“Socialism.” There I said it. It is the word that the corporate media and the neo-conservatives want to equate with Soviet communism and the Nazi Party that had as much to do with the “socialist” nomenclature in its name as the Democratic Party has to do with democracy. However, when we eliminate “socialism” from our discourse, we eliminate just about everything that we do collectively as a society – the army, our public school system, the fire department, our post offices, public roads etc. We also eliminate part of our solution to the many social and economic problems that we face and one of the most significant facts about our history. It was a socialist overlay to a predominately capitalist economy that saved us from vampire capitalism during the first great depression, the same vampire capitalism that has dismantled the New Deal and has now brought us once again to the brink of economic disaster. The right wing likes to argue that the New Deal did not save us from the Great Depression. World War II did.
However, a stronger argument could be made for the fact that the war saved capitalism because, without the war, we may have evolved into a social democracy much like Europe did after the war. The thesis also ignores the fact that it was this socialist government during the war that created the greatest industrial war machine in history, defeated Japan and Germany in a two-front war, and after the war instituted the G.I. Bill that made it possible for the working-class people who fought in America’s war to buy a home, start a business, or go to college. It also created a social-economic safety net to ameliorate the excesses of capitalism and protect its citizens against unemployment, secured their well-being when they grew old, and opened higher education to all our children.
Central to the New Deal’s reforms of capitalism and its implementation of a mixed economy was its attempt to create a balance between big business, big government, and big labor; and it was the unions empowered by the New Deal that forced big business to offer pensions, fair wages, safe working conditions, and health plans to their employees. Even if a company wasn’t unionized, it was the unions that caused the employer to offer these benefits to keep the unions out. In the process, America experienced the most prosperous period in its history and created the largest middle class in the world.
Unfortunately, the cancerous growth of vampire capitalism was only in remission, and the globalization of manufacturing, finance, and the labor markets has broken down the balance that the New Deal attempted to create between business, labor, and government, and now we have global corporate feudalism, Fortress America, the gutting of our civil rights, the privatization of the commonwealth, the privatization of profit, the socialization of losses. In fact, the radical right seems to want to go back to pre-revolutionary America where this country was run by a hereditary aristocracy as a corporate franchise.
What went wrong? They tried to guarantee certain rights and freedoms from the abuses of capitalism and at the same guarantee the right to a better life in the pursuit of happiness, but it failed to control capitalism and failed in its promises primarily because it failed to eliminate the capitalism at the core of the economic system, and it failed to give us, the American people, the power to decide for ourselves, the power to ensure those rights and freedom and secure for ourselves that promise for a better life. In some ways the conservative criticism of the Welfare State is right, it does create a passive dependency on the state to secure those rights and freedoms when we should be making those decisions for ourselves and taking on the responsibilities of truly sovereign people in a direct and participatory political and economic democracy.
Author's Note - This the first in a series of excerpts on The Prelude To An Economy By The People. The excerpts will focus on the flaws of previous attempts at reform of the economic system. On our way to a new paradigm we will focus on (1) The New Deal, (2) Nationalization of the French economy during the Mitterrand Era. (3) German Codetermination, and The Mondragon Cooperative Network.
Author's Note - I have made Learn or Die: The New American Revolution available to you through Smashwords in a Freedom for Free Edition where you can pay what you want for the book or nothing at all. It is free. I'm doing this because after 50 years of research and study I believe I have found the way for all of us.
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