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When a thousand socialists from across the United States gathered in Chicago over the weekend for the biennial convention of the Democratic Socialists of America, DSA national director Maria Svart declared: What we're seeing today is historic: the largest gathering of democratic socialists in an era.

Since the 2016 election, Svart is delighted to report, tens of thousands of democratic socialists have come together to build a future for this country in which everyone has the right to a decent job, a good home, a free college education for their children, and health care for their family. For years, we've been sold hope and promised change by Wall Street politicians now we're taking matters into our own hands.

DSA got a big boost from the surge of interest in democratic socialism that extended from the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, who upended decades of right-wing histrionics and media neglect bordering on malpractice when he declared: "Do they think Im afraid of the word? Im not afraid of the word. When I ran for the Senate the first time, I ran again st the wealthiest guy in the state of Vermont. He spent a lot on advertising very ugly stuff. He kept attacking me as a liberal. He didnt use the word socialist at all, because everybody in the state knows that I am that."

Far from being harmed by his embrace of the S word, Sanders benefited from the fact that he was not another apologist for a capitalist experiment that had produced market instability, cruel austerity and scorching income inequality. Young people, in particular, were excited about alternatives.

DSA has invited them into the fold, and thousands joined. The groups membership has tripled over the past year to 25,000. It now has 177 local groups in 49 states and the District of Columbia. And DSA members are running for and winning local offices across the country.

This is a striking development.

But it has happened before.

Socialists once governed great American cities, helped to define the politics of states across the country, and played a critical role on the national stage. The Socialist Party of Eugene Victor Debs and Norman Thomas had many bases of strength (and exists to this day, along with DSA, Socialist Alternative and a burgeoning array of socialist organizations).

From 1910 to 1960, the strongest of these bases was in Wisconsin.

Milwaukee was not just a hotbed of socialism. What was then one of the largest and most prosperous of American cities was run by Socialists. The first member of the Socialist Party to govern a major American city, Emil Seidel, took charge of Milwaukee in 1910 (with the poet Carl Sandburg as his aide), two years before he would run for the vice presidency on a Socialist ticket headed by Debs. The Debs-Seidel ticket pulled close to 1 million votes nationally 6 percent of the total cast in an election year that saw Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Bull Moose Progressive Teddy Roosevelt and even Republican William Howard Taft borrow ideas from the Socialists. By the end of 1912, the Socialist Party had elected mayors, city councilors, school board members and other officials in 169 cities from Butte, Montana, to New York City. In several states, the Socialists were so successful that they were no longer seen as a third or minor party.

Wisconsin was one of those states. Republicans held the majority of state legislative seats during the 1910s and 1920s, while Socialists usually formed the major opposition caucus; Democrats were an afterthought. When those legislatures ushered in many of the reforms that would define Wisconsin as Americas laboratory of democracy, progressive Republicans associated with Robert M. La Follette worked with the Milwaukee Socialists to advance the agenda.

The Milwaukee Socialists did not just influence Madison. They influenced Washington. The first Socialist elected to the U.S. Congress, Milwaukeean Victor Berger, took his seat in 1911 and held it, on and off, until 1929. Far from being marginalized, Berger worked closely with the insurgent Republican caucus that included La Follette, New York Congressman Fiorello La Guardia and the great progressive leaders of the era.

When La Follette mounted an independent progressive campaign for the presidency in 1924, the Socialist Party endorsed his candidacy and Debs hailed the campaigns calls for supporting public ownership of utilities, strengthening labor unions, protecting the rights of women and minorities, defending civil liberties, and preventing wars and war profiteering.

La Follette carried Wisconsin, finished second in 11 Western states and won more than 5 million votes nationwide (17 percent of the total). When some comrades questioned endorsing a lifelong Republican, the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee, Daniel Hoan, said of La Follette: He says the supreme issue is whether the wealth of the nation shall remain in the hands of the privileged few Is not that the thing we have been ding-donging for 40 years?

The Socialist Party faded as a national force after Franklin Delano Roosevelts New Deal stole many of its ideas and much of its thunder. But democratic socialism never disappeared from the American landscape.

Seventy years after Emil Seidel took charge of Milwaukee with a declaration that socialists are prepared to govern, Bernie Sanders took charge of Burlington, Vermont, as a proud democratic socialist.

Sanders went on to serve as an independent socialist member of the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate, caucusing with Democrats but positioning himself to their left on issues ranging from health care reform to trade to economic democracy.

His presidential candidacy confirmed the appeal of such a politics in a 21st century that has been characterized by rampant inequality and the corrupt excesses of crony capitalism.

DSA's growth confirms that the appeal of democratic socialism extends beyond any one campaign.

In the early 1900s, Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party rose in a grass-roots movement against the forces of nationalism, oligarchy, and authoritarianism, recalled DSAs Svart. One hundred years later, todays democratic socialists stand in that same tradition, at a time no less perilous.

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John Nichols: Socialism never went away, but now it's really back - Madison.com

Socialism on the march. | Metro DC - DSA

CHICAGOA thousand delegates, alternates, and members from across the United States attended the biennial convention of the Democratic Socialists of America here last weekend. The gathering was described by Maria Svart, DSAs national director, as the biggest gathering of avowed socialists in a very long time.

The organizations membership tripled to 25,000 this year, largely on the heels of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. Sanders was unafraid to use the word socialism and proved that one could be a serious contender for even the highest office in the land if he or she embraced the word in the right way.

In a conversation on the sidelines of the convention, Svart explained that the construct of socialism being something bad falls apart when people see that socialists are people who fight for jobs for all, decent affordable housing, free college education, and single-payer health care for everyone in America. This is what DSA and its members are doing, she said.

In the resistance movement to Trump, DSA and its members have been out in the streets demonstratingwhether it was at the Womens Marches the day after his inauguration or at the airports and courthouses when the president instituted his Muslim ban.

Part of the rapid growth of DSA results, according to Svart, from the organizations refusal to give capitalism a pass. We show that socialism means taking on and opposing income inequality, horrendous austerity, and all the other negative features of capitalism.

Many people signed up with DSA this year because they saw joining as a way of continuing the political revolution embodied in the Sanders campaign of 2016.

Kristian Hernandez, the daughter of immigrants, heads up the North Texas chapter of DSA. She joined after the Democratic Partys national convention in Philadelphia last July. I started out as a Berniecrat, she said, and I saw first hand the mess that the Democratic Party could be when I was at the convention. I met DSA members and got turned onto the idea of being able to continue the fight after the convention.

Hernandez said she had not yet read Karl Marx, but understood that oppression cant just be fought by theory alone, you have to get involved and do something.

The pay-off of DSAs participation in the Sanders campaign can be seen not just in its raw membership numbers, however, but also in the extensive network of new grassroots groups it now has around the nation. The organization now has 177 local chapters in 49 states and the District of Columbia.

More DSA members are also running for local office in various places across the U.S. Sometimes they run as Democrats, other times as independents. It was back in 1912 that Eugene Debs garnered almost a million votes when he ran for president of the on the Socialist Party ticket. DSA isnt at the Debs level of support yet, but its gaining ground.

DSAs growth is not entirely explained by the Sanders campaign, however. Polls show that more than a third of American adults now say they prefer socialism to capitalism, noted Joseph Schwartz, a member of the DSAs National Political Committee. He said that among young people, aged 18 to 29, the numbers are even higher, probably 50 percent.

DSA members see support for socialist ideas in the broad public as another key factor in the tripling of their membership this year.

A third element, they say, is peoples desire to come out and fight against the policies of Trump. With Trump in office, the times are perilous, said Svart.

Other Peoples World coverage of the DSA convention:

> Democratic Socialists of America hold convention in Chicago this weekend

> Growth of Democratic Socialists of America reflects growing rejection of capitalism

The members and leaders of DSA have a variety of perspectives regarding socialist strategy in the era of Trump.

Paul Prescod, a Philadelphia teacher and a member of DSAs steering committee in his city, saw organizing and working in unions as the key. Socialists are not going to really make headway unless there is a labor movement that is able to fully represent and fight for workers, he said. Its a place to start. He said socialists were already leading key labor battles across the country and pointed to the 2012 Chicago teachers strike as an example.

Jeremy Gong, another member of the National Political Committee, saw support for politicians like Bernie Sanders in the U.S. and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party in the UK, as important. That type of support, coupled with backing of key legislation like the fight for Medicare for All in the U.S., he said, would help create more fertile ground for socialist ideas. Fights for something like single-payer [health care] encourages workers to come together, have success, and to fight the bosses on other things. Its a critically important fight.

Ella Malony, a DSA leader from New York, said elections are very important but dont tell the whole story. Trump was elected but he has no mandate, she explained. Half the people stayed home and he lost the popular vote, so his support is smaller than it seems. The Democrats are also losing popular support. We [socialists] are gaining support but we are totally marginalized.

Malony said that even the election of democratic socialists is useful only to the extent that it politicizes and mobilizes people for action. As a result, she said, DSA will be involved in elections in some areas and in other types of political campaigns in other areas.

Malony scored both Democrats and Republicans for being caught up in militarism. She said that calling for the transfer of huge amounts of money from the military budget toward human needs was another key battle for socialists. When people support those cuts in military spending, she said, they are taking the first steps in an anti-imperialist direction.

Schwartz, who is also an organizer of college professors, sees elections and organizing as both critical in the fight for socialist ideas.

We have to change who is in office because Trump has power and obviously changing who is in Congress is a way to weaken that power.

Schwartz sees campaigning for some progressive Democrats as part of that electoral strategy. We need to back people like Mayor Lumumba in Jackson, Miss., and Ben Jealous or Nina Turner, he said, but Democrats who are neoliberals are not people we want to support.

The struggle against racism has to be a central focus for us, Schwartz said, because even with the Bernie Sanders campaign, you always saw him pivot to class when questions of race were brought up. We are not going to have a united working class unless workers who are in minority groups feel that their special interests are being looked out for.

Racism is used to divide us, Schwartz said. We must fight against it and here in DSA we have to fight hard to improve the composition of our membership and leadership. A socialist organization must make the fight against racism a priority.

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In the era of Trump, a growing DSA talks socialism - People's World

DSA members at the Womens March in New York City on January 21, 2017. (Courtesy of Democratic Socialists of America)

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When a thousand socialists from across the United States gathered in Chicago over the weekend for the biennial convention of Democratic Socialists of America, DSA National Director Maria Svart declared, What were seeing today is historic: the largest gathering of democratic socialists in an era.

Since the 2016 election, Svart is delighted to report, tens of thousands of democratic socialists have come together to build a future for this country in which everyone has the right to a decent job, a good home, a free college education for their children, and health care for their family. For years, weve been sold hope and promised change by Wall Street politiciansnow were taking matters into our own hands.

DSA got a big boost from the surge of interest in democratic socialism that grew from the Sanders campaign. Bernie upended decades of right-wing histrionics, Democratic Party caution, and media neglect that bordered on malpractice when he showed America that a national contender could embrace the S word and survive. Do they think Im afraid of the word? Im not afraid of the word, declared Sanders as he launched his bid for the Democratic nomination. When I ran for the Senate the first time, I ran against the wealthiest guy in the state of Vermont. He spent a lot on advertisingvery ugly stuff. He kept attacking me as a liberal. He didnt use the word socialist at all, because everybody in the state knows that I am that.

Rather than getting harmed for making an effort to explain how democratic socialism works in places like Denmark, Sanders benefited from the fact that he wasnt just another apologist for the capitalist experiment that has produced market instability, cruel austerity, and scorching income inequality. In particular, young people were excited about alternatives.

DSA invited them into the foldwith a smart continuing the political revolution message that built on the slogan of the Sanders runand thousands joined. The groups membership has tripled over the past yearto 25,000and it now has 177 local groups in 49 states and the District of Columbia. DSA members are running for local offices and winning across the country.

Thats a striking development in a country wherebecause of the often irrational responses of media and political elitesmajor public-policy challenges go unaddressed because of the rejection of sound responses that are deemed too socialistic. This has happened even with proposals for smart social and industrial strategies that have been successfully deployed in countries with which the United States is closely allied.

American socialists once governed great cities, helped to define the politics of states across the country, and played a critical role in setting the national agenda.

The prospect of democratic socialism in the United States might seem radical to some, but it is important to remember that its not a new one.

American socialists once governed great cities, helped to define the politics of states across the country, and played a critical role in setting the national agenda. The Socialist Party of Eugene Victor Debs and Norman Thomas influenced presidents and Congresses, and was covered on the front pages of newspapers on a daily basis.

That party had many bases of strength, and indeed exists to this day, along with DSA, Socialist Alternative, and an array of other socialist organizations, some old and some new.

From 1910 to 1960, the hotbed of socialism in America was Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At the time it was one of the largest and most prosperous cities in Americaand it was run by Socialists. The first member of the Socialist Party to govern a major American city, Emil Seidel, took charge of Milwaukee in 1910, with the poet Carl Sandburg as his aide. Two years later, he ran for the vice presidency on a Socialist ticket headed by Debs. The Debs-Seidel ticket pulled close to 1 million votes nationally6 percent of the total cast in an election year that saw Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Bull Moose Progressive Teddy Roosevelt, and even Republican William Howard Taft borrow ideas from the Socialists. By the end of 1912, the Socialist Party had elected mayors, city councilors, school-board members, and other officials in 169 cities from Butte, Montana, to New York City. In several states, it was so successful that it was no longer seen as a third or minor party.

In Wisconsin, for instance, Republicans held the majority of state legislative seats during the 1910s and 1920s, while Socialists usually formed the major opposition caucus. Democrats were an afterthought. When those legislatures ushered in many of the reforms that would define Wisconsin as Americas laboratory of democracy, progressive Republicans associated with Robert M. La Follette worked with the Milwaukee Socialists to advance the agenda.

The Milwaukee Socialists did not just influence Madison, Wisconsin, but Washington, DC, as well. The first Socialist elected to the US Congress, Milwaukeean Victor Berger, took his seat in 1911 and held it, on and off, until 1929. Far from being marginalized, Berger worked closely with the insurgent Republican caucus that included La Follette, New York Congressman Fiorello La Guardia, and the great progressive leaders of the era.

When La Follette mounted an independent progressive campaign for the presidency in 1924, the Socialist Party endorsed his candidacy and Debs hailed his calls for supporting public ownership of utilities, strengthening labor unions, protecting the rights of women and minorities, defending civil liberties, and preventing wars and war profiteering.

La Follette carried Wisconsin, finished second in 11 Western states, and won more than 5 million votes nationwide (17 percent of the total). When some comrades questioned endorsing a lifelong Republican, the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee, Daniel Hoan, said of La Follette: He says the supreme issue is whether the wealth of the nation shall remain in the hands of the privileged few. Is not that the thing we have been ding-donging for 40 years?

The Socialist Party faded as a national force after Franklin Delano Roosevelts New Deal stole many of its ideas and much of its thunder. But democratic socialism never disappeared from the American landscape.

Seventy years after Emil Seidel took charge of Milwaukee with a declaration that socialists are prepared to govern, Bernie Sanders took charge of Burlington, Vermont, as a proud democratic socialist.

Sanders went on to serve as an independent socialist member of the US House and the US Senate, caucusing with Democrats but positioning himself to their left on issues ranging from health-care reform to trade to economic democracy.

His presidential candidacy demonstrated the appeal of these politics in the 21st century, which has been characterized by rampant inequality and the corrupt excesses of crony capitalism.

The growth of DSA confirms that the appeal of democratic socialism extends far beyond any one campaignas do a recent American Culture & Faith Institute poll indicated. The survey found that 37 percent of all American adults now say they prefer socialism to capitalism. A 2016 Harvard University survey revealed that 51 percent of Americans aged 18 and 29 say they reject capitalism outright.

It is this search for economic and political alternatives that has given DSA an opening, not just to build its membership but to pressure the Democratic Party to move left.

In the early 1900s, Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party rose in a grassroots movement against the forces of nationalism, oligarchy, and authoritarianism, recalls DSAs Svart. One hundred years later, todays democratic socialists stand in that same tradition, at a time no less perilous.

Continued here:
America Has a Long and Storied Socialist Tradition. DSA Is Reviving It. - The Nation.

BERKELEY According to mainstream economic theory, globalization tends to lift all boats, and has little effect on the broad distribution of incomes. But globalization is not the same as the elimination of tariffs and other import barriers that confer rent-seeking advantages to politically influential domestic producers. As Harvard University economist Dani Rodrik frequently points out, economic theory predicts that removing tariffs and non-tariff barriers does produce net gains; but it also results in large redistributions, wherein eliminating smaller barriers yields larger redistributions relative to the net gains.

Globalization, for our purposes, is different. It should be understood as a process in which the world becomes increasingly interconnected through technological advances that drive down transportation and communication costs.

To be sure, this form of globalization allows foreign producers to export goods and services to distant markets at a lower cost. But it also opens up export markets and reduces costs for the other side. And at the end of the day, consumers get more stuff for less.

According to standard economic theory, redistribution only comes about when a countrys exports require vastly different factors of production than its imports. But there are no such differences in todays global economy.

In the United States, a balance-of-payments surplus in finance means that more Americans will be employed as construction workers, capital-goods producers, and nurses and home health aides. Similarly, a surplus in services means that more Americans will work not only as highly educated (and well-remunerated) consultants in steel-and-glass eyries, but also as, say, janitors and housekeepers in motels outside of Yellowstone National Park.

At the same time, a deficit in manufacturing may create more manufacturing jobs abroad, in countries where labor costs are low relative to capital; but it destroys relatively few jobs in the US, where manufacturing is already a highly capital-intensive industry. As Stanford University economist Robert Hall has been pointing out for three decades, more Americans are employed selling cars than making them. The commodities that the US imports from abroad embody a significant amount of relatively unskilled labor, but they do not displace much unskilled labor in America.

So, at least in theory, the shift in US employment from assembly-line manufacturing to construction, services, and caretaking may have had an impact on the overall distribution of income in terms of gender, but not in terms of class. Why, then, has there been such strong political resistance to globalization in the twenty-first century? I see four reasons.

First and foremost, it is easy for politicians to pin the blame for a countrys problems on foreigners and immigrants who do not vote. Back in 1890, when politicians in the Habsburg Empire routinely blamed Jews for various socioeconomic ills, the Austrian dissident Ferdinand Kronawetter famously observed that Der Antisemitismus ist der Sozialismus der dummen Kerle: anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools. The same could be said of anti-globalization today.

Second, more than a generation of inequitable and slower-than-expected economic growth in the global North has created a strong political and psychological need for scapegoats. People want a simple narrative to explain why they are missing out on the prosperity they were once promised, and why there is such a large and growing gap between an increasingly wealthy overclass and everyone else.

Third, Chinas economic rise coincided with a period in which the global North was struggling to reach full employment. Contrary to what the followers of Friedrich von Hayek and Andrew Mellon have always claimed, economic readjustments do not happen when bankruptcies force labor and capital out of low-productivity, low-demand industries, but rather when booms pull labor and capital into high-productivity, high-demand industries.

Thus, neoliberalism does not just require open and competitive markets, global change, and price stability. It also depends on full employment and near-permanent booms, just as economist John Maynard Keynes had warned in the 1920s and 1930s. In recent decades, the neoliberal order failed to deliver either condition, most likely because doing so would have been impossible even with the best policies in place.

Fourth, policymakers did not do enough to compensate for this failure with more aggressive social policies and economic and geographic redistribution. When US President Donald Trump recently told upstate New Yorkers that they should leave the region and seek jobs elsewhere, he was simply echoing the past generation of center-right politicians in the global North.

The global Norths current political and economic dilemmas are not so different from those of the 1920s and 1930s. As Keynes noted then, the key is to produce and maintain full employment, at which point most other problems will melt away.

And, as the Austro-Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi argued, it is the role of government to secure socioeconomic rights. People believe that they have a right to live in healthy communities, hold stable occupations, and earn a decent income that rises over time. But these presumed rights do not stem naturally from property rights and claims to scarce resources the coins of the neoliberal realm.

It has been ten years since the global financial crisis and the start of the Great Recession in the global North. Governments still have not repaired the damage from those events. If they do not do so soon, the -isms of fools will continue to wreak havoc in the decades ahead.

Read more from the original source:
The New Socialism of Fools by J. Bradford DeLong - Project Syndicate - Project Syndicate

Conservatives use the term socialism to describe government programs. Their purpose is to label these programs as bad, evil, foreign.

The meaning of socialism has evolved through the years. At one time it meant that the government controlled most everything. Later socialism meant that workers controlled the means of production. The dictionary definition of socialism connects it to communism.

Today however, in our country socialism generally means the services government supplies through taxation. This socialism involves taxpayer funds being used collectively to benefit society as a whole despite income, contribution, or ability to pay. In this sense socialism means we are willing to put into government hands those things that are mutually beneficial and private industry cannot supply.

Though the word socialism has bad connotations, it has positive meaning when used in connection to programs designed to help people. Part of conservative philosophy is to limit government and lower taxes. That may not be bad in itself but it is why they oppose Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, public education, childcare, minimum wage standards, womens health issues, health care for all, and anything involving taxes. (Notice they support a strong military a prime example of socialism- because that is the only service that their big money contributors cannot supply for themselves.)

Government sees the need for programs when private industry cant or wont help. Every democratic country in the world realizes the need for government involvement and all of them have a combination of capitalism with socialism. Unfettered capitalism does not work and that is why we have rules and regulations also branded as socialism to protect us from destructive forces like pollution.

Of course many programs and rules and regulations need improvement or upgrades and maybe some should be eliminated. But there is little room for legitimate debate in Congress when Republicans want to eliminate or greatly curtail programs, while Democrats want to improve those same programs.

A step to resume debate may be not branding programs with unfair labels.

Jack Strausser,

Elysburg

Read the original here:
Letter to the Editor: Socialism | Opinion | dailyitem.com - Sunbury Daily Item