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The World Socialist Web Site issued an open letter to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) responding to neo-Stalinist attacks by DSA leaders against Leon Trotsky and the current representatives of his revolutionary legacy, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and its affiliated Socialist Equality Parties.

The WSWS revealed that this campaignwith memes and statements celebrating the murder of Trotsky and the assassin himself, Ramon Mercader, and resurrecting the anti-Trotskyist slanders that served as justification for mass murder of revolutionaries under Stalins Terrorwas carefully coordinated by major figures in the DSA leadership with extensive connections to the Democratic Party.

By attacking Trotskyism through its DSA agents, the Democratic Party, a ruthless defender of Wall Street and US imperialism, is reacting to the growing movement of the working class in the US. Part of a global resurgence of the class struggle, this movement is clashing with the reactionary trade union apparatus and the bourgeois political system as a whole. The ruling class recognizes that this movement finds conscious expression in the WSWS, which has a growing audience among militant workers and socialist-minded youth, including within the DSAs own ranks.

The development of a genuine socialist movement, not only in the United States but internationally, requires that the working class learn to recognize the nefarious political role played by organizations like the DSA, the politics of which reflect the interests of the affluent middle class. In each country, organizations that share this same class character and pseudo-left politics are acting to divide the working class along national, ethnic, racial and gender lines and subordinate it to capitalism and its state.

This struggle is especially significant in Brazil and Latin America, where in recent decades workers have gone through the experience of the bourgeois Pink Tide governments, which, despite their populist rhetoric, failed to resolve the deep social, economic and political contradictions that have historically affected the region.

The DSA is also the political force behind Jacobin magazine, founded and edited by its member Bhaskar Sunkara. Jacobin has consistently acted to sow illusions in the supposedly progressiveand even socialistcharacter of the corrupt Pink Tide governments. In recent years, Jacobin has sought to mount an incursion into Brazil and Latin America. It inaugurated in 2019 both a Brazilian edition, in Portuguese, and a Latin American one, in Spanish.

These international operations have a sinister character. The DSA is a faction of the Democratic Party, which has historically oppressed Latin America, launching dozens of invasions, coups and interventions in the region over the past century.

The DSAs own pedigree is bound up with these crimes. It traces its origins to the Democratic Socialists Organizing Committee (DSOC), founded by Michael Harrington in the early 1970s. Harrington was an acolyte of Max Shachtman, who drifted far to the right after renouncing the defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism and breaking with the Trotskyist movement in 1940. Shachtman embraced Cold War anti-communism and became a political adviser to the AFL-CIO bureaucracy.

Among the leading Shachtmanite cadre was Tom Kahn, who in the 1980s would become director of the AFLCIOs Department of International Affairs (later the Solidarity Center) as it defended the operations of US imperialism, particularly in the bloody counter-insurgency wars in El Salvador and Guatemala and the CIA Contra war against Nicaragua.

The anti-communist AFL-CIO bureaucracys role in Central America was in continuity with its previous intervention in Brazil through its American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), a front for the CIA. The AIFLD trained and funded right-wing union leaders, including in the telephone and telegraph union, who backed the 1964 military coup that overthrew President Joao Goulart and ushered in two decades of dictatorship.

Also coming out of this tendency was Carl Gershman, who became president of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1984, a position he holds to this day. The NED was created to carry out overtly the kind of financing of pro-US parties and unions that the CIA previously funded covertly. It has played a key role in Washingtons regime change operations in the region, from Nicaragua in the 1980s to Venezuela, funding leaders of the 2002 coup against Hugo Chvez and backing US puppet Juan Guaid to this day.

The current turn of the DSAa servile defender of the corporatist AFL-CIO apparatusand Jacobin to Latin America must be understood within this historical context. While presenting a left face, they are part of US imperialisms response to the emergence of an unprecedented political crisis in the region.

The past five years, since the shipwreck of the brief commodities boom, have been marked by accelerated growth in poverty, unemployment and an intensification of already grotesque levels of social inequality. The Pink Tide parties, which have gone on to implement capitalist readjustment programs, have been widely discredited, together with bourgeois establishment as a whole.

The opposition of workers and youth to the existing capitalist setup emerged in mass protests and strikes in different countries of the region, particularly since 2019. Both the social catastrophe and the radicalization of the masses have been sharply exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which is leaving a trail of death and destruction across Latin America.

Latin American workers can only achieve their social demands by definitively breaking the political grip of all the parties representing the interests of the national bourgeoisies, regardless of the left rhetoric with which they seek to cover themselves. Only by this means can they unify their struggles across national borders, directing their appeals to their class brothers in the region and also in the imperialist countries, and adopt a revolutionary socialist leadership and political program. Jacobins efforts are aimed precisely at heading off such a revolutionary development.

Since its founding in 2019, Jacobins Brazilian edition has sought to introduce itself in Brazil as an authoritative voice of socialism. With this aim, it brought together the Brazilian representatives of Pabloite revisionism and its Morenoite variantswhich falsely present themselves as Trotskyistswith Stalinism and academic identity politics.

The person chosen to head the magazines political project, in close coordination with DSAs Sunkara, was Sabrina Fernandes, who had already contributed to the American Jacobin. Besides being a prominent YouTuber in Brazil and an academic, Fernandes is a leading member of the Socialism and Freedom Partys (PSOL) tendency Subverta, which is affiliated to the Pabloite international and defines itself as an ecosocialist and libertarian collective.

Fernandes international connections are worth noting. She began her academic career in Canada, where she affiliated herself to the reactionary New Democratic Party (NDP). She is currently a postdoctoral fellow of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, an institution linked to the German state and the pseudo-left Die Link (The Left), which is also funding Jacobin Brasil.

The mainstream Brazilian magazine poca (usually uninterested in left politics) published an extensive and flattering profile of Fernandes. Speaking to the magazine about her political foundations, she declared: It is common for the radical left to say Oh, because Lenin wrote this, because Trotsky did that and try to give these answers to the different problems we have today. I claim that legacy, but we cant be anachronistic.

This emblematic statement is fully aligned with Jacobin's reactionary purposes. The magazine wants to claim the legacy of Lenin and Trotsky only to repudiate and combat it in every essential aspect, particularly their struggle to establish an independent political party of the working class, hostile to the influences of the petty bourgeoisie, and the struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeois state. Jacobins aims emerged in its first Brazilian issue, titled Marx & Co. The cover of the magazine was a comic-style illustration with cut-outs of historical figures, putting in Marxs company notorious anti-Marxists: bourgeois nationalists like Salvador Allende, leaders of Brazils Stalinist Communist Party, and Stalin himself. Some of the authors have publicly expressed discomfort particularly with the publication of an article by Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) member Jones Manoel, an open defender of Stalin and his historical contributions.

This episode shed light on the operations that preceded Jacobins publication in Brazil. Answering the issues raised by professors Sean Purdy of the PSOL and Ruy Braga, a former member of the Morenoite PSTU, who wrote on Facebook that they should have warned before about Jones Manoels participation, Sabrina Fernandes stated: But there was a warning before when Bhaskar came I explained that the magazine has a wide range that extends to the PCB on certain topics. The article is not about Stalin, you havent even read it yet. Anti-communism criminalizes all of us, that is the lesson of our political situation.

The message is clear: First, the inclusion of a representative of Stalinism in the magazine was not accidental, but a deliberate guideline laid down with the DSA. And second, any attempt to educate the new generation becoming radicalized on the historical divide between Stalinism and Marxisma division that, in Trotsky's words, is a river of bloodwill be furiously attacked by Jacobin as anti-communism.

Jacobin has its focused efforts in recent months on a campaign to present former Workers Party (PT) President Luiz Incio Lula da Silva (commonly known as Lula) and the possibility of a new PT administration as the solution to Brazils profound social and political crisis.

For 14 years the PT ruled Brazil in the interests of the capitalist class and in alliance with the most reactionary forces within its political establishment, including the countrys current fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro. The immense discrediting of the PT among workers and the partys promotion of the military and right-wing forces paved the way for Bolsonaros rise to the presidency.

After being convicted on corruption charges involving Brazils major construction companies, Lula was barred from running in the last presidential election in 2018. In March of this year, however, the proceedings against Lula were ruled legally flawed and the convictions annulled by the Supreme Court, restoring his political rights in the run-up to the 2022 presidential election.

This news was intensely celebrated by Jacobin, and it has continued publishing a series of articles with titles such as Lula is back and he can save Brazil from Bolsonaro. Once Lula assumes the leadership of social movements and left forces, he will confront the social crisis, restore democracy in Brazil, and even take the lead globally in the fight for universal access to vaccinesso claims Jacobin Brasils editor Hugo Albuquerque. In his opinion, all of these wonders are possible without any break with capitalism, quite the opposite.

Albuquerque makes clear that his hopes are based on signs that Lula is being rehabilitated by the Brazilian financial oligarchy. He states that the rapid advance of the Brazilian crisis could very well augur a new outlook among the countrys oligarchy. [T]he ruling class may begin to revise the wisdom of its longstanding anything-but-the-Workers-Party stance.

No doubt, within the Democratic Party administration of President Joe Biden and the US State Department there are also those who believe the interests of US imperialism would be in safer hands under Lula than Bolsonaro. As a faction of the Democratic Party, the DSA provides a left face for these tactical considerations in Washington.

To cover this pro-capitalist policy with pseudo-revolutionary language, Jacobin enlisted the services of a specialist, the veteran of the Morenoite movement Valrio Arcary. Arcary had held positions in the PT leadership before his organization, Convergncia Socialista, was expelled from the party in the early 1990s and formed the PSTU. Today he leads PSOLs Morenoite tendency Resistance.

In his article For a United Front with an anti-capitalist program, he makes grotesque distortions of the politics of Lenin and Trotsky and shamelessly falsifies the history of the Russian Revolution. He attempts to justify PSOLs support for a Lula candidacy by equating it with the demand All power to the soviets raised by the Bolsheviks after the February Revolution of 1917. Who ran the soviets?, Arcary asks, and answers, The moderate Menshevik and SR leaderships. He consciously omits the very existence of the bourgeois Provisional Government which was supported by the treacherous leadership of the soviets, against which the slogan drawn up by Lenin was turned. The aim is to portray the Bolsheviks as their opposite: spineless left supporters of the bourgeoisie, seeking to pressure its leadership to the left! In other words, equating them with the PSOL.

The significance of Jacobins operations to disrupt the development of a genuine socialist movement in Brazil was recognized by Lula himself. Around two weeks ago, Lula tweeted pictures of himself holding up copies of Jacobin Brasil and asking his followers, Have you read it yet?!

But these efforts are doomed to fail. Each new step in the development of the crisis of world capitalism is throwing the working class in Brazil and internationally on the road to socialist revolution and at the same time exposing ever more deeply the visceral hostility of these petty-bourgeois impostors to genuine socialism.

The struggle of the International Committee of the Fourth International to clarify the anti-Marxist nature of these tendencies and the historical roots of their treachery and to promote a real internationalist socialist program is laying the groundwork for creating a new revolutionary leadership in the Brazilian working class that will lead it to political power.

WSWS Review

What is the pseudo-left?

This review examines the response of pseudo-left political tendencies internationally to the major world political events of the past decade.

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State Department socialists: The sinister operations of Jacobin and the DSA in Brazil - WSWS

Joseph Biden ran for president as an environmental candidate, pledging to address global warming. On day one as president, he blocked all new gas and oil leases on federal lands and water, stopped the Keystone XL pipeline, and took the United States back into the Paris Climate Agreement. Now he is proposing a 2022 budget with $36 billion ($14 billion more than last year) for clean energy, improved water infrastructure, and more research. He also proposes to spend $174 million to develop electric vehicle infrastructurethough the Republican Party wants only a small fraction of that.

Environmental groups like the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, and Sunrise, spent some $1.5 million in the 2020 elections mostly for Biden and other Democrats. Yet, in the last few months the Biden administration has given the go-ahead to various projects either on federal land or necessitating federal approval: the Willow project, a large oil drilling project on Alaskas North Slope, oil and leases in Wyoming, and the continued use of the Dakota Access pipeline. All of these projects were approved by Donald Trumps administration and fiercely opposed by environmental organizations. As Gregory Stewart, a leader of the Alaska chapter of the Sierra Club, said of the Alaska project, They are opening up a lane for the oil and gas industry to cause irreparable harm to Arctic communities public health and wildlife habitats.

Since the COVID pandemic, the environmental movementunlike the racial justice movements spectacular demonstrationshas not been very visible. While local environmental protests continue, there is no large, active national movement. Environmental activists have focused on support for the Green New Deal legislation sponsored by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey.

Were going to transition to a 100 percent carbon free-economy, that is more unionized, more just, more dignified and guarantees more health care and housing than we ever have before, Ocasio-Cortez says. Do we intend on sending a message to the Biden administration that we need to go bigger and bolder? The answer is absolutely yes. The Democratic Socialists of America says of the Green New Deal proposals, they are conversation startersnot complete and adequate blueprints. While the GND calls for a transition to a more sustainable economy and a more just society, it does not take on the oil and gas companies directly.

The more radical wing of the U.S. environmental movement challenges the culture of growth and argues that carbon emissions can only be reduced by virtually stopping oil drilling and coal mining and closing down and drastically retrenching the industries that drive them: steel, auto, and plastics, among others. To do that, one would have to nationalize the energy industries and bring them under the control of a genuinely democratic government. That is, one needs to fight for socialism as the solution to the climate crisis. As the group System Change not Climate changes states, The current ecological crisis results from the capitalist system, which values profits for a global ruling elite over people and the planet. It must therefore be confronted through an international mass movement of working people around the world.

2 June 2021

Source: New Politics.

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Biden, the Oil Companies, and the Environment - International Viewpoint

Much of the time that we think we are talking about issues, we are actually talking about words. One side will argue against one definition of aword, while the other side argues in favor of adifferent definition of aword. Each side can claim that the other is not addressing the issue, because the issue is defined differently on each side. In this way, political debate can carry on unimpeded by any barriers of mutually agreed upon terms, like separate superhighways rushing on at full speed in opposite directions. This characterizes alarge amount of political discourse in this country: Torrents of people talking about different things, all of whom assume that they are talking about the samethings.

There is much hand-wringing today over the idea that misinformation and conspiracy theories and omnipresent propaganda have created asituation in which Americans dont seem to have asingle set of mutually agreed upon facts. That is true. But it does not capture an even more elementary flaw in what we are doing. We allow entire issues to be created and to be talked about endlessly in the national political media without ever determining what those issues mean.

The absurd effect of this failure is twofold. First, it allows bad faith political actors to purposely exploit this rhetorical vulnerability in order to smear the other side by inflating the definition of bad things to include whatever the other side is doing. This is standard issue political scumbag behavior, and is to be expected. Worse, though, it creates aself-reinforcing cycle in which widespread use of some vague, ill-defined term convinces the public that this term is something important, driving media coverage and creating impenetrable towers of meaninglessness that come to dominate our partisan politicallandscape.

If you can push abullshit issue into everybody knows territory, you can get away with never having to define it at all. What does it mean? Stupid question. Everybody knows this is anissue.

What does cancel culture mean? Does it mean Being fired from your job for being racist or sexist? Does it mean Being criticized in public for saying racist or sexist things? Does it mean Things that used to be seen as okay for white people to say now are seen as not okay and Iam upset about that because Ilike to say those things? It is easy to see how at one end of the spectrum of definitions, cancel culture is an extremely narrow, niche problem without any major impact on the general publicand at the other extreme, it is apernicious force that might come for anyone. If Iwere making an honest attempt to offer the definition of this term as it is most often used, it would be: People suffering consequences for things they said, with an overwhelming emphasis on the most goofy or misguided examples that we can find. By this definition, cancel culture is just arebranding of the ordinary human foibles that accompany the slowly evolving standards of society. Engaging in any debate at all about cancel culture without ameticulous definition of terms is to fall into atrap before you have evenbegun.

What does woke mean? Does it mean Aware of racism and sexism and other forms of discrimination and committed to working to eradicate them? Does it mean Khmer Rouge-style fanatics coming to seize and indoctrinate your white babies into their vicious cult? Its genuine operational definition is probably something like Anything that makes white people feel guilty. It is aterm that means nothing, and it is aterm that can instantly serve as aslur to discredit anythingan empty bucket into which people can dump every uncomfortable thing in order to invalidate it. The fact that major media figures allow debates about wokeness to happen with astraight face, and without awritten definition, is ridiculous. It is aperfect political black hole, amagic wand that can tarnish whatever anyone dislikes and be said not to apply to anything that they like. It means everything, which means that it meansnothing.

This same dynamic applies to terms that may have once had alegitimate definition, but which become definition-less by the time they have been elevated into the popular mind, laden with propaganda. Do any of the politicians or commentators decrying critical race theory have aprecise working definition for this academic term? Of course not. It now means Anything that talks about white peoplesracism.

And what does socialism mean, exactly? Apolitical scientist (or, you know, an In These Times reader) could tell you the textbook definition, but that does not matter one bit in the context of the terms actual use in America. Here, socialism is used as shorthand to mean anything and everything from a more democratic and egalitarian alternative economic system to capitalism to Social Security and Medicaid to Kim Jong Un executing his own top officials with anti-aircraft guns. To stand up and argue Hey, many broadly popular government programs could be considered socialist is to miss the point that the other side is not and will never be arguing against anything that is broadly popular; they will always redraw the definition of socialism at will to suit their purpose of making itunpopular.

To attempt to have any kind of good faith debate on any of these topics is the political equivalent of trying to hold back an ocean wave with your hands. Its just going to go around you. We cant expect politicians to stop creating these sorts of terms. After all, undefined words that serve to make the other side look bad and can never be pinned down enough to make your side look like hypocrites are the pinnacle of real world political speech. What we can expect, though, is for the media not to get sucked into this stupid and meaningless game, to serve as amechanism that reinforces the idea that unreal things are real. None of these pseudo-issues should be written about in respectable publications or spoken about on the airwaves until they have been subjected to arelentless and scrupulous defining of what they do and do not mean. Idont care if the attempt to define woke in ameaningful way takes the entire length of acable news segment, leaving no time for the ensuing talking points. The fact that coming to arealistic, mutually agreed upon definition sounds so daunting and time consuming is asign that the underlying issue does not, necessarily,exist.

Meanwhile, things like poverty and inequality and death and disease and climate change and war can all be easily quantified, defined and debated in ameaningful way. When someone instead spends all their time talking about things that seem undefinable, it is probably because they find reality to be an uncomfortabletopic.

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Words That Mean Nothing - In These Times

Spencer Platt / Getty Images May Day March Takes Place In New York City

Watch the CBSN Originals documentary, "Speaking Frankly | Socialism," in the video player above.

Socialism: It's a buzzword in the 2020 election season, having sprung up dozens of times during campaign, particularly during the Republication National Convention. Conservative leaders depict the idea as a democracy-killing bogeyman. Some Democrats including Senator Bernie Sanders and Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib have embraced the label with gusto.

CBSN Originals presents "Speaking Frankly | Socialism"

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The political philosophy has history going back centuries. Directly or otherwise, it has influenced government policies around the world, including in America.

But what exactly does socialism mean? What do socialists want right now? And is the Republican warning that socialism is threatening to destroy the American way of life a real concern? There are some facts about socialism that are beyond dispute.

At its simplest, socialism calls for a nation's citizens to control at least some of its means of production the major ingredients needed for a healthy economy. Think infrastructure, energy, natural resources. Under socialism, any surplus or profit from those sectors must benefit those same citizens. Capitalism, meanwhile, calls for private owners to control the means of production and to keep any profit they make for themselves.

Many Americans see these two systems as opposites and Republicans, in particular, tend to view it as an either-or situation. In a recent Pew Research Centersurvey, the majority of Republicans (68%) expressed a positive view of capitalism and a negative view of socialism.

But a substantial minority of voters hold a positive view of both systems 25% of the overall group of Americans surveyed by Pew felt favorably about socialism as well as capitalism.

The fact is, the two systems can, and do, coexist in many countries. Some governments blend socialist policies with capitalism and democratically elected leadership, a system usually called social democracy.

No socialists are running for president on a major-party ticket in 2020. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party's nominees for president and vice president, are not socialists. They are not members of the current socialist party, called Socialist Party USA, or of the nation's biggest socialist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which has about 70,000 members nationwide.

Asked what he'd say to people who were worried about socialism, Biden told Wisconsin stationWLUK-TV: "I beat the socialists. That's how I got elected. That's how I got the nomination. Do I look like a socialist? Look at my career, my whole career. I am not a socialist."

Overall, socialism accounts for a small percentage of America's political makeup. Socialist Party USA had no members in any national or state office in 2020. Only about half a dozen DSA members have held federal office over the years, all in the U.S. House of Representatives, including the current Congresswomen Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib. Senator Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist and has been supported by the DSA, but he is not a known member and does not run under the Socialist Party.

Republicans have frequently used the terms "socialism" and "socialist" as a threat or insult when referring to progressive candidates who are not actually socialists.

There have always been different types of socialists not to mention wildly varying ideas of what the "means of production" are, what role government should have, and where free enterprise might still fit in. Some socialists see "means of production" as all major industries, such as finance or energy.

For Jabari Brisport, a New York teacher and state senate candidate, "What [socialism] means is that energy, housing, health care, education, finance, and transportation ... shall be controlled publicly and not run by, for profit motive."

Other socialists have pushed for a total ban on private enterprise. Karl Marx, the Prussian intellectual who championed socialism in the 19th century, predicted that capitalism was doomed to fail, and a government-controlled economy would rise. Vladimir Lenin, whose Bolshevik revolution gave rise to the Soviet Union's communist regime, preferred armed struggle to help push capitalism into history's trash bin.

Today, the most prominent of America's socialists are very different from the Marxists of the past. They largely push for progressive reforms within capitalism a philosophy generally defined as social democracy.

The Democratic Socialists of America aims to blend socialism-inspired reforms with America's current free-enterprise system. The DSA does not believe private enterprise should be immediately overthrown in favor of a government-run economy. Instead, Ocasio-Cortez, for example, has pushed for a "revolution of working people at the ballot box" new laws and stronger unions to make private businesses more accountable to what DSA members see as public interests.

Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, has advocated for universal free health care, canceling all student debt, and expanding Social Security benefits within America's free-market economy.

The Republican Party has made socialism or more specifically, warnings about socialism a part of its 2020 campaign messaging. During the Republican National Convention in August, one of the speakers, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, cast socialism as antithetical to the American Dream.

"If we let them, [Democrats] will turn our country into a socialist utopia, and history has taught us that path only leads to pain and misery, especially for hard-working people hoping to rise," Scott said.

During his nomination acceptance speech, Mr. Trump echoed that warning, calling Joe Biden a "Trojan horse for socialism."

Some of Biden's policy proposals do call for big spending; he has proposed a$2 trillion clean energy plan. But Biden has also rejected ideas that are darlings of the DSA, such as the Green New Deal. (President Trump, for his part, has also pushed for mega-spending on areas that could be seen as means of production including a $12 billionaid package for farmers.)

Opponents of socialism often point to Venezuela as a cautionary tale. Once ranked as the richest South American country thanks to its oil reserves, in 1998 Venezuela elected a socialist leader, Hugo Chvez. Chvez centralized power in his increasingly authoritarian grip and spent billions on social programs from profits on oil. Under Chvez's successor, Nicols Maduro, global oil prices plummeted and Venezuela's petroleum-dependent economy collapsed.

"It's just empty, empty shelves, all over," says Venezuela-born Maria Fernanda Bello, a coalition director for Young Americans Against Socialism. "Socialists are always going to promise you free tuition, free health care, free everything, but they will never promise you freedom."

But American socialists like Bernie Sanders reject the comparison.

"Let me be very clear: Anybody who does what Maduro does is a vicious tyrant," Sanders said at a 2019 Democratic primary debate. "To equate what goes on in Venezuela to what I believe is extremely unfair."

Some of America's most popular policies have been linked with socialism since their inception, whether the label was earned or not. When Social Security was first proposed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the midst of the Great Depression, a suspicious senator asked the secretary of labor whether it counted as socialism. When told it did not, the senator responded, "Isn't this a teeny-weeny bit of socialism?"

American entrepreneurs have also taken advantage of programs that could be interpreted as socialism-lite.

Donald Trump's father, Fred, got his start building Depression-era homes for New York families with the help of the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insures home mortgages made by private lenders essentially bringing some control over America's finances under the power of its people, via the federal government. Later, Fred Trump turned to the FHA again, building agency-backed housing for military families. Donald Trump later inherited his father's fortune, built in part by these projects.

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What is socialism? And what do socialists really want in 2020?

By what standard do we evaluate a social system? Do we accept a system based on its theoretical structure, its promised outcome, a majority vote or is it by some other means that a system should be judged?

Concerning the system of socialism, most of its proponents seem to be taken in by its theory, not its merit. This is no insult to the socialists intelligence many of the brightest minds fall under its spell. Its a matter of perspective. The socialist tends toward rationalism. I say rationalism in the philosophical sense, meaning the socialist places higher trust in reason than in experience. On paper, this is only logical, but in practice, not all rational arguments unfold with such precision.

On the other hand, the capitalist tends toward empiricism, observing the system and formulating a judgment based on its applied effects. It is no secret that mankinds standard of living and political freedom have rapidly accelerated after the birth of capitalism. Its also no secret that the more society advances socialist doctrines, the more impoverished and enslaved they become.

This is not to say that free markets dont have their own shortcomings nor should it be said that the intentions of socialism are valueless. It isnt perfection that the capitalist seeks, rather effectiveness. It isnt that the capitalist is opposed to social justice, equality and economic freedom, rather that the methods by which the socialist proposes to achieve these ends have proven destructive.

Common ground between these two opposing camps may very well be found in empiricism. To bring about stronger cohesion and a unified political direction, socialists dont have to abandon their goals, only their methods.

Tanner Cook lives in Fargo.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Forum's editorial board nor Forum ownership.

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Letter: The common ground between socialism and capitalism - INFORUM