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Michael Harrington, although his book is out of date, has some nice pieces that endure in this text from the days before even Nixonian conservatism.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.

This book is about the future of the socialist past. It is not
a narrative or a chronology, but a search for a living tradition,
and it will therefore dwell on what has been only insofar as it
touches on what might be. That, however,does not mean that
I approach history like a fundamentalist preacher rummaging
through scripture to find authority for his own favorite apoca-
lypse. Such amoralistic account of socialism would not in the
least help in changing the world. So it is in the interest of my
intense partisanship to be as ruthlessly honest as possible: my
subjectivity forces me tobe as objective as I can.

I begin, like every student of the past and future, with a con-
viction about the present. Man has socialized everything except
himself. He has rationalized his work and nature and the very
planet in every respect save one: with regard to their underly-
ing purpose. And, just as the socialists predicted more than a
century ago, he is in conflict with an environment that he himself
has brilliantly, and thoughtlessly, created. His genius threatens
to overwhelm him.

Under capitalism, an intricate system of antagonistic coopera-
tion makes a single individual more productive than a thousand
once were. Science, the community of human knowledge, is
casually employed for private purposes with revolutionary pub-
lic consequences. This creates the highest living standard ever
known, rots the great cities, befouls the air and water, and em-
bitters classes, generations and races. Under Communism, these
contradictions are collectivized, not resolved. The state owns the
means of production, and a bureaucratic elite owns the state.
Its interests, which are every bit as egotistic as those of corpora-
tions, are imposed upon the system by totalitarian command. The
anti-social is thus consciously planned rather than being dictated
by the “will” of the market.
Unfortunately, most of the people of the world do not even
have the luxury of suffering from such sophisticated ironies. In
the age of space exploration they struggle to satisfy primordial
needs for food and shelter. More often than not the unification
of mankind has made them more miserable. Trade more effec-
tively than ever exacts a tribute from the poor nations to the rich,
both capitalist and Communist; medicine saves a baby from an
ancient plague only to deliver him up to a new kind of hunger;
a miraculous seed threatens rural unemployment and even starva-
tion because only elite farmers can use it.
The ultimate in these contradictions is both unprecedented and
obvious to the point of banality. Nuclear science has penetrated
the innermost secrets of our world and discovered there the possi-
bility of annihilating it. It is as if the human race had perse-
vered through the millennia only to reenact the drama of Adam
and Eve. In the goodness of the fruit of the tree of knowledge
there is the taste of evil.
These things need not be. Even the most superficial critic of
society now realizes that it is not our knowledge, but the way in
which it is organized, that menaces us. But beyond that humanist
cliche there must be the specifics of a tough-minded, socialist
solution: exactly how are we going to socialize the already social
means of production? For one need not any longer ask whether
the future is going to be collective-if we do not blow ourselves
to smithereens, that issue has already been settled by a technology
of such complex interdependence that it demands conscious regu-
lation and control. The question is: What form will twenty-first-
century collectivism take? Will it be a totalitarian, a bureaucratic
or a democratic collectivism?
Socialism answers: Our technology could indeed be the instru-
ment of enslavement; or it could, for the first time ever, provide
the material base for a genuine human community that would
democratize economic and social as well as political power. That
socialist possibility, which will be detailed in the last three chap-
ters, is not the insight of some radical prophets. It is, as the next
chapter will show, either an observable tendency of social reality
or it is a delusion. The history of socialism, then, is not simply
the accumulation of a certain wisdom; it is the process whereby
men and women have themselves defined what socialism is in
the course of struggle. The past I am concerned with here is,
in short, alive.
Indeed, I have often been struck by the way in which the
theorists of some of the most daring and vanguard ideas of the
contemporary Left are only faint and unwitting echoes of some
long-dead socialist giant. Among the college-educated and upper-
middle-class American activists of the sixties and early seventies,
I have glimpsed the wraith of that most proletarian of French
revolutionaries, Auguste Blanqui. He, too, thought that the work-
ing class had been so stupefied by the capitalist system that it
would have to be saved from itself by an elite conspiracy which
could only permit democratic freedoms once the people had been
properly reeducated. Or, to take an even more remarkable an-
ticipation, in the debates of Gracchus Babeuf and his Con-
spiracy of Equals in the 1790S, one glimpses Stalin and Mao
waiting in the wings.
So the early socialists asked the questions that still bedevil us,
and that is one of the many reasons they deserve our attention.
But I do not propose to people this book with a race of prophetic
supermen. On the contrary. It is important to root out every bit
of messianism from the socialist vision, to reject the notion of a
secular redemption that, like the incarnation of Christ, claims
to make all things new. Every time men have acted upon that
kind of chiliastic definition, the result has been totalitarian. There-
fore the rich history of socialist tragedy and error is as important
as the record of its profundity. Marx and Engels, to cite a single,
spectacular instance, mistook the rise of capitalism for its decline.
Only if socialists learn a chastened empiricism from such facts
is there any hope for the plans and projects outlined in the last
chapters of this book.
More generally, the demystification of Marx and Engels will
be a central theme in this analysis. Their words are now used to
justify theories and practices they would abominate. They are
seen by most people as the fathers of totalitarianism and as ma-
terialistic simpletons who taught that economic interests neatly
determine the entire course of society. As long as that falsifica-
tion of the socialist past prevails-and it is a state religion in
Russia, China and other Communist countries-the graven images
of Marx and Engels are among the greatest obstacles to the so-
cialist future.
There also are socialist classics that must be recovered if the
next century is to be decently created. In 1914 Lenin wrote that,
since they had not studied Hegel’s Logic, for almost half a
sentury “none of the Marxists understood Marx.?” My attitude
is almost as extreme and arrogant. I believe, as Chapter V will
document, that Das Kapital has been barbarously treated by its
contemporary academic critics, like Paul Samuelson, and even
unfairly handled by sympathetic thinkers, like Joan Robinson. As
a result, there is much in that magnificent book that, despite the
fact that it was published more than one hundred years ago, is
new. I propose to rescue it from the distortions of the professors
and the rigidities of the keepers of holy writ. For it could help
us, not simply to understand the world, but to change it.
An overview of socialist history also illuminates an idea that
is crucial for understanding what is happening today under Com-
munism, in the Third World and within the welfare state. This
is the concept of anti-socialist “socialism.”
Bismarck was, as will be seen later on in greater detail, the
first of the anti-socialist “socialists.” In 1878 he outlawed any
organization that even advocated socialism, By 1882 he was tell-
ing the Reichstag, “Many of the measures that we have adopted
for the welfare of the land are socialistic and we need more so-
cialism in our state …. ” Clearly, the Junker leader had not
undergone a sudden conversion between 1878 and 1882, moving
from the Right to the Left. He had shrewdly understood that
the socialists had mass appeal, and he was determined to use
socialist slogans in order to fight socialism.
Even before Bismarck attempted to co-opt the socialist appeal,

Marx had understood the potential of anti-socialist “socialism.”
In the 1850S he analyzed the Credit Mobilier under Napoleon III
in France as “Bonapartist” or “imperial” “socialism.” And in an
attack on Proudhon he used an even more telling phrase. “Com-
munism,” Marx wrote, “must free itself from all the ‘false broth-
ers’ ” of the fashionable socialisms of the time. He did not realize
that in the twentieth century the “false brothers” were to become
world powers, and worse, that they would call themselves Marxist.
. Early on, then, a sophisticated conservative understood that
socialism had accurately anticipated two of the most important
tendencies of the modern age. Technology was indeed making
economic, social and political life more collective, even when it
operated under the auspices of laissez-faire; and millions dreamed
that this process could be made the instrument of their emanci-
pation from poverty and servility. The collectivizing trend meant
that the state would have to take a role in directing the economy.
The socialist aspirations among the people could be used to
provide popular support for such policies-even when they were
in the service of some new, or more efficient, form of exploita-
tion.
Thus from Bismarck to the present moment, dictators and
charlatans as well as democratic socialists have fought for the
possession of the word “socialism.” Joseph Stalin invoked it to
justify psychopathic purges and the totalitarian accumulation
of capital; Clement Attlee used it to help build a democratic
welfare state in Britain after World War II. But the most mon-
strous single definition of the term was unquestionably the
“National Socialism” of the Nazis. Gregor Straser, the “Left-
wing” Nazi, said that Hitler was responding to the “anti-capitalist
yearnings” of the masses.
If, then, socialism is to have any meaning-past, present or
future-a way must be found to distinguish between the various,
and often murderously hostile, claimants to its name. And this
is particularly important in the 1970S when one is confronted by
Russian, Chinese, Yugoslavian, Israeli, African, Cuban, Chilean,
Indian, Arab and other “socialisms.” In the Tower of Babel that
is the Left, is there any empirical test that can establish the differ-
ence between the authentic and the spurious socialisms?
It was one of the many accomplishments of Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels to demonstrate how this can be done. One must,
they said, go behind the socialist rhetoric of a given movement
and discover who is making the decisions and what interests
are being served. Using those criteria, they realized as young men
in the 1840S that the times were giving birth to two new move-
ments: to socialism and to “socialist” anti-socialism. In The
Communist Manifesto they pointed out that there were reac-
tionary and conservative “socialisms.” They told of aristocrats
~ho hated capitalism because it was anti-feudal and wanted to
march back to medievalism in the name of “socialism.” And
there were small businessmen who wanted the capitalist giants
who threatened them to be controlled; intellectuals with blue-
printed panaceas; and even utopians among the bourgeoisie
itself who dreamed of a harmonious capitalism free of conflict.
They all called themselves “socialists.”
The hallmark of these “socialisms” was that they were the
creations of ~seeking minorities, ruses whereby feudalists or
\ shopkeepers or businessmen sought to cloak their special interests
in soaring universals. But capitalism, Marx and Engels said-and
they were, as will be seen, both right and wrong-was creating
a new and vast majority which owned no means of production
and whose common good required nothing more than the democ-
ratization of the economy and society. A genuine socialist move-
ment was one that led the struggles and articulated the needs
of these people.
Marx died in 1883 and thus did not have the opportunity to
see how Bismarck would turn the/anti-socialist “socialism” de-
scribed in the Manifesto into a state policy. But Engels lived
long enough to see through this trick and his disciple, Karl Kaut-
sky, the famous “pope” of Marxism before the First World War,
even gave it a new name. He called it “state socialism,” a strategy
of government intervention into th€economy, including the
nationalization of certain enterprises, for the purpose of shoring
up capitalism.
These distinctions from the socialist past must be carefully
explored for they are crucial to the present and future. In 1917
a socialist revolution triumphed in a Russia that lacked the pre-
conditions for socialism. Eventually, most of the revolutionists
were murdered in the name of the Revolution and a new form of
class society, anti-capitalist and anti-socialist, came into being.
Variants of this bureaucratic collectivism have now appeared in
Eastern Europe, China and; in new and. unexpected mutations,
throughout the Third World. Do these cases then prove that the
socialist vision of the people emancipating themselves is a hoax?
The welfare state poses a similar problem in a radically differ-
ent context. The reform of capitalism was achieved largely be-
cause of the presence of a mass socialist movement (or, in the
United States, of the unions) and over the outraged protests of
businessmen, who gained enormously from the change. The ad-
vances that were thus made are quite real and the result of a
democratic struggle. They are the very opposite of those “revolu-
tions from above” carried out by a Bismarck or a Stalin. But the
danger is that the welfare state is then equated with socialism
itself. In their daily battle to make capitalism more tolerable,
socialists could lose their vision of a fundamental transformation
of social relationships. The classes would remain and the domina-
tion of private, minority priorities would take on much more
sophisticated forms. With the unwitting cooperation of the so-
cialists themselves, their dream would become the new facade
of an old order.
So it is possible that, in quite different but parallel ways, the
socialist ideal will be expropriated under Communism and the
welfare state and in the Third World. That would mark the cor-
ruption of the future.

Class -societies have, of course, always justified themselves in
the name of the highest values of religion or honor or freedom.
But if socialism were to be effectively turned into a rationale
for new modes of exploitation, then there would be no hope of
a just order of things. That has not yet happened, for despite the
monstrous crimes committed in its name, the socialist vision still
speaks to the majority of mankind. In the Communist sphere, for
instance, every movement of opposition and protest-the East
German general strike of 1953, the Polish and Hungarian up-
risings of October, 1956, the Czechoslovakian spring of 1968 and
the Polish strikes in the winter of 197a-1971-was trying to
create the “human face of socialism,” not to return to capitalism.
Paradoxically~ as Zbigniew Brzezinski has noted, in Eastern Eu-
rope, “socialism has wide •popuiar support whereas Communism
as an institutionalized belief has not.” Thus the distinction be-
tween the socialist ideal and its manipulation, first formulated by
Marx and Engels, has enormous practical significance for the
present and future
But if the people were to accept the anti-socialist “socialisms”
as genuine, then one of the most crucial elements of the socialist

possibility-a conscious mass movement-would disappear. The
millions would have internalized the definition of dictators or
bureaucrats that the people cannot rule and must passively ac-
cept orders from on high. That would be the death of socialism.
And that is why I will take such pains in this book to understand
anti-socialist “socialism.”
Finally, this book describes the necessity of socialism, not its
inevitability.
I am not at all sure that there will be a socialist alternative to
Communism and the welfare state. It is certainly quite possible
that the twenty-first century will belong to bureaucratic collectiv-
ism and that the dream of human self-emancipation will turn
out to have been mankind’s noblest deception. But I am sure that
if men are to master their own genius-if the fantastically pro-
ductive and destructive and interdependent technological society
we have blundered into is to be our homeland and not our prison
-then they must socialize themselves along with everything
else. So after so many failures and betrayals the socialism de-
fined here does not pretend to be the wave of the future. It is
simply our only hope.’

Raul Castro, who officially took over as president from his ailing brother, Fidel, last year, launched his own quiet revolution on the island. He is attempting to streamline, decentralize and revive the economy.

But Cuba has been forced to cut spending on marquee social programs such as health care and education.

As the island’s transportation infrastructure crumbles, horse-drawn carts serve as taxis in many parts of the country. With gas at just over $4 a gallon and spare parts in short supply, many Cubans have turned to bicycles, horses and ox carts to get around.

Cuba’s trade deficit has soared. The government has a liquidity crisis. The 47-year-old U.S. embargo still hampers trade with its closest neighbor.

And adding to Cuba’s problems, the island was hit last year by three hurricanes.

But none of that seems to bother Adele Silva, who lives in the eastern city of Holguin.
Satisfied With The Welfare State

Much of the roof on her house has collapsed, and gravel is piled in the living room. A flock of chickens resides just off the kitchen.

Yet Silva says she’s happy. “Because I enjoy any situation, and I take a positive attitude. In Cuba, I always feel protected,” she says.

Last year, Hurricane Ike ripped the roof off the back of Silva’s house. Just recently, the government brought her bags of sand, bricks and a truckload of gravel, which she’ll use to repair her building.

Despite the delay, she says the Cuban state looks after its people.

“Here, there’s social security. It’s very special,” she says. “In Cuba, everyone has social security. It’s one of the principles of the revolution.”

She says the state provides her with food, clothes and basic furniture. In Cuba, even the poor send their children to college, she notes, which isn’t the case in many other Latin American countries.

Asked if Cuba might change to capitalism, she says flatly that Cubans don’t want that. Silva says she is proud of the socialist country built under Fidel Castro, the ailing leader who transferred power to his brother in 2006 and was replaced by Raul in 2008 elections.

In Cuba’s Camaguey province, rice farmer Roberto Barada Perez (center) dries his crop on the main road. Barada, 44, got two parcels of land totaling 65 acres under a new program to redistribute state-owned land on the communist island to private farmers. Jason Beaubien/NPR

But in a recent speech in Holguin, Raul Castro said Cuba’s woes won’t be solved by shouting patriotic slogans or denouncing the United States. He called on Cubans to return to the land and revitalize the island’s faltering farms.

A Surplus Of Problems

“These have been difficult and arduous months from one end of the country to the other,” he said.

Cuba doesn’t have a surplus of anything “except problems,” he added.

According to Raul, half of Cuba’s arable land is sitting idle or underutilized while food imports increasingly drain the public treasury. In an effort to revive agriculture, Raul launched a program that has given out more than 1.5 million acres of fallow state-owned land to private farmers and small cooperatives.

The economy has slowed so much that many of Cuba’s main roads are almost empty. In the Camaguey province, rice farmer Roberto Barada Perez is using one lane of a two-lane highway to dry his crop.

He received about 65 acres last year under Raul Castro’s land redistribution program and planted all of it with rice.

“It’s a dignified way to support my family,” Barada says. “Because, really, there aren’t other ways to help my family financially.”

Barada is only allowed to sell the rice to the government at a price set by the state, which he complains is too low. Despite this, he says he hopes to get one more plot in the coming months.

As president, Raul Castro has also allowed Cubans to buy computers and cell phones and to stay in tourist hotels. And he’s suggested that pay should be linked to performance.

‘A Different Kind Of Socialism’

Rafael Hernandez, editor of the quarterly journal Temas in Havana, says Raul Castro is attempting to transform the Cuban state.

“Cuba is in the middle of transition from a kind of socialism to a different kind of socialism,” Hernandez says.

Hernandez predicts that that transition won’t follow a Russian or Chinese model, but a uniquely Cuban model.

“Cuban socialism is sick of hypercentralization, and everything is related to that. That is, to me, the monster to kill,” he says.

Hernandez says Raul is attempting to decentralize the only communist state in the Americas by granting greater autonomy to individual government ministries.

Across Cuba, there are people desperate for U.S.-style capitalism to come rushing back in. But Hernandez says he doesn’t think they are the majority, and they certainly are not in power.

Most Cubans want a socialist state, he says. They just want one that functions far better than the one they currently have.

Monthly Review May 2009
Why Socialism?
by Albert Einstein
This essay was originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1949).
Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.
Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the so-called civilized period of human history has—as is well known—been largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively economic in nature. For example, most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.
But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called “the predatory phase” of human development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future.
Second, socialism is directed towards a social-ethical end. Science, however, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and—if these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous—are adopted and carried forward by those many human beings who, half unconsciously, determine the slow evolution of society.
For these reasons, we should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society.
Innumerable voices have been asserting for some time now that human society is passing through a crisis, that its stability has been gravely shattered. It is characteristic of such a situation that individuals feel indifferent or even hostile toward the group, small or large, to which they belong. In order to illustrate my meaning, let me record here a personal experience. I recently discussed with an intelligent and well-disposed man the threat of another war, which in my opinion would seriously endanger the existence of mankind, and I remarked that only a supra-national organization would offer protection from that danger. Thereupon my visitor, very calmly and coolly, said to me: “Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race?”
I am sure that as little as a century ago no one would have so lightly made a statement of this kind. It is the statement of a man who has striven in vain to attain an equilibrium within himself and has more or less lost hope of succeeding. It is the expression of a painful solitude and isolation from which so many people are suffering in these days. What is the cause? Is there a way out?

It is easy to raise such questions, but difficult to answer them with any degree of assurance. I must try, however, as best I can, although I am very conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.
Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. As a solitary being, he attempts to protect his own existence and that of those who are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires, and to develop his innate abilities. As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of his fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures, to comfort them in their sorrows, and to improve their conditions of life. Only the existence of these varied, frequently conflicting, strivings accounts for the special character of a man, and their specific combination determines the extent to which an individual can achieve an inner equilibrium and can contribute to the well-being of society. It is quite possible that the relative strength of these two drives is, in the main, fixed by inheritance. But the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior. The abstract concept “society” means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is “society” which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word “society.”
It is evident, therefore, that the dependence of the individual upon society is a fact of nature which cannot be abolished—just as in the case of ants and bees. However, while the whole life process of ants and bees is fixed down to the smallest detail by rigid, hereditary instincts, the social pattern and interrelationships of human beings are very variable and susceptible to change. Memory, the capacity to make new combinations, the gift of oral communication have made possible developments among human being which are not dictated by biological necessities. Such developments manifest themselves in traditions, institutions, and organizations; in literature; in scientific and engineering accomplishments; in works of art. This explains how it happens that, in a certain sense, man can influence his life through his own conduct, and that in this process conscious thinking and wanting can play a part.
Man acquires at birth, through heredity, a biological constitution which we must consider fixed and unalterable, including the natural urges which are characteristic of the human species. In addition, during his lifetime, he acquires a cultural constitution which he adopts from society through communication and through many other types of influences. It is this cultural constitution which, with the passage of time, is subject to change and which determines to a very large extent the relationship between the individual and society. Modern anthropology has taught us, through comparative investigation of so-called primitive cultures, that the social behavior of human beings may differ greatly, depending upon prevailing cultural patterns and the types of organization which predominate in society. It is on this that those who are striving to improve the lot of man may ground their hopes: human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.
If we ask ourselves how the structure of society and the cultural attitude of man should be changed in order to make human life as satisfying as possible, we should constantly be conscious of the fact that there are certain conditions which we are unable to modify. As mentioned before, the biological nature of man is, for all practical purposes, not subject to change. Furthermore, technological and demographic developments of the last few centuries have created conditions which are here to stay. In relatively densely settled populations with the goods which are indispensable to their continued existence, an extreme division of labor and a highly-centralized productive apparatus are absolutely necessary. The time—which, looking back, seems so idyllic—is gone forever when individuals or relatively small groups could be completely self-sufficient. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption.
I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.
For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call “workers” all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production—although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. Insofar as the labor contract is “free,” what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists’ requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.
The situation prevailing in an economy based on the private ownership of capital is thus characterized by two main principles: first, means of production (capital) are privately owned and the owners dispose of them as they see fit; second, the labor contract is free. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist society in this sense. In particular, it should be noted that the workers, through long and bitter political struggles, have succeeded in securing a somewhat improved form of the “free labor contract” for certain categories of workers. But taken as a whole, the present day economy does not differ much from “pure” capitalism.
Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers’ goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.
This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.
Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?
Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.

Socialism is better than capitalism. So say 20 percent of Americans, and another 27 percent say they can’t say which is better, according to an April 9 Rasmussen poll.

There’s hope.

When you consider that virtually no newspaper, broadcaster, well-funded think tank, teacher, or anybody’s boss or commander ever said something nice about socialism, it’s remarkable that only 53 percent of us still favor rule by the moneyed class. Perhaps folks are learning how capitalism sacrifices happiness for individual gain.

As Billy Bragg exhorts us in his update of the socialist anthem “The Internationale”: “Stand up, all victims of oppression/for tyrants fear your might/Don’t cling so hard to your possessions/For you have nothing if you have no rights.”

No less a “capitalist tool” than Forbes Magazine let a red cat out of the bag with a report this month that the happiest countries tend to be Scandinavian socialist democracies. High per-capita GDP certainly plays a role in their felicity, but even social democratic New Zealand, with per-capita GDP only 64 percent of the United States’, ranks with the 10 democracies above us in the happiness index. They pay high taxes in these pinkotopias, but folks enjoy entitlements like free college, extensive elder care, and 52-week paid maternity leave.

However, Chávez said this does not mean debate and difference of opinion are not allowed. “It is positive that there are internal currents, but they must have a political basis, not a personal one,” he said.

Chávez also told PSUV leaders not to take their leadership positions for granted and not to prioritize their personal concerns over those of the party’s more than four million members. “We cannot permit a small group of unconditional [party leaders] to construct their personal projects over the hopes of the people,” he said.

Since Venezuelan voters approved a constitutional amendment to lift term limits on elected offices last February, Chávez has called for an acceleration of Venezuela’s drive toward “21 st Century Socialism.” His administration has revived land re-distribution to empower food production “communes,” which are based on a new form of legally sanctioned social property.

However, internal barriers to change persist within the party. Last month, a state police squad forcibly evicted more than sixty small farmers and workers from the National Lands Institute (INTI) who were demarcating idle and under-used private lands for re-distribution in the Portuguesa state. The state police fell under the responsibility of the the governor, who is a member of the PSUV national directorate.

Chávez said on Sunday, “The party should be a strong articulator of the workers’ movement, the students, the small farmers, women, the indigenous people, and all the social movements.”

In his weekly presidential op-ed column, which is published on Sundays and titled “Chávez’s Lines,” Chávez spoke of the importance of the workers’ movement for the construction of Socialism in Venezuela.

“There cannot be institutional or governing practices that contradict our pro-worker definition,” Chávez said. “There cannot be a relationship of tutelage with respect to the workers… It is not the state, nor the government, nor the PSUV whose duty it is to organize and lead the workers; it is the workers themselves who must assume this historic responsibility.”

A commission of national party leaders has been formed to carry out a new membership drive for the next five weekends. The party will issue membership cards and update its membership registry.

In addition, the commission has been tasked with organizing more socialist battalions at the local level, which will come together in a national congress of the PSUV in August to discuss the organizational structure and future direction of the party.

Also, the party plans to found an editorial foundation to spur the ideological formation of its members.

Chávez called for the creation of the PSUV after his re-election to a second presidential term in 2006, with the purpose of bringing together all the existing leftist parties that supported his presidency into one party whose leadership is democratically elected by the membership base.

Last year, 2.5 million PSUV members went to the polls to choose the party’s candidates for the mayoral and gubernatorial elections, making the PSUV the only political party to comply with Venezuela’s constitutional requirement that party leaders and candidates for office be elected democratically within the party.

Venezuelan President Calls for “Re-definition” of Socialist Party

by James Suggett

Mérida, May 4 th 2009 — On his weekly talk show Aló Presidente on Sunday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez said the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), of which he is president, will undergo a “re-definition” in which sectarianism and corrupt party leadership must end and the party must strengthen its ties to social movements .

The PSUV is “on course toward the redefinition of many things in the party’s internal operating,” Chávez said on the nationally televised talk show. “In the PSUV, we must distance ourselves from the tendencies of the past; we cannot let ourselves be trapped by sectarianism,” he said.

However, Chávez said this does not mean debate and difference of opinion are not allowed. “It is positive that there are internal currents, but they must have a political basis, not a personal one,” he said.

Chávez also told PSUV leaders not to take their leadership positions for granted and not to prioritize their personal concerns over those of the party’s more than four million members. “We cannot permit a small group of unconditional [party leaders] to construct their personal projects over the hopes of the people,” he said.

Since Venezuelan voters approved a constitutional amendment to lift term limits on elected offices last February, Chávez has called for an acceleration of Venezuela’s drive toward “21 st Century Socialism.” His administration has revived land re-distribution to empower food production “communes,” which are based on a new form of legally sanctioned social property.

However, internal barriers to change persist within the party. Last month, a state police squad forcibly evicted more than sixty small farmers and workers from the National Lands Institute (INTI) who were demarcating idle and under-used private lands for re-distribution in the Portuguesa state. The state police fell under the responsibility of the the governor, who is a member of the PSUV national directorate.

Chávez said on Sunday, “The party should be a strong articulator of the workers’ movement, the students, the small farmers, women, the indigenous people, and all the social movements.”

In his weekly presidential op-ed column, which is published on Sundays and titled “Chávez’s Lines,” Chávez spoke of the importance of the workers’ movement for the construction of Socialism in Venezuela.

“There cannot be institutional or governing practices that contradict our pro-worker definition,” Chávez said. “There cannot be a relationship of tutelage with respect to the workers… It is not the state, nor the government, nor the PSUV whose duty it is to organize and lead the workers; it is the workers themselves who must assume this historic responsibility.”

A commission of national party leaders has been formed to carry out a new membership drive for the next five weekends. The party will issue membership cards and update its membership registry.

In addition, the commission has been tasked with organizing more socialist battalions at the local level, which will come together in a national congress of the PSUV in August to discuss the organizational structure and future direction of the party.

Also, the party plans to found an editorial foundation to spur the ideological formation of its members.

Chávez called for the creation of the PSUV after his re-election to a second presidential term in 2006, with the purpose of bringing together all the existing leftist parties that supported his presidency into one party whose leadership is democratically elected by the membership base.

Last year, 2.5 million PSUV members went to the polls to choose the party’s candidates for the mayoral and gubernatorial elections, making the PSUV the only political party to comply with Venezuela’s constitutional requirement that party leaders and candidates for office be elected democratically within the party.
_______________________________________________

Finally we got someone other than another white guy in the White House. Finally, after the long linguistic train wreck of the Bush years, we got someone who speaks in complete sentences. Finally we got someone who shows an interest in the world beyond the borders of border fences and country clubs. And now that we’ve got the son of a Kansan mother and a Kenyan father presiding in Washington, the right-wing guttersnipes have gone back to an old game. They have set up Barack Obama for target practice as a socialist.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 20% disagree and say socialism is better. Twenty-seven percent (27%) are not sure which is better.

Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided. Thirty-somethings are a bit more supportive of the free-enterprise approach with 49% for capitalism and 26% for socialism. Adults over 40 strongly favor capitalism, and just 13% of those older Americans believe socialism is better.

Investors by a 5-to-1 margin choose capitalism. As for those who do not invest, 40% say capitalism is better while 25% prefer socialism.

There is a partisan gap as well. Republicans – by an 11-to-1 margin – favor capitalism. Democrats are much more closely divided: Just 39% say capitalism is better while 30% prefer socialism. As for those not affiliated with either major political party, 48% say capitalism is best, and 21% opt for socialism.

A single dissenting voice risked “derision,” in his words, by insisting that “once the sordid memory of Soviet communism is laid to rest and the fervor of anti-government hysteria abates, politicians and intellectuals of the next century will once again draw openly upon the legacy of socialism.”

I was that lone dissenter. In the 1960s, I had been a member of the radical antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and even after that organization descended into violence and chaos, I kept the faith alive and edited a Marxist theoretical journal that advocated democratic socialism. Subsequently, I suffered my share of disillusionment with Marx and socialism, but I never bought into the facile view that the collapse of Soviet communism had altogether relegated these ideas to the dustbin of history.

And although I felt isolated in my viewpoint in 1995, I think I have been proven prescient. In recent months, the onset of the severe global economic downturn has undermined faith in the magic of the market and resurrected the specter of socialism. John Makin, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, the same think tank that years ago hosted that panel on socialism’s demise, recommended that the Obama administration nationalize the banks. American politicians and policymakers—not known for their admiration of Scandinavian socialism—have begun looking to the experiences of Sweden and Norway for inspiration. A recent Newsweek cover even announced, “We Are All Socialists Now.”

Socialism, once banished from polite conversation, has made a startling comeback. But what about socialism as a remedy for today’s crisis?

http://www.marxmail.org/msg56882.html

http://www.esquire.com/print-this/obama-socialist-connections-0209

What’s So Bad About Socialism Anyway?

Just like they don’t really know what the Che T-shirt means, Generation
O doesn’t really care if you call them — or their new president —
socialist. They want answers beyond the message.

By: Stephen Marche

Roland Barthes, the French theorist and semiotician, once wrote that sex
is everywhere in America, except in sex. For the past 40 years, the same
has been true for socialism, which has been simultaneously nowhere and
everywhere in America, falsely denied by its politics and falsely
claimed by its popular culture. As the federal government puts the
finishing touches on its plan to effectively nationalize America’s
banking system, Steven Soderbergh’s four-and-a-half-hour epic Che is
opening in select theaters, and its hero could have scarcely imagined
that it would be America’s first M.B.A. president who would oversee the
proletariat’s glorious march to the workers’ control of the means of
production. Alan Greenspan, meanwhile, the prophet of capitalism, has
traded his coat of many colors for Job’s sackcloth and ashes (“I found a
flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure
that defines how the world works”), and though Obama spent the month of
October denying that he is a socialist, his inauguration is upon us and
the point is moot. Socialism, real, perceived, or simply misunderstood,
has shit-blossomed to new prominence, and Americans are scrambling to
make sense of it in this new age of Obama.

Since the ’60s, the Hollywood Left has preferred its socialism vague and
mushy — a feel-good unattainable ideal, preferably starring Warren
Beatty — rather than a system of government that can actually be put
into practice (as it is in Europe). And though Soderbergh has made a
movie that even Castro likes — El Jefe approved it for screening at the
Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana — Che will hopefully
cause people to ask themselves whose face they’re wearing. If you
believe in the freedom of the press, the right to belong to a political
party of your choice, the due process of law, and/or private property,
then Che Guevara was a monster, plain and simple. But even with that
knowledge, it’s unlikely that Johnny Depp will get rid of his Che
medallion. And it’s unlikely that all the pseudo-hipsters who buy their
Che T-shirts at Urban Outfitters will stop wearing them. No. These
T-shirts send a message, which effectively boils down to this: I have
vague left-wing sympathies but don’t read history. I am educated enough
to want nonconformity but not intelligent enough to avoid conformity. I
believe in supporting the wretched of the earth but happily purchase
products from multinational corporations.

It’s all part of a long history of reducing the genuine struggles of
peoples around the world for social justice to pretty baubles, from Jane
Fonda’s Radio Hanoi broadcasts to Madonna mugging in guerrilla gear to
TV personality Tim Vincent wearing a hammer-and-sickle shirt on Access
Hollywood. In 2007, Cameron Diaz carried a Maoist messenger bag while
sightseeing in Peru and was forced to apologize — 70,000 Peruvians were
murdered by the Maoist Shining Path in the ’80s and ’90s. At least with
Che chic, the idiocy is dreamy and romantic and you can pretend that
wearing his face is all about being young, riding motorcycles, and
having South American — level sex; Mao was responsible for the death of
60 million people — he makes Hitler look like an amateur.

Cameron Diaz is not, of course, a communist. She’s a ditz — that’s her
ideology. Her Mao bag was tasteless, not evil. And she’s far from alone
in her tastelessness. The coolest literary bar in New York is KGB in the
East Village — the 92nd Street Y for young writers — and it’s full of
Soviet propaganda. In Toronto, I was once in a bar called Pravda that
had, alongside Lenin and Che, a picture of Felix Dzerzhinsky on the
wall: He founded the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, and described his own
job as “organized terror.” There are communist-chic bars and restaurants
in Melbourne, Australia, and Singapore, too, and the trend has recently
returned to its birthplace. In Berlin, the hotel Ostel re-creates, in
minute detail, the experience of living under Soviet rule in the GDR.
You check in at “Border Control.” Images of party leaders stare down
from the walls like the Big Brothers of yore, and Ostel even has a roll
of GDR-era toilet paper under glass in the lobby. Hilarious. Nothing
shows the defeat of tyranny more thoroughly than its reclamation by
nostalgia.

And so dead politics return as public dreams, with the same process
neutering the kaffiyeh, the cooling head scarf traditionally worn by
Palestinian peasants that now warms the necks of trust-fund kids. Here’s
how this erstwhile symbol of solidarity with the downtrodden became a
status totem: Yasir Arafat sympathetic old-lady professors at Berkeley
their worshipful students the guys they go to Sam Roberts concerts with
Rachael Ray in a Dunkin’ Donuts ad. With each exposure, the political
symbol loses meaning. Which is why Che’s face isn’t appropriate for
community organizers anymore; it suits pro poker players at Vegas
nightclubs much better.

Obama has promised fresh politics, new in substance, new in style. We’ll
see. Like FDR and LBJ before him, he has had to reject the title of
“socialist.” But let’s face it: McCain was on to something back in
October when he croaked in a radio address, “At least in Europe, the
socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are up-front about their
objectives.” (Obama was busy texting his supporters.) BHO’s predecessors
cloaked their agendas with camouflage terminology, the “New Deal” and
the “Great Society,” and Obama may yet find some similarly palatable
euphemism for his attempt to strengthen the core of the federal
government through massive infrastructure overhaul, universal health
care, and, yes, higher taxes and redistribution of wealth. But already
the way we perceive and process world events is changing. Shepard
Fairey’s Obama posters have been the most successful political art in
half a century — the grimy, brutalist images reminiscent of nothing so
much as the socialist-realist propaganda from World War II and the
Spanish civil war, the era when America crushed fascism and built the
strongest middle class in the world. What the Fairey posters show is
that Generation O is embracing the political aesthetics of their
grandparents, and like many of their grandparents, they don’t really
care what you call them. Socialist, pragmatist, vegetable, mineral:
Obama’s followers want results, on the financial crisis, the
environment, and the war in Iraq. Who has time to watch
four-and-a-half-hour movies about dead guerrillas?

The corporate forces that are looting the Treasury and have plunged us into a depression will not be contained by the two main political parties. The Democratic and Republican parties have become little more than squalid clubs of privilege and wealth, whores to money and corporate interests, hostage to a massive arms industry, and so adept at deception and self-delusion they no longer know truth from lies. We will either find our way out of this mess by embracing an uncompromising democratic socialism—one that will insist on massive government relief and work programs, the nationalization of electricity and gas companies, a universal, not-for-profit government health care program, the outlawing of hedge funds, a radical reduction of our bloated military budget and an end to imperial wars—or we will continue to be fleeced and impoverished by our bankrupt elite and shackled and chained by our surveillance state.

The free market and globalization, promised as the route to worldwide prosperity, have been exposed as a con game. But this does not mean our corporate masters will disappear. Totalitarianism, as George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. “A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,” Orwell wrote, “that is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” Force and fraud are all they have left. They will use both.

There is a political shift in Europe toward an open confrontation with the corporate state. Germany has seen a surge of support for Die Linke (The Left), a political grouping formed 18 months ago. It is co-led by the veteran socialist “Red” Oskar Lafontaine, who has built his career on attacking big business. Two-thirds of Germans in public opinion polls say they agree with all or some of Die Linke’s platform. The Socialist Party of the Netherlands is on the verge of overtaking the Labor Party as the main opposition party on the left. Greece, beset with street protests and violence by disaffected youths, has seen the rapid rise of the Coalition of the Radical Left. In Spain and Norway socialists are in power. Resurgence is not universal, especially in France and Britain, but the shifts toward socialism are significant.

Corporations have intruded into every facet of life. We eat corporate food. We buy corporate clothes. We drive corporate cars. We buy our vehicular fuel and our heating oil from corporations. We borrow from corporate banks. We invest our retirement savings with corporations. We are entertained, informed and branded by corporations. We work for corporations. The creation of a mercenary army, the privatization of public utilities and our disgusting for-profit health care system are all legacies of the corporate state. These corporations have no loyalty to America or the American worker. They are not tied to nation states. They are vampires.

“By now the [commercial] revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water,” Wendell Berry wrote in “The Unsettling of America.” “Air remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution had imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.”

The corporation is designed to make money without regard to human life, the social good or impact on the environment. Corporate laws impose a legal duty on corporate executives to make as much money as possible for shareholders, although many have moved on to fleece shareholders as well. In the 2003 documentary film “The Corporation” the management guru Peter Drucker says: “If you find an executive who wants to take on social responsibilities, fire him. Fast.”

A corporation that attempts to engage in social responsibility, that tries to pay workers a decent wage with benefits, that invests its profits to protect the environment and limit pollution, that gives consumers fair deals, can be sued by shareholders. Robert Monks, the investment manager, says in the film: “The corporation is an externalizing machine, in the same way that a shark is a killing machine. There isn’t any question of malevolence or of will. The enterprise has within it, and the shark has within it, those characteristics that enable it to do that for which it was designed.” Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface Corp., the world’s largest commercial carpet manufacturer, calls the corporation a “present day instrument of destruction” because of its compulsion to “externalize any cost that an unwary or uncaring public will allow it to externalize.”

“The notion that we can take and take and take and take, waste and waste, without consequences, is driving the biosphere to destruction,” Anderson says.

In short, the film, based on Joel Bakan’s book “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power,” asserts that the corporation exhibits many of the traits found in people clinically defined as psychopaths.