Mediaboss Marketing

Satish Kumar, a beloved elder of the green movement, has been setting the global agenda for change for the last 60 years. Greatly inspired by E.F. Schumacher, author of the iconic Small is Beautiful, Satish started the Schumacher Society in the UK and the experimental Small School in Hartland, Devon. He founded the Schumacher College and has been its Programme Director since. After 43 years of editing and steering the Resurgence magazine (Britains longest-serving editor), the publication, described as the artistic and spiritual flagship of the green movement, Satish stepped down as its editor soon after his 80th birthday. He is the author of several books, the most notable one being No Destination, which is the story of his 8,000-mile walk from New Delhi to Washington to plead for nuclear disarmament.

Satish Kumar is the innovative, imaginative and ever expansive global Gandhian, pacifist, author, farmer, editor, educator and activist, mentor to millions in the green-humanitarian movement. Described as one of Indias most illustrious sons, recipient of several world accolades, he travels the world, speaking, teaching and inspiring. He turns 81 this month.

Over the years, I have come to understand that all my actions ought to be driven by a sense of service. You know that quote from Rabindranth Tagore? He said, I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. I am in the service of the earth and her forests, rivers, animals and people. Young or old is only an idea. As long as my health permits, I wish to serve until my last breath. Through service I connect with people, animals and nature. Life is nothing but connectivity which is another word for relationship. E.M. Forster famously said, only connect which means that in order to be a good earth citizen, thats all we need to do.

Schumacher offered me the post of the editor of Resurgence magazine in 1973. At that time I was only visiting the UK and was planning to return to India to work with the Gandhian movement. Schumacher said, You will make an excellent editor of Resurgence. I answered, But I want to return to India. Schumacher asked, Why? I replied, I am a Gandhian and I wish to work for the Gandhian movement. Schumacher said, But Satish, there are many Gandhians in India, we need one in England. Make Resurgence a Gandhian magazine, both have the same values. Ecological reverence, social justice, spiritual values, simple living, local industry and political action, are what Resurgence stands for. Schumachers argument was very persuasive and in 1973, I became editor of Resurgence. I am delighted to say that over the years, Resurgence has carried articles from the wisest, brightest, most iconoclastic thinkers from every part of the globe. Of particular interest to me is to link East and West, Gandhi and other global public intellectuals.

My biggest challenge is to interpret Gandhi for our times. It is not necessary to go back to Gandhi, we have to transport him to our time. For me sarvodaya (the upliftment of all) is much more inclusive than any political ideal. Capitalism and the free market benefit the 'few' at the expense of the 'many' and particularly at the expense of nature. Socialism or communism also puts humans above nature. Socialism is utilitarian the greatest good of the greatest number. But sarvodaya does not put humans above nature. Sarvodaya is the well-being and upliftment of all living entities humans, animals, forests and oceans. Capitalism and socialism are both anthropocentric. Sarvodaya is bio-centric or life-centric and much more relevant today when life-giving air, water, forests and land are being sucked away from us by commerce. For far too long has Nature been sacrificed at the altar of growth. Sarvodaya promotes elegant simplicity, frugality, sustainability, respect for bio-diversity and nature conservation. This dimension of Gandhi has been at the centre of Resurgence and my lifes work.

Schumacher College is a new model of radical and cutting-edge education which encourages one to critically engage with ecology, economics, livelihood, political action and sustainable living. Our work is to inspire, challenge and question ourselves as co-inhabitants of the world, to ask the questions we all struggle to find answers to and to find sound knowledge, intuition and wonder in our search for solutions. This is a place for personal transformation and collective action. We describe this as a holistic approach to learning, practising the education of head, heart and hands, bridging the gap between theory and practice, knowledge and experience. Schumacher College is now a respected college that attracts some of the worlds most well-known thinkers, philosophers, writers, scientists, activists and artistes and students of all ages and from every corner of the globe.

Look at what the realists and pragmatists have done for us. They have led us to war and climate change, poverty on an unimaginable scale, and wholesale ecological destruction. Half of humanity goes to bed hungry because of the realistic leaders of the world. I tell people who call me unrealistic to show me what their realism has done. Realism is an outdated, overplayed and wholly exaggerated concept. Instead, we need to learn from nature. Nature is realistic; man is the only being who is not. Who else goes to bed hungry? Not snakes or tigers or any other animal. Nature does not need 'realistic' Tescos or Monsantos to feed itself. Our system of 'realistic' business leadership has totally failed. We need more idealism in the world. And yes, the poor are never the problem. It is the rich who are making a mess of the world in pursuit of greater and greater wealth, causing pollution, resource depletion and climate change.

Disenfranchisement or feelings of powerlessness are the casualties of globalisation because globalisation benefits only the global players big companies, multinational corporations. Globalisation concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer hands. This is why the top 1% own more than 50% of global wealth. So, fundamentalism is, to some extent, the result of the failure of the neoliberal market economy. The pursuit of power and wealth by any means, corrupt or otherwise, has been the agenda of politicians during the past 50 years. So, we need to return to a decentralised human scale, humble, modest and sustainable form of economics and politics. The more people are empowered, the less extremism there will be.

It is time for the environmental movement to embrace the cause of animal rights. The green movement is rightly concerned about global warming and climate change, loss of biodiversity, clear-cutting of rainforests, pollution of our rivers and oceans and the explosion of human population. But one important dimension is missing from our environmental agenda and that is attention to the cruel plight of animals used for food, entertainment and experiments as much as those lost to us by poaching and forest depletion. Animals are part and parcel of the environment, so I call upon all environmental activists and organisations to remedy this and embrace the cause of animal rights as an integral and important part of the environment movement. We need to add the rights of animals to the welfare of animals. This fundamental dignity of life and equality of rights is an essential foundation upon which the environmental movement has to be built.

My guiding mantra is Soil, Soul, Society. The nurturing of the first two will automatically give rise to the happy third. I have spoken and written about this extensively.

India has a soul that is philosophically so large that it is unfathomable to many cultures. So, it pains me to see narrow sectarian thinking, keeping India in the dark ages, causing strife and dissent, and in the process ignoring the real issues that concern the county. I ask Indians to exercise their own independent judgement to focus on what really matters. I also ask Indians to lead the world in ahimsa (non-violence) and kindness, through embracing all that is culturally and socially noble.

Satish Kumar will be teaching Gandhi and Globalisation at Navdanya Farm, Dehradun, between October 29 and November 2, 2017.

Go here to see the original:
Sarvodaya, the solution to the ills of capitalism and socialism - The Hindu

Letters to the Editor (Aug. 9): Kansans, socialism, Catholic conference, city funding Wichita Eagle (blog) An Aug. 7 claimed that our military, police, fire, interstate highway system and social security were examples of socialism. Webster's definition of socialism is any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ...

Go here to see the original:
Letters to the Editor (Aug. 9): Kansans, socialism, Catholic conference, city funding - Wichita Eagle (blog)

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.

Share your opinion on this topic by sending a letter to the editor to tctvoice@madison.com. Include your full name, hometown and phone number. Your name and town will be published. The phone number is for verification purposes only. Please keep your letter to 250 words or less.

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

Question: If a man had no incentive to work, but lived off his male friends fathers Capitalist business, what idea of government would he propose?

Karl Marx of the late 1800s had an idea of a parasitic form of government, and others like him were caught up by the idea. The results are communism, socialism and now progressivism.

When I was in Ecuador recently on vacation, I was most impressed by the people and the culture, and two thoughts came to my mind: We could not live without farmers, and people helping people works better than government helping people.

People helping people costs the government nothing and creates a neighborly, industrious society, which is biblical. Government helping people loses too much to bureaucracy, leaving little left, and creates an isolated, lazy society, which is socialism.

No socialistic government has ever been prosperous, and such governments always eventually collapse from within. America was once prosperous, but we are now on the brink of collapse.

Will the insurrectionists support our new administration, which is trying to make improvements, or will they continue to behave as hypocrites and crybabies? Will our leaders began to serve, rather than be served?

And will our judges began to support our Provident-ordained Constitution, or will they continue to play God?

Excerpt from:
Letter, 8/8: Socialism always fails - Lincoln Journal Star

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.

See the original post here:
In the era of Trump, a growing DSA talks socialism - People's World