SOME THOUGHTS ON SOCIALISM V CAPITALISM

    I'm a socialist. It took me a long time to admit it to myself, it took even longer before i could be confident enough to admit it publicly. That is a good thing. It shows thought, it shows deliberation. We liberals are used to that. It's what makes us what we are. 

     I grew up in a time during which, and just after, congress was having communist witch-hunts. People then had no clear idea between socialism and communism. The same ignorance exists today, some 70-odd years later. Mostly in one particular party. A party well-practiced in witch-hunting. Today's witch hunters have made witches from LGBTQ PLUS people. They have made witches of teachers and school boards for teaching Critical Race Theory (which is not taught until first-year law school) though any history that places slavery in a bad light would be too critical. They have vilified any mention of DES (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in the workplace, though they do not have a seat in the executive office or on the board of directors. They are even against being woke, which to most people is synonymous with aware. In short, these idiots are no smarter than their late 17th century forebears that actually chased witches or what they thought were witches, yet they insist on being heard. Good news, they are no longer burning white people. Bad news, they own, and threaten with, assault Weapons. If you have too much melanin, and they are cops, you run a very likely risk of being shot or imprisoned for such heinous crimes as having a broken tail-lite lens? Others prefer easier targets: churches, synagogues, elementary schools, Grocery stores, or the occassional Jason Aldean country festival. Don't worry, he won't say shit about gun laws.

     This absolutist approach is not just an issue with rightwingers. I have had Facebook discussions with people who are seeking some kind of perfect socialism, in the same way that rightwingers seek some kind of perfect capitalist economy. Nobody told them that perfection in a democracy has not been achieved. I'm reminded of a quote from Winston Churchill that, "democracy is the worst form of government in the world. Except for all of the others". Winston Churchill is well remembered for his sharp remonstrances, delivered in a wry manner. Our conservatives don't get the joke. Many of them think wry, when used in that way, refers to a grain. Or whiskey. There is a difference between our rightwing absolutist and us lefties seeking the same degree of perfection; we aren't placing restrictions on who can vote and we don't have patience with racists and fascists. What Socialists of my acquaintance have advocated for have been such things as public Healthcare. Righties also had a public healthcare option, though they kept their involvement on the downlow. The Heritage Foundation, the political pressure group that created the media argument against Hillary-care back in the 1990s had a public healthcare option in their pocket. That plan became Romneycare in Massachusetts, and with some modest changes, later became Obamacare. Ironically Mitt Romney was not able to mention it during his presidential campaign because of hatred on the right for President Obama. We suspect that much of that hatred on the part of the right had to do with melanin. Others use the epithet liberal as their reason to hate him, being too cowardly to confront their racism.

     As a youngish man in my 40s, I had a discussion with a person with whom I had few disagreements. He was what I believed was center-left, I was what he believed was farther left. We did not, however use those descriptions. He characterized himself and those like him as progressive. I, and my colleagues were liberal. At some point I stated that, "progressives were afraid to admit they were liberal, why was that"? 

      Socialism is defined by Oxford Languages as, a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole. Marxists would define it as a transitional state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of communism. This is probably the definition that frightens rightwingers most. We all at one time or another are acquainted with a form of socialism, even capitalists. The public coffers often gets stuck with businesses and banks who fail. We get stuck cleaning up the pollution when the company disappears. We get stuck rescuing people in a hurricane made worse by fossil fuel use. We call this, quietly, corporate socialism; socializing costs, privatizing profits. I remember my senior year in high school taking a Civics class taught by the baseball coach. Who else would be qualified to teach Civics? In this class we studied the Communist manifesto. I remember one thing from Mr. Croco's civics class, "the withering away of the state". Many years later, in the 1990s, a fellow who led an anti-tax group was quoted as saying, "I want to starve government until we can drown it in the bathtub". Somewhat more recently another fellow advocated for the "deconstruction of the administrative state". As a liberal I would interpret all of these as meaning nearly the same thing, one being more hostile than the others. The first instance comes strongly from the left wing, the latter two are unambiguously from the right wing, unless Grover Norquist and Steve Bannon are in the process of transitioning. The second of those three wishes disproves the fear of Socialists being bent on violent overthrow, placing the blame squarely in the realm of the right wing. We can say this confidently because the knowledge of rhetorical nuance is lost among those on the right. On January 6, 2021 we got an even more sinister view of the defenders of capitalism. 

     If we delve deeper into the Oxford definition we see where the means of economic production or exchange is not necessarily owned by the community as a whole, it could be merely regulated by the community as a whole, meaning the government that we elect. This assumes that our elections are not corrupted by very wealthy capitalists bent on eliminating competition. I cannot speak for leftists before me, but I never had in my basket of fears regarding capitalism, the thought that our Constitutional rights would be endangered by the capital markets. Violent insurrectionists, Brownshirts, fascists and other dangers lurked in the darker recesses of politics; not socialists placing restrictions on corporate pollution. Sure politicians have always been influenced by the blandishments of wealthy people. But we have within my lifetime never thought about our president as being corrupt until sometime after 2016. Stupid, yes. Driven by power? That too, though, in that case of Nixon, he was forced by his own party to resign. But we never considered that the swamp that always needed drained was ruled over by a POTUS as the top preditor. It has been only very recently that it has been revealed to us that even the Supreme Court is being controlled by billionaire rightwingers. Marx and Engles created this economic policy we call socialism to protect the working class from a few wealthy predators who sought nothing less than wealth without consequence. Democracy was created to form a government that was responsible to the electorate. It is true that the originalist interpretation of the electorate was confined to white, land-owning males, but we had been working on that for not quite 250 years. Women were granted the vote in 1920, African-Americans were finally granted the right to vote in 1965. We had not achieved perfection, but we were making progress. Sometime around the 1980s, we started to realize that trickle-down economics did not trickle down to us, those of us not in the habit of contributing to elect our servants. It was flowing up to the wealthy families that have utilized strategic political influence. We did begin to see trickling down to us a roll-back of the liberal progress of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. People began to investigate this. We had an entire class of people following in the footsteps of the muck-rakers, even as media went from newspapers, magazines, and radio to the newer venue of television. Around a decade after the great Paddy Cheyevski movie, Network, hit the big screen a new media branch was formed with the express purpose of being a pro-Republican news venue, the prediction envisioned by Cheyevski. This was Foxnews, owned by Rupert Murdoch a tabloid billionaire, and run by Roger Ailes, a onetime aid of Ronald Reagan and creator of this Pez-dispenser of rightwing hagiography. At the same time the broadcast news media, which had not previously been a profit center, now was. This resulted in a small number of conglomerates owning 90% of the media markets.

     So now we face the very real possibility of our democracy being under total control of the monied class and not, as rightwingers fear, of the contributions of George Soros. Fossil fuel magnates like Charles Koch have spent the last 50 years creating political pressure groups and thinktanks designed to influence politicians. As the Supreme Court allowed money to be considered free speech, they bought up every bit of free speech that they could get their hands on, and they used that free speech to put in office compliant men and women in the three separate but equal branches of government. We are left with a dilemma: how do we regain the concept of government by the consent of the governed, when government has for so long been rendered by the consent of those who govern? 

     Chicago has many stories, and many story-tellers. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal of a time when the windy city was trying to bring the World's Fair to town. Their problem was the memory people had of Al Capone and the Valentines Day Massacre, combined with the many examples of corrupt Civic officials. One of the things they tried to do to scrub their reputation, was to remove prostitutes from the streets. But the people who controlled prostitution, and the women trapped in the practice, had used their influence to preserve their lucrative business. The police, who were supposed to rid the streets of prostitution were granted "freebies". It was not in their self-interest to clamp down on the business they were required to regulate. We can have a disagreement on who are the metaphorical prostitutes, we know too well who gets screwed in the deal.