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John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.

This article is a revised and extended version of a talk presented on July 12, 2020, to the concluding session (of the Main Forum) of the Seventh South-South Forum on Sustainability: Climate Change, Global Crises, and Community Regeneration. The Conference/Webinar was organized by Lau Kin Chi and Sit Tsui through Lingnan University in Hong Kong.

Any serious treatment of the renewal of socialism today must begin with capitalisms creative destruction of the bases of all social existence. Since the late 1980s, the world has been engulfed in an epoch of catastrophe capitalism, defined as the accumulation of imminent catastrophe on every side due to the unintended consequences of the juggernaut of capital.1 Catastrophe capitalism in this sense is manifested today in the convergence of (1) the planetary ecological crisis, (2) the global epidemiological crisis, and (3) the unending world economic crisis.2 Added to this are the main features of todays empire of chaos, including the extreme system of imperialist exploitation unleashed by global commodity chains; the demise of the relatively stable liberal-democratic state with the rise of neoliberalism and neofascism; and the emergence of a new age of global hegemonic instability accompanied by increased dangers of unlimited war.3

The climate crisis represents what the world scientific consensus refers to as a no analogue situation, such that if net carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion do not reach zero in the next few decades, it will threaten the very existence of industrial civilization and ultimately human survival.4 Nevertheless, the existential crisis is not limited to climate change, but extends to the crossing of other planetary boundaries that together define the global ecological rift in the Earth System as a safe place for humanity. These include: (1) ocean acidification; (2) species extinction (and loss of genetic diversity); (3) destruction of forest ecosystems; (4) loss of fresh water; (5) disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles; (6) the rapid spread of toxic agents (including radionuclides); and (7) the uncontrolled proliferation of genetically modified organisms.5

This rupturing of planetary boundaries is intrinsic to the system of capital accumulation that recognizes no insurmountable barriers to its unlimited, exponential quantitative advance. Hence, there is no exit from the current capitalist destruction of the overall social and natural conditions of existence that does not require exiting capitalism itself. What is essential is the creation of what Istvn Mszros in Beyond Capital called a new system of social metabolic reproduction.6 This points to socialism as the heir apparent to capitalism in the twenty-first century, but conceived in ways that critically challenge the theory and practice of socialism as it existed in the twentieth century.

In the United States, key sectors of monopoly-finance capital have now succeeded in mobilizing elements of the primarily white lower-middle class in the form of a nationalist, racist, misogynist ideology. The result is a nascent neofascist political-class formation, capitalizing on the long history of structural racism arising out of the legacies of slavery, settler colonialism, and global militarism/imperialism. This burgeoning neofascisms relation to the already existing neoliberal political formation is that of enemy brothers characterized by a fierce jockeying for power coupled with a common repression of the working class.7 It is these conditions that have formed the basis of the rise of the New York real-estate mogul and billionaire Donald Trump as the leader of the so-called radical right, leading to the imposition of right-wing policies and a new authoritarian capitalist regime.8 Even if the neoliberal faction of the ruling class wins out in the coming presidential election, ousting Trump and replacing him with Joe Biden, a neoliberal-neofascist alliance, reflecting the internal necessity of the capitalist class, will likely continue to form the basis of state power under monopoly-finance capital.

Appearing simultaneously with this new reactionary political formation in the United States is a resurgent movement for socialism, based in the working-class majority and dissident intellectuals. The demise of U.S. hegemony within the world economy, accelerated by the globalization of production, has undermined the former, imperial-based labor aristocracy among certain privileged sections of the working class, leading to a resurgence of socialism.9 Confronted with what Michael D. Yates has called the Great Inequality, the mass of the population in the United States, particularly youth, are faced with rapidly diminishing prospects, finding themselves in a state of uncertainty and often despair, marked by a dramatic increase in deaths of despair.10 They are increasingly alienated from a capitalist system that offers them no hope and are attracted to socialism as the only genuine alternative.11 Although the U.S. situation is unique, similar objective forces propelling a resurgence of socialist movements are occurring elsewhere in the system, primarily in the Global South, in an era of continuing economic stagnation, financialization, and universal ecological decline.

But if socialism is seemingly on the rise again in the context of the structural crisis of capital and increased class polarization, the question is: What kind of socialism? In what ways does socialism for the twenty-first century differ from socialism of the twentieth century? Much of what is being referred to as socialism in the United States and elsewhere is of the social-democratic variety, seeking an alliance with left-liberals and thus the existing order, in a vain attempt to make capitalism work better through the promotion of social regulation and social welfare in direct opposition to neoliberalism, but at a time when neoliberalism is itself giving way to neofascism.12 Such movements are bound to fail at the outset in the present historical context, inevitably betraying the hopes that they unleashed, since focused on mere electoral democracy. Fortunately, we are also seeing the growth today of a genuine socialism, evident in extra-electoral struggle, heightened mass action, and the call to go beyond the parameters of the present system so as to reconstitute society as whole.

The general unrest latent at the base of U.S. society was manifested in the uprisings in late May and June of this year, which took the form, practically unheard of in U.S. history since the U.S. Civil War, of massive solidarity protests with millions of people in the streets, and with the white working class, and white youth in particular, crossing the color line en masse in response to the police lynching of George Floyd for no other crime than being a Black man.13 This event, coming in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the related economic depression, led to the June days of rage in the United States.

But while the movement toward socialism, now taking hold even in the United States at the barbaric heart of the system, is gaining ground as a result of objective forces, it lacks an adequate subjective basis.14 A major obstacle in formulating strategic goals of socialism in the world today has to do with twentieth-century socialisms abandonment of its own ideals as originally articulated in Karl Marxs vision of communism. To understand this problem, it is necessary to go beyond recent left attempts to address the meaning of communism on a philosophical basis, a question that has led in the last decade to abstract treatments of The Communist Idea, The Communist Hypothesis, and The Communist Horizon by Alain Badiou and others.15 Rather, a more concrete historically based starting point is necessary, focusing directly on the two-phase theory of socialist/communist development that emerged out of Marxs Critique of the Gotha Programme and V. I. Lenins The State and Revolution. Paul M. Sweezys article Communism as an Ideal, published more than half a century ago in Monthly Review in October 1963, is now a classic text in this regard.16

In The Critique of the Gotha Programmewritten in opposition to the economistic and laborist notions of the branch of German Social Democracy influenced by Ferdinand LassalleMarx designated two historical phases in the struggle to create a society of associated producers. The first phase was initiated by the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, reflecting the class-war experience of the Paris Commune and representing a period of workers democracy, but one that still carried the defects of capitalist class society. In this initial phase, not only would a break with capitalist private property take place, but also a break with the capitalist state as the political command structure of capitalism.17 As a measure of the limited nature of socialist transition in this stage, production and distribution would inevitably take the form of to each according to ones labor, perpetuating conditions of inequality even while creating the conditions for their transcendence. In contrast, in the later phase, the principle governing society would shift to from each according to ones ability, to each according to ones need and the elimination of the wage system.18 Likewise, while the initial phase of socialism/communism would require the formation of a new political command structure in the revolutionary period, the goal in the higher phase was the withering away of the state as a separate apparatus standing above and in antagonistic relation to society, to be replaced with a form of political organization that Frederick Engels referred to as community, associated with a communally based form of production.19

In the later, higher phase of the transition of socialism/communism, not only would property be collectively owned and controlled, but the constitutive cells of society would be reconstituted on a communal basis and production would be in the hands of the associated producers. In these conditions, Marx stated, labor will have become not a mere means of life but itselfthe prime necessity of life.20 Production would be directed at use values rather than exchange values, in line with a society in which the free development of each would be the condition for the free development of all. The abolition of capitalist class society and the creation of a society of associated producers would lead to the end of class exploitation, along with the elimination of the divisions between mental and manual labor and between town and country. The monogamous, patriarchal family based on the domestic enslavement of women would also be surmounted.21 Fundamental to Marxs picture of the higher phase of the society of associated producers was a new social metabolism of humanity and the earth. In his most general statement on the material conditions governing the new society, he wrote: Freedom, in this sphere [the realm of natural necessity], can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism of nature in a rational wayaccomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy in the process of promoting conditions of sustainable human development.22

Writing in The State and Revolution and elsewhere, Lenin deftly captured Marxs arguments on the lower and higher phases, depicting these as the first and second phases of communism. Lenin went on to emphasize what he called the scientific distinction between socialism and communism, whereby what is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the first, or lower phase of communist society, whereas the term communism, meaning complete communism, was most appropriately used for the higher phase.23 Although Lenin closely aligned this distinction with Marxs analysis, in later official Marxism this came to be rigidified in terms of two entirely separate stages, with the so-called communist stage so removed from the stage of socialism that it became utopianized, no longer seen as part of a continuous or ongoing struggle. Based on a wooden conception of the socialist stage and the intermediary principle of distribution to each according to ones labor, Joseph Stalin carried out an ideological war against the ideal of real equality, which he characterized as a reactionary, petty-bourgeois absurdity worthy of a primitive sect of ascetics but not of a socialist society organized on Marxist lines. This same stance was to persist in the Soviet Union in one way or another all the way to Mikhail Gorbachev.24

Hence, as explained by Michael Lebowitz in The Socialist Imperative, rather than a continuous struggle to go beyond what Marx called the defects inherited from capitalist society, the standard interpretation of Marxism in the half-century from the late 1930s to the late 80s introduced a division of post-capitalist society into two distinct stages, determined economistically by the level of development of the productive forces. Fundamental changes in social relations emphasized by Marx as the very essence of the socialist path were abandoned in the process of living with and adapting to the defects carried over from capitalist society. Instead, Marx had insisted on a project aimed at building the community of associated producers from the outset as part of an ongoing, if necessarily uneven, process of socialist construction.25

This abandonment of the socialist ideal associated with Marxs higher phase of communism was wrapped up in a complex way with changing material (and class) conditions and eventually the demise of Soviet-type societies, which tended to stagnate once they ceased to be revolutionary and even resurrected class forms, heralding their eventual collapse as the new class or nomenklatura abandoned the system. As Sweezy argued in 1971, state ownership and planning are not enough to define a viable socialism, one immune to the threat of retrogression and capable of moving forward on the second leg of the movement to communism. Something more was needed: the continuous struggle to create a society of equals.26

For Marx, the movement toward a society of associated producers was the very essence of the socialist path embedded in communist consciousness.27 Yet, once socialism came to be defined in more restrictive, economistic terms, particularly in the Soviet Union from the late 1930s onward, in which substantial inequality was defended, post-revolutionary society lost the vital connection to the dual struggle for freedom and necessity, and hence became disconnected from the long-term goals of socialism from which it had formerly derived its meaning and coherence.

Based on this experience, it is evident that the only way to build socialism in the twenty-first century is to embrace precisely those aspects of the socialist/communist ideal that allow a theory and practice radical enough to address the urgent needs of the present, while also not losing sight of the needs of the future. If the planetary ecological crisis has taught us anything, it is that what is required is a new social metabolism with the earth, a society of ecological sustainability and substantive equality. This can be seen in the extraordinary achievements of Cuban ecology, as recently shown by Mauricio Betancourt in The Effect of Cuban Agroecology in Mitigating the Metabolic Rift in Global Environmental Change.28 This conforms to what Georg Lukcs called the necessary double transformation of human social relations and the human relations to nature.29 Such an emancipatory project must necessarily pass through various revolutionary phases, which cannot be predicted in advance. Yet, to be successful, a revolution must seek to make itself irreversible through the promotion of an organic system directed at genuine human needs, rooted in substantive equality and the rational regulation of the human social metabolism with nature.30

Building on G. W. F. Hegels philosophy, Engels famously argued in Anti-Dhring that real freedom was grounded in the recognition of necessity. Revolutionary change was the point at which freedom and necessity met in concrete praxis. Although there was such a thing as blind necessity beyond human knowledge, once objective forces were grasped, necessity was no longer blind, but rather offered new paths for human action and freedom. Necessity and freedom fed on each other, requiring new periods of social change and historical transcendence.31 In illustrating this materialist dialectical principle, Lenin acutely observed, we do not know the necessity of nature in the phenomena of the weather. But while we do not know this necessity, we do know that it exists.32 We know the human relation to the weather and nature in general inevitably varies with the changing productive relations governing our actions.

Today, the knowledge of anthropogenic climate crisis and of extreme weather events is removing human beings from the realm of blind necessity and demanding that the worlds population engage in the ultimate struggle for freedom and survival against catastrophe capitalism. As Marx stated in the context of the severe metabolic rift imposed on Ireland as a result of British colonialism in the nineteenth century, the ecological crisis presents itself as a case of ruin or revolution.33 In the Anthropocene, the ecological rift resulting from the expansion of the capitalist economy now exists on a scale rivaling the biogeochemical cycles of the planet. However, knowledge of these objective developments also allows us to conceive the necessary revolution in the social metabolic reproduction of humanity and the earth. Viewed in this context, Marxs crucial conception of a community of associated producers is not to be viewed as simply a far-off utopian conception or abstract ideal but as the very essence of the necessary human defense in the present and future, representing the insistent demand for a sustainable relation to the earth.34

But where is the agent of revolutionary change? The answer is that we are seeing the emergence of the material preconditions of what can be called a global environmental proletariat. Engelss Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845, was a description and analysis of working-class conditions in Manchester, shortly after the so-called Plug Plot Riots and at the height of radical Chartism. Engels depicted the working-class environment not simply in terms of factory conditions, but much more in terms of urban developments, housing, water supply, sanitation, food and nutrition, and child development. The focus was on the general epidemiological environment enforced by capitalism (what Engels called social murder and what Norman Bethune later called the second sickness) associated with widespread morbidity and mortality, particularly due to contagious disease.35 Marx, under the direct influence of Engels and as a result of his own social epidemiological studies twenty years later while writing Capital, was to see the metabolic rift as arising not only in relation to the degradation of the soil, but equally, as he put it, in terms of periodical epidemics induced by society itself.36

What this tells usand we could find many other illustrations, from the Russian and Chinese Revolutions to struggles in the Global South todayis that class struggle and revolutionary moments are the product of a coalescence of objective necessity and a demand for freedom emanating from material conditions that are not simply economic but also environmental in the broadest sense. Revolutionary situations are thus most likely to come about when a combination of economic and ecological conditions make social transformations necessary, and where social forces and relations are developed enough to make such changes possible. In this respect, looked at from a global standpoint today, the issue of the environmental proletariat overlaps with and is indistinguishable from the question of the ecological peasantry and the struggles of the Indigenous. Likewise, the struggle for environmental justice that now animates the environmental movement globally is in essence a working-class and peoples struggle.37

The environmental proletariat in this sense can be seen as emerging as a force all over the world, as evident in the present period of ecological-epidemiological struggle in relation to COVID-19. Yet, the main locus of revolutionary ecological action in the immediate future remains the Global South, faced with the harsh reality of imperialism in the Anthropocene.38 As Samir Amin observed in Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marxs Law of Value, the triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan is already using the planets bio-capacity at four times the world average, pointing toward ecological oblivion. This unsustainable level of consumption of resources in the Global North is only possible because

a good proportion of the bio-capacity of society in the South is taken up by and to the advantage of these centers [in the triad]. In other words, the current expansion of capitalism is destroying the planet and humanity. The expansions logical conclusion is either the actual genocide of the peoples of the Southas overpopulationor, at the least, their confinement to ever-increasing poverty. An eco-fascist strand of thought is being developed which gives legitimacy to this kind of final solution to the problem.39

A revolutionary process of socialist construction aimed at building a new system of social reproduction in conformity with the demands of necessity and freedom cannot occur without an overall orienting principle and measure of achievement as part of a long-term strategy. It is here, following Mszros, that the notion of substantive equality or a society of equals, also entailing substantive democracy, comes into play in todays struggles.40 Such an approach not only stands opposed to capital at its barbaric heart but also opposes any ultimately futile endeavor to stop halfway in the transition to socialism. Immanuel Kant spelled out the dominant liberal view shortly after the French Revolution when he stated that the general equality of men as subjects in a state coexists quite readily with the greatest inequality in degrees of the possessions men have. Hence, the general equality of men coexists with great inequality of specific rights of which there may be many.41 In this way, equality came to be merely formal, existing merely on paper as Engels pointed out, not only with respect to the labor contract between capitalist and worker but also in relation to the marriage contract between men and women.42 Such a society establishes, as Marx demonstrated, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right.43 The idea of substantive equality, consistent with Marxs notion of communism, challenges all of this. It demands a change in the constitutive cells of society, which can no longer consist of possessive individualists, or individual capitals, reinforced by a hierarchical state, but must be based on the associated producers and a communal state. Genuine planning and genuine democracy can only start through the constitution of power from the bottom of society. It is only in this way that revolutions become irreversible.

It was the explicit recognition of the challenge and burden of twenty-first-century socialism in these terms that represented the extraordinary threat to the prevailing order constituted by the Venezuelan Revolution led by Hugo Chvez. The Bolivarian Republic challenged capitalism from within through the creation of communal power and popular protagonism, generating a notion of revolution as the creation of an organic society, or a new social metabolic order. Chvez, building on the analyses of Marx and Mszros, mediated by Lebowitz, introduced the notion of the elementary triangle of socialism, or (1) social ownership, (2) social production organized by workers, and (3) satisfaction of communal needs.44 Underlying this was a struggle for substantive equality, abolishing the inequalities of the color line and the gender line, the imperial line, and other lines of oppression, as the essential basis for eliminating the society of unequals.

In Communism as an Ideal, Sweezy emphasized the new forms of labor that would necessarily come into being in a society that used abundant human productivity more rationally. Many categories of work, he indicated, would be eliminated altogether (e.g. coalmining and domestic service), and insofar as possible all jobs must become interesting and creative as only a few are today. The reduction of the enormous waste and destruction inherent in capitalist production and consumption would open up space for the employment of disposable time in more creative ways.

In a society of equalsone in which everyone stands in the same relation to the means of production and has the same obligation to work and serve the common welfareall needs that emphasize the superiority of the few and involve the subservience of the many will simply disappear and will be replaced by the needs of liberated human beings living together in mutual respect and cooperation. Society and the human beings who compose it constitute a dialectical whole: neither can change without changing the other. And communism as an ideal comprises a new society and a new [human being].45

More than simply an ideal, such an organizing principle in which substantive equality and substantive democracy are foremost in the conception of socialism/communism is essential not only to create a socialist path to a better future but as a necessary defense of the global population confronted with the question of survival. Dystopian books and novels notwithstanding, it is impossible to imagine the level of environmental catastrophe that will face the worlds peoples, especially those at the bottom of the imperialist hierarchy, if capitalisms creative destruction of the metabolism of humanity and the earth is not stopped midcentury.

According to a 2020 article on The Future of the Human Climate Niche in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, based on existing trends, 3.5 billion people are projected to be living in unlivable heat outside the human climate niche by 2070, under conditions comparable to those of the Sahara desert.46 Even such projections fail to capture the enormous level of destruction that will fall on the majority of humanity under capitalist business as usual. The only answer is to leave the burning house and to build another now.47

Although untold numbers of people are engaged in innumerable struggles against the capitalist juggernaut in their specific localities all around the world, struggles for substantive equality, including battles over race, gender, and class, depend on the fight against imperialism at the global level. Hence, there is a need for a new global organization of workers based on the model of Marxs First International.48 Such an International for the twenty-first century cannot simply consist of a group of elite intellectuals from the North engaged in World Social Forum-like discussion activities or in the promotion of social-democratic regulatory reforms as in the so-called Socialist and Progressive Internationals. Rather, it needs to be constituted as a workers-based and peoples-based organization, rooted from the beginning in a strong South-South alliance so as to place the struggle against imperialism at the center of the socialist revolt against capitalism, as contemplated by figures such as Chvez and Amin.

In 2011, just prior to his final illness, Chvez was preparing, following his next election, to launch what was to be called the New International (pointedly not a Fifth International) focusing on a South-South alliance and giving a global significance to socialism in the twenty-first century. This would have extended the Bolivarian Alliance for Peoples of Our America to a global level.49 This, however, never saw the light of day due to Chvezs rapid decline and untimely death.

Meanwhile, a separate conception grew out of the efforts of Amin, working with the World Forum for Alternatives. Amin had long contemplated a Fifth International, an idea he was still presenting as late as May 2018. But in July 2018, only a month before his death, this had been transformed into what he called an Internationale of Workers and Peoples, explicitly recognizing that a pure worker-based International that did not take into account the situation of peoples was inadequate in confronting imperialism.50 This, he stated, would be an organization, not just a movement. It would be aimed at the

alliance of all working peoples of the world and not only those qualified as representatives of the proletariatincluding all wage earners of the services, peasants, farmers, and the peoples oppressed by modern capitalism. The construction must also be based on the recognition and respect of diversity, whether of parties, trade unions, or other popular organizations of struggle, guaranteeing their real independence. In the absence of [such revolutionary] progress the world would continue to be ruled by chaos, barbarian practices, and the destruction of the earth.51

The creation of a New International cannot of course occur in a vacuum but needs to be articulated within and as a product of the building of unified mass organizations expanding at the grassroots level in conjunction with revolutionary movements and delinkings from the capitalist system all over the world. It could not occur, in Amins view, without new initiatives from the Global South to create broad alliances, as in the initial organized struggles associated with the Third World movement launched at the Bandung Conference in 1955, and the struggle for a New International Economic Order.52 These three elementsgrassroots movements, delinking, and cross-country/cross-continent alliancesare all crucial in his conception of the anti-imperialist struggle. Today this needs to be united with the global ecological movement.

Such a universal struggle against capitalism and imperialism, Amin insisted, must be characterized by audacity and more audacity, breaking with the coordinates of the system at every point, and finding its ideal path in the principle of from each according to ones ability, to each according to ones need, as the very definition of human community. Today we live in a time of the perfect coincidence of the struggles for freedom and necessity, leading to a renewed struggle for freedom as necessity. The choice before us is unavoidable: ruin or revolution.

Original post:
The Renewal of the Socialist Ideal - Monthly Review

By Kevin Reed 5 September 2020

Earlier this year, the World Socialist Web Site was officially blacklisted from r/politics, the largest political subreddit on the link-sharing social media site Reddit, with no explanation given.

On August 28, an article entitled, Trump runs for Fhrer inexplicably made it past the blacklist, having been shared by a Reddit user in the r/politics subreddit. It quickly won thousands of upvotes, received over 600 comments, and was elevated onto Reddits front page.

The r/politics moderators immediately sprang into action. They labeled the WSWS article as coming from an Unacceptable Source and shut down the political discussion among Reddit members.

As we reported on Saturday, the censored WSWS articlewhich analyzed President Trumps nomination acceptance speech at the 2020 Republican National Conventionbecame instantly popular because it said what the establishment media refused to. It exposed Trumps law and order response to the mass protests, his appeals to the police, military and federal paramilitary forces, and his tirades against socialism and Marxism as part of an attempt to establish a personalist presidential dictatorship and create a fascist movement in the US.

The articles thousands of upvotes were accompanied by overwhelmingly supportive comments, including the following:

These events make clear the nature of Reddits censorship of the WSWS. It is aimed at silencing left-wing criticism of the US political establishment, under conditions in which broad sections of its own readers are hungry for news and analysis from just such a perspective.

Moreover, the WSWS analysis pointed out that the only reason Trump has been able to take his dictatorial plans as far as he has is because of the spinelessness of his Democratic Party opponents. As the article explained, the Democrats have consistently blocked any appeal to the broad majority of the population and, in particular, the working class, and this is because, as one of the two parties of Wall Street and big business, the Democrats are just as terrified of, and hostile to, the growth of mass popular opposition to capitalism as Trump is.

However, for the r/politics moderators, this analysis by the WSWS is considered unacceptable. And, approximately nine hours after the WSWS article was sharedand after it had received 9,200 upvotes (93 percent of those who voted) and more than 600 commentsthe r/politics moderators labeled the article from an Unacceptable Source and shut down the political discussion.

The subreddit moderators political censorship of the WSWS article Trump runs for Fhrer comes as no surprise given their previous removal of wsws.org from the r/politics domain whitelist.

On May 26, Reddit users attempting to post links from the World Socialist Web Site to r/politics were informed that the wsws.org domain had been removed as a recognized source of news and analysis on the subreddit.

Subsequent attempts by users to publish links to articles from wsws.org were returning an automated system message that says, Your submission was automatically removed because wsws.org is not on our approved source whitelist. r/politics has a number of conditions that domains must adhere to in order to be approved as an acceptable source.

As we explained in an earlier article on April 3, regarding the banning of the World Socialist Web Site from the r/coronavirus subreddit, the removal of the wsws.org domain by moderators is unmistakably an act of political censorship designed to block our analysis of the unfolding crisis from reaching the public.

In the case of the r/coronavirus ban in April, moderators claimed that WSWS articles were off-topic political discussion. In the more recent case of r/politicsa subreddit specifically devoted to political topics and political discussionthe moderators have resorted to a cruder form of censorship: the false claim that the World Socialist Web Site is unacceptable.

We have also pointed out that the World Socialist Web Site is recognized internationally as a major source of authoritative Marxist journalism and analysis. Articles on the site are frequently quoted by leading authors and journalists around the world and in dozens of academic papers. Articles and statements on wsws.org are translated into 24 languages and the site is followed daily by a growing international audience of hundreds of thousands of readers.

Both recent instances of political censorship by Reddit moderators were recently noted by Matt Taibbithe freelance journalist and contributing editor for Rolling Stonein his May 29 blog post Planet of the Censoring Humans, which surveyed a series of recent online censorship actions by the social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit.

Taibbi wrote, In late April, the World Socialist Web Sitewhich has been one of the few consistent critics of Internet censorship and algorithmic manipulationwas removed by Reddit from the r/coronavirus subreddit on the grounds that it was not reliable. The site was also removed from the whitelist for r/politics, the primary driver of traffic from Reddit to the site.

The subreddit r/politics was created in August 2007 and is one of the most widely used forums on Reddit. Out of 1.2 million subreddits on the news aggregation platform, r/politics ranks at number 56. It has 6.5 million members with tens of thousands actively participating users at any one moment. At the time of this writing, for example, there are approximately 150,000 users participating in live online political discussions on r/politics on a range of topics.

There are more than 1,020 news source domains included on the r/politics whitelist. These include newspaper publishers (359), policy think tanks (188), web publishers (183), magazine publishers (118), television networks (48), international news agencies (39), polling and research organizations (37), radio broadcasters (19), US government agencies (10), news wire services (10) and political parties (9).

The r/politics whitelist includes numerous right-wing publisherssuch as The Federalist, Breitbart.com and theWashington Timeswho engage in promoting racism, xenophobia, conspiracy theories and completely false and dangerous information about the coronavirus pandemic.

The World Socialist Web Site had been previously whitelisted nearly three years ago by the subreddit and, since August 2017, hundreds of article links have been shared. These articles have resulted in some of the most popular discussions on r/politics and produced a combined total of hundreds of thousands of upvotes and tens of thousands of comments.

We demand answers from the moderators of r/politics to the following questions:

Finally, we call upon all Reddit users and others who defend free speech rights to demand an end to political censorship by r/politics moderators and that the World Socialist Web Site be restored to the subreddit whitelist with an accompanying official statement to this effect.

The author also recommends:

Reddit moderators censor WSWS article on Trumps speech at Republican convention [29 August 2020]

Reddit bans 2,000 communities in major censorship action [2 July 2020]

Why is the World Socialist Web Site banned from the subreddit r/coronavirus? [3 April 2020]

Google is blocking the World Socialist Web Site from search results.

To fight this blacklisting:

Go here to read the rest:
End the blacklist of the World Socialist Web Site on Reddit! - WSWS

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! Im Amy Goodman. The Quarantine Report.

Our next guest writes today in the Los Angeles Times, Fifty years ago today, on the night of Sept. 4, 1970, I was dancing, along with a multitude of others, in the streets of Santiago de Chile. We were celebrating the election of Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected socialist leader in the world.

President Allendes victory had historical significance beyond Chile. Before then, political revolutions had been violent, imposed by force of arms. Allende and his left-wing coalition used peaceful means, proclaiming it unnecessary to repress ones adversaries to achieve social justice. Radical change could happen within the confines and promises of a democracy, he writes.

Ariel Dorfman went on to become the cultural and press adviser to President Allendes chief of staff during the last months of his presidency in 1973. He continues, I have often fantasized about how different the world would be if Allende had not been overthrown, three years later, in a bloody coup. I wonder where humanity would be if his peaceful revolution had been allowed to run its course and become a template for other countries.

Those words from todays op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by our Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean American best-selling author, human rights defender, playwright, poet and distinguished professor emeritus of literature at Duke University, joining us now from Durham, North Carolina.

We welcome you back to Democracy Now! Talk about what happened 50 years ago, the way the word socialist is thrown around in the United States today by the leaders of this country, and what you see are the lessons from Chile.

ARIEL DORFMAN: Well, its great to be back with you, Amy.

Allendes revolution, which was a peaceful revolution, was the attempt to put the resources of the country and the future of the country into the hands of the majority. Chile had been a country that had had incredible poverty, where most of our resources were controlled from abroad, many by American companies, where the land was not tilled by the people was tilled by the people, but those people didnt get the riches or prosperity that they had. And Allende basically was a movement for social justice and for putting in the center of history the real protagonist of that history, which are the everyday men and women who built the country,I mean, the essential workers right? that are now so praised but who are generally left behind and neglected and forgotten.

So it was a moment in history which is very, very important, because Allende was saying to the world, We do not need to repress, eliminate, censor our adversaries. We dont need to kill other people, in order to have social justice. We can do this through peaceful means. And so, Allende joins Gandhi and Martin Luther King and so many other wonderful people of history saying there is a way of changing the reality, of changing everything, everything that we dont have to leave the world in the same way in which we found it. We can create a different world ahead of us. And it was a wonderful experiment. It was an experiment that lasted 1,000 days. But in those 1,000 days, wonderful things happened.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I wanted to go to today, to the Republican National Convention, to the former governor of South Carolina, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley.

NIKKI HALEY: A Biden-Harris administration would be much, much worse. Last time, Joes boss was Obama. This time, it would be Pelosi, Sanders and the Squad. Their vision for America is socialism. And we know that socialism has failed everywhere. They want to tell Americans how to live and what to think. They want a government takeover of healthcare. They want to ban fracking and kill millions of jobs. They want massive tax hikes on working families. Joe Biden and the socialist left would be a disaster for our economy.

AMY GOODMAN: So, thats Nikki Haley. And, of course, President Trump repeatedly talks about socialism. This was the State of the Union.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Tonight we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.

AMY GOODMAN: Ariel Dorfman, please respond.

ARIEL DORFMAN: Well, listen, I would be glad if America were a socialist country, because then people would not be starving. There wouldnt be racism in the way weve got it. Everyone would have healthcare, and the economy would be much, much better off.

But socialism isnt on the ballot, you know? Social justice is on the ballot. Healthcare for all is going to be on the ballot. Infrastructure is going to be on the ballot. Racial justice is going to be on the ballot. I mean, theres lots of things that are going to be on the ballot, but not necessarily socialist. And Trump is simply deranged, as we know. He lies about everything.

And, you know, when your previous guest, Professor Stanley, spoke about fascism, I remember two very different things. First of all, the whole campaign against Allende during the Allende government was exactly what Professor Stanley is speaking about, but exactly, you know? That we are diseased, the law and order, were going to come were going to rape your women. The socialists are going to rape your women. Well, of course, the people who ended up raping women and children were the fascists who took the reins of government after they overthrew Allende. So, they spoke about foreigners infiltrating the country. They spoke about the nationalism. They spoke about sexual unease. Every one of those little fascist things that you mentioned there was part of the campaign against Allende, which was in great measure paid for by the CIA and Nixon and Kissinger. Besides that, after, when Pinochet took power on September 11th, 1973, the whole policy of the Pinochet government was exactly what Professor Stanley is saying, taking the exact same points.

So, socialism isnt a problem thats ahead, you know? But people will have to decide whether sweeping change is going to come. And I think that the country is ready for those sweeping reforms, just like the sort of sweeping reforms that we had to do in Chile, because there are moments when you need to change things drastically in order to make things better. And, in fact, Joe Biden and Harris are the party to security. In fact, theyre the party of stability, not the party of chaos. If anybody is creating chaos, it is people like Donald Trump and all his enablers. And they will go down in history as accomplices to murder.

AMY GOODMAN: I daresay that you

ARIEL DORFMAN: Mass murder, by the way. Mass murder, not just general murder.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me ask you about the U.S. topping 6 million cases of coronavirus, 187,000 deaths, could be 400,000 by January 1st. You say the pandemic is teaching Americans what its like to live in exile. Explain.

ARIEL DORFMAN: Yes, I think that we are you know, Ive lived in exile a great part of my life, and Ive been an immigrant a great part of my life. And we are used to distancing. We are used to discovering in distance the capacity that we have to connect with one another, the capacity we have if you think about the immigrants, immigrants have come into a country, and when we come into this country, we see everything with new eyes. And Im suggesting that that experience is one which Americans are going to have to have.

In fact, Im suggesting that even confinement may lead to enormous advances in literature and art, some of the greatest art. I have a novel that just came out called Cautivos, which is about Cervantes in the jail of Seville. And he created the greatest novel of all time, Don Quixote de la Mancha, right? And he created it in circumstances of confinement, of extreme confinement. And some of the greatest literature has been done either in exile in other words, when youre distanced from others, when youve lost everything, when youve lost your country and you have to refound everything, you have to rethink everything or in confinement, when youre isolated and you have time to look into yourself and say, What is the real meaning of life? What is real happiness? How will we connect with one another? How will we seek and imagine a different sort of future?

So, those are things that, strangely enough you know, Im an optimist. I think its terrible, whats happening. I would not wish it on the worst of my enemies, this pandemic were living through. But it is a chance for us to think again about what it means to be isolated, what it means to lose a country, what it means to lose everyday life, what it means not to go to the funeral of the people we love, not to be able to hug the people we love like immigrants all over the world. We cant do that, right? Were separated from ourselves. And yet, from that pain, I think that new things can be born. Were like phoenixes in that sense. We rise from the ashes. And we rise from the ashes with our imagination, with our compassion, with our ability to think and to rethink the world in a different way.

I think thats whats really, really going to happen in the next few months. We have to decide whether were going towards a different sort of future, imagine the possibility of that future, or whether were going to get in a stranglehold of a past and die in that. And many people will die because of it. I mean, death is on the ballot. Death is on the ballot this November. It is a matter of life and death, whats going to happen.

AMY GOODMAN: Ariel Dorfman, I want to thank you for being with us, Chilean American best-selling author, human rights defender, playwright and poet. We will link to your op-ed in the Los Angeles Times today headlined I danced in the streets after Allendes victory in Chile 50 years ago. Now I see its lessons for today. He was the cultural and press adviser to President Allende during the last months of his presidency in 1973. Salvador Allende died in the palace in Santiago September 11th, 1973, as the authoritarian dictator Augusto Pinochet, supported by the Nixon government in the United States, rose to power. Pinochet would kill thousands of people in the years to come.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we remember David Graeber in his own words. Stay with us.

More here:
Death Is on the Ballot: Lessons for the US, 50 Years After Allende's Socialist Revolution in Chile - Democracy Now!

From each according to ability; To each according to need, is a phrase derived from where?

A) The works of Karl Marx

B) The Bible

C) The Constitution of the United States

If you answered A, you are kinda right. But if you answered B, youre not exactly wrong either.

C, on the other hand, would get you zero points. But you would not be alone in getting it wrong. In a 1987 survey, nearly half of Americans surveyed believed the phrase From each according to ability; To each according to need came from the U.S. Constitution.

The phrase was, in fact, popularized by Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. But its origins are in France.

It occurs in the 1848 speeches of the socialist politician Louis Blanc and can be traced further back to the cover of the 1845 edition of philosopher tienne Cabets utopian novel Voyage en Icarie: First right: To Live To each according to his needs First duty: To Work From each according to his ability.

But a decade and a half before Cabet, the followers of the French political theorist Henri de Saint-Simon coined a similar phrase, To each according to ability; To each according to works as an epigraph of their journal LOrganisateur in 1829.

There is a constitution that contains a mix of both phrases, but it isnt the U.S.s. Rather it is the Constitution of the USSR. Joseph Stalin paired From each according to ability with To each according to work in the 1936 Soviet Constitution.

So where does the Bible come in? Well, Saint-Simon, Cabet and Blanc all committed Christians whose social programs were inspired by their faith borrowed each of these phrases from French Bible translations of the time, and defended them on scriptural grounds. History of economics scholar Adrien Lutz and I traced these phrases back to these French biblical passages.

To each according to needs comes from the Book of Acts documenting the practices of early Christian communities in Jerusalem. In the Book of Acts, believers were together and had all things in common and sold their possessions and distributed the proceeds within the community as any had needs.

In Voyage en Icarie, Cabet tells of a fictional community who practice similar communal living arrangements. He later went to the U.S. and founded a number of Icarian communities in the second half of the 19th century, that practiced communal ownership of goods and were governed by egalitarian ideals.

From each according to ability, is likewise found in the Book of Acts: So the disciples determined, everyone according to his ability, to send relief to the brothers living in Judea. Cabet and Blanc both construed this phrase as a call for Christian servitude. They believed society to be a cooperative venture in which people of means should contribute more.

To each according to ability is in the Gospel of Matthew. In the Parable of the Talents, a master gives his servants different amounts of money or talents and goes away on a journey: To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Upon his return, he praises the servants who have invested and increased their allotment but condemns the one who buried the money and simply returned it.

For Saint-Simon, the phrase meant putting jobs and resources in the hands of the most qualified and entrepreneurial people and taking them away from nobility. This would lead to greater productivity, benefiting everyone, and in particular, the most disadvantaged socioeconomic groups in society.

To each according to works occurs at many junctions in the Bible. For example, St. Pauls Second Letter to the Romans states: [God] will render to each according to his works: To those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life.

The phrase is also found it in First Corinthians: He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. Whereas St. Pauls letter makes rewards contingent on ones achievements as a single individual, in Corinthians it measures the effort that one brings to a collective endeavor.

The same article in the Soviet Constitution that employs this phrase also contains a quote from a Bible passage found in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.

The message is the same, but the background of this quote is interesting. St. Paul, the Christian apostle, believed that he and his co-workers did have a right to be maintained by the Church presumably because their ministry was a sufficient contribution to the common good.

But they were facing an incentive problem: There were idle and disruptive elements in the Christian community who were trying to free-ride on the communal living arrangements. For this reason, even though they were doing ministry, St. Paul urges his followers to do manual labor to set a model and distance themselves from the free riders.

The sentiments behind these slogans are not confined to the ash heaps of history. Rather, many of the policies from the political left today fit under these simple slogans.

To each according to need can be applied to the debate over health care. The aim is to take the provision of health care away from market forces and to make it freely accessible to all who need it. From each according to ability is what underlies a concern for the common good and a conception of society as a cooperative venture, with mandatory public service as a matching policy proposal.

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To each according to ability is at the core of equal opportunity an ideal that underlies affirmative action legislation and various policies to increase the accessibility of college. To each according to work maps onto the ideal of equal pay for equal work and the push for minimal wage policies, mainly benefiting manual labor jobs.

Two millennia in the making, these phrases illustrate what is said in the book of Ecclesiastes: There is nothing new under the sun.

Read more:
'From each according to ability; to each according to need' tracing the biblical roots of socialism's enduring slogan - The Conversation US

Do the Democrats and media believe there isn't enough chaos in America, so we need a president with probable dementia, and a very abrasive and phony vice president? Does their strong endorsement by communist China define that Democrat platform?

In a family, not being permitted to ask questions is one of the key indicators of a dysfunctional and abusive family. With that same standard, the media, Democrat Party and educational system are all dysfunctional and abusive. But is that surprising when the cultural marxism (socialism), that the media, Democrat Party and National Education Association push is itself dysfunctional and abusive?

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See the article here:
Socialist agenda sows division and chaos in everything it touches - Wyoming Tribune