And interesting older text: Socialism, by Michael Harrington, a book from the seventies that younger readers may not know. (isn’t Amazon great? you can get an old copy for two and half bucks)
Watching the charade of rightwing ideology in action, to the point of accusing Obama (!) of socialism, I am mindful of a lost world of liberal/left culture and thought that is being asphixiated by neoliberal media tactics, devastatingly successful.
I am often stunned by the sheer idiocy of the current generation, even of educated persons. The work of Fox News has been done well: idiots roll off the assembly line
I am a critic of Marx and Engels and have posted frequently on that issue, but the current prejudice against socialism, despite the left’s idiocy on the legacy of Stalinism, is a form of historical ignorance, and often the result of the mindset described in Frank’s What’s The Matter With Kansas: the working class mindset poisoned by overdose watching of Fox News into the rejection of self-interest. Basically the rightist elite understands the low class asshole hooked on Fox News: he is easily turned against himself to be a compliant idiot in the system from which he can receive no profit.
We can see this in clever way propaganda has reversed the idea of revolt in the stupidity of the Tea Party movement. etc, etc….
These phenomena were foretold fairly well by Marx/Engels.
The right wing is trying to destroy American democracy, and in the process have distorted the meaning and usage of the terms ’socialism’ and ‘liberalism’.
Michael Harrington, although his book is out of date, has some nice pieces that endure in this text from the days before even Nixonian conservatism.
He makes the case for the democratic Marx in the wake of 1848, and as a consistent socialist clarifies the way in which Lenin along with the right wing destroyed the socialist idea.
It is not complex: any right thinking citizen-voter untouched by the Fox News poison machine would naturally embrace basic elements of socialism, or, at least, welfare economics and social democratic pseudo-socialism.
One can disagree with these statements, but the idea of socialism should at least be used in a proper usage even by critics.
Harrington would have a hard time in the current scene where unrepentant leftists of crypto-Stalinist persuation have coopted the idea of socialism as badly as those on the right. Harrington was a rare thinker, and insisted on the need for the left to resurrect socialism after and apart from the Bolshevik theft of the idea.
Anyway, his book is a minor classic of reasonable and intelligent socialist discourse.
It might help, even for critics of socialism, to insist at least on the right use of the term, instead of the current systematic mystifications of the increasingly fascist right in the the US.
Everything that Marx predicted is rapidly coming to pass in the US, and the result could be catastrophic very soon.
An archaeological study of the ideas of socialism and the left are essential, but that is very difficult because of the kind of distortions of the record, right and left, that Harrington uncovered with considerable foresight in the seventies.
SOCIALISM HAS KNOWN increments of success, basic failure and
massive betrayal. Yet it is more relevant to the humane con-
struction of the twenty-first century than any other idea.
The American system has struggled and failed for over a century for simple health care, an achievement pulled out of a hat by Bismarck in the nineteenth century (to coopt the left). As that point a grave danger arises, as the ‘enough is enough’ tipping is reached.