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The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has 25,000 members. Its growth over the past year has been massive tripling in size and no doubt a product of the increasing rejection of a bipartisan neoliberal consensus that has visited severe economic insecurity on the vast majority, particularly among young workers.

No socialist organization has been this large in decades. The possibilities for transforming American politics are exhilarating.

In considering how to make such a transformation happen, we might be tempted to usher those ranks of new socialists into existing vehicles for social change: community organizations, trade unions, or electoral campaigns organizations more likely to win immediate victories for the workers that are at the center of our vision. Why not put our energy and hone our skills where they seem to be needed the most? Workers needs are incredibly urgent; shouldnt we drop everything and join in these existing struggles right now?

While its crucial to be deeply involved in such struggles as socialists, we also have something unique to offer the working class, harnessing a logic that supports but is different from the one that organizers for those existing vehicles operate under. Heres a sketch of a practical approach rooted in that vision that can win support for democratic social change in the short run and a majority for socialist transformation in the long run.

For socialists, theory and practice must be joined at the hip. Socialists work for reforms that weaken the power of capital and enhance the power of working people, with the aim of winning further demands what Andr Gorz called non-reformist reforms. We want to move towards a complete break with the capitalist system. Socialists, unlike single-issue activists, know that democratic victories must be followed by more democratic victories, or they will be rolled back.

Single-payer health care is a classic example of a non-reformist reform, one that would pry our health system free from capitals iron grip and empower the working class by nationalizing the private health insurance industry. But socialists conceive of this struggle differently than single-issue advocates of Medicare for All.

Socialists understand that single payer alone cannot deal with the cost spiral driven by for-profit hospital and pharmaceutical companies. If we do achieve a national (or state-level) single-payer system, the fight wouldnt be over; socialists would then fight for nationalization of the pharmaceutical industry. A truly socialized health care system (as in Britain and Sweden) would nationalize hospitals and clinics staffed by well-paid, unionized health care workers.

Socialists can and should be at the forefront of fights like this today. To do so, we must gain the skills needed to define who holds power in a given sector and how to organize those who have a stake in taking it away from them. But we cant simply be the best activists in mass struggles. Single-issue groups too often attack a few particularly bad corporate actors without also arguing that a given crisis cannot be solved without curtailing capitalist power.

Socialists not only have to be the most competent organizers in struggle, but they have to offer an analysis that reveals the systemic roots of a particular crisis and offer reforms that challenge the logic of capitalism.

As socialists, our analysis of capitalism leads us to not just a moral and ethical critique of the system, but to seeing workers as the central agents of winning change.

This isnt a random fetishizing of workers its based on their structural position in the economy. Workers have the ability to disrupt production and exchange, and they have an interest in banding together and articulating collective demands. This makes them the key agents of change under capitalism.

This view can be caricatured as ignoring struggles for racial justice, immigrant rights, reproductive freedom, and more. But nothing could be further from the truth. The working class is majority women and disproportionately brown and black and immigrant; fighting for the working class means fighting on precisely these issues, as well as for the rights of children, the elderly, and all those who cannot participate in the paid labor market.

Socialists must also fight on the ideological front. We must combat the dominant ideology of market individualism with a compelling vision of democracy and freedom, and show how only in a society characterized by democratic decision-making and universal political, civil, and social rights can individuals truly flourish.

If socialist activists cannot articulate an attractive vision of socialist freedom, we will not be able to overcome popular suspicion that socialism would be a drab, pseudo-egalitarian, authoritarian society. Thus we must model in our own socialist organizations the democratic debate, peaceful conflict, and social solidarity that would characterize a socialist world.

A democratic socialist organization that doesnt have a rich and accessible internal educational life will not develop an activist core who can be public tribunes for socialism. Activists dont stay committed to building a socialist organization unless they can articulate to themselves and others why even a reformed capitalism remains a flawed, undemocratic society.

But socialists must also be front and center in struggles to win the short-term victories that empower people and lead them to demand more. Socialists today are a minority building and pushing forward a potential, progressive anti-corporate majority. We have no illusions that the dominant wing of the Democrats are our friends. Of course, most levels of government are now run by Republicans well to the right of them. But taking on neoliberal Democrats must be part of a strategy to defeat the far right.

Take the Democrats, who are showing what woeful supposed leaders of the resistance they are every day. Contrary to the party leaderships single-note insistence, the Russians did not steal the election for Trump; rather, a tepid Democratic candidate who ran on expertise and competence lost because her corporate ties precluded her articulation of a program that would aid the working class a $15 minimum wage, Medicare for All, free public higher education.

Clinton failed to gain enough working-class votes of all races to win the key states in the former industrial heartland; she ended up losing to the most disliked, buffoonish presidential candidate in history. If we remain enthralled to Democratic politics-as-usual, were going to continue being stuck with cretins like Donald Trump.

Of course, progressive and socialist candidates who openly reject the neoliberal mainstream Democratic agenda may choose for pragmatic reasons to use the Democratic Party ballot line in partisan races. But whatever ballot line the movement chooses to use, we must always be working to increase the independent power of labor and the Left.

Sanders provides an example: its hard to imagine him offering a radical opening to using the s word in American politics for his openly independent campaign if he had run on an independent line. Bernie also showed the strength of socialists using coalition politics to build a short-term progressive majority and to win people over to a social-democratic program and, sometimes, to socialism. Sanders gained the support of six major unions; if we had real social movement unionism in this country, he would have carried the banner of the entire organized working-class movement.

Bernies weaker performance than Clinton among voters of color though not among millennials of color derived mostly from his being a less known commodity. But it also demonstrated that socialists need deeper social roots among older women and communities of color. That means developing the organizing strategies that will better implant us in the labor movement and working-class communities, as well as struggles for racial justice and gender and sexual emancipation.

Socialists have the incumbent obligation to broaden out the post-Sanders, anti-corporate trend in US politics into a working-class rainbow coalition. We must also fight our governments imperialist foreign policy and push to massively cut wasteful defense spending. We should be involved in multiracial coalitions, fighting for reforms like equitable public education and affordable housing.

Democratic socialists can be the glue that brings together disparate social movement that share an interest in democratizing corporate power. We can see the class relations that pervade society and how they offer common avenues of struggle. But at 25,000 members, we cant substitute ourselves for the broader currents needed to break the power of both far-right nativist Republicans and pro-corporate neoliberal Democrats.

We have to work together with broader movements that may not be anti-capitalist but remain committed to reforms. These movements have the potential to win material improvements for workers lives. If we stay isolated from them, we will slide into sectarian irrelevance.

Of course, socialists should endeavor to build their own organizational strength and to operate as an independent political force. We cannot mute our criticism against business unionist trends in the labor movement and the middle-class professional leadership of many advocacy groups. But in the here and now, we must also help win those victories that will empower workers to conceive of more radical democratic gains. Our members are disproportionately highly educated, young, male, and white. To win victories, we must pursue a strategy and orientation that makes us more representative of the working class.

In the final analysis, socialists must be both tribunes for socialism and the best organizers. Thats how the Communist Party grew rapidly from 1935-1939. They set themselves up as the left wing of the CIO and of the New Deal coalition, and grew from twenty thousand to one hundred thousand members during that period.

The Socialist Party, on the other hand, condemned the New Deal as a restoration of capitalism. In saying so they were partly right: the New Deal was in part about saving capitalism from itself. But such a stance was also profoundly wrong in that it distanced the Socialist Party from popular struggles from below, including those for workers rights and racial equality that forced capital to make important concessions. This rejection was rooted in a concern that those struggles were reformist; it led the SP to fall from twenty thousand members in 1935 to three thousand in 1939.

Of course, there are also negative lessons to be learned from the Communist growth during the Popular Front period. They hid their socialist identity in an attempt to appeal to the broadest swath of Americans possible. When forced to reveal it, they referred to an authoritarian Soviet Union as their model. And by following Moscows line on the Hitler-Stalin Pact and then the no-strike pledge during World War II, the party abandoned the most militant sectors of the working class. Thus, the Communists put themselves in a position that prevented them from ever winning hegemony within the US working-class movement from liberal forces.

Still, the Popular Front was the last time socialism had any mass presence in the United States in part because, in its own way, the Communists rooted their struggles for democracy within US political culture while trying to build a truly multiracial working-class movement.

The road to DSA becoming a real working-class organization runs through us becoming the openly socialist wing of a mass movement opposed to a bipartisan neoliberal consensus. If we only become better organizers, with more practical skills in door-knocking and phone-banking and one-on-one conversations, we will likely see the defection of many of our most skilled organizers who will take those skills and get jobs doing mass work in reformist organizations.

Such a defection bedeviled DSA in the 1980s, leading to a donut phenomenon thousands of members embedded in mass movements, but few building the center of DSA as an organization. We must avoid this. Simultaneously, if we dont relate politically to social forces bigger than our own, DSA could devolve into merely a large socialist sect or subculture.

The choice to adopt a strategy that would move us towards becoming a mass socialist organization with working-class roots is ours. This is the most promising moment for the socialist left in decades. If we take advantage of it, we can make our own history.

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What Should Socialists Do? - Jacobin - Jacobin magazine

The Democratic Socialists of Americahave a big question to answer a 24,000-person strong question. According to a recent announcement, thats how many members the group claims to have, thanks in part to the interest in socialism prompted by the insurgent presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders and as a reaction to theelection of a far-right president in Donald Trump. But, as800 delegates descend on Chicago forthe DSA conventionthis week, the group must figure out how itsmasses of card-carrying socialists will engage in electoral politics.

Local chapters have debated how much energy to put into running for office versus engaging in issue advocacy, and whether to align with Democrats or work on building a new political party.

EnterJabari Brisport a DSA-endorsed, Green Party candidate for New Yorks 35th City Council District whooffers one potential path forward for the group.

A flyer for a New York City council candidate forum hangs outside the Epiphany Lutheran School in Brooklyn, NY on July 26, 2017.

Photo: Bryan Thomas for The Intercept

Brisport is a 29-year-old African American artist and activist who was born and raised in the 35th District, which includes portions of Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, and other neighborhoods in Brooklyn. In a wide-ranging interview with The Intercept, he described his motivation for running, and his thoughts on the larger political zeitgeist.

Grassroots politics runs deep in his family as does radicalism. Brisports mother is a former Black Panther. Hespent years organizing around local causes, and was an enthusiastic backer of Sanderss presidential campaign. Unlike Sanders, however, Brisport chose to end his cooperation with Democratic Party after the election.

Last year, I was really just fed up with the party, he said. After Bernie lost the nomination, I decided to moved on out to the Greens who, honestly, ideologically Im closer to and are a better fit with me. I was also tired of arguing with other Democrats over things I think are basic, like whether money influences politics.

The New York City Councils first-past-the-post elections, where whoever gets the most votes wins outright, running as a third-party candidate is tough.But because Brooklyn is so heavily dominated by Democrats,Brisport is essentially trying to introduce atwo-party competition. In doing that, hes walking a path similar to Kshama Sawant, the Socialist Alternative councilwoman in Seattle who defeated a Democratic opponent on a platform designed around democratizing wealth and power in the city.

The incumbent in the 35th District is a former art museum executive named Laurie Cumbo,who moved into the district to run for office in 2013. Brisports main ideological difference with Cumbo is their divergent approaches to developing Brooklyn.

Hers is what Ive seen called the Guggenheim Theory of development, which is that if you bring lots of really glitzy art spaces to an area, really great concert halls, really great art museums, so on and so forth, thatll bring economic improvement to the area, he noted. Which is like a half-truth. Because it brings more wealth and improvement to the area but also pushes out the poor people.

What Brisport is describing is the process of gentrification, which has swept his part of Brooklyn in recent years, drawing the ire ofAfrican American and West Indian communitiesin the district. Brisport claims to offera more democratic form of growth guided by the local community.

Give more community control, he suggested, pointing to the redevelopment of the Bedford-Union Armory in Crown Heights. Brisport opposes plans to turn the 138,000-square-foot armory into a bonanza for private developers. Instead, he is supporting residents who want to turn the site into a community land trust. Under such a model, land development would be approved by a nonprofit controlled by the local community.

People from the community organize into a non-profit, and then you can turn over the land to them, instead of wealthy developer, he explained. They can choose who they contract out to. Maybe theyll contract out to a non-profit. Ultimately, theyll have final say in the negotiations.

That same spirit of greater localized democracy runs through the entirety of Brisports platform: From expanding participatory budgeting, to requiring police officers to live in the city, to taxing the rich to ensure a more equitable distribution of wealth and power.

One of the challenges ofBrisports run for office and for DSA, in general is defining democratic socialism in a way that Americans will embrace it as a mainstream ideology.

You tell somebody socialism without hearing somebody describe it, they automatically think government owns everything, takes away your property, he complained. Its not necessarily thinking about it as government. Its about We The People. Its about having power and agency over how things are guided.

He cited the financial crisis as an example of how a group of elites were able to negatively impact the lives of millions of people without facing democratic accountability.

In 2008, when the banks crashed the economy, we cant vote out the CEOs of those banks, we have no say over those bankers, he noted. However, if an elected official messes up the economy, you can vote them out. You have a say.

A crowd gathers for a New York City council candidate forum inside the Epiphany Lutheran School in Brooklyn, NY on July 26, 2017.

Photo: Bryan Thomas for The Intercept

One of the obstacles Sanderss presidential campaign faced in his race against Hillary Clinton was the strong loyalty shown by older African American voters to the establishment of the Democratic Party. The only cohort of the black electorate Sanders won was the youngest. The establishment party candidates also made strong showingsamong these voters of other ethnic backgrounds in races againstpopulists. In his re-election bid, Chicagos Mayor Rahm Emanuel, for instance, counted on strong black support to beat back challenger Chuy Garcia in his Democratic primary. Sanders-backed Tom Perriello suffered from a deficit among black voters in the Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary.

For Brisports part, these shortfalls came largely thanksto a coordinated campaign by the partys establishment and the deep Southern tiesheld by Clinton and her husband, the former Arkansas governor President Bill Clinton.

The Democratic Party weaponized identity politics a little bit against Bernie Sanders, he said of last years presidential primary. As soon as he started losing the South, they made this whole thing of him not connecting with black voters. Which is insane. Because like, if Coke was really doing well in the South over Pepsi, nobody would be like, Well, I guess Pepsi is having trouble connecting with black voters!'

However, he also said Sanders should have adjusted his approach to appeal to a wider set of voters. Bernie also is a little big guilty, he conceded. At some point, he failed to move things outside of an economic lens. I think he was asked this one question at a debate that was like whats your biggest blind spot as a white person. He said, when youre white you dont know what its like to be poor. I dont know how he got to that conclusion.

I love Bernie. I would vote for him ten times. But Im not sure what he was going for with that statement, Brisport continued. I think his bigger blinder was seeing so much from an economic lens when you do need a mixture of an economic approach and an approach towards marginalized group. When I said weaponized identity politics earlier, I dont mean to say Im anti-identity politics. I understand their role. Its a double-edged sword. Its something to be addressed not something to be used as character assassination.

Brisports criticism matches that of Khalid Kamau, a DSA-backed socialist candidate who won a city council seat in South Fulton, Georgia, in the spring.

I love Bernie, but I think where his campaign failed I dont think this is a personal failure of Bernie, but perhaps of the people that were around him and advising that campaign is that there wasnt enough attention paid to people of color, Kamau told Truthout in March. I am not sure that people of color who were in that campaign were listened to the way they should have been.

New York City council candidate Jabari Brisport (second from left) meets with constituents following a candidate forum inside the Epiphany Lutheran School in Brooklyn, NY on July 26, 2017.

Photo: Bryan Thomas for The Intercept

Going forward, Brisport believes the best way for democratic socialists to build a truly multi-racial movement is to show up and support communities of every background.

DSA is multi-tendency. Its electoral but also fighting lots of different battles: housing, immigrant justice, climate, labor rights, strike solidarity, education he explained. What theyve been really great at doing is going into these conflicts where the community is fighting. And not only allying themselves with the local community, but amplifying them and also taking a backseat. Not like coming up and saying, Were DSA were running this. But also saying how can we amplify what you do?

New York Citys 2,000-member strong DSA chapter has put its money where it mouth is in diversifying the movement. So far, both of the candidates it supports for city council races comes from non-white backgrounds. In addition to Brisport, DSA voted to endorse Reverend Khader El-Yateem in his Democratic primary in Brooklyns diverse Bay Ridge neighborhood. El-Yateem is a Palestinian Christian and a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign (BDS) a bold stance in a city known for its stridently pro-Israel politics.

El-Yateem is Trumps worst nightmare. He supports immigrants, is Arab-American and explicitly refuses to take money from developers, NYC-DSA Co-Chairwoman Rahel Biru said in a statement.

Brisport has seen the difficulties in organizing people of different ethnic backgrounds into one movement first hand in his own backyard. He pointed to disputes between Caribbean Americans and Jewish Americans in Brooklyn over housing as an example.

Theres a general sense in the community that the Jews are buying up the land and controlling everything, he said of complaints hes seen in the Caribbean community. Which is upsetting. He added, Its almost like what I saw Trump do. He saw peoples real concerns about an economy that was failing them and shifting it over to Muslims and Mexicans.

Brisports goal is to end the racial infighting and unite his diverse district behind democratic socialism.

What I tell people is gentrification isnt caused by white people, its caused by capitalism, he said. If you de-commodify the land and you take the profit motive away then we can actually fight against this.

Top photo: Jabari Brisport, a 29-year-old actor-turned-activist-turned-member of the Democratic Socialists of America, poses for a portrait in Brooklyn, NY on July 26, 2017.

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Jabari Brisport Is Running For City Council to Bring Democratic Socialism to Brooklyn - The Intercept

It is enormously frustrating that conservatives cant capture the moral high ground from the phony virtue-signaling factory that is the modern Democratic Party. Conservative policies not only work better but also are morally superior.

Democrats depend on cliches and false narratives to obstruct true reform which includes shaming many Republicans from believing enough in their own agenda to pursue it with conviction. This is nowhere more apparent than in the endless debate over the fate of Obamacare and the future of American health care.

It is unconscionable that Republicans are unable to muster a simple majority to end the Obamacare monstrosity a freakish beast that does everything it promised not to do and does little it promised to do, a gargantuan scam that is destroying our health care, eroding our liberty and punishing our economy. Its a camel with its entire body already inside the tent of the American idea hellbent on completing Obamas plan to fundamentally demolish it.

Democrats are incapable of offering new ideas because they are ideologically and politically enslaved. Their worldview weds them to the historically discredited notion that great results flow from allegedly good intentions. And their lust for power impels them to exploit identity politics and perpetuate victimhood for the constituencies whose overwhelming support is essential to their political lifeblood.

For example, they cant support decentralization and competition in education, no matter how much that could improve the lives of minorities trapped in inferior schools, or support across-the-board tax cuts even though cuts for higher-income earners help stimulate economic growth, which redounds to the benefit of middle- and lower-income earners because they cannot abandon their class warfare strategy.

Now back to todays more pressing issue health care reform. Their policies have wrought untold disaster across the board, yet they will acknowledge no responsibility for these failures, much less join, in any way, those seeking solutions.

Democrats tell us they would be happy to work with Republicans to repair the glitches in Obamacare. The problem is that we are not dealing with mere glitches. The entire legislative debacle is a galloping cancer on our system.

Further exposing the Democrats fraud, almost all of the Republicans so-called repeal and replace proposals have not actually contemplated repeal at all; theyve just proposed revisions. Yet Democrats, in lockstep, will not even come to the table to discuss them. In other words, except for their failed efforts to fully repeal the bill, all Republican proposals have been efforts not to completely end Obamacare (sad to say) but to partially repair it.

Democrats dont want the system improved. They know its a barely disguised wealth redistribution scheme that if left alone will necessarily eventuate in a single-payer system a euphemism for socialized medicine.

So for now, lets forget Democrats, who have no intention of working with Republicans on this.

What about the couple of handfuls of pseudo-Republicans who dont have the decency to end this nightmare the ones who campaigned on the promise to repeal this law but wont now pull the trigger?

I dont want to hear that their consciences are involved or that they are from liberal states. How about their intellectual honesty and dignity?

Why do they enable Democratic propaganda that millions would be hurt by repealing a law that forces those millions to buy insurance against their will? Why arent they held accountable for giving life-support to a law that is already harming people and would result in socializing one-sixth of our economy?

Dont you just love hearing the self-serving protestations of these squishes, pretending to care so much about people while they are single-handedly (as Democratic intransigence is an irremediable reality) decimating world historys greatest health care system?

There is nothing compassionate about what Democrats and their sanctimonious foxhole-sharing Republican frauds are doing here.

Its time for freedom-loving, people-loving Americans to turn the tables on these charlatans and recapture the moral high ground through aggressive and intelligent messaging. Well never save this republic if we cant make the case that government largesse is fundamentally destructive and incompetent and that the invisible hand of the market yields results across the board that are more beneficial for more people than those of any other system known to man.

Socialism kills, impoverishes and enslaves and only masquerades as compassion while facilitating the compassion merchants consolidation of power. Freedom brings prosperity and, if you insist on using compassion as the be-all-end-all yardstick, is abundantly compassionate.

^

Follow David Limbaugh on Twitter @davidlimbaugh and his website at http://www.davidlimbaugh.com.

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DAVID LIMBAUGH: Socialism kills, impoverishes, enslaves - Examiner Enterprise

Venezuela is a woeful reminder that no country is so rich that it cant be driven into the ground by revolutionary socialism.

People are now literally starving about three-quarters of the population lost weight last year in what once was the fourth-richest country in the world on a per-capita basis. A country that has more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia is suffering shortages of basic supplies. Venezuela now totters on the brink of bankruptcy and civil war, in the national catastrophe known as the Bolivarian Revolution.

The phrase is the coinage of the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, succeeded by the current Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro. The Western Hemispheres answer to Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Maduro has instituted an ongoing self-coup to make his country a one-party state.

The Chavistas have worked from the typical Communist playbook of romanticizing the masses while immiserating them. Runaway spending, price controls, nationalization of companies, corruption and the end of the rule of law its been a master class in how to destroy an economy.

The result is a sharp, yearslong recession, runaway inflation and unsustainable debt. The suffering of ordinary people is staggering, while the thieves and killers who are Chavista officials have made off with hundreds of billions of dollars. At this rate The Economist calls the countrys economic decline the steepest in modern Latin American history there will be nothing left to steal.

Any government in a democratic country that failed this spectacularly would have been relegated to the dustbin of history long ago. Maduro is getting around this problem by ending Venezuelas democracy.

The Chvistas slipped up a year or two by allowing real elections for the countrys National Assembly, which were swept by the opposition. They then undertook a war against the assembly, stripping it of its powers and culminating in a rigged vote this week to elect a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution. The opposition boycotted the vote, and outside observers estimate less than 20 percent of the electorate participated.

The goal of Maduros alleged constitutional reforms is to no longer have a constitution worthy of the name. Immediately after the vote, his forces arrested two leading opposition figures in the dead of night. Video shows one of them, Antonio Ledezma, being taken away in his pajamas and another, Leopoldo Lpez, bundled into the back of a car.

It looks like what it truly was a pair of kidnappings.

Denied the ordinary means of dissent via the press and elections, the opposition has taken to the streets. Already more than 100 people have been killed in clashes over the past several months.

Worse is yet to come. Lacking legitimacy and representing only a fraction of the populace, the Maduro regime will rely on the final backstop of violent suppression. It is now the worst crisis in a major country in the Western Hemisphere since the heights of the Colombian civil war in the 1990s and 2000s.

There is no easy remedy to Venezuelas agony. If mediation were the solution, the country never would have gotten to this pass. Endless negotiations between the government and the opposition have gone nowhere the organized-crime syndicate that has seized power under the banner of revolution knows it has no option but to retain its hold on power by any means necessary.

The US needs to use every economic and diplomatic lever to undermine the regime and build an international coalition against it. We should impose more sanctions on specific officials and on the state-run oil company; we should advertise what we know about the details of how Chavistas park their ill-gotten gains abroad; we should nudge our allies to further isolate the Venezuelan government by pulling ambassadors and breaking diplomatic relations.

The hope is that with enough pressure, the regime will crack and high-level officials will break with Maduro, weakening his position and making a negotiated restoration of democratic rule possible.

In the meantime, the Bolivarian Revolution is proceeding according to its sick logic and there will be blood.

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Venezuela: a nation devoured by socialism - New York Post

If ever I have to live in a dictatorship, put me down for one of those right-wing set-ups. To toil under leftist autocracy would be too exhausting you plant potatoes all day, get chased around by the secret police, then have to wade through articles in the Guardian explaining why youre not experiencing true socialism.

Its the standard response of Western radicals faced with the brutal truth about the regimes they fetishise. They will not bedissuaded by evidence that their ideology tends to result in mass immiseration and exciting opportunities in the garbage-scavenging economy. For no evidence is possible: when command economies go wrong, it turns out real socialists were never in command.

Venezuela is shaping up to be the next false dawn and soon its erstwhile champions will airily assure us that it too wasnt run along genuine socialist lines. Incumbent president Nicols Maduro is celebrating his victory in Sundays election in which he took Bertolt Brecht somewhat literally and dissolved the peoples parliament and elected another.

The 2015 election, which saw moderate parties wrest control of the National Assembly, was the first major reversal in power forMaduro. Since then he has been busy packing the courts, suspending regional elections, and intimidating the opposition. He has also overseen an economic implosion. Hugo Chvez was able to bankroll his socialist paradise with oil revenues. But when petroleum prices plummeted, so too did Venezuelas ability to fund its expansive social welfare system and generous fuel subsidies. This has produced public unrest and growing hostility towards the regime amongst even its loyalest constituencies, including the poor and rural. The Chavista miracle is over.

Maduros new Constituent Assembly, which will replace the National Assembly, will be composed entirely of candidates nominated by his United Socialist Party. It will be empowered to rewrite the constitution to remove what precious checks and balances remain. The United States has branded the move another step toward dictatorship and termed the Maduro junta architects of authoritarianism. Socialism the real variety or otherwise having failed, the Venezuelan people will have no choice but to live with it for some time to come.

The unfolding crisis has prompted calls for Jeremy Corbyn and other former Chvez fan boys to acknowledge yet another failure of their worldview. The Labour leader hailed Chvez for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared and making massive contributions to Venezuela [and] a very wide world. Diane Abbott once declared that Chavez shows another world is possible. Owen Jones pronounced him an icon for Venezuelas long-suffering poor who represented a break from years of corrupt regimes with often dire human rights records. All this he achieved despite an aggressively hostile media and bitter foreign critics, Jones gushed.

In large part it was their shared anti-Americanism that brought Chvez and the Western far-left together. He was a plucky little Simn Bolvar for the 21st century, defying latter day imperialists and defending the independence of Latin America. Like them, he despised neoliberalism. (Neo is Greek for new and Leftist for all forms of.) It hardly mattered that Chvez, while undoubtedly giving the poor more of a hearing than most of his predecessors, was in truth a thug and a strongman. Those notorious right-wingers at Human Rights Watch said his regime was characterised by a dramatic concentration of power and open disregard for basic human rights guarantees.

Human rights monitors were deported and a judge who freed one of Chvezs critics from arbitrary detention found herself summarily jailed then placed under house arrest. Commercial TV stations had their licences revoked and restrictions were placed on critical newspapers. When Globovisin, the last remaining independent broadcaster, covered a prison riot that was poorly handled by the government, it was fined millions of dollars for promot[ing] hatred for political reasons that generated anxiety in the population. After Globovisins owner accused Chvez of not respecting press freedoms, he was arrested for disseminating false information and offending the president. Even mans best friend wasnt safe from the megalomaniac dictator. When a soap opera mocked Chavez by naming a dog after him, his government had the show cancelled.

Asking Corbyn and his fellow-travellers to recant their cheerleading for the extinguishing of Venezuelan democracy is futile. They would not accept the premise, then theyd accuse you of being a CIA asset, and when every excuse had been exhausted they would invoke the not-real-socialism clause. The question they should be pressed on is this: If Chavismo is so progressive and egalitarian, why do they not support it for Britain? Why does Jeremy Corbyn prescribe full-bloodedsocialism for Venezuela but wont do the same for Britain? The far-left has spent decades pointing to political miserablism inflicted on the worlds poor and prating that another world is possible and yet now that they are in control of the Labour Party they seem pretty relaxed about the world we have. They are like Leninists lost on a gap year: Capitalism in one country, to the barricades everywhere else.

Corbyn and his ilk are not revolutionaries but revolution tourists. They find far-flung political struggles exotic and romantic; they wouldnt like to live in Venezuela but its a sun-kissed break from the dreary managerialism of Britain. This is nothing more than the cultural appropriation they denounce in its every other manifestation but what a thrilling form it takes, allowing absolute white boys from hipster London to join the Latin American proletariat until they get bored and alight upon a new cause to patronise. They will never find true socialism because they only want it for others, not themselves.

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Socialism is destroying Venezuela but the left will never admit it - Spectator.co.uk (blog)