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I was heartened to see the reprinting of a full page WaPo article on the deplorable situation in Venezuela in your 16 July edition. The article did an excellent job of describing the suffering of the average citizen due to shortages of even the most basic commodities. While the author did a good job of listing the symptoms of a sick economy, she fails to even name the cause: socialism.

How is it that one of the richest countries in South America, a country blessed with a huge variety of natural resources including vast oil deposits, a mild climate and large expanses of tillable soil, cannot feed its fairly small population? It is as if the author cannot bear to utter the word socialism, which does not appear once in her article.

What Chavez started by nationalizing businesses and driving foreign investors out of the country, the hapless former bus driver Maduro perfected, bringing total ruin to the Venezuelan economy with fatal doses of poisonous socialist medicine. Ham-handed government interventions such as price controls just created further shortages as more factories closed and consumers hoarded. When prices rose, government increases in the minimum wage proved futile with runaway inflation always a step ahead. The author also fails to mention the repression and gradual slide into totalitarianism in Venezuela, inevitably following the failure of socialist policies.

This will not end well for Maduro, who is perhaps only months away from hanging on a lamppost when the starving masses finally rise up. The implications for the U.S. should be obvious, even to the far left which has taken over the Democrat party and who are now clamoring for a $15 minimum wage.

Milton Friedman once said that if you put the government in charge of the Sahara, in five years there would be a shortage of sand, and Venezuela is well on the way to demonstrating his prescience.

Jim Senner, New Bern

See more here:
Letter: Socialism behind failure in Venezuela - New Bern Sun Journal

James Ball, For the Express-News

Photo: J. Patric Schneider /For The Chronicle

No, governor, the common good is not socialism

Gov. Greg Abbotts recent claim that tree ordinances of municipalities amount to socialism understandably made headlines across Texas. But even more curious than the claim itself is the reason he gave for this claim.

The reason bears repeating, so far afield it is from mainstream notions of American civic responsibility and traditional religion, not the least of which is Abbotts own Catholicism.

As reported in the San Antonio Express-News, the governor addressed the cities defense of their ordinances and his opposition to them: Trees add to the greater good of the city. They also improve the environment. Municipalities are saying they have a right to impose a fee on you for removing a tree because if you remove a tree, youre diminishing the greater good of the city, and the greater good of the environment. They have articulated the per se definition of collectivism, socialism.

Abbotts political philosophy is that there is no such thing as the greater good. All we have is the individual pursuing his or her private aims and rights that protect this freedom, chief among them being the right to private property. Anything else is collectivism, which he equates with socialism.

A quick look at the Constitution belies this view of society. In the preamble, We the People declare that establish(ing) justice and promot(ing) the general Welfare are, along with Liberty, constitutive of our national purpose. In other words, the social good or the public good was never reducible to what private individuals or property owners chose to do or not do.

The course of American history and many Supreme Court decisions testify to the role of the government as an instrument of the people in pursuing this justice and this public welfare. Thats not collectivism. Thats America!

Abbotts abhorrence of the greater good is also coming from a place outside of the way mainstream religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam, for example have long conceived of society and social responsibility.

For instance, in Catholic political thought, the common good is the good or well-being of the community in which one participates, to which one contributes, from which one benefits, and through which one becomes more human. The common good includes an ensemble of public goods such as decent education, affordable housing, clean air and, now, says Pope Francis, the climate itself. We all have a stake in these.

The common good is not an odious threat to personal autonomy, but it does mean that the needs of the community can sometimes take precedence over the interests of the individual or corporation, and that the role of law is to promote the common good. Unlike communist totalitarianism, in Catholic social teaching, property rights are real, but they are not absolute or unrestricted.

Pope Francis writes, The principle of the subordination of private property to the universal destination of goods, and thus the right of everyone to their use, is a golden rule of social conduct and the first principle of the whole ethical and social order. Thats not collectivism. Thats Catholicism, with parallels in other religions.

Gov. Abbott might be ill-informed about Catholic social and political theory, or he might be consciously rejecting it. Either way, his virtue is that he is honest. His justification for his crusade against tree ordinances in Texas is rooted not simply in idolizing free market economics about which Catholicism has its own reservations but in an often-unacknowledged libertarianism that has overtaken the leadership of much of the Republican Party in Texas and therefore our state government.

We can and should disagree in good faith on particular issues of public policy, but we are in real trouble if we throw out the venerable idea of the common good, even as we invoke another venerable idea, freedom, in doing so.

Justice William O. Douglas once wrote, The right to be left alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom. If that is true, it is equally true that the fruition of freedom is the capacity to contribute to and defend the common good.

James Ball is an associate professor of theology at St. Marys University.

Read this article:
No, governor, the common good is not socialism - mySanAntonio.com

Mark Alexander Jul. 26, 2017

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. Thomas Jefferson (1781)

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), still reeling from the electoral thrashing put on them by Donald Trump and the Republicans last November, announced a major charade this week. Their Democrat Party is, once again, attempting to reboot and rebrand itself into something its not.

The party is adopting a new slogan for its policy props, A Better Deal. Yes, its a cheap knock-off of Franklin Roosevelts 1933 New Deal slogan and is an updated do-over of FDRs failed socialist policies while cloaking them in the language of Donald Trumps middle class appeal.

Barack Obama used FDRs model to buy two presidential elections, so why not try it again? So what if the Democrats last grand national experiment with centralized statist policies, the so-called Great Society, was also an abysmal failure. All thats important to Pelosi, Schumer and the rest of their party is a return to power. And if they can fool enough people at the ballot box with false promises based on economic centralization and wealth redistribution, theyll accomplish their mission.

Of course, the best contemporary case study in the failure of Democrat regulatory schemes is the so-called Affordable Care Act ObamaCare or whats left of it today.

According to Schumer, When you lose an election with someone who has 40% popularity, you look in the mirror and say, What did we do wrong? And the number one thing that we did wrong is we didnt tell people what we stood for. A bold, sharp-edged message, platform [and] policy that talks about working people and how the system is rigged against them is going to resonate.

Actually, Id argue that the number one thing the Democrats got wrong was Hillary Clinton. And Id also argue that people knew exactly what her party stood for.

Schumer hopes the new message will resonate because it will include some proposals (plagiarized from language in Trumps playbook) that are quite different than the Democratic Party you heard in the past [when] we were too namby-pamby. (I suspect the last Democrat leader to use the term namby-pamby was FDR.)

The full focus-grouped slogan is A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future, and it includes a list of 26 populist promises. However, no Better Deal list can be found on the Democrat Party website because not all Democrats are on board.

Talking about 26 separate issues before an election to an electorate is overwhelming, said Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA), vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus. You have to punch through the clutter of what everyone else is saying.

Fact is, the new and improved Better Deal will prove to be nothing more than all the previous Democrats socialist Raw Deals over the past century.

How do I know?

The first clue is that its being promoted by Democrats. Dead giveaway.

But the second clue, the more substantive one, would be a century of failed socialism that has left hundreds of millions of victims in its worldwide wake of devastation and destruction.

On November 7th, Sen. Bernie Sanders and his socialist legions of misinformed millennial serfs across the nation, who were all sandbagged by the Democrat Party in 2016 to clear a path for Hillary Clinton, will be celebrating the 100-year anniversary of the Great Socialist Revolution of 1917.

Thats the date when Vladimir Lenins band of Bolsheviks overtook the Russian Provisional Government in Petrograd, which led to the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922 and the vision for the spread of socialist communism worldwide. And indeed it did metastasize.

The USSRs horrific Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist state endured until the mid 1980s, when the last of its socialist dictators, Mikhail Gorbachev, implemented dramatic economic reforms through his free-enterprise glasnost and perestroika policies. It was an effort to avert a complete socialist meltdown.

Gorbachev attempted to head off the total collapse of the Soviet Union after Ronald Reagan helped him see the light. But it was too little, too late, and as President Reagan was leaving office in 1989, the Soviets Eastern European satellite states were being overthrown by democracy movements. When Gorbachev resigned from what was left of the USSR in 1991, it reconstituted itself as the Russian Federation.

(Begin Sarcasm) Notably, the Federation is now headed by Donald Trumps best buddy and biggest campaign booster, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. According to socialist Democrats in our country, in collusion with their mainstream media propaganda machine, Putin managed to win the 2016 election for Trump. (End Sarcasm)

More than 25 years since the USSRs collapse, the Federations economy is largely dependent on energy exports, antiquated industry and struggling service sectors. It will take many more years to build a healthy economy on the toxic trash heap of Soviet socialism.

For those of us who were on the ground in the former USSR, and then again after 1990 assisting early Federation reformers, the devastation of 70 years of socialism was and remains apparent in every corner of every quarter of the former Soviet states.

But the socialists now heading the Democrat Party here in the U.S. are either in complete denial about the consequences of the state-planned and regulated economy they seek to implement, or blinded by their own insatiable quest for power.

These party leaders, who label anyone questioning their socialist climate change agenda science deniers, are themselves socialism deniers.

While Sovietologists and Sinologists can explain the historic consequences of socialism in Russia and China (and its puppet state, North Korea) in great detail, any amateur observer with an ounce of acumen can discern those consequences unfolding in real time in what was once the most prosperous nation on the South American continent, Venezuela.

Three short years ago, the Leftmedia proclaimed that Venezuela was socialist Hugo Chavezs economic miracle.

Recall how Bernie Sanders proclaimed, The American dream is more apt to be realized in Venezuela, adding, Whos the banana republic now?

Well, while I appreciate the fact that Bernie is the only Democrat honest enough to call himself a socialist, he is now eating heaping helpings of crow as more than 30 million Venezuelan men, women and children starve while Feelin the Bern of the unfettered socialism he advocated.

I dare Bernie, or any of his mindless millennials who embrace the profoundly ignorant opinion that socialism works, to vacation in Venezuelas now-imploding capital of Caracas. (Travel tip: Bring your own toilet paper.) And while there, they might want to try the newest weight-loss fad, the Venezuelan diet! If they hurry, maybe they can get there by Sunday, in time for Chavezs socialist successor, Nicolas Maduro, to impanel his fake constituent assembly for rubber-stamping his socialist policy directives.

Ignorance is bliss at least until you run out of toilet paper.

Make no mistake, Democratic Socialism, like Nationalist Socialism, is nothing more than Marxist Socialism repackaged. It seeks a centrally planned economy directed by a dominant-party state that controls economic production by way of taxation, regulation and income redistribution, and control of public opinion by way of its mainstream media propaganda machine. The rise of Democratic Socialism therefore depends upon supplanting Liberty the rights endowed by our Creator primarily by denying that such an endowment even exists.

After the defeat of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi (National Socialist German Workers Party) regime, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill observed, Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy. Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

Four decades later, as the USSR was on the verge of collapse, Ronald Reagan observed, Throughout the developing world, people are rejecting socialism because they see that it doesnt empower people, it impoverishes them.

His contemporary, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, keenly summed up the problem with socialism: Socialist governments always run out of other peoples money.

Sound familiar?

(Footnote: On the subject of socialist problems, I invite you to listen to an interview with my friend, noted economist Thomas DiLorenzo, on his new book, The Problem with Socialism.)

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis Pro Deo et Libertate 1776

More:
The Socialism Deniers and the 'Better Deal' - Patriot Post

The New York Times reported at the beginning of 2017 that George Orwells 1984 is suddenly a best-seller. Prof. Stefan Collini, of the University of Cambridge, explained to the NYT that readers saw a natural parallel between the book and the way Mr. Trump and his staff have distorted facts.

Since Orwell is back en vogue, its appropriate to remind readers that he liked socialism a lot more than he liked the common run of socialists. In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell writes, there is the horriblethe really disquietingprevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words Socialism and Communism draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, Nature Cure quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

I had no opportunity to examine members of the Socialist Party of Maine during its founding convention on July 16, so I have no idea how closely the cranks meeting in Augustas Viles Arboretum corresponded to Orwells distressed description. Almost fifty years of associating with socialists of one variety or another, however, inclines me to suspect some resemblances. The vegetarians, sandal-wearers, nudists, and birth-control fanatics have pretty much fused with the climate-control fanatics and associated eco-weirdos. And, when we substitute Democratic Party grafters for those Labour Party crawlers, we see there hasnt been much change across eighty years of history and three thousand miles of ocean.

Despite this, their meeting was a success. The Socialist Party of Eastern Maine was officially amalgamated with the Socialist Party of Southern Maine, creating the Socialist Party of Maine. I must leave it to the entomologists to distinguish the Socialist Party of Maine from the Maine Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party, the Loafing Families Party, Millennials for Revolution, the Communist Party of Maine, the Green Independent Party, the Trotskyist Party, the Trotskyite Party, the Maine Peoples Alliance, the Progressive Alliance and all the other progressive sectarians, living or dead. Ive gotten too old and slow to keep up myself.

Tom MacMillan, who helped organize the convention, explained the Socialist hopes and dreams. Because we believe in democratic socialism, we take both the democratic and the socialism very seriously. In their workplaces that means promoting worker-owned cooperatives. Thats a good example. Democracy at work, democracy at the ballot box, and democracy in society. We think that regular people can control their lives better than their bosses can or by the owners of big companies.

With a little help from cryptanalysis and free-ranging intuition, Ive deduced from MacMillans remarks that regular people will use their democratic power to give themselves fair wages, affordable health care, education, food and housing for all, and ranked-choice voting. The Regulars will pay for these beautiful things by taxing irregular people (also known as the wealthy).

I cant say whether MacMillan is addicted to fruit juice and sandals, but he seems to fit the socialist profile in other important respects. His works and days have run along lines remote from those of most Regulars. Theres no evidence that he has ever contributed to the material wealth he wants to redistribute. Although he learned how to run Americas economy, culture and society in college, he has no record of running anything.

Despite MacMillans thin resume, hes worth a paragraph or two. He equipped himself to transform American society by earning a B.A. in International Development and Social Change eight years ago. He served as Secretary of the Maine Green Independent Party Steering Committee. He ran on the Green ticket for the Maine House of Representatives in 2012 and 2014. He was endorsed for election by the Maine Peoples Alliance (MPA), the New Progressive Alliance, and the Maine Education Association (MEA).

The connections are more interesting than the man. The Socialist Party of Maine may back candidates against Democratic Party nominees and incumbents, and the MPA and MEA may choose to back the occasional socialist while reserving almost all of their endorsements for Democrats. All these factions and fractions have one unifying project: The enlargement of government power.

All these varieties of big government cultists are surely sincere when they praise democracy, but they all harbor a covert conviction that democracy is too important to be left to the people.

Continued here:
What do Maine's socialists know about working Maine? - The Maine Wire

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Izquierda Revolucionaria, the Socialist Party's co-thinkers in Spain, joined half a million others to march in Madrid on International Women's Day, photo CWI (Click to enlarge)

This historic unification has a clear material basis in the profound change in the class struggle internationally opened up by the world capitalist crisis which began in 2008 and which still rages today.

Such periods of sharp change and turmoil are invariably also reflected in developments in the workers' movement and the left, including the revolutionary left - resulting in splits, realignments and fusions - as ideas, organisations and tendencies are put to the test.

It is our common understanding of, and response to this new period and agreement on the method of how to intervene in it and the central tasks it poses for the working class and Marxism, which is the basis for our unification.

The capitalist crisis is deep and intractable. None of the attempts of the world's ruling classes to deal with it have brought a solution any closer or re-established the system's lost equilibrium. On the contrary, they have stored up the potential for new crises and conflicts.

The world economic crisis of over-production, characterised by a crisis of investment and chronic lack of demand in the world economy, is no closer to being resolved than at the moment of its outbreak.

The trillions of dollars injected into the world economy in the form of 'quantitative easing' have not had anywhere near the desired results, in resuscitating either investment or demand.

Far from representing a new motor for world growth as hoped for by many capitalist commentators, the last phase of the crisis has seen the so-called 'emerging' economies - with China at the head - drawn into the maelstrom of the world crisis.

The global strike of capital investment paints a clear picture of the obstacle which private ownership of wealth and means of production, together with the nation state, represents for the development of the world economy.

The crisis has already resulted in profound changes in the moods and outlook of all classes, most significantly among the working class, young and oppressed peoples around the world.

Marxists predicted at the onset of the crisis that it would usher in a period of revolution and counter-revolution, and this has been the tenor of events since then. From the revolutionary upheavals of the "Arab Spring" in 2011, to mass movements against austerity and the current social rebellion against Trumpism in the USA's urban centres, the period has been marked by the increasing entry of the masses onto the scene of history.

This has been accompanied by a polarisation in society with a shift to the left in political consciousness and also, as a result of the bankruptcy of reformism and the traditional bourgeois parties, an electoral growth of the far right.

Socialist Party general secretary Peter Taaffe addressing the unity congress, photo by JB (Click to enlarge)

The development of new left parties and formations, like Podemos in Spain, France Insoumise (led by Jean Luc Melenchon) etc, together with the mass left movements around Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, are powerful - though complex and unfinished - expressions of this.

These new left formations and movements are contradictory and volatile, reflecting the nature of the period which has given birth to them.

Our role is to intervene energetically in these processes, while at the same time audaciously and openly defending a socialist, class-struggle based programme.

While building our own revolutionary organisation, we work to assist the development of these formations into new mass parties of the working class armed with a revolutionary alternative to capitalism.

A new era of opportunities for revolutionary change has opened up. CWI sections in the USA and Ireland have already played leading roles in mass working class movements which have won important victories (water charges in Ireland and $15 Now in US). The members of Izquierda Revolucionaria, in the leadership of the Sindicato de Estudiantes (students union - SE) waged a victorious battle against the "revalidas" (education counter-reforms) in the Spanish state which has consolidated the SE as a fighting point of reference in the struggle against austerity.

These victories show our ability to engage with the masses and, in certain circumstances, to become a real factor in the situation, which sets our organisations apart from other Marxist organisations.

Our unification is rooted in a broad agreement on the perspectives for world capitalism and the tasks which arise for Marxists. However, it is reflected in much more than this.

Our mutual experience of discussing and fighting side-by-side has revealed an agreement not only in ideas and perspectives, but in strategy, tactics, programme and orientation. As Lenin said, without revolutionary ideas there is no revolutionary movement. But equally, ideas and theory without practice are blind.

Our revolutionary international and sections have a clear orientation to intervene in the mass struggles, trade union and political organisations of the working class. We also maintain the principle of the political and organisational independence of the revolutionary party.

Flexibility in tactics, coupled with principled political and programmatic firmness, is a hallmark of our shared political roots and method.

We fight to occupy the front line in the struggle against all forms of oppression, uniting the working class and all the oppressed around a perspective of socialist change.

The CWI, together with our new comrades in IR, is an international Marxist force with a real base among workers and youth in a number of key countries.

Juan Ignacio Ramos, IR general secretary, speaking at the rally, photo Natalia Medina (Click to enlarge)

The international rally on 19 July organised by IR and the CWI was a huge success. More than 600 workers, youth and activists from both organisations and the wider left packed the main hall of the Cocheras de Sants, Barcelona. There was an electric atmosphere, in defence of the October 1917 revolution and Marxist internationalism.

Speakers were: Ana Garcia the general secretary of the Sindicato de Estudiantes (SE - students union), Paul Murphy, Solidarity TD (MP) in the Irish Republic; Juan Ignacio Ramos general secretary of Izquierda Revolucionaria; Peter Taaffe, general secretary of the Socialist Party and Kshama Sawant, Socialist Alternative councillor in Seattle, USA.

In two hours they covered a broad scope of issues from the October revolution to the class struggle today. All of the speakers emphasised the extraordinary legacy of Bolshevism, the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky and their relevance in the fight for a socialist world today.

The banner of the October revolution is for us a guide to action. When the workers and youth of Russia took power they showed in deeds and not only in speeches that it really is possible to change reality and bring down capitalism.

There were also references to the collapse of the USSR and the Stalinist regimes in eastern Europe, which gave way to a vicious capitalist counterrevolution.

At that time, capitalists internationally cried victory and the leaderships of the traditional left organisations, the old communist parties and social democracy, as well as the trade unions, turned sharply to the right and accepted the creed of neoliberalism.

But in the middle of the storm of reaction and of abandonment of struggle, Marxists resisted. We knew that the apparent triumph of capitalism would be temporary and that a new crisis would dispel all illusions

All speakers underlined how, starting ten years ago, world capitalism is living through its worst recession since 1929.

Conditions determine consciousness, as Karl Marx said. The crisis accelerated all the processes of the class struggle and led to an upturn in struggle.

The consciousness of millions of workers and especially youth has advanced, together with social polarisation. Capitalism has been thrown into a period of uncertainty and pessimism.

But the experience of these years has also shown that if we want real change, rhetoric and speeches are not enough.

The example of Greece is conclusive. Left party Syriza and its leader Tsipras had the backing of the working people. But Tsipras lacked a revolutionary policy, accepted the logic of the capitalist system and capitulated shamelessly to the 'Troika' (group of capitalists), applying its austerity.

Kshama Sawant speaking in Barcelona, 19.7.17, photo by JB (Click to enlarge)

Kshama Sawant explained the work of Socialist Alternative in Seattle - the successful campaign for $15 an hour, and the big mobilisations built, together with others, against Trump's reactionary policies.

Kshama explained how to use an elected position to raise the level of organisation and consciousness. The same applies to Paul Murphy in the struggle against water charges - which provoked a brutal response by the state.

However, the Socialist Party (CWI in Ireland) organised with others a mass campaign against the criminalisation of protest, which managed to defeat this attack and achieve a 'not guilty' verdict for all defendants in the biggest political trial for a generation.

Peter Taaffe explained the main ideas of Bolshevism, underlining the importance of the existence of a revolutionary party to transform society completely. This is the central task of the epoch: building revolutionary parties all over the world, through patient intervention in the class struggle and in the new political phenomena which arise as a consequence of the crisis of the system and of social democracy.

Ana Garcia focussed on the key role of young people in all the events we have seen in Spain. The children of the crisis see that this system has nothing to offer them. They have been the spinal column of the social rebellion which has held the minority Popular Party government in check.

Ana explained how the Sindicato de Estudiantes has played a leading role in this battle with 25 general strikes in schools and universities against the government which is the inheritor of Francoism.

Millions of youth want a deep and radical change but this change cannot be achieved by respecting the logic of capitalism. This is why the SE defends the ideas of Marxism and Bolshevism.

Borja Latorre and Juan Ignacio Ramos both spoke in defence of the right of self-determination in Catalonia. For IR, the Catalan people have the right to decide, and this should not be conditional on the state accepting it. This right must be won by mobilisation and mass struggle.

We cannot subordinate ourselves to the Catalan bourgeoisie, right-wing nationalists like PDeCat, who are champions of cuts and repression. We fight for a socialist Catalonia, a socialist republic, to unite the forces of the workers and youth of Catalonia with those of the rest of the Spanish state, to win real democracy which can only be socialism.

The rally finished with an emotional singing of the Internationale in various languages by more than 600 people, ending a deeply red and internationalist event.

Originally posted here:
Building workers' struggle and the forces of international socialism - Socialist Party