The Socialists are Coming

[xoxoxoBruce]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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