Socialism Facilitates Human Liberation

[marmar]

Socialism Facilitates Human Liberation

Wednesday, 16 December 2015 00:00
By Danny Katch, Haymarket Books | Book Excerpt


The following is the introduction to Socialism ...Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation:


Socialism is a good idea, but
... it doesn't work in practice.
... human beings are too greedy for it to succeed.
... the rich and powerful will never allow it.

Most of us have heard one of these declarations in school, on television, around the dinner table. Whatever the specific reason, the lesson we are meant to take away is that socialism ain't gonna happen. Interestingly, the argument always begins with the reluctant concession that socialism is, in fact, a good idea. There's even a rightwing bumper sticker that goes a step further than good and reads: "Socialism ... A Great Idea until You Run Out of Other People's Money." I realize that the guy with this message on his vehicle alongside Confederate flags and various other "I'm an asshole" signifiers doesn't mean it as a compliment. But it says something that even the most hostile opponents of socialism often start out by admitting that it sure sounds nice.

Perhaps they do so because the inverse is so obviously true. Capitalism is a bad idea. Imagine if we start a society on an uninhabited tropical island, and I propose that the people who do all the work will be paid as little as possible while the people who don't do anything but own stocks will have more money than they could possibly spend in their lifetimes. You would all be looking at each other and shaking your heads. "Wait, wait, hear me out," I might say. "We'll also treat air, water, plants, minerals, and other animals as objects to be exploited even more ruthlessly than workers!" Now you'd slowly back away because there's obviously something not right with me, even as I continue on: "Wait, don't go! We can maintain peace by creating massively destructive weapons and violent prisons. Why is everybody leaving?"

In this most capitalist of countries, growing numbers are concluding that capitalism doesn't work. Some of them have read sharp critics of the system like Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein. Others have just lived in this world with open eyes and hearts. This is a positive step forward from the political climate in recent decades, in which critics of capitalism were too marginal to even be considered dangerous. But it's not enough to know what we're against. If we're not for something different, we're just daydreaming - or whining, if your personality is more like mine. Capitalism isn't going to collapse from criticism alone. People have cursed and denounced this thing for centuries and it's very good at deflecting opposition with a big "but" of its own:

Capitalism is a bad idea, but
... it's the only system that works.
... it fits with humanity's greedy nature.
... don't waste your life trying to change it.

One of the last major social systems to be permanently overturned was based on plantation slavery. A key turning point took place when the slaves of Saint-Domingue defeated armies from France and Spain to create the nation of Haiti in 1810. For hundreds of years before the Haitian Revolution, enslaved Africans had understood the injustice of this system and had fought rebellions to try to escape it. But after Haiti, these rebellions - from Brazil to Virginia - became revolutions attempting not to escape slavery but to end it. There is no socialist equivalent to the Haitian example to prove to the world that capitalism is no longer necessary, and books are no substitute for revolutions. My more modest aim is to introduce some of today's daydreamers and whiners to a concept that the world desperately needs. ....................(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/34079-socialism-facilitates-human-liberation

[Festivito]

1. Pure Capitalism like pure Socialism fail, thusly, democracy arises. eom