Socialist Manifesto Quotes

Socialism was made to be an ideology of radical democracy, of working-class self-emancipation, not a tool for state-managed development. A revolution from above, with an unelected party overseeing the creation of a social surplus and rerouting it to certain ends, even with the best of intentions, is a formula for authoritarianism.

Any ideology built around a notion of destiny—nationalism and socialism alike—runs the risk of calamity. The solution is a banal one: valuing and protecting rights and liberties, while ensuring that ordinary people are not only consulted through mass rallies but actually have democratic avenues to make choices and hold their leaders accountable. Without this bedrock, any postcapitalist society risks creating a new caste of oppressors.

Why does socialist central planning not work? The means of production are not held privately, so there cannot be any exchange markets for them and therefore no exchange ratios established. That means there is no way to calculate profit and loss. Without profit and loss, there is no way to assess the tradeoffs associated with alternative uses of resources.

At its core, to be a socialist is to assert the moral worth of every person, no matter who they are, where they’re from, or what they did.17 With any luck, future generations will look back at the time when life outcomes were accidents of birth with shock and disgust, the same way we look back on more extreme forms of exploitation and oppression—slavery, feudalism, and so on—that have already been done away with. If all human beings have the same inherent worth, then they must be free to fulfill their potential, to flourish in all their individuality.

The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.

Now imagine what a change it would be for a young black American to grow up in a society where they didn’t have to settle for the worst schools, the worst health care, the worst jobs, or possibly be subjected to the worst carceral system on Earth. Imagine what it would mean for women if they were more easily able to leave abusive relationships or escape workplace harassment with the help of strong welfare guarantees. Imagine our future Einsteins and Leonardo da Vincis liberated from grinding poverty and misery and able to contribute to human greatness. Or forget Einstein and Leonardo—better yet, imagine ordinary people, with ordinary abilities, having time after their twenty-eight-hour workweek to explore whatever interests or hobbies strike their fancy (or simply enjoy their right to be bored). The deluge of bad poetry, strange philosophical blog posts, and terrible abstract art will be a sure sign of progress.

Just as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's statement "Property is theft" is usually misunderstood, so it is easy to misunderstand Benjamin Tucker's claim that individualist anarchism was part of "socialism." Yet before Marxists monopolized the term, socialism was a broad concept, as indeed Marx's critique of the "unscientific" varieties of socialism in the Communist Manifesto indicated. Thus, when Tucker claimed that the individualist anarchism advocated in the pages of Liberty was socialist, he was not engaged in obfuscation or rhetorical bravado. He (and most of his writers and readers) understood socialism to mean a set of theories and demands that proposed to solve the "labor problem" through radical changes in the capitalist economy. Descriptions of the problem varied (e.g., poverty, exploitation, lack of opportunity), as did explanations of its causes (e.g., wage employment, monopolies, lack of access to land or credit), and, consequently, so did the proposed solutions (e.g., abolition of private property, regulation, abolition, or state ownership of monopolies, producer cooperation, etc.). Of course, this led to a variety of strategies as well: forming socialist or labor parties, fomenting revolution, building unions or cooperatives, establishing communes or colonies, etc. This dazzling variety led to considerable public confusion about socialism, and even considerable fuzziness among its advocates and promoters.

The Bolshevik Revolution, which had happened only a quarter century earlier, had in contrast involved the embrace of concentrated authority as a means of overthrowing class enemies and consolidating a base from which a proletarian revolution would spread throughout the world. Karl Marx claimed, in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, that the industrialization capitalists had set in motion was simultaneously expanding and exploiting the working class, which would sooner or later liberate itself. Not content to wait for this to happen, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin sought to accelerate history in 1917 by seizing control of Russia and imposing Marxism on it, even though that state failed to fit Marx’s prediction that the revolution could only occur in an advanced industrial society. Stalin in turn fixed that problem by redesigning Russia to fit Marxist-Leninist ideology: he forced a largely agrarian nation with few traditions of liberty to become a heavily industrialized nation with no liberty at all. As a consequence, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was, at the end of World War II, the most authoritarian society anywhere on the face of the earth.

The nameable goals of the socialist and even Marxist manifestos of the nineteenth century—public education, free health care, a government role in the economy, votes for women—have all been achieved, mostly peacefully and mostly successfully, by acts of reform in liberal countries. The attempt to achieve them by fiat and command, in the Soviet Union and China and elsewhere, created catastrophes, moral and practical, on a scale still almost impossible to grasp.

Most people are saddled with debt, have few job protections, can’t comfortably afford health care and housing, and don’t believe that their children will fare any better than they do. In this new gilded age, they’re unwilling philanthropists, subsidizing the lavish lifestyles of the rich.

But however determined this programme of domestic consolidation, following the Reichstag election results of May 1924, not even the votes of the SPD were sufficient to carry the constitutional amendments necessary to ratify the Dawes Plan, which included an international mortgage on the Reichsbahn. Over a quarter of the German electorate had voted for the far right - 19 per cent for the DNVP, almost 7 per cent for Hitler's NSDAP. Almost 13 per cent had opted for the Communists. The two-thirds majority would have to include at least some deputies from the DNVP, intransigent foes of the Versailles Treaty and the progenitors of the 'stab in the back' legend. So concerned were the foreign powers that the American ambassador Alanson Houghton intervened directly in German party politics, summoning leading figures in the DNVP to explain bluntly that if they rejected the Dawes Plan, it would be one hundred years before America ever assisted Germany again. Under huge pressure from their business backers, on 29 August 1924 enough DNVP members defected to the government side to ratify the plan. In exchange, the Reich government offered a sop to the nationalist community by formally renouncing its acceptance of the war-guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty. Nevertheless, on 10 October 1924 Jack Morgan bit his tongue and signed the loan agreement that committed his bank along with major financial interests in London, Paris and even Brussels to the 800-million Goldmarks loan. The loan was to apply the salve of business common sense to the wounds left by the war. And it was certainly an attractive proposition. The issuers of the Dawes Loan paid only 87 cents on the dollar for their bonds. They were to be redeemed with a 5 per cent premium. For the 800 million Reichsmarks it received, Germany would service bonds with a face value of 1.027 billion. But if Morgan's were bewildered by the role they had been forced to play, this speaks to the eerie quality of the reconfiguration of international politics in 1924. The Labour government that hosted the final negotiations in London was the first socialist government elected to preside over the most important capitalist centre of the old world, supposedly committed by its party manifesto of 1919 to a radical platform of nationalization and social transformation. And yet in the name of 'peace' and 'prosperity' it was working hand in glove with an avowedly conservative adminstration in Washington and the Bank of England to satisfy the demands of American investors, in the process imposing a damaging financial settlement on a radical reforming government in France, to the benefit of a German Republic, which was at the time ruled by a coalition dominated by the once notorious annexationist, but now reformed Gustav Stresemann. 'Depoliticization' is a euphemistic way of describing this tableau of mutual evisceration. Certainly, it had been no plan of Wilson's New Freedom to raise Morgan's to such heights. In fact, even Morgan's did not want to own the terms of the Dawes Settlement. Whereas Wilson had invoked public opinion as the final authority, this was now represented by the 'investing' public, for whom the bankers, as financial advisors, were merely the spokesmen. But if a collective humbling of the European political class had been what lay behind Wilson's call for a 'peace without victory' eight years earlier, one can't help thinking that the Dawes Plan and the London Conference of 1924 must have had him chuckling in his freshly dug grave. It was a peace. There were certainly no European victors.

In the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s presidency and assassination, something called the New Left emerged in American politics. Much like Bernie’s following, the new left found its strength on college campuses across the United States. Organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) populated the movement. Meanwhile, in Washington, Lyndon Baines Johnson, perhaps to provide cover for his failing war in Vietnam, tried to appease the New Left by ushering through a socialist agenda. Among the programs he supported were food stamps in 1964, Medicaid in 1965, and the Gun Control Act of 1968. By the early 1970s, the hippies of the New Left had traded their peace signs for raised fists and terrorist organizations. Among them was the Weather Underground, which was responsible for more than two thousand domestic bombings. The Weather Underground’s manifesto, called Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-imperialism, is dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy’s assassin.

Hitler didn’t imagine a world of gas chambers and ovens; he imagined a world after the gas chambers and ovens had accomplished their purpose. Stalin didn’t imagine a world of permanent exile and imprisonment; he imagined a “workers’ paradise” once the Others had been effectively silenced. Mao didn’t imagine a world with hundreds of millions of dead bodies littering the land; he imagined the perfect world that would come once the killing fields had done their job. If Stalin could have just blinked his eyes, if Mao could have just waved a wand, or if Hitler could have just snapped his fingers and accomplished the same ends, surely, they would have.

Ignorance is Strength.

These people weren’t fools who were unaware of America’s flaws; they were people who had experienced rather than just imagined Socialism and understood that in the real world, great doesn’t mean perfect and flawed doesn’t mean failed.

The German Socialists allied with the Islamicists during World War II and the Soviet Socialists were the Islamicists’ biggest financial, military and diplomatic benefactors throughout the Cold War. It should not be surprising, then, that the Democratic Socialists would side with the Islamic supremacists of today. Obama, for example, joined with the enemies of America by giving billions of dollars to the Ayatollahs and Mullahs in Iran, supporting the efforts of Hezbollah in Lebanon and ordering the military to “stand down” so the thugs of ISIS could do their work in Syria and beyond.

Socialists – no matter the incarnation – and Islamicists are, in fact, very much alike. They are all globalist. They’re all utopian. They all divide the world into only two kinds of people: those with the Supreme Trait and everyone else who they, in turn, despise with a seething passion.

According to the Woke, the problem with all of those other Supremacist movements was that they each declared something – a person, a family, a race, a religion or a class, for example – to be better than everything else. The Woke, then, are going to create the perfect world by going the other way. In order to create the perfect world of their imagination, the Woke have simply decreed that nothing is better than anything else. The Supreme Trait possessed by the Woke is total moral and intellectual indiscriminateness.   In the world of the Woke, all things – from behaviors to body-sizes, works of art and literature to systems of governance – are to simply be accepted as equally right, equally good, equally valid and equally true.

Orwell anticipated in the next Socialist society: Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

There are, of course, a multitude of problems with an ideology where paradise requires no one to ever think they’re right. One is that the Woke think they’re right. Another is that the Woke are wrong. But the Woke aren’t just wrong; they are wrong about everything. All of the time. And to the Nth degree. This is neither because they’re stupid (as in they lack either the knowledge or the mental capacity to arrival at the right and rightful conclusion) nor that they’re evil. It is because the central tenet required to be Woke – the belief that nothing is better than anything else – is so fundamentally untrue that everything else that follows is not merely wrong but the very opposite of right.

The Democratic Socialists have their archetype, as well. He is twenty-something, still sporting his baby-curls and without a wisp of facial hair that might hint at eventual maturity or, God forbid, masculinity. He appears to still be living in his parents’ basement, clutching his only worldly possession – a cup of hot cocoa – so wholly without responsibility, desire or drive that he hasn’t even bothered to change out of his night clothes. He’s come to be known derisively as “Pajama Boy.

Pajama Boy wasn’t the creation of the political far right meant to mock the moral and intellectual infantilism of today’s indiscriminate Left. In fact, the model was chosen and costumed, the set was staged and lit, the nation’s leading hair and make-up artists were called in and hundreds if not thousands of photos were shot before the Woke’s top marketing gurus selected just the right image to connect with their core constituents in an effort to sell them on their flagship policy known as Obamacare. What makes Pajama Boy the kind of person the Woke wishes to see everyone emulate is that, while chronologically he’s a grown-up, in every other way he remains a child. To the Woke, the perfect adult – the Supremacy’s version of the “worker,” the Aryan or the pious Islamicist – is the permanent child in a grown-up body.

The fact that the Nationalist prefers a world with a multiplicity of countries, religions, and cultures puts the lie to two of the Democratic Socialists’ greatest claims to moral supremacy. It is Nationalism, not Socialism, that seeks to live in peace and harmony with the other peoples and cultures of the world and, because it does, it is Nationalism, not Socialism, that promotes co-existence and diversity.

One of the great truisms of the past hundred years is that the only people who support Socialism are people who have never lived under it. Those who have endured its torments will risk everything to escape it and swear the oath, “Never Again.

Whereas the Marxist Socialist believed the Supreme Trait – the characteristic that when shared by all the people would create the perfect world – was found in the “Worker” and the German Socialist believed it was found in the “Aryan,” the Democratic Socialist is convinced that the Supreme Trait is found in those they call the “Woke.

Here’s Fallon, in his own words, responding to those who had been his friends and fellow warriors just the day before: I heard you. You made me feel bad. So now what? Are you happy? I’m depressed. Do you want to push me more? What do you want me to do? You want me to kill myself?

just the one hundred years since Marx’s theory was first put into practice there have been three Socialist governments with the manpower and the resources to invade other lands. Two – Germany and Russia – tried to take over the world, committed the cruelest of oppressions, and murdered more human beings than any other peoples in history. The third, China, has been only somewhat less adventurous overseas, but this is mostly because, with a population of 1.4 billion people and provinces so different from one another they are akin to their own countries, the Chinese are typically still too distracted trying to homogenize their own people into one to venture too far outside their own already massive borders. Still, their body count is staggering – between 40 and 80 million people under Socialist favorite Mao Tse-Tung alone.

Like the Nazis, the Soviets and Ku Klux Klan before them, Woke Supremacist “protests” are meant to frighten, intimidate, coerce, harass, badger, bully and beat into submission those who, through nothing more than their willingness to listen to another point-of-view, have failed the “one drop” test.

In fact, here is how Lyndon Johnson sold his fellow Democrats on the entire Socialist welfare scheme the Master Planners have been using for the past fifty years, which they euphemistically call their “War on Poverty”: These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.

Rather than modify their beliefs and practices in order to be correct, the Democratic Socialists change what it means to be correct to justify their wrongful beliefs and practices.

It was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – often described as the “new face” of the Democratic party – who smugly declared, “It is more important to be ‘morally right’” than to be factually correct while Joe Biden, one of the oldest faces in the Democratic party, moralized in his campaign stump speech that, “We [Democrats] prefer truth over facts.

Rather, the narrative the Powers-That-Be in these various institutions sell to those they’re charged with informing, educating, enlightening and entertaining must always serve the purposes of The Supremacy. New York Times opinion writer Bret Stephens tip-toed (for obvious reasons) around this fact in a piece now seemingly expunged from the Internet: A historian searching for clues about the origins of many of the great stories of recent decades – the collapse of the Soviet empire; the rise of Osama bin Laden; the declining US crime rate; the economic eclipse of Japan and Germany – would find most contemporary journalism useless.

Alinsky explains the purpose of the rules in the book’s first sentence: What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. Given that Marx, Lenin, Mao and Hitler all wanted to change the world from what it was to what they believed it should be, according to Alinsky, the book was written as much for the next Hitler as it was for the Democratic Socialists who embrace it as gospel today.

Alinsky himself went out of his way to make sure this point was well understood by all. It is why, on the first page of the book’s introduction, Alinsky paid tribute to the Devil: Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins – or which is which), the very first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did so so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom – Lucifer.

ESPN on-air personality Chris Palmer who, when he saw the black neighborhoods being set afire, tweeted “Burn that s**t down. Burn it all down.” When later the violence had reached the walls of his gated community, however, Palmer tweeted something entirely different:  Get these animals TF out of my neighborhood. Go back to where you live.

It wasn’t a “white person” who ordered the internment of Japanese-Americans based on nothing other than the color of their skin and the blood in their veins. That was the longest-serving, most powerful and best-loved Democrat of all, Franklin Roosevelt and it should not go unnoticed that it is this same Roosevelt who remains so beloved a figure in today’s Democratic party that, when Ocasio-Cortez sought to sell her massive one-size-fits-all “environmental” programs to her fellow Democrats, she did so by naming her bill after the Socialist/collectivist/ racist Roosevelt’s signature policies, “The New Deal.” That’s not a “dog whistle,” that’s a bullhorn.

While the Woke deface monuments dedicated to Abraham Lincoln who gave his life in freeing the slaves, the Democratic Socialist responsible for one of the worst acts of racism in American history still has Democrats naming bills for him. Democrats don’t fight racism; they exploit it.

Whenever the Democratic Socialist points to a nation where Socialism has succeeded, he invariably ignores the elephants in the room of China, Russia and Nazi Germany, and references only the tiny Nordic states of Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and Norway. These are odd choices since none of them is actually Socialist. Not in the slightest. In fact, they all fall far to the right on today’s American political spectrum. Their economic system is the same as that of the United States – free-market capitalism. They are proud Nationalists who love their country, respect the borders of their neighbors and expect their borders to be respected by others.

In fact, so concerned at this disinformation campaign waged by the Woke Supremacists, Løkke Rasmussen, the Prime Minister of Denmark, came to America, and told the assembled: I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of Socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a Socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.

Rasmussen wasn’t addressing middle school students who, understandably, might not have known this simple fact; he was addressing the best and the brightest products of the Supremacy at the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. That those who are militating for turning America into Denmark don’t know the first thing about that country’s economic model, governing system or culture speaks volumes about the purpose of those charged with “educating” them in the first place.

Just to the right of the RINOs and the Nordic states is the traditional wing of the Republican party. They are the “conservatives.” These are the true liberals – lower case “l” – in that what they seek to conserve is not only America’s liberal, democratic republic, but the limited role of government that allows for the freedom of choice on which liberalism is founded.

Slightly to the right of the conservatives are the libertarians. Whereas the conservative advocates for the limited government enshrined in the Constitution, the libertarian seeks minimal government. The libertarian believes that just because the government can do something doesn’t mean that it should. The libertarian lives by the “No Harm Principle,” which states that free men should be able to live in any fashion they desire so long as they don’t do harm to others. Compare and contrast Alinsky’s rules where the Master Planners “go in” and “rub raw” the sores of discontent in order to incite rioting, looting and death. Compare and contrast the Democratic Socialists’ protests scripted to force others to do their will through “any means necessary” and compare and contrast Pelosi’s dictum whereby the destruction of the Other is fluffed off with the wave of a hand and a mumbled “so be it.

And on its part, German Socialism recognized more and more its own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty bourgeois philistine. It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German petty philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of this model man it gave a hidden, higher, socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character.

The socialists’ manifesto called for ‘the progressive nationalization of all the instruments of production, distribution and exchange’. Gandhi thought this ‘too sweeping’, commenting archly that ‘Rabindranath Tagore is an instrument of marvellous production. I do not know that he will submit to being nationalized.

Even those who make a grand show of promising to leave every time one or another election doesn’t go their way never quite seem to make the move.

Socialism is about the structure of money and power; ideology is about how that money and power is used.

Not all Globalists are Socialists, but all Socialists are Globalists.

The Nationalist of old and the Socialist of today both embrace a system in which a venerated government owns everything within its realm. This is why the brilliant Thomas Sowell titled one of his most essential works describing the ideology of today’s Left, The Vision of the Anointed.

One of the great truisms of the past hundred years is that the only people who support Socialism are people who have never lived under it.

At this point, several generations into the Woke Supremacy, it is almost impossible to tell the liars from the merely deluded because the rhetoric and the results are the same.

Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, economist, political theorist, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known works are the “The Communist Manifesto” and “Das Kapital”. He died stateless and poverty-stricken with fewer than a dozen mourners attending his funeral. His last words reportedly were: “Go away! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!

If there is one thing the world should have learned at the most horrific of costs, it is that there is no appeasing Socialism. Socialism doesn’t stop its invasions, oppressions, cruelties, and atrocities until it is forced to. There is no compromising with socialists. There can be no deals made with socialists and, if and when a deal is cut, socialists never intend to keep their side of the bargain.

Political crisis is rooted in the institutional structure of capitalist society. This system divides “the political” from “the economic,” the “legitimate violence” of the state from the “silent compulsion” of the market. The effect is to declare vast swaths of social life off limits to democratic control and turn them over to direct corporate domination. By virtue of its very structure, therefore, capitalism deprives us of the ability to decide collectively exactly what and how much to produce, on what energic basis, and through what kinds of social relations. It robs us, too, of the capacity to determine how we want to use the social surplus we collectively produce, how we want to relate to nature and to future generations, and how we want to organize the work of social reproduction and its relation to that of production. Capitalism, in sum, is fundamentally antidemocratic.

Whether the accused is the President of the United States, a three-star General, a nominee to the Supreme Court or just a kid from Covington, Kentucky, and whether the accuser is a conman, a prostitute, a radical or a terrorist, the Supremacist convicts upon accusation and the Other can mount no effective defense.

Democratic Socialism is just the latest Socialist movement with One-World ambitions seeking to create the perfect society of their imagination through a Cancel Culture different this time only in its advanced technological sophistication.

Not content with the liberal creed of equality of rights, of equality before the law, the socialist State would trample on such equality on behalf of the monstrous and impossible goal of equality or uniformity of results--or rather, would erect a new privileged elite, a new class, in the name of bringing about such an impossible equality. Socialism was a confused and hybrid movement because it tried to achieve the lbieral goals of freedom, peace and industrial harmony and growth--goals which can only be achieved through liberty and the seperation of government from virtuallty--by imposting the old conservative means of statism, collectivism, and hierarchical privilege.

If you study Marx' Communist Manifesto you will find that in essence Marx said the proletarian revolution would establish the SOCIALIST dictatorship of the proletariat. To achieve the SOCIALIST dictatorship of the proletariat, three things would have to be accomplished: (1) The elimination of all right to private property; (2) The dissolution of the family unit; and (3) Destruction of what Marx referred to as the'opiate of the people,' religion.

To be a socialist today is to believe that more, not less, democracy will help solve social ills—and to believe that ordinary people can shape the systems that shape their lives.

You know your company is in a precarious position, but you also know that those in charge are getting paid fifty times more than you. Are they really doing fifty times the work? Couldn’t you figure out how to do their jobs too?

The market under capitalism is different because you don’t just choose to participate in it—you have to take part in it to survive. Your ancestors were peasants, but they weren’t any less greedy than you.

They had their little plot of land, and they grew as much crop as possible on it. They ate some of it, and then they gave a chunk of the remainder to a local lord to avoid getting killed. Any leftover product they often

Capitalism is a social system based on private ownership of the means of production and wage labor. It relies on multiple markets: markets for goods and services, the labor market, and the capital market.

workers simply collectively owned their firms’ capital, those in capital-intensive industries would earn far more profits than those in labor-intensive ones. Having different “rents” prevents that. You also have to pay a graduated income tax, as you did before, on the income you

You get paid more, you have a bit more say in what goes on at work, your job is secure, your managers are responsive, there’s more office camaraderie, but still, at the end of the day, everyone just wants to leave.

It was the economist John Maynard Keynes, a liberal who believed socialists were well-intentioned idiots, who presented the best approach of the time to taming capitalism. The methods laid out in his 1936 work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, once implemented, would help spur employment, ensure productive investment, and mitigate crises. Before the Keynesian revolution, the reigning classical theory

If you could even find Marx outside of university classrooms (where he was increasingly presented as a humanist philosopher instead of a revolutionary firebrand), it was on Wall Street, where cheeky traders put down Sun Tzu and heralded the long-dead German as a prophet of globalization. Capitalism had certainly yielded immense progress in countries such as China and India. In 1991, when Indian finance minister Manmohan Singh announced plans to liberalize India’s economy, he quoted Victor Hugo: “No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come.” Over the next twenty-five years, India’s GDP grew by almost 1,000 percent. An even more impressive process unfolded in China, where Deng Xiaoping upturned Mao-era policies to deliver what he called “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and what the rest of the world recognized as state-managed liberalization. China is now as radically unequal as Latin America, but over five hundred million Chinese have been lifted out of extreme poverty during the past thirty years.1

The pain is not limited to one generation. It’s widely felt. In the United States, hourly wages have grown by a paltry 0.2 percent since 1979. Things

THE 2007–2008 FINANCIAL crisis provoked no great protests, but it did provide plenty of villains. Advances in information technology and the loosening up of financial industry regulations since the 1980s had set bankers free to take enormous risks. By the late 1990s, with home prices climbing higher and higher every year, private mortgage lenders saw an opportunity to reap tremendous profits while passing the risks on to the public.

class. We’re not starting from scratch, though. The Bernie Sanders campaign encouraged millions to believe that things can be different. New mass actions, such as 2018’s teacher strikes, have also revealed in our own age the power of working people. What we need now are organizations: working-class parties and unions that can unite scattered resistance into a socialist movement.1 Easier said than done. But this chapter offers a road map based on the long, complex, variously inspiring and dismal history of left politics—for challenging capitalism and creating a democratic socialist alternative to it. 1. Class-struggle social democracy does not close avenues for radicals; it opens them. On the face of it, Corbyn and Sanders advocate a set of demands that are essentially social democratic. But they represent something far different from modern social democracy. Whereas social democracy morphed in the postwar period into a tool to suppress class conflict in favor of tripartite arrangements among business, labor, and the state, both of these leaders encourage a renewal of class antagonism and movements from below. To

To Sanders, the path to reform is through confrontation with elites. Rather than talking about an entire nation struggling together to restore the US economy and shared prosperity, and rather than seeking to negotiate a better settlement with business leaders (if only they saw that progressive change was in their interests!), Sanders’s movement is about creating a “political revolution” to get what is rightfully ours from “millionaires and billionaires.” His

Our task is formidable. Democratic socialists must secure decisive majorities in legislatures while winning hegemony in the unions. Then our organizations must be willing to flex their social power in the form of mass mobilizations and political strikes to counter the structural power of capital and ensure that our leaders choose confrontation over accommodation with elites. This is the sole way we’ll not only make our reforms durable but break with capitalism entirely and bring about a world that values people over profit.

DSA today has over fifty thousand members—that’s forty-five thousand more than it did a few years ago. Buoyed by the rise of Sanders, youth disillusionment with the politics of the Democratic center, and outrage over Trump’s actions, DSA has quickly garnered widespread attention and its share of local victories.

Unions are important. They might not be revolutionary organizations, but they are labor’s primary vehicle in the battle with capital over the spoils of production. Today, despite organizing just 11 percent of the US workforce, unions are still the only institutions capable of exerting political pressure at the scale required to push back against national elites.

Two key markets under capitalism are thereby done away with: the traditional labor market and capital markets. But markets for goods and services remain. Too many informational problems exist for them to be done away with. Companies will also still have to compete with each other—inefficient firms will collapse (though the fall for individual stakeholders in a firm would be cushioned by the welfare state, even more so than it was

Collectively you and your coworkers now control your company. You’re more like citizens of a community than owners. You just have to pay a tax on its capital assets (the building and the land it’s on, machinery, and so forth), in effect renting it from society as a whole. (To preserve the value of the capital stock in your care, a depreciation fund must be set up for repairs and improvements.)10 Your tax goes into a public fund, which invests in new endeavors. More about that later. But the tax you pay also solves the problem of different production processes having

These measures provoke turmoil as capitalists muster desperate acts of resistance. But in the end banks are nationalized, and the state takes over all private firms. You see firsthand how things play out at the pasta sauce plant.

the average CEO-to-worker compensation in the nation was 354:1; after, it dropped to 89:1. At your workplace the most extreme differential is now 4:1. It’s similar at others, as well. Work gets better, but it doesn’t feel as if something monumental

BOOKS LIKE THIS often start by telling you, the reader, what’s wrong with the world today. For much of capitalism’s history, radicals have been sustained less by a clear vision of socialism than by visceral opposition to the horrors around them. Instead of making the case for socialism, we made the case against capitalism. I have tried to do something different by presenting what a different social system could look like and how we can get there. Naturally, it’s easy to compare an existing, complicated society with one that only lives in our imagination. In Marx’s day, utopian socialists did little but write “recipes for the cookshops of the future.

faster. Now, when new technology is brought in, your coworkers have a different calculus. If they can produce 20 percent more per employee, why not decrease the workweek to twenty-eight hours? (For all sectors, legislation dictates the required workweek cannot exceed thirty-five hours.)13 There is still market competition, and firms still fail, but the grow-or-die imperative doesn’t apply when your enterprise’s goal is no longer to maximize total profits but rather to maximize profit-per-worker. And instead of a race to the bottom, there’s pressure to make sure janitorial and other “dirty jobs” are well compensated. In time, many of these tasks will be automated. People used to fear that machines would bring about mass unemployment, but now you and most others look forward to the social impact of technological innovations.14

The Civil War was the true American Revolution. The Republican Party expropriated $3.5 trillion in “private property” in emancipating the South’s four million slaves. The Reconstruction that followed saw the country’s most oppressed people attempt to construct a new world free of their former masters’ whips. The fight against black slavery inspired battles against what was denounced as “wage slavery.” Such a spirit motivated the Knights of Labor, which started off with just nine members in 1869 but organized hundreds of thousands by the 1880s. It rallied workers in all trades and brought tens of thousands of black workers into what had been an overwhelmingly white movement.4 Just as many women joined up, as the Knights spanned from Pennsylvania mines to New York garment factories to Denver railroads and Alabama foundries.

the

with a good school district. Even though we didn’t have much, I had enough—a decent home, a great education, basketball courts, and a public library where I spent way too much of my youth. My life was far more comfortable than the world my parents were born into, or even that of my older siblings. It was clear to me why—certainly the tireless efforts of my family,

wasn’t an awakening. Like many a middle-class kid before me, I found radicalism through books. My local library had heaps of socialist literature, most of them donated by red diaper babies and Jewish cultural associations. By chance, I picked up Leon Trotsky’s My Life the summer after seventh grade, didn’t particularly like it (still don’t), but was sufficiently intrigued to read the Isaac Deutscher biographies of Trotsky, the works of democratic socialist thinkers including Michael Harrington and Ralph Miliband, and eventually the mysterious Karl

With this bold stroke, they re-politicized International Women’s Day. Brushing aside the tacky baubles of depoliticization—brunches, mimosas, and Hallmark cards—the strikers have revived the day’s all-but-forgotten historical roots in working-class and socialist feminism.