"Everyone now is more or less a Socialist" [View all]

[Babel_17]

Everyone now is more or less a Socialist. 
—Charles Dana, managing editor of the New York Tribune, and Lincoln’s assistant secretary of war, 1848

http://www.occasionalplanet.org/2011/12/16/lincoln-and-the-socialist-roots-of-the-republican-party/

Lincoln was an avid reader of newspapers, especially of the New York Tribune, which was the great Republican paper of the day. It took a strong stand against slavery in the south. But it also had forceful opinions on the relationship between Labor and Capital, arguing that “Labor needs not to combat but to command Capital.” Greeley wanted to “expose the crimes whereby wealth is amassed and luxury enjoyed.” Nichols writes:

Greeley welcomed the disapproval of those who championed free markets over the interests of the working class, a class he recognized as including both the oppressed slaves of the south and the degraded industrial laborers of the north.

Nichols writes that after Lincoln addressed the challenges of the war, he also spoke of another, perhaps deeper, division. He wanted to speak about the danger of government favoring the interests of capital over labor. In doing so he presented the radical analysis of Marx and others of his time.

"It is not needed, nor fitting here [in discussing the Civil War] that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions; but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effect to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor, in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them, and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded thus far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.

Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights."

I guess, assuming Senator Sanders continues to stay competitive, eventually the media will give more publicity to the history of progressivism, including that which gets labeled as Socialism, Democratic Socialism, etc, here in the United States of America.