Originally posted 10/13/08...
America has changed in profound ways in the past month. Conservatorships, equity buyouts, seizures, and bailouts are things that were politically impossible even during the Great Depression. Why? Because the United States of America was understood to be a free market economy, and these moves were understood to be anathema to us. So what changed? How did the government get away with what they wouldn't have dreamed of 80 years ago? For starters, the words socialist and communist have been altered and misused so that it is difficult to find one clear definition of either. In the textbook for my Introduction to Business class, for example, the definition of socialism is basically a system in which the government owns the communications, transportation, and utilities companies and heavily taxes and regulates the others. This same book defined communism as a government in which all means of production are owned by the state. In a later term I took macroeconomics, and the textbook for this class defined socialism and communism as the same thing, a centrally planned economy in which the government owns the means of production. The Webster's Dictionary from 1993 defined socialism as "economic and political system, aiming at public or government ownership of means of production, etc." It defined communism as "the theory of a social system in which everything is held in common, private property being abolished." Without a clear definition, it is difficult to teach against these ideologies. In fact, our government seems to have studied George Orwell's 1984, and adopted his mind control technique "Newspeak". Through the 'PC' (politically correct) movement terms have been labelled taboo and banished from polite conversation. We have been dealing with this for about 20 years or so. It has been long enough that we don't even question the concept of taboo language. Socialist, Communist are words that are taboo. It is seen as slander and "Flippant" to label a politician or political move as socialist. Most people even think that communism died with the USSR, and find anyone who talks about it to be chasing ghosts. It is time to throw these blindfolds off and face the reality of our situation. Communism is not dead, it is merely hiding in the shadows waiting to reemerge. Socialism is the preferred system of most people, inasmuch as it means a government that provides a strong safety net for it's people including free health care, free education, and a generous welfare program. Governments are expected to regulate the markets and protect workers rights to organize. It seems to me that socialism is alive and well. And here is why: The Communist Party of the USA quotes Marx and Engels from the Communist Manifesto as saying:
"...the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to establish democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class, and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible."
p.30 IP Ed; MESW, p.52; MECW, p.504
Now, understand, the bourgeoisie is the land-owning, business owning middle-class. Carl Marx knew that the beauty of free market capitalism is a robust middle class.
In any event, this quote begins to describe the process by which a capitalist society makes the transition to a socialist one. By exploiting democracy, and bleeding the middle class dry a society is gradually weakened until it collapses into a socialist, then communist order. As a result, I define socialism as the continuum, the first step of which is some mild socialist mechanism, and as more mechanisms are added, the society moves toward complete communism. Communism being the complete ownership of all means of production by the government. A society can be mostly a free market society, with a progressive income tax in place, and be considered socialist in this view, as it has stepped onto the continuum. By this definition, most nations in existence today are socialist to some degree. America is no exception.
Posts
