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Bill Shorten is banking on young Australians forgetting the historical failure of socialism, Mathias Cormann says. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian

The finance minister, Mathias Cormann, says Bill Shorten is banking on enough young Australians forgetting the historical failure of socialism to prosecute a Jeremy Corbyn-style politics-of-envy campaign which would deliver only economic decline and social division.

Cormann used a strongly worded speech to the Sydney Institute on Wednesday night to posit that Shorten was intent on inflicting socialism on an unwitting new generation, declaring that the Labor leader has made the deliberate and cynical political judgment that enough Australians have forgotten the historical failure of socialism.

He compared Labors policy platform to the policies of East German communism, characterising the oppositions outlook as socialist revisionism.

The Berlin Wall came down 28 years ago, which means roughly 18% of Australians enrolled to vote were born after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the failure of a system of government that destroyed the economies of eastern Europe, the finance minister told his audience.

Cormanns thesis was that Shorten was growing increasingly cocky and complacent in his pre-election pitch to voters but the overture would not ultimately succeed because the Labor leader had overreached in his shift to the left.

The finance minister said Labor was misreading not only what is in the best interest of Australians today and into the future, but also the great aspirational spirit of the Australian people.

Cormanns speech was predominantly a rebuttal of Shortens political offensive about rising inequality, and his arguments that success in life is increasingly predetermined by parental income.

The minister said intergenerational income mobility was an important measure of equal opportunity to succeed, in that it measures the linkages between the socioeconomic status of parents and the economic performance and success of their adult children.

Australia performs very well internationally when it comes to intergenerational income mobility, he said. Some dismiss these sorts of measures and indicators as too complicated and hard to communicate and clearly for Bill Shorten it is just an inconvenient truth which he chose to ignore.

Indeed, according to the 2016 Stanford Poverty and Inequality Report, Australia was ranked sixth out of 24 middle- and high-income countries when it comes to providing opportunity to succeed in life through effort and hard work, rather than relying on the socioeconomic status of their parents.

On this important measure, Australia ranks ahead of other significant countries including the UK, the US, Switzerland, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand and Sweden.

In an effort to blunt Labors political messaging on inequality, which is resonant in the community at a time of prolonged wages stagnation, the treasurer, Scott Morrison, has previously used the Gini coefficient to argue that income inequality has improved in Australia rather than deteriorated.

With all major opinion polls, apart from YouGov, showing that the Coalition is consistently trailing Labor on the two-party-preferred measure in the national political contest, the government is increasingly intensifying its political attack on Shorten, who lags behind Malcolm Turnbull on preferred prime minister ratings.

Labor has characterised the increasing stridency from senior government players from the prime minister down as obsessional and over the top.

Cormann on Wednesday argued that Shorten was intent on stoking grievance and resentment with sneering attacks on millionaires, and was also attempting to channel the anxiety of the community to his own political advantage.

He wants to slide into office with the politics of envy and the economics of snake oil.

The finance minister declared socialism had failed for a reason.

If, as a government, you want to pursue equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity, the people in our community that are best able to contribute to our success as a nation will either lose the incentive to work hard to be successful or they will leave and go to work hard and be successful somewhere else.

Pursuing the socialist ideal of equality of outcome leads to mediocrity and stagnation. If you make it harder for aspirational Australians to get ahead, there will be less prosperity which would be bad for everyone.

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'Cocky' Bill Shorten wants to inflict socialism on a new generation, Mathias Cormann says - The Guardian

Home | The Socialist 23 August 2017 | Join the Socialist Party

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Rally for Socialism 2016, photo Paul Mattsson (Click to enlarge)

Socialism 2017 takes place on 11 and 12 November. It is a weekend of discussion and debate with a choice of over 40 workshops and rallies.

Keynote speakers include Socialist Party general secretary Peter Taaffe, author of From Militant to the Socialist Party; Corbynista MP Ian Mearns; Seattle socialist Kshama Sawant who led the US's first successful battle for a $15 an hour minimum wage; Irish socialist MP Paul Murphy fresh from an attempt to criminalise him for effective protesting; and Hannah Sell, Socialist Party deputy general secretary and regular contributor to the Socialist Party's monthly magazine Socialism Today.

There will be time during every workshop for everyone to have a say, to raise questions, propose points of difference, or expand on aspects of the discussion.

We welcome this as discussion and debate brings clarification for all our understanding of the complex world we live in, the lessons from past struggles and the programme we need to fight for socialism today.

At Socialism 2017 we will discuss the Russian Revolution 100 years ago. 1917 provides a powerful example of how it is possible for the working class and poor to take their destiny into their own hands and transform the world.

We will be discussing the impact of the revolution and why the Soviet Union degenerated into dictatorship. But Socialism 2017 will not be a history lesson! It is focused on the burning questions our movements face.

Socialism 2017 will bring together working class fighters, trade unionists and youth and student activists, anti-cuts campaigners, those who want to find out about socialism and Marxism, and people who want to change the world, for a weekend of discussion and debate on the alternative to capitalist crisis.

How can we get rid of the Tories? When will police and institutional racism end? Will a Jeremy Corbyn government be undermined by the Blairites? Can workers fight low pay? What about the trade union leaders who don't want to fight?

What happened to the socialist movement in Venezuela? How can we prevent Trump from delivering World War III? What really happened in the 1917 Russian Revolution?

What do we do about media bias? After Grenfell, how can we end the scandal of private profiteering? Can we win the right to free education?

If these are the questions you are asking then, a) you are not alone, and b) Socialism 2017 is the event for you.

It will be the political event of the year, celebrating the anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, hearing from workers and socialists in struggle around the world

Continued here:
Come to Socialism 2017 - Socialist Party

This morning someone posted a video showing a man with a sledgehammer vandalizing a monument to Christopher Columbus in Baltimore as he rants about genocidal terrorists like Christopher Columbus and George Washington. The Baltimore Brew reports the 225-year-oldmonument to Columbus is the oldest one still standing in the United States.

The two-minute video also features a monologue that lists capitalism among Columbus worst sins. Christopher Columbus symbolizes the initial invasion of European capitalism into the Western Hemisphere, the narrator says. He continues, Columbus initiated a centuries-old wave of terrorism, murder, genocide, rape, slavery, ecological degradation and capitalist exploitation of labor in the Americas.

The culture of white supremacy preceded the United States. Its at the foundation of U.S. culture, business, bureaucracies, and psychology. Observe how vehemently Republican and Democratic misleaders defend genocidal terrorists like Christopher Columbus and George Washington.

Christopher Columbus has become an increasingly polarizing figure over the lasttwo decades. Those who think his history deserves more criticism and less celebration have the right to make that case. In the past few years, a growing number of cities have renamed Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples Day so its not as if there has been no movement on this issue.

Just yesterday a handful of people in Columbus, Ohio gathered to demand the removal of a Columbus statue at city hall. Thats how this ought to work. You get like-minded people together and make your case to your elected representatives.Smashing things with a sledgehammer in the middle of the night is not what democracy looks like.

Read more here:
Baltimore's Christopher Columbus monument vandalized (for socialism) - Hot Air

A far-right demonstrator in Charlottesville. For the new wave of national socialists, socialism means kicking out immigrants, sequestering black people, and establishing an authoritarian state. Photograph: Steve Helber/AP

The groups that marched through Charlottesville last weekend with clubs, shields and cans of mace were clearly drawn from the most extreme and violent end of Americas far right. But key elements of the ideology of at least some of them echo themes that have animated populist groups across the political spectrum, including on the left.

In their chants and placards, the marchers were explicitly fascist, racist and antisemitic. One of their number is accused of murdering a leftwing activist with his car and injuring many more. They came prepared to do violence to leftists, whom they consider to be existential enemies. They werent shy about any of this, and the event was the crest of an extremist wave that has been swelling since well before Donald Trumps inauguration.

But at the same time, some of the groups that marched evince a hostility to neoliberal capitalism, which is equal to that of the most ardent supporters of Bernie Sanders, the leftwing populist who mounted a vigorous challenge to Hillary Clinton during last years Democratic primaries although for the far right it comes inextricably linked to a virulent racism. Many also support the enhancement of the welfare state.

For example, those marching under the red and blue banners of the National Socialist Movement (NSM) have signed up to a manifesto that supports a living wage, sweeping improvements in healthcare, an end to sales taxes on things of lifes necessity and land reform for affordable housing.

An establishing principle in the document written by their leader, Jeff Schoep, is that the state shall make it its primary duty to provide a livelihood for its citizens. It calls for the nationalisation of all businesses which have been formed into corporations.

The manifesto of Matthew Heimbachs Traditionalist Worker Party calls for opportunities for workers to have jobs with justice. And in a manifesto issued on the day of the Charlottesville march, the noted far-right figurehead Richard Spencer wrote that the interests of businessmen and global merchants should never take precedence over the wellbeing of workers, families, and the natural world.

Spencer has previously spoken out including at the American Renaissance conference, a gathering of far-right activists in Nashville in July in favour of single payer universal healthcare.

At the conference, Spencer gave Trump just three out of 10 when invited to rate him because he was too focused on the Republican agenda of tax cuts and dismantling Obamacare.

These critiques of capitalism and mainstream conservatism are key to the socialist element of national socialism. Observers of the far right argue that understanding this is essential to demystifying the far rights appeal, especially to the alienated millennial men currently swelling its ranks.

Matthew Lyons is a researcher into far-right movements, and the author of one book on rightwing populism in the US, and another, recently published, on the alt-right. He argues that a lot of the socialist content in the ideology of movements such as the NSM is vague, and is at one level a prime example of how the far right takes elements of leftist politics and appropriates them for their own purposes.

But he adds that there is a broad hostility to an idea of the capitalist ruling class, within a notion of capitalism centred on stereotypes of Jews.

He talks of a long tradition in Nazism and other parts of the far right of drawing a distinction between finance capital and industrial capital, with the former, identified with Jews, being seen as parasitic.

This identification is apparent on the web pages of NSM, and until the site was purged from the internet on the website of Vanguard America, the group with which the alleged murderer James Fields marched in Charlottesville.

Jewish finance is consistently nominated as the principal enemy of these groups. Lyons explains that this distinction is an antisemitic variant on the ideology of producerism, which is common across the populist right and privileges the makers of tangible things over those engaged in more abstract pursuits. They define industrial capitalists as good capitalists, or even as workers, he says, adding that this was how the noted antisemite Henry Ford described his role at the head of a giant auto manufacturer.

So there is a notion of class conflict, and even a revolutionary perspective, says Lyons. But the society they plan to build on the wreckage of the one they overturn will be constructed for the benefit of whites.

Their socialism, explains Lyons is not universalist. It rejects any notion of an international working class. In their utopia, the state would only be used to tend to the needs of white people. And many groups also reject the idea of equality even among whites.

Alexander Reid Ross is the author of Against the Fascist Creep, a sweeping history of fascism from the early 20th century to the present. He argues that while contemporary fascists try to make nationalism palatable for the working class, ultimately what they envision has nothing to do with socialism; its absolutely inegalitarian.

He also points to the historical example of fascist states during the inter-war period, where workers lived on less food, received lower wages for working longer hours, and enjoyed no collective bargaining rights, and then were fed into the meat grinder of the second world war.

Similarly, for the new wave of national socialists, Ross says, socialism means kicking out immigrants, sequestering black people, and establishing an authoritarian state within which they can live out their fantasies.

Implicitly and explicitly, they offer a critique of the free market capitalism that has been recent conservative orthodoxy throughout the developed west.

Shane Burley, researcher and author of a forthcoming book, Fascism Today: What it Is and How to End It, says: What they want is a situation where the economy is not left up to the free market where it is instead under the control of an elite.

He points out that the trend of mobilising socialist ideas and rhetoric really dates back to the Strasserite section of the Nazis, and helped pull support from areas that would normally go to the far left. It would be a socialism that retains hierarchy, where classes are determined by God or science.

A preoccupation with the source of inequality was on display at Julys American Renaissance conference, where speakers flourished IQ data, and even images of different-sized brains, in their accounts of the reason for social divides. There, and at other alt-right events this year, it has been evident that these views are very attractive to a particular slice of young, millennial men.

In Charlottesville, hundreds marched sporting white polo shirts and distinctive, undercut fashy haircuts. At the Nashville conference, they made up half the crowd. In the breaks between speakers, many sought out Spencer to take candid selfies.

Ross said that in the unresolved aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, those seeking out fascist groups resemble those of the interwar period: veterans who are pissed off about the way that society treats them; and an educated strata who dont feel they can find a place in the current economy.

Observers argue that Trumps campaign rhetoric runs parallel to the racialised economic populism of the far right, and opened up a space in which they can proselytise.

Lyons says that as president, Trump has mostly pursued a familiar conservative agenda, but as a candidate, his platform of protectionism and xenophobic economic nationalism marked out the place where civic and racial nationalism coincide.

In the wake of the Charlottesville protests, and as Trumps presidency continues to melt down, it remains to be seen whether socialism, fascist-style, will retain its allure for so many resentful, violent young men.

See the rest here:
Socialism, fascist-style: hostility to capitalism plus extreme racism - The Guardian

Harlowe, N.C.

Aug. 16, 2017

TO THE EDITOR:

This great nation, the United States of America, is well on its way to becoming a communist/socialist nation. Its following in the footsteps of Hitlers Germany and Maos China.

They first took over the youth in those countries. Hitler took the children from their parents when the children were 4-years-old. They put them in special training schools where they were taught communistic ways, which in theory is a system of the ownership of all property by the community as a whole or under one control.

They gave the children back to their parents when the children were 12-years-old. By that time, their thoughts and habits of life were set in stone. The children rebelled against their parents and all authority that did not conform to communism.

Then they destroyed all statues that showed honor to past heroes who gave their lives to the founding of those countries. Then they destroyed all history books that showed how the countries were established and they replaced the books with those teaching communism.

I dont know what is being taught in kindergarten through 12th grade in our schools, but I do know that 98% of what is being taught by our college professors in socialism. In theory, socialism is the ownership, operation, production and distribution by society rather than by private individuals.

Both socialism and communism destroy and put an end to all values that the people of this great nation had long fought and died for. They kill the ambitions and individual pride in self accomplishments, uniqueness and independent nature of its citizens. During both Hitlers and Maos first year in power, they destroyed millions of their own people.

If socialism and communism are so great, why are so many people who live under those conditions tearing down walls to come and live in the United States?

I am 89-years-old and I have predicted that this unrest in this country, by people who have lost the values of their parents and forefathers, would one day destroy this country. I didnt think that it would happen during my lifetime, but with todays movement in this country, Im not so sure that it wont happen during my lifetime.

To the youth and unrest in this country: Be careful what you wish for; it may come back to haunt you.

BETTY WARD MOTES

Continued here:
Letter to the Editor: Our yearn for socialism will kill us - Carolinacoastonline