its dots. We need to say that there are alternatives being realized all around us and theorize the underlying ideals and possibilities. But we need to start from the confidence that the revolution has been with us for a while and is succeeding in bits and pieces. Enlarged and clarified, it could answer a lot of the urgent needs the depression brings.

If anarchists and neoliberals had one thing in common, it was an interest in shrinking the state that socialists hoped would solve things. Right now nothing but that state exists on a scale to drag us back out of what the corporations and international markets dragged us into, but one of the questions for the long term is about scale. Small isn't always beautiful, but big beyond accountability or comprehension got crazy as well as ugly.

 

[The_Trouvere]

Look Mommy! MeeMie make pee pee.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DBuk91phkI

 

[KingOrfeo]

"Capitalism's Deadly Logic," Tariq Ali:

The crisis confronting capitalism is a vivid demonstration of the vapidity that underlay the appeal of globalization (a k a the Washington Consensus) as a mantra for all seasons, all times, all countries and all continents. Mass unemployment once again threatens the advanced capitalist world, as it has during thirty-four business cycles since 1854. Ehrenreich and Fletcher map today's conditions, underline the weaknesses of the left on every level and then pose the old question, What is to be done?

Before addressing the question, a few points of disagreement. Despite mocking those on the left who, in the past, saw every downturn as an opportunity to proclaim that the end of capitalism was nigh, the authors fall into the same trap. This time, we are told, the "patient may not get up from the table." I don't agree. Capitalism is always faced with crises, which are part of the deadly logic of an economy based on a state-buttressed market system. It has failed many times before but has recovered, including during periods when it confronted real political challenges. Its ability to adapt and survive should not be underestimated, even though it will do so, as before, at the expense of the majority it exploits.

Until the emergence of a viable sociopolitical and economic alternative, perceived by a majority as such, there will be no final crisis of capitalism. In order to save themselves, today's elites will consider approaches to the crisis that preserve the status quo. The choice they are faced with domestically is between establishing a public utility credit and banking operation geared to reviving a productive sector, or shoring up a discredited, deregulated Wall Street/City of London operation based on fictive capital. The bailouts in New York and London are designed to do the latter. Globally, it's more difficult to accept a loss of Atlanticist control, but if pressure continues to mount, the Far Eastern bloc might suggest a new set of institutions based on multilateral rather than imperial control, leading to dismantling but also renewal.

What of the alternatives? With the post-1990 entry of capitalism into Russia, China, Vietnam, etc., the global media networks crowed that the capitalist Cinderella had defeated the ugly sisters, communism and socialism. The shift was experienced by a majority of the world's less-privileged citizens as a collapse of all anti-capitalist perspectives.

A new mood for change developed slowly: the Caracazo in 1989, Seattle a decade later, followed by the birth of a World Social Forum to counter the ideology of Davos, followed by a set of mass social movements in South America. The dramatic collapse of the Argentinian economy led to workers' self-management experiments, factory occupations and district soviets (councils) in Buenos Aires to discuss a different future. In Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay, the social movements challenging the neoliberal order produced governments that represented a new form of radical social democracy that seeks to combine state, socialized, cooperative, small-scale private and individual enterprises. These popularly elected governments broke the isolation of Cuba and obtained its help in constructing health and education infrastructures that benefit the majority. If Cuba, in turn, learned the importance of political pluralism from its new allies, the results would be beneficial.

What happens in Latin America is important for the United States. The backyard has moved indoors. The large Hispanic population within US borders maintains links with its past. The effect has sometimes been negative--e.g., among Cubans in Florida, but there, too, the mood is changing. The social movements in South America challenged deregulation and privatization more effectively than organized labor has done in North America or Western Europe. If adopted in the United States, this model could build popular pressure for a nationalized health service, massive investment in education and reduced military spending, and against bailouts for the car industry and sinking airlines. Let them fall, so that a public transportation infrastructure can be built based on an ecologically sound and more efficient train service that serves the needs of all. Without action from below, there will be no change from above.

 

[KingOrfeo]

"Be Utopian: Demand the Realistic," Robert Pollin:

Neoliberal capitalism--whose defining features were Wall Street greed and big business domination of government policy-making--is dead. But what comes next?

Solidarity, equality and freedom have always been the fundamental principles animating the left. It is from these principles that the left has constructed its various visions of a truly democratic, egalitarian social order--i.e., the only type of society that deserves to be called "socialist." Given the collapse of neoliberalism, shouldn't the left now advance a case for full-throttle socialism?

While socialism is desirable as a longer-term vision of a just society, it is unrealistic in my view to expect it to take shape today. The problem is that, at this stage in history, we do not know what a socialist economy would look like, nor do we know how to move from our current disintegrating neoliberalism to something approximating socialism. Socialism should be seen as a series of challenges and questions as we push a social justice agenda forward amid the ongoing crisis. It should not be seen as a package of obvious and ready-made answers.

This becomes clear in considering the collapsed financial system. In the short term, there are no longer any viable alternatives to government takeovers of failing banks. But nationalizing the banks, by itself, is neither a panacea nor an advance toward socialism. The fact that former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan now supports nationalization should at least give pause to its enthusiasts on the left. Over the longer term, a nationalized financial system presents daunting problems.

Realistically, such a system will inevitably produce failures and scandals tied to "crony capitalism"--privileged back-dealings with well-connected nonfinancial businesses. In addition, individual financial enterprises, as with all business entities, require micro-management. The government would have to create an incentive system for the managers of the publicly owned banks that would substitute for the very straightforward profit motive that guides managers of private banks. If the nationalized bank managers are not committed to maximizing profits, how should their performance be evaluated?

Resolving such questions would require years of experimentation and fine tuning. In the meantime, taxpayers would pay for the inevitable breakdowns. This, in turn, could be the very thing--perhaps the only thing--that could shift the target of public outrage over the collapse of the financial system off Wall Street and onto the government. At this historical juncture, it is therefore preferable to fight for a new financial regulatory regime with primarily private bank ownership as the means of promoting financial stability and channeling credit to priority areas such as affordable housing and the green economy.

Building the green economy raises similar concerns. We need to stop consuming fossil fuels and defeat global warming over the next twenty to thirty years. This is a massive project, and it will not succeed by relying entirely on the public sector or community-based nonprofit organizations, however worthy. Rather, its primary propulsive forces will be large government incentives for private businesses to profit from clean energy investments, and for these same business interests to face significant costs through producing and selling fossil fuels. The Obama stimulus program is a first major step in the right direction, by mixing large-scale public investments--in the range of $80 billion over two years--with even larger incentives for private firms.

One of the most bracing slogans to emerge from the 1968 uprising in France was "Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible." I am more inclined to embrace its mirror image as a guide for moving forward today. That is, "Be Utopian, Demand the Realistic."

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

"Economy, Ecology, Empire," John Bellamy Foster:

We are living in a new historical moment. Today's threefold crisis of capitalism--viewed in terms of economy, ecology and empire--is potentially the worst in history, not excluding the 1930s and '40s. The current economic downturn already compares in many ways with the Great Depression, and the bottom has not yet been reached. The ecological catastrophe is the most serious that humanity has experienced, threatening the mass extinction of species and human civilization. The struggle over empire, with US hegemony waning but far from gone at present, points to the danger of more frequent and larger wars. I have discussed the three aspects of this historical crisis in The Great Financial Crisis (recently published with Fred Magdoff), The Ecological Revolution (forthcoming in April) and Naked Imperialism (2006). Any realistic treatment of the world situation, and the need for socialism, must attend to all three of these global contradictions emanating from capitalism.

Fortunately, global resistance to the system is also growing, in response to its economic, ecological and imperial contradictions. Today Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, together with Cuba, are leading the way in promoting a "socialism for the twenty-first century." Much of the rest of Latin America is also in revolt against decades of neoliberalism. In Nepal a revolutionary struggle has overthrown the monarchy and is working at establishing more egalitarian and democratic conditions. A broad, popular movement against neoliberalism has emerged in South Africa. General strikes have broken out in Guadeloupe and Martinique (the French Antilles). Widespread revolts have arisen in Greece and throughout the European Union with millions in the streets. The governments of Iceland and Latvia have been toppled. A New Anti-Capitalist Party (NAP) has been established in France. China is experiencing labor unrest as a result of the crisis.

If there is one place in this world ferment where mass dissent seems noticeably absent at the moment, it is in the United States, the epicenter of the global crisis. In my view, this is likely temporary. In the 1930s it took four years before the great revolt from below gained momentum. The 1929 stock market crash occurred at a time when the US labor movement was extremely weak, dominated by a restrictive craft union structure under the AFL. The economy hit bottom in 1933 with 25 percent unemployment. It was in 1934 that the country witnessed a general strike wave and the massive entry onto the world stage of the industrial labor movement, leading to the creation of the CIO. It was this grassroots revolt that formed the political impetus for the "Second New Deal" in the late 1930s, culminating in Roosevelt's landslide election victory in 1936.

Today the prospect of a revolt from below in the United States, which could well gain momentum within several years under conditions of deep economic stagnation, promises new space for a radical/socialist movement. Such a movement could start by demanding the institution of Roosevelt's 1944 Economic Bill of Rights, and go on to pursue socialist and ecological policies in the direction of equality, community and sustainability. Even the slightest tremor of such a social earthquake in the United States, the center of a world empire, would, like Seattle in 1999, be heard around the world, helping to inspire a greater planetary struggle.

Such a new socialist movement should dispense forever with capitalism's endless irrational pursuit of "More!" and focus instead on "Enough!"

 

[KingOrfeo]

"Limits and Horizons," Christian Parenti:

Asked to reimagine socialism, two thoughts come to mind. First is the obvious need for state intervention in the economy. Capitalism will have to be hauled from the ditch by the redistributive engines of government--merely mopping up bad assets, so-called "lemon socialism," won't do. Capitalism needs something more like "rescue socialism" or emergency social democracy--a program of progressive restructuring.

Think about the basic components of the problem: the wider economy needs a banking system, the banks need the mortgages paid and the homeowners need incomes sufficient to do that. Thus, direct wages and the broader "social wage"--spending on public healthcare, schooling and social insurance--must rise.

In other words, for both human and purely macroeconomic reasons, the world's poor and working classes need higher incomes. At first this will be at the expense of corporate profits, paid for by taxing the rich. But in the long run redistribution will propel new forms of investment, production and increased rates of return to private capital.

That old formula--a mixed economy, based on robust left Keynesianism--is not socialism as in "expropriation of the means of production" and "liquidation of the ruling class," as such. But pushed far enough, it becomes something like the Scandinavian model. (I assure you, oh most righteous and revolutionary of comrades, there are actually worse fates than living in Sweden.)

So "a specter stalks..." but it is not capitalism's revolutionary Götterdämmerung, just the ghost of mild-mannered Eduard Bernstein, father of evolutionary, reform socialism.

Picking up the urgency sounded by Bill McKibben, if civilization is to avoid runaway climate change and barbarism, this program of rescue reforms must be environmentally radical: massive subsidies for green firms and technologies; severe penalties for grey ones; a wholesale movement toward a carbon-neutral form of industrialization; the Global Green Deal described by Mark Hertsgaard.

My second thought on the question of socialism concerns the centrality of intellectual work. This became apparent to me during a recent trip to India. Despite a decade and a half of neoliberal policies and much of India seeming to drift rightward, a coalition of communists and left regional parties is now poised to win the April elections. Even the current Congress-led coalition government has been acting rather left, spending heavily on rural welfare and development.

In India I was struck by the political sophistication of regular working-class people. In the tea shops and among the knots of parked rickshaw drivers, the newspapers pass from hand to hand, and those who can't read glean what they can from conversation.

Compared to the average American, your average Indian has a superior grip on the intricacies of international relations, political economy, history and environmental issues like GMO crops. And Indians' thinking about these matters tends to be structural and historically informed, capable of dealing with contradictions and nuance. The sentimentality, hectoring moralism and attraction to simple answers that are the anti-intellectual hallmarks of American political culture (particularly our left) are in India reduced to a faint murmur.

I think this is to some extent the result of India's broad and varied Marxist traditions, all of which take political education very seriously. The country is full of magazines, journals and small government-funded research centers. This intellectual work has a progressive impact on policy and electoral politics in countless ways.

So in facing the big question of reimagining socialism, one small task for us might be to more rigorously reimagine our intellectual lives. We might do well to be more grown-up and less self-righteous, to address and accept contradictions.

Speaking of contradiction, the environmental crisis requires radical ideas, but I fear it offers very limited possibilities for social change. The disastrously, apocalyptically, compressed timeframe of climate change will not wait for revolution. Realistically all we have time for is a program of reform that will get us to capitalism with a green and social democratic face.

 

[KingOrfeo]

"A Post-Capitalist Future Is Possible," Doug Henwood:

It's great to see The Nation trying to rehabilitate socialism. It's too bad that it takes a massive financial and economic crisis to prompt the forum, though. There's a tendency on the radical left to look to crisis to do a lot of the political heavy lifting. Sure, people may be more likely to consider systemic overhauls when the system isn't working very well. But that's not a certainty. Fear can also make people hunker down. The economic troubles of the 1970s benefited the right more than the left.

Socialism needs more than foul-weather friends. Most of the time, the system works more or less well by its own standards. GDP grows, people go to work every day and make money for the boss, and no one really rocks the political boat. Yet many features of capitalism's "working well" are fairly appalling. In the United States, one in eight are poor, by a very undemanding official definition. Downsizing and a million personal bankruptcies a year came to be the new normal. Globally, a billion get by on a dollar a day or less. Whole regions of cities, nations, continents are written off as hopeless. We've come to live with a daily sense of impending environmental catastrophe. And that was in the good years.

Now, we see capitalism's gravediggers eagerly hoping the thing will kill itself and allow us to perform the burial. That could always happen, but it probably won't. The system has faced massive crises before and recovered. It emerged from fifteen years of Great Depression and world war to embark on its greatest run, the golden age of the 1950s and 1960s.

I also want to dissent from another prescription: Rebecca Solnit's contention that the revolution is already happening, via "gardens and childcare co-ops and bicycle lanes and farmers' markets and countless ways of doing things differently and better." While many of these things are very nice, they're well short of a transformative vision. The package draws heavily on an ancient American fantasy of self-reliance and back-to-the land escapism. It's no model for running a complex industrial society. Such a system couldn't make computers or locomotives, and it probably couldn't feed 6 billion earthlings either. Maybe Solnit wants to give all that up. If so, she should tell us.

So, not to coin a phrase, what is to be done? I don't think off-the-shelf utopias like Parecon are very helpful; there's just no imaginable roadmap from here to there. We have to work with what we have rather than invent finished products de novo. If we don't have a model of how a socialist economy would work, we do have some principles, like a more egalitarian distribution of income, greater economic security, a friendlier relationship with the earth, more popular control over investment and technology, and worker control of the workplace.

While the current economic crisis probably won't be the magic intervention that will deliver us to a post-capitalist future, there are opportunities to advance the socialist cause. The mass insecurity and impoverishment produced by the imploding labor market are wonderful arguments for a more civilized welfare state. The need for a new dynamic sector to generate an economic recovery is a perfect opportunity to promote high-speed rail and alternative energy research (and in far greater quantities than the Obama administration is proposing). Our banking system is being rescued with public money. Why shouldn't the public get something in return for that, like publicly or cooperatively owned financial institutions that could provide customers with low-cost services and communities with economic development funds? And with the housing market not likely to recover for at least several years, why not experiment with different models of ownership? For example, instead of foreclosing on houses, why not turn them into limited-equity co-ops, which take the speculative motive out of that essential of life? These things won't happen spontaneously; they need state action, prodded by organized and thoughtful activism. The public isn't with us yet, but we're a long way from the days when The Market seemed like a fresh idea.

 

[KingOrfeo]

That, MeeMie, is how actual socialists feel about Obama, and in general about this juncture in history.

So, of course, he's a socialist.

 

[fgarvb1]

Damn that W!

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

But let's don't tell anyone cuz we need more than 6 votes to hold power...so let's just call ourselves Democrats...Kthx.

OK, this is really my fault, I should've told you: The jesting part has to be funny to work.

 

[richard_daily]

what the fuck, the bird brain is on ignore... why are these posts of c&p'd un-sourced tripe showing up on my front page???

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

No need, it's always hilarious when Socialists pretend to be in the mainstream.

If you'll read the above C&P's, none do.

(That's the earnestness part. It's actually much easier.)

 

[The_Trouvere]

No need, it's always hilarious when Socialists pretend to be in the mainstream.

If Barack Obama is a socialist, he is not only mainstream. He is president.

 

[The_Trouvere]

"A Post-Capitalist Future Is Possible," Doug Henwood:

"It's great to see The Nation trying to rehabilitate socialism. It's too bad that it takes a massive financial and economic crisis to prompt the forum, though. There's a tendency on the radical left to look to crisis to do a lot of the political heavy lifting. Sure, people may be more likely to consider systemic overhauls when the system isn't working very well. But that's not a certainty. Fear can also make people hunker down. The economic troubles of the 1970s benefited the right more than the left."

- Doug Henwood


What matters is who's in power when things get really bad. If Al Smith had won the presidency in 1928, he would have been blamed for the stock market crash. In the South Protestant Fundamentalists would have said the Great Depression was God's punishment for electing a Roman Catholic.

If Gerald Ford had been elected in 1976, the Iranian Revolution and the resulting OPEC oil boycott would still have happened, but the continuing stagflation, which began in 1974, would have been blamed on the Republicans. The Republican ascendancy never would have happened.

 

[Cap’n AMatrixca]

Barack is a Socialist, he says so whenever given the opportunity, of course, never directly, but he uses all the right words and aims his programs at all the right people and singles out all the right enemies.

By the same argument, Barack is a communist, he doesn't use the words, but he enacts the policies and demands even more government in our lives because our enemies have enslaved us by cheating us. He will "liberate" the working man and make him noble!

Barack is an altruistic collectivist who works for the little people, the underdogs, the people who have been denied a good education, who have been discriminated against, who have had to work at 1/400th of what the CEO makes. He will create a greener, safer and more egalitarian world for them where book-smart is more important than money-smart.

Barack is also showing signs of being a Fascist when it comes to business by endorsing regulations which first make it difficult to maintain a semblance of competitiveness in the world, offering a government stake in the failing business, then directing its product and pay, and offering continual subsidies from the coffers of the People's Treasury.

Barack is all of those things and so much more, so don't be outraged that people would use the "S" word, be outraged that they are short-"changing" him by not adding the "C," "A C," and "F" words too...

Anything else would be ad hominem.

 

[The_Trouvere]

Barack is a Socialist, he says so whenever given the opportunity, of course, never directly, but he uses all the right words and aims his programs at all the right people and singles out all the right enemies.

If most Americans feel better off in four years than now socialism will become a fashionable ideal in the United States, like it was during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the late 1960's and early '70's. That is why Rush Limbaugh and many other Republicans hope that millions more Americans lose their jobs and homes.

Meanwhile the word "socialism" is losing its derogatory connotations because the Cold War is fading into history. People are more likely to associate the term with the prosperous democracies of Western Europe. Also, although the economy in Communist China is less socialist than it used to be, the government still has a very large roll to play. Many Americans resent the success of the Chinese economy, but it is difficult to see it as an example that socialism does not work.

Yelling "Socialism! Socialism!" will not do the Republicans any more good than yelling "Bill Ayers! Bill Ayers!" The only people who care about that are the same cranky wingnuts who are hoping the President's economic policies fail.

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]