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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

A dramatic shift in electoral politics is currently disrupting leading capitalist democracies, challenging the ideological hegemony and legitimacy of the global neoliberalism of late capitalism.

In the U.S.,Bernie Sanders, a self-declared democratic socialist, almost won the Democratic Partys nomination for President. At the outset of the primaries, the nomination was widely viewed as a slam-dunk for Hillary Clinton. Some polls since the election report that Sanders may well have defeated Donald Trump.

In the UK, the Labour Party, under the leadership ofJeremy Corbyn, came close to winning the election, despite the conviction of the right wing of his own party, which repeatedly tried to oust him, and the mass media, that Corbyn would lead the party to its worst defeat in history. Corbyn, a militant socialist, ran on the most left-wing platform put forward by the Labour Party since 1945.

In France,Jean-Luc MlenchonsLa France Insoumise(rough translation: Rebellious France) missed winning a place in the run-off in the Presidential election by a few percentage points. Mlenchon was painted by the world media and the world establishment as dangerously far left.

Such events lead to an obvious question for Canadians: whatever became of the CCFs dream?

TheCo-operative Commonwealth Federation(CCF) was founded in 1932 in Calgary, uniting various working class labour and socialist parties with populist farm organizations. In 1933, the CCF met in Regina and adopted theRegina Manifesto, concluding with a solemn pledge:

No CCF Government will rest content until it has eradicated capitalism and put into operation the full programme of socialized planning which will lead to the establishment in Canada of the Co-operative Commonwealth.

Co-operative Commonwealth

In 1934 the Saskatchewan Farmer-Labour Party/CCF became the Official Opposition under the leadership of George Williams. Williams served as Leader of the Opposition from 1934-1941, when he went overseas to fight fascism. Williams initiated a planning process involving the legislative caucus and key party members to prepare for power the plan was to move quickly on the realization of socialism. Upon victory under the leadership of Tommy Douglas, the plan was largely implemented from 1944 to 1948. It was a significant step in the eradication of capitalism in Saskatchewan, involving an ambitious program of public ownership through Crown corporations, aggressive government support for the establishment of co-operatives in all economic areas, the first steps in the construction of a universal publicly funded system of social and health security, and unshackling the urban working class through unapologetically pro-labour trade union laws.

The economic cornerstone of this new socialist provincial economy was the public ownership of natural resources and their development. This was supplemented by publicly owned industrial plants to process selected resources into finished products. The CCF dream now had legs, and became a beacon of hope all across Canada.

So what became of this dream?

The short answer is the CCFs parliamentary leadership killed it off and buried it, abandoning the visionary fight for a socialist society, where all could live in dignity and security. Instead, the leaders focused on winning elections through moderation and compromise, thus securing their careers as professional politicians seeking the ultimate prize parliamentary power.

In 1948 Douglas led the CCF to another majority government, 31 seats of 52 with 48 per cent. The partys 5 per cent fall in popular vote (in 1944 the CCF won 47 seats with 53 per cent), resulted in a loss of 16 seats. Douglas, the senior bureaucrats, and the cabinet panicked, convinced that a sharp right turn was necessary to retain power. The public ownership of natural resources and their development, the partys foundational, and most controversial, socialist economic policy was abandoned. The left of the party lost its most effective champions George Williams died in 1945 and Joe Phelps, the Minister of Natural Resources and Industrial Development, was defeated. Phelps had led the drive in public ownership from 1944 to 1948. The party establishment blocked efforts to find a seat for Phelps in a by-election, ensuring Phelps was kept out of the caucus and the cabinet.

The right turn was successfully executed. The CCF made peace with capitalism, inviting capital to lead in the development of natural resources. The publicly owned industrial plants were gradually abandoned and closed. The dream of the eradication of capitalism and building a socialist economy was unceremoniously buried.

Meanwhile, on the federal scene, M. J. Coldwell, a long time ideological opponent of Williams leadership in Saskatchewan, had replaced J. S. Wordsworth as national CCF leader. His primary focus in internal party politics was to ferret out and expel suspected communists, and to abandon the Regina Manifesto, which he described as a millstone around the neck of the party. Coldwell was finally successful in 1956 when the Winnipeg Declaration replaced the Regina Manifesto. The reborn, more right-wing and moderate CCF embraced a mixed economy and incremental steps in building the welfare state. There was no more talk of the eradication of capitalism. As far as the official party apparatus was concerned the old CCF dream was buried.

But it was a long and torturous road the vision of socialism is hard to kill. There was resistance from the rank and file all along the way. The main problem for the leadership was that the right turn was a dismal failure, but each new leader continued the rightward march until the CCFs successor, the New Democratic Party (NDP, founded in 1961), finally embraced neoliberalism, the latest and most savage stage of capitalism.

The NDP

This complete capitulation to capitalism finally tantalized the party under Jack Layton. The years of compromise and ideological cleansing appeared to pay off. Over four elections from 2004 to 2011 Layton led the federal NDP to significant gains in seats culminating in 2011 when the party swept Quebec, becoming the Official Opposition, one election away from power. Laytons death in August 2011 and his replacement by Tom Mulcair set the stage for the lunge for power. In the best tradition of past party leaders, Mulcair pushed through the final compromise rescinding the partys commitment to apply democratic socialist principles to government, carefully hidden in the constitution.

The last vestige of the partys socialist roots thus expunged, Mulcair transformed the NDP into a non-ideological government in waiting, able to provide prudent neoliberal economic leadership. In 2015 Mulcairs NDP ran on a bold neoliberal platform: balanced budgets; debt reduction; no new taxes on the rich; and the slow realization of increased program spending over years of balanced budgets. Justin Trudeau and the Liberals pounced, campaigned from the left promising immediate deficit spending on infrastructure, job creation, and greatly enhanced program spending. Mulcairs NDP finished third, behind the Liberals and the Tories. The party promptly drove him from office in April 2016.

This brings us to today, where the NDPs rank-and-file membership, and its electoral base, the loyal 15 to 20 per cent, remain considerably to the left of the parliamentary leadership. No candidate in the current leadership race has provided an engaging vision for the future. In fact, the race has been greeted with yawns not only among the public, but within the party.

The dream therefore lingers on, bursting onto the historical stage at key political conjunctures. TheWaffle Manifestoemerged from the new activism of the 1960s and galvanized the party in an effort to make a turn to socialism. It was defeated in 1969. In 2001 theNew Politics Initiativeadvocated disbanding the NDP and building a more clearly socialist party with organic links with progressive social movements. Though briefly widely influential, it was defeated at the 2001 convention and disbanded in 2004. More recently, as a result of the increasingly urgent politics of the climate change crisis, and of the suffering resulting from global neoliberalism, theLeap Manifestoagain galvanized the party. Its fate has yet to be determined, but the party establishment is firmly opposed. No candidate in the leadership race has tied his or her star to the manifesto.

Can the dream be resurrected for these times and move enough people to build a new vehicle for its realization? The first dream came out of the nightmares of the Great Depression and World War II, horrific disasters resulting from crises of capitalism. The dream this time must face the fact that the present stage of capitalism promises a series of worsening natural and social disasters, putting the social and natural worlds as we know them at risk the biggest nightmare of all.

J. F. Conway teaches sociology at the University of Regina.

All images in this article are from the author.

Go here to read the rest:
Canada and Socialism: Whatever Became of the CCF's Dream? - Center for Research on Globalization

In most platforms where I argue for socialism, I always get the brisk question; Where has socialism worked? My sincere belief is that the question that needs to be asked is; Where has capitalism worked?

The latter question carries much more weight compared to the former question as the system of capital accumulation has been in existence for more than 500 years.

The socialist system, in contrast, was only experimented in the 20th century. Following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, socialism was exported in various nations in the world. Even during the existence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), capitalism continued to be a powerful economic system in the world. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 almost gave a blank cheque for imperialism the highest stage of capitalism to thrive.

While some nations, amongst them Cuba, China and North Korea, still pursue Marxist-Leninist policy positions, most nations of the world, South Africa included, are still predominantly capitalistic in policy outlook. So if we all agree that capitalism is the oldest system, and that it remains in existence in the majority of nations of the world, must we then not answer the question; Where has capitalism worked?

The failures of capitalism

Any attempt to search for the failures of capitalism, anywhere in the world, is equal to searching for the horse you are riding. In fact, those who claim not to see the failures and challenges of this centuries-old system display the highest form of political and economic absentmindedness. By its very nature, capitalism is a challenged system. It thrives on the exploitation of the sellers of labour power (workers), by those who are not really working, but who actually steal from workers by virtue of them being owners of the means of production.

Because the primary mandate of private firms is profit maximization, bigger and more powerful owners of firms are always looking for ways to grow their capitalist interests and have greater market shares. Smaller, emerging entrepreneurs are either forcefully removed from the market, or are simply swallowed by these economic sharks. Bourgeois economists tell us that this is normal. We are told that this shows that market fundamentals are at play.

Below are some of the grave failures of capitalism:

- Financial inequality continues to rise unabated and more wealth is being concentrated in the hands of the few. According to Forbes, the worlds 10 richest billionaires own $505 billion in combined wealth. This sum is greater than the total value of goods and services produced by most nations on an annual basis. Bourgeois economists tell us that these people are entrepreneurs and, by virtue of them being risk-takers, they deserve this amount of wealth, at the expense of the world population.

- The crisis of poverty is deepening. Almost 50% of the world population (3 billion people) live on less than $2.50 dollars a day, while more than 1.3 billion live on extreme poverty (less than $1.25 a day). The United States, which is host to 46% of the worlds population of millionaires, has more than 550 000 homeless people. These poor, desperate people, who sleep on the streets of major cities like New York (home to the New York Stock Exchange), California, Los Angeles etc., often build structures that clearly expose the contradiction between greedy wealth accumulation and exploitation of the poor by the capitalist class. The above picture is a reality in most capitalist nations, South Africa included.

- Nation states are captured by private capital. The challenge of corporate state capture, unlike many believe, is not a South African problem. It is an inherent characteristic of capitalism. In the current context of global imperialism, powerful multinational corporations act like global economic cartels to influence the policy and legislative decisions of nation states. It is because of this arrangement that the wealthy Rothchilds family, amongst others, has stakes in almost all central banks in the world. These are real examples of state capture, brought to us by capitalism, and not incidences of alleged nepotism, fraud or corruption which are sometimes elevated to state capture.

- Commodification of essential services. Capitalism is very ruthless. A dying patient, whose chronic ailment has been caused by the gas emissions by a firm mining in his locality, is chased away from a private hospital because he does not have money to pay for healthcare. Because of economic crimes of collusions and price-fixings, the state, whose resources are limited, depletes her budget by paying exorbitant amounts on medication from pharmaceutical companies. The state is then unable to employ more nurses and staff. By the time the ailing patient mentioned above gets through a long queue at the public hospital, his body may have given up on the fight against disease. In short, capitalism literally kills people through commodification of health, education, etc. as well as evil collusions and other methods.

What needs to be done?

In the short term, progressive nations must collectively introduce wealth taxes in their countries. In the context of South Africa, there is a need for the nationalization of, amongst others, minerals and banking sectors. The South African Reserve Bank must be owned by the state. There must be a creation of a state pharmaceutical company. Collusions and price-fixing must be criminalized. But all these need a decisive and capable state, with a strong and effective party giving direction and providing oversight. And, lastly, workers of the world must unite to destroy capitalism, and bring about a socialist world order!

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Capitalism has failed the world: Socialism is the viable alternative - News24