Capitalism is facing its greatest crisis since the Great Depression: a housing crisis, a credit crisis, skyrocketing unemployment etc. As in every such crisis, liberals have to step in and try to salvage the mess created by the speculators and the greedy corporate rich who blindly followed their religious faith in the "free market." Just like FDR in the New Deal, Barack Obama is being labelled a "socialist" by conservative opponents of economic democracy. Will this time be any different?
Because so much government intervention is necessary to "stimulate" the capitalist system, there is a lot of talk of "socialism" in the mainstream media, usually from anti-socialists who want to scare the public away from the programs of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. Glenn Beck and Fox News has even had the current directors of the
Democratic Socialists of America and the Communist Party on to be a punching bag. Newsweek proclaimed on a recent cover story,
We Are All Socialists Now!
The problem is that the mainstream media has accepted the right-wing anti-socialist definition of "socialism" to mean "bigger government," so anything connected with government, especially "wasteful" spending, is labelled "socialist." But would Karl Marx have advocated that "we the people" (the government) bail out the corporate rich? No, socialists were opposed to the bailout of banks, though many support most of the trillion dollar "stimulus" that will go mostly to the working class. The real difference between "capitalism" and "socialism" is that capitalism favors distribution of wealth from the bottom to the top, and socialists fight to redistribute wealth from the rich to the working class and poor. That is a big difference.
While right-wing critics like to link socialists to Joseph Stalin (the discredited Communit dictator who actually killed his communist and socialist critics!), the better examples of democratic socialism would be Martin Luther King, who brilliantly articulated the democratic socialist view that the U.S. was spending too much on the military (especially Vietnam) and not enough to help the poor. Before his murder, MLK was prepared to launch a "class war" against the corporate rich and American capitalism.
The basic premise and fundamental value of socialism is actually found in the teachings of Jesus Christ and the early Christians. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," was not only a Marxist idea, it was a gospel preached by Jesus Christ and his early followers.
Some socialists are speaking out, including in the new issue of
The Nation:
Reimagining Socialism, Barbara Ehrenreich & Bill Fletcher Jr.
Immanual Wallerstein,
Follow Brazil's ExampleTariq Ali,
Capitalism's Deadly LogicAnd from the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson
Who You Calling a Socialist?Whatever is happening right now, there is no doubt that captitalism is going to end up on the ash heap of history along with Stalin's bastardization of Communism. What will take its place is the subject of a class struggle going on as we speak between those who defend the accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a corporate elite, and those on the left who are fighting to extend democracy from mainstreet to Wall Street. Socialism is still a struggle to pry the hands of a powerful economic elite from the control of society and put the majority of working class people in control.
The question is, can the Democratic Party be the instrument for this democratic revolution, or is it time for the workers of America to unite and form their own political party?
The two answers to that question can be found in the fractions of what remains of the Socialist Party in the U.S.:
Democratic Socialists of Americaand
Socialist Party USA
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