Socialism: an American Story - Update in pictures
- Get link
- X
- Other Apps
Socialism: an American Story - Update in pictures, tweets, and posts - 11:49 AM 6/23/2019
Update - June 23, 2019
M.N.: My take on it, very simple: SOCIALISM IS HEALTH, SOCIALIST SOCIETY IS THE HEALTHY SOCIETY, in all respects; as the SOCIAL ORGANISM.
All the "RIGHTS" that Bernie Sanders had listed here, are the elements, the prerequisites, and the parts of the HEALTHY Society's structure and functions:
“The right to quality health care, the right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society, the right to a good job that pays a living wage, the right to affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment.”
Democracy, as the harmonious balance of forces and processes of the body politic and the governing modes, is the inseparable part of the HEALTHY SOCIETY as the the social organism and the self-regulating and self-organising, sui generis, SYSTEM.
Thus, the TRUE SOCIALISM, by my (Michael Novakhov's) definition, can only be the DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM, as evidenced in commonly accepted practices and patterns of functioning of the democratic political systems, primarily minted by the WESTERN CULTURE, and its acceptable versions in other cultures.
This concept is gnostically opposite to Marxism, and it views its dogmas about the primacy of the economic forces (Marxist "political economy"), class struggle, and the role of working class, just as such: unscientific, incorrect, counterproductive, and historically dangerous dogmas. Employing their Hegelian "unity and conflict of the opposites", the Marxists, in my humble uneducated opinion, overemphasize the "conflict", and discount the "unity", elaborating on the "false dichotomies" of these concept.
The Healthy Society contains both the Social Peace and class harmony, as well as the class tensions and class struggles, in the true mix of the real life complexity.
The biological, psychological, and the social-cultural forces are the true, primary, and natural determinants of the social and historical processes, together with the economic ones. "Political Economy", in a non-Marxian sense, is the Alimentary-Energy System of the Social Organism.
The idea of the Society as the Organism is very old, it descends to Plato, and it is a part of the Western Canon of Ideas, although it is referred to under the different, and sometimes confusing terms, in various sources.
The true leader of the Society, of course is not the Working Class, the most they aspire to become (as a class), is to move upper, to the middle strata, and these tendencies were well studied and well documented.
The true leaders of the Society are the Thinking, the Intellectual classes, in all their varieties, colors, affiliations, philosophies, etc., etc. It is them who move the Society forward. They are the head of the Social Organism.
The elaborations on all these ideas should follow, hopefully.
Michael Novakhov
9:21 AM 6/23/2019
__________________________________________________________
Donald Trump and his political movement | The New Abwehr Hypothesis of The Operation Trump: A Study In Political Psychology, Political Criminology, and Psychohistory, and as the aid for the General, Criminal and the Counterintelligence Investigations of Donald Trump – by Michael Novakhov, M.D. (Mike Nova): Web Research, Analysis, Hypotheses, and Opinions | Current News | Reviews of media reports | Selected reading lists | Sites: <a href="http://trumpinvestigations.org/" rel="nofollow">http://trumpinvestigations.org/</a> | <a href="https://trumpinvestigations.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">https://trumpinvestigations.blogspot.com/</a> | <a href="https://trumpandtrumpism.com/" rel="nofollow">https://trumpandtrumpism.com/</a>
“The right to quality health care, the right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society, the right to a good job that pays a living wage, the right to affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment.”
Democracy, as the harmonious balance of forces and processes of the body politic and the governing modes, is the inseparable part of the HEALTHY SOCIETY as the the social organism and the self-regulating and self-organising, sui generis, SYSTEM.
Thus, the TRUE SOCIALISM, by my (Michael Novakhov's) definition, can only be the DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM, as evidenced in commonly accepted practices and patterns of functioning of the democratic political systems, primarily minted by the WESTERN CULTURE, and its acceptable versions in other cultures.
This concept is gnostically opposite to Marxism, and it views its dogmas about the primacy of the economic forces (Marxist "political economy"), class struggle, and the role of working class, just as such: unscientific, incorrect, counterproductive, and historically dangerous dogmas. Employing their Hegelian "unity and conflict of the opposites", the Marxists, in my humble uneducated opinion, overemphasize the "conflict", and discount the "unity", elaborating on the "false dichotomies" of these concept.
The Healthy Society contains both the Social Peace and class harmony, as well as the class tensions and class struggles, in the true mix of the real life complexity.
The biological, psychological, and the social-cultural forces are the true, primary, and natural determinants of the social and historical processes, together with the economic ones. "Political Economy", in a non-Marxian sense, is the Alimentary-Energy System of the Social Organism.
The idea of the Society as the Organism is very old, it descends to Plato, and it is a part of the Western Canon of Ideas, although it is referred to under the different, and sometimes confusing terms, in various sources.
The true leader of the Society, of course is not the Working Class, the most they aspire to become (as a class), is to move upper, to the middle strata, and these tendencies were well studied and well documented.
The true leaders of the Society are the Thinking, the Intellectual classes, in all their varieties, colors, affiliations, philosophies, etc., etc. It is them who move the Society forward. They are the head of the Social Organism.
The elaborations on all these ideas should follow, hopefully.
Michael Novakhov
9:21 AM 6/23/2019
__________________________________________________________
Donald Trump and his political movement | The New Abwehr Hypothesis of The Operation Trump: A Study In Political Psychology, Political Criminology, and Psychohistory, and as the aid for the General, Criminal and the Counterintelligence Investigations of Donald Trump – by Michael Novakhov, M.D. (Mike Nova): Web Research, Analysis, Hypotheses, and Opinions | Current News | Reviews of media reports | Selected reading lists | Sites: <a href="http://trumpinvestigations.org/" rel="nofollow">http://trumpinvestigations.org/</a> | <a href="https://trumpinvestigations.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">https://trumpinvestigations.blogspot.com/</a> | <a href="https://trumpandtrumpism.com/" rel="nofollow">https://trumpandtrumpism.com/</a>
M.N.: My take on it, very simple: SOCIALISM IS HEALTH, SOCIALIST SOCIETY IS THE HEALTHY SOCIETY, in all respects; as the SOCIAL ORGANISM.
Read the whole story
· · · · · ·
Next Page of Stories
Loading...
Page 2
Next Page of Stories
Loading...
Page 3
Next Page of Stories
Loading...
Page 4
Donald Trump has dismissed a United Nations request for the FBI to investigate the murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, suggesting it would jeopardise American weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.
A report on Khashoggi’s assassination published last week by the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings said the US should open an FBI inquiry and “pursue criminal prosecutions within the United States, as appropriate”.
But Trump brushed the proposal aside in an interview broadcast by NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.
Asked if he would allow the FBI to investigate, Trump said: “I think it’s been heavily investigated.”
Asked who had investigated, the president replied: “By everybody. I mean … I’ve seen so many different reports.”
Khashoggi, 59, was killed when he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October last year. The UN special rapporteur blamed the Saudi government for the murder and said there was credible evidence that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and other senior officials were responsible.
Trump told NBC the murder “really didn’t come up” in a call with the prince on Friday.
Trump also suggested Saudi Arabia was no worse than other states in the Middle East, which he called a “vicious, hostile place”, adding: “Look at Iran, look at other countries, I won’t mention names.”
The president then cited a drastically overinflated figure for Saudi spending on US weapons that fact-checkers have previously noted does not match the official record.
“I only say they spend $400bn to $450bn over a period of time, all money, all jobs, buying equipment,” Trump said.
In fact Saudi Arabia last year signed “letters of offer and acceptance” for $14.5bn in military purchases from the US.
The Senate last week voted to block the Trump administration selling arms to Saudi Arabia, with seven Republicans joining Democrats to pass the measure. Trump has pledged to use his presidential veto and push on with the sales.
While denying he was saying such purchases were “the price” for Khashoggi’s murder, Trump on Sunday defended his consideration of arms sales in responding to the assassination. Khashoggi was a US resident who wrote for the Washington Post.
“I’m not like a fool that says, ‘We don’t want to do business with them,’” Trump said. “And by the way, if they don’t do business with us, you know what they do? They’ll do business with the Russians or with the Chinese …
“We make the best equipment in the world, but they will buy great equipment from Russia and from China.”
... like you, are reading and supporting The Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism than ever before. And unlike many new organisations, we have chosen an approach that allows us to keep our journalism accessible to all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford. But we need your ongoing support to keep working as we do.
The Guardian will engage with the most critical issues of our time – from the escalating climate catastrophe to widespread inequality to the influence of big tech on our lives. At a time when factual information is a necessity, we believe that each of us, around the world, deserves access to accurate reporting with integrity at its heart.
Our editorial independence means we set our own agenda and voice our own opinions. Guardian journalism is free from commercial and political bias and not influenced by billionaire owners or shareholders. This means we can give a voice to those less heard, explore where others turn away, and rigorously challenge those in power.
We need your support to keep delivering quality journalism, to maintain our openness and to protect our precious independence. Every reader contribution, big or small, is so valuable. Support The Guardian from as little as $1 – and it only takes a minute. Thank you.
Read the whole story
· · ·
FILE - In this Dec. 15, 2014 file photo, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi speaks during a press conference in Manama, Bahrain. An independent U.N. human rights expert investigating the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi is recommending an investigation into the possible role of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, citing "credible evidence." (AP Photo/Hasan Jamali, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump isn't saying whether he'll direct the FBI to investigate the death of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi (jah-MAHL' khahr-SHOHK'-jee).
Trump does not answer directly when asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" whether he'll allow the FBI to examine the slaying of the Saudi Arabian journalist. In the interview taped last week and broadcast Sunday, Trump says Khashoggi's killing has been "heavily investigated."
Khashoggi was killed, and believed to have been dismembered, inside a Saudi consulate in Turkey by Saudi agents on Oct. 2. His remains have never been found.
Both Saudi Arabia and Turkey have investigated. Last week, an independent U.N. report found "credible evidence" to warrant further investigation into the possible role of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Khashoggi's writings criticized the Saudi royal family.
Kim Jong Un received 'personal letter' from Trump, says North Korean ...
CNN-15 hours ago
Washington (CNN) North Korean leader Kim Jong Un received a "personal letter" from US President Donald Trump, according to North Korean ...
North Korean leader receives letter from President Trump
<a href="http://Aljazeera.com" rel="nofollow">Aljazeera.com</a>-7 hours ago
<a href="http://Aljazeera.com" rel="nofollow">Aljazeera.com</a>-7 hours ago
Kim Jong Un says he received 'personal letter' from Trump
CNN-15 hours ago
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un says he received a "personal letter" from President Donald Trump, according to North Korean state news ...
Trump threatened Time journalist with prison over Kim Jong Un letter
CNN-Jun 21, 2019
New York (CNN Business) President Trump's interview with a team of reporters from Time magazine took a sudden turn when he made a ...
Trump 'threatened journalist with prison time' for taking photograph of ...
International-Yahoo News-Jun 22, 2019
International-Yahoo News-Jun 22, 2019
North Korean Media Says Kim Receives 'Excellent' Letter From Trump
NBC New York-5 hours ago
President Donald Trump sent North Korean leader Kim Jong Un an "excellent" letter, the North's state-run news agency reported Sunday, ...
Kim Jong Un's 'beautiful' letter to Trump contained no details on way ...
CNN-Jun 12, 2019
Washington (CNN) A "beautiful" letter from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un touted by President Donald Trump on Tuesday lacked substance ...
Read the whole story
· · ·
Next Page of Stories
Loading...
Page 5
Update - June 23, 2019
M.N.: My take on it, very simple: SOCIALISM IS HEALTH, SOCIALIST SOCIETY IS THE HEALTHY SOCIETY, in all respects; as the SOCIAL ORGANISM.
All the "RIGHTS" that Bernie Sanders had listed here, are the elements, the prerequisites, and the parts of the HEALTHY Society's structure and functions:
“The right to quality health care, the right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society, the right to a good job that pays a living wage, the right to affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment.”
Democracy, as the harmonious balance of forces and processes of the body politic and the governing modes, is the inseparable part of the HEALTHY SOCIETY as the the social organism and the self-regulating and self-organising, sui generis, SYSTEM.
Thus, the TRUE SOCIALISM, by my (Michael Novakhov's) definition, can only be the DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM, as evidenced in commonly accepted practices and patterns of functioning of the democratic political systems, primarily minted by the WESTERN CULTURE, and its acceptable versions in other cultures.
This concept is gnostically opposite to Marxism, and it views its dogmas about the primacy of the economic forces (Marxist "political economy"), class struggle, and the role of working class, just as such: unscientific, incorrect, counterproductive, and historically dangerous dogmas. Employing their Hegelian "unity and conflict of the opposites", the Marxists, in my humble uneducated opinion, overemphasize the "conflict", and discount the "unity", elaborating on the "false dichotomies" of these concept.
The Healthy Society contains both the Social Peace and class harmony, as well as the class tensions and class struggles, in the true mix of the real life complexity.
The biological, psychological, and the social-cultural forces are the true, primary, and natural determinants of the social and historical processes, together with the economic ones. "Political Economy", in a non-Marxian sense, is the Alimentary-Energy System of the Social Organism.
The idea of the Society as the Organism is very old, it descends to Plato, and it is a part of the Western Canon of Ideas, although it is referred to under the different, and sometimes confusing terms, in various sources.
The true leader of the Society, of course is not the Working Class, the most they aspire to become (as a class), is to move upper, to the middle strata, and these tendencies were well studied and well documented.
The true leaders of the Society are the Thinking, the Intellectual classes, in all their varieties, colors, affiliations, philosophies, etc., etc. It is them who move the Society forward. They are the head of the Social Organism.
The elaborations on all these ideas should follow, hopefully.
Michael Novakhov
9:21 AM 6/23/2019
__________________________________________________________
Donald Trump and his political movement | The New Abwehr Hypothesis of The Operation Trump: A Study In Political Psychology, Political Criminology, and Psychohistory, and as the aid for the General, Criminal and the Counterintelligence Investigations of Donald Trump – by Michael Novakhov, M.D. (Mike Nova): Web Research, Analysis, Hypotheses, and Opinions | Current News | Reviews of media reports | Selected reading lists | Sites: <a href="http://trumpinvestigations.org/" rel="nofollow">http://trumpinvestigations.org/</a> | <a href="https://trumpinvestigations.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">https://trumpinvestigations.blogspot.com/</a> | <a href="https://trumpandtrumpism.com/" rel="nofollow">https://trumpandtrumpism.com/</a>
“The right to quality health care, the right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society, the right to a good job that pays a living wage, the right to affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment.”
Democracy, as the harmonious balance of forces and processes of the body politic and the governing modes, is the inseparable part of the HEALTHY SOCIETY as the the social organism and the self-regulating and self-organising, sui generis, SYSTEM.
Thus, the TRUE SOCIALISM, by my (Michael Novakhov's) definition, can only be the DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM, as evidenced in commonly accepted practices and patterns of functioning of the democratic political systems, primarily minted by the WESTERN CULTURE, and its acceptable versions in other cultures.
This concept is gnostically opposite to Marxism, and it views its dogmas about the primacy of the economic forces (Marxist "political economy"), class struggle, and the role of working class, just as such: unscientific, incorrect, counterproductive, and historically dangerous dogmas. Employing their Hegelian "unity and conflict of the opposites", the Marxists, in my humble uneducated opinion, overemphasize the "conflict", and discount the "unity", elaborating on the "false dichotomies" of these concept.
The Healthy Society contains both the Social Peace and class harmony, as well as the class tensions and class struggles, in the true mix of the real life complexity.
The biological, psychological, and the social-cultural forces are the true, primary, and natural determinants of the social and historical processes, together with the economic ones. "Political Economy", in a non-Marxian sense, is the Alimentary-Energy System of the Social Organism.
The idea of the Society as the Organism is very old, it descends to Plato, and it is a part of the Western Canon of Ideas, although it is referred to under the different, and sometimes confusing terms, in various sources.
The true leader of the Society, of course is not the Working Class, the most they aspire to become (as a class), is to move upper, to the middle strata, and these tendencies were well studied and well documented.
The true leaders of the Society are the Thinking, the Intellectual classes, in all their varieties, colors, affiliations, philosophies, etc., etc. It is them who move the Society forward. They are the head of the Social Organism.
The elaborations on all these ideas should follow, hopefully.
Michael Novakhov
9:21 AM 6/23/2019
__________________________________________________________
Donald Trump and his political movement | The New Abwehr Hypothesis of The Operation Trump: A Study In Political Psychology, Political Criminology, and Psychohistory, and as the aid for the General, Criminal and the Counterintelligence Investigations of Donald Trump – by Michael Novakhov, M.D. (Mike Nova): Web Research, Analysis, Hypotheses, and Opinions | Current News | Reviews of media reports | Selected reading lists | Sites: <a href="http://trumpinvestigations.org/" rel="nofollow">http://trumpinvestigations.org/</a> | <a href="https://trumpinvestigations.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">https://trumpinvestigations.blogspot.com/</a> | <a href="https://trumpandtrumpism.com/" rel="nofollow">https://trumpandtrumpism.com/</a>
M.N.: My take on it, very simple: SOCIALISM IS HEALTH, SOCIALIST SOCIETY IS THE HEALTHY SOCIETY, in all respects; as the SOCIAL ORGANISM.
All the “RIGHTS” that Bernie Sanders had listed here, are the elements, the prerequisites, and the parts of the HEALTHY Society’s structure and functions:
“The right to quality health care, the right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society, the right to a good job that pays a living wage, the right to affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment.”
Democracy: the harmonious balance of forces and processes of the body politic and the governing modes. is the inseparable part of the HEALTHY SOCIETY as the the social organism and the self-regulating and self-organising, sui generis, SYSTEM.
Thus, the TRUE SOCIALISM, by my (Michael Novakhov’s) definition, can only be the DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM, as evidenced in commonly accepted practices and patterns of functioning of the democratic political systems, primarily minted by the WESTERN CULTURE, and its acceptable versions in other cultures.
This concept is gnostically opposite to Marxism, and it views its dogmas about the primacy of the economic forces (Marxist “political economy”), class struggle, and the role of working class, just as such: unscientific, incorrect, counterproductive, and historically dangerous dogmas. Employing their Hegelian “unity and conflict of the opposites”, the Marxists, in my humble uneducated opinion, overemphasize the “conflict”, and discount the “unity”, elaborating on the “false dichotomies” of these concept.
The Healthy Society contains both the Social Peace and class harmony, as well as the class tensions and class struggles, in the true mix of the real life complexity.
The biological, psychological, and the social-cultural forces and processes are the true, primary, and natural determinants of the social and historical processes, together with the economic ones. “Political Economy”, in a non-Marxian sense, is the Alimentary-Energy System of the Social Organism.
The idea of the Society as the Organism is very old, it descends to Plato, and it is a part of the Western Canon of Ideas, although it is referred to under the different, and sometimes confusing terms, in various sources.
The true leader of the Society, of course is not the Working Class, the most they aspire to become (as a class), is to move upper, to the middle strata, and these tendencies were well studied and well documented.
The true leaders of the Society are the Thinking, the Intellectual classes, in all their varieties, colors, affiliations, philosophies, etc., etc. It is them who move the Society forward. They are the head of the Social Organism.
The elaborations on all these ideas should follow, hopefully.
Michael Novakhov
9:21 AM 6/23/2019
Michael_Novakhov shared this story .
After watching Bernie Sanders try, for at least the second time, to defend himself as a “democratic socialist” by defining “democratic socialism” as something that is not actually socialism, I’m struggling to understand the purpose of it all. What does he gain from this? What is he trying to do?
Here’s how Sanders talked about his ideology in a recent speech at George Washington University:
“The right to quality health care, the right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society, the right to a good job that pays a living wage, the right to affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment.”
“That,” he continued, “is what I mean by democratic socialism.”
Compare this with the vision of his political hero Eugene Debs, whom Sanders profiled in the 1979 documentary Eugene Debs: Trade Unionist, Socialist, Revolutionary.
“Socialism,” Debs wrote in 1904, “is first of all a political movement of the working class, clearly defined and uncompromising, which aims at the overthrow of the prevailing capitalist system by securing control of the national government and by the exercise of the public powers, supplanting the existing capitalist class government with socialist administration.”
It is, Debs said, “the collective ownership and control of industry and its democratic management in the interest of all the people.”
More modern programs for American socialism started from the same place. In his 1978 essay “What Socialists Would Do in America—If They Could,” Michael Harrington, who would co-found the Democratic Socialists of America a few years later, assumed a “national planning process in which all the people would have an effective right to participate.” This would include democratically owned and managed property as well as a private sector where “many of the existing functions of corporate power” had been socialized.
Sanders has proposed a capital fund controlled by workers at major corporations, but that arrangement lies quite a distance from the direct ownership envisioned by Debs or Harrington. That, Sanders rejects.
“The next time you hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this,” he said in a 2015 speech at Georgetown, “I don’t believe the government should own the means of production.”
Instead of a Marxist, Sanders likes to frame himself as a New Dealer, an heir to the party of Franklin Roosevelt.
Roosevelt, Sanders said last week, “led a transformation of the American government and the American economy” and was “reviled by the oligarchs of his time,” who attacked his New Deal programs as “socialism.”
It’s clear that Sanders wants to drain those attacks of their power by leaning into them, by saying yes, the New Deal was socialist and that was a good thing. And he is right about the reactionary opposition to Roosevelt. They warned of creeping Bolshevism and imminent revolution under programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Works Progress Administration. But being attacked as a socialist doesn’t make one a socialist, and neither Roosevelt nor the New Deal was socialist.
Roosevelt came to office a fiscal conservative. He wanted to balance the budget. He also understood, however, that mass unemployment threatened the “profit system.” In the face of labor unrest and direct action by industrial workers, he was willing to change course, to meet the activists and movements to his left with policies that satisfied some of their demands. But Roosevelt’s goal was always preservation: to reform capitalism and harmonize labor and capital, not to forge a replacement.
What, then, should we make of Sanders’ decision to embrace a nearly revolutionary label, “democratic socialism,” but define it in terms of American left-liberal politics?
One answer is that as someone who did live and work in left-wing and Marxist circles for much of his adult life, he wants to bring the term into the mainstream of American politics. To not just embrace the “socialist” attacks as a badge of honor but to make “democratic socialism” an extension of the New Deal is to make it sound normal, even desirable.
More Americans may embrace the label. And because the term still implies a larger set of ideological commitments outside Democratic Party liberalism, some of Sanders’ followers will become bona fide socialists who want that Debsian transformation of economic relations in the United States.
It has already happened with the substantial growth of the Democratic Socialists of America since 2016 and an increasing (albeit still small) number of Americans with a positive view of “socialism,” including a bare majority of the youngest adults.
The term does other political work. It distinguishes him from his rivals in the Democratic primary and suggests he wants to go further than his stated views—that he’s also interested in fundamental transformation, even if his program isn’t more meaningfully progressive than that of his closest ideological rival, Elizabeth Warren.
There’s another way to understand Sanders’ rhetoric around “democratic socialism.” For Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect, Sanders embodies the not-always-clear divide between liberals and the left.
“In running as a democratic socialist who seeks to complete and update FDR’s agenda,” he writes, “Sanders straddles the very fuzzy border between social democracy and American left liberalism.” In both traditions, democracy is an economic project as well as a political one. Perhaps Sanders is just trying to make that explicit—to once and for all marginalize the centrist Democratic Party politics of the past three decades, in which the economic rights of workers were subordinate to the demands of capital—as well as show Americans how effective governance can include left-wing politics. It is the political project of his entire career, from Burlington to the Capitol Building.
At the beginning of his speech at George Washington, Sanders took note of the “growing movement toward oligarchy” in the United States and the world at large. He listed the leaders of several governments—Putin in Russia, Xi in China, Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Viktor Orban in Hungary—that “meld corporatist economics with xenophobia and authoritarianism.” I think this analysis, which I’ve written about in the past, can also help us make sense of Sanders’ idiosyncratic use of “democratic socialism.”
In a 1977 essay for Dissent magazine, “Socialism and Liberalism: Articles of Conciliation?,” socialist writer Irving Howe addressed the “tacit collaboration of right and left extremes in undermining the social and moral foundations of liberalism,” which he described as “a great intellectual scandal of the age.” Those critics failed, he wrote, “to consider what the consequences might be of their intemperate attacks upon liberalism.” To assault the foundations of liberal democracy, he added, “meant to bring into play social forces the intellectuals of both right and left could not foresee.”
In straddling the two sides of the left-wing divide—in tying “democratic socialism” to the legacy of the most important figure in American liberalism—Sanders might be modeling a kind of pragmatism. Not the colloquial pragmatism of do what works, but something from the American philosophical tradition where the truth of the matter is in the doing, not the definitions.
He calls himself a “democratic socialist,” others call themselves “liberals,” but in the United States they’re part of a common project, fighting on a united front.
____________________________________
Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠
Bernie Sanders’ definition of socialism
Michael_Novakhov shared this story .
After watching Bernie Sanders try, for at least the second time, to defend himself as a “democratic socialist” by defining “democratic socialism” as something that is not actually socialism, I’m struggling to understand the purpose of it all. What does he gain from this? What is he trying to do?
Here’s how Sanders talked about his ideology in a recent speech at George Washington University:
All the “RIGHTS” that Bernie Sanders had listed here, are the elements, the prerequisites, and the parts of the HEALTHY Society’s structure and functions:
“The right to quality health care, the right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society, the right to a good job that pays a living wage, the right to affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment.”
Democracy: the harmonious balance of forces and processes of the body politic and the governing modes. is the inseparable part of the HEALTHY SOCIETY as the the social organism and the self-regulating and self-organising, sui generis, SYSTEM.
Thus, the TRUE SOCIALISM, by my (Michael Novakhov’s) definition, can only be the DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM, as evidenced in commonly accepted practices and patterns of functioning of the democratic political systems, primarily minted by the WESTERN CULTURE, and its acceptable versions in other cultures.
This concept is gnostically opposite to Marxism, and it views its dogmas about the primacy of the economic forces (Marxist “political economy”), class struggle, and the role of working class, just as such: unscientific, incorrect, counterproductive, and historically dangerous dogmas. Employing their Hegelian “unity and conflict of the opposites”, the Marxists, in my humble uneducated opinion, overemphasize the “conflict”, and discount the “unity”, elaborating on the “false dichotomies” of these concept.
The Healthy Society contains both the Social Peace and class harmony, as well as the class tensions and class struggles, in the true mix of the real life complexity.
The biological, psychological, and the social-cultural forces and processes are the true, primary, and natural determinants of the social and historical processes, together with the economic ones. “Political Economy”, in a non-Marxian sense, is the Alimentary-Energy System of the Social Organism.
The idea of the Society as the Organism is very old, it descends to Plato, and it is a part of the Western Canon of Ideas, although it is referred to under the different, and sometimes confusing terms, in various sources.
The true leader of the Society, of course is not the Working Class, the most they aspire to become (as a class), is to move upper, to the middle strata, and these tendencies were well studied and well documented.
The true leaders of the Society are the Thinking, the Intellectual classes, in all their varieties, colors, affiliations, philosophies, etc., etc. It is them who move the Society forward. They are the head of the Social Organism.
The elaborations on all these ideas should follow, hopefully.
Michael Novakhov
9:21 AM 6/23/2019
| Michael_Novakhov shared this story . |
After watching Bernie Sanders try, for at least the second time, to defend himself as a “democratic socialist” by defining “democratic socialism” as something that is not actually socialism, I’m struggling to understand the purpose of it all. What does he gain from this? What is he trying to do?
Here’s how Sanders talked about his ideology in a recent speech at George Washington University:
“The right to quality health care, the right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society, the right to a good job that pays a living wage, the right to affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment.”
“That,” he continued, “is what I mean by democratic socialism.”
Compare this with the vision of his political hero Eugene Debs, whom Sanders profiled in the 1979 documentary Eugene Debs: Trade Unionist, Socialist, Revolutionary.
“Socialism,” Debs wrote in 1904, “is first of all a political movement of the working class, clearly defined and uncompromising, which aims at the overthrow of the prevailing capitalist system by securing control of the national government and by the exercise of the public powers, supplanting the existing capitalist class government with socialist administration.”
It is, Debs said, “the collective ownership and control of industry and its democratic management in the interest of all the people.”
More modern programs for American socialism started from the same place. In his 1978 essay “What Socialists Would Do in America—If They Could,” Michael Harrington, who would co-found the Democratic Socialists of America a few years later, assumed a “national planning process in which all the people would have an effective right to participate.” This would include democratically owned and managed property as well as a private sector where “many of the existing functions of corporate power” had been socialized.
Sanders has proposed a capital fund controlled by workers at major corporations, but that arrangement lies quite a distance from the direct ownership envisioned by Debs or Harrington. That, Sanders rejects.
“The next time you hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this,” he said in a 2015 speech at Georgetown, “I don’t believe the government should own the means of production.”
Instead of a Marxist, Sanders likes to frame himself as a New Dealer, an heir to the party of Franklin Roosevelt.
Roosevelt, Sanders said last week, “led a transformation of the American government and the American economy” and was “reviled by the oligarchs of his time,” who attacked his New Deal programs as “socialism.”
It’s clear that Sanders wants to drain those attacks of their power by leaning into them, by saying yes, the New Deal was socialist and that was a good thing. And he is right about the reactionary opposition to Roosevelt. They warned of creeping Bolshevism and imminent revolution under programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Works Progress Administration. But being attacked as a socialist doesn’t make one a socialist, and neither Roosevelt nor the New Deal was socialist.
Roosevelt came to office a fiscal conservative. He wanted to balance the budget. He also understood, however, that mass unemployment threatened the “profit system.” In the face of labor unrest and direct action by industrial workers, he was willing to change course, to meet the activists and movements to his left with policies that satisfied some of their demands. But Roosevelt’s goal was always preservation: to reform capitalism and harmonize labor and capital, not to forge a replacement.
What, then, should we make of Sanders’ decision to embrace a nearly revolutionary label, “democratic socialism,” but define it in terms of American left-liberal politics?
One answer is that as someone who did live and work in left-wing and Marxist circles for much of his adult life, he wants to bring the term into the mainstream of American politics. To not just embrace the “socialist” attacks as a badge of honor but to make “democratic socialism” an extension of the New Deal is to make it sound normal, even desirable.
More Americans may embrace the label. And because the term still implies a larger set of ideological commitments outside Democratic Party liberalism, some of Sanders’ followers will become bona fide socialists who want that Debsian transformation of economic relations in the United States.
It has already happened with the substantial growth of the Democratic Socialists of America since 2016 and an increasing (albeit still small) number of Americans with a positive view of “socialism,” including a bare majority of the youngest adults.
The term does other political work. It distinguishes him from his rivals in the Democratic primary and suggests he wants to go further than his stated views—that he’s also interested in fundamental transformation, even if his program isn’t more meaningfully progressive than that of his closest ideological rival, Elizabeth Warren.
There’s another way to understand Sanders’ rhetoric around “democratic socialism.” For Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect, Sanders embodies the not-always-clear divide between liberals and the left.
“In running as a democratic socialist who seeks to complete and update FDR’s agenda,” he writes, “Sanders straddles the very fuzzy border between social democracy and American left liberalism.” In both traditions, democracy is an economic project as well as a political one. Perhaps Sanders is just trying to make that explicit—to once and for all marginalize the centrist Democratic Party politics of the past three decades, in which the economic rights of workers were subordinate to the demands of capital—as well as show Americans how effective governance can include left-wing politics. It is the political project of his entire career, from Burlington to the Capitol Building.
At the beginning of his speech at George Washington, Sanders took note of the “growing movement toward oligarchy” in the United States and the world at large. He listed the leaders of several governments—Putin in Russia, Xi in China, Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Viktor Orban in Hungary—that “meld corporatist economics with xenophobia and authoritarianism.” I think this analysis, which I’ve written about in the past, can also help us make sense of Sanders’ idiosyncratic use of “democratic socialism.”
In a 1977 essay for Dissent magazine, “Socialism and Liberalism: Articles of Conciliation?,” socialist writer Irving Howe addressed the “tacit collaboration of right and left extremes in undermining the social and moral foundations of liberalism,” which he described as “a great intellectual scandal of the age.” Those critics failed, he wrote, “to consider what the consequences might be of their intemperate attacks upon liberalism.” To assault the foundations of liberal democracy, he added, “meant to bring into play social forces the intellectuals of both right and left could not foresee.”
In straddling the two sides of the left-wing divide—in tying “democratic socialism” to the legacy of the most important figure in American liberalism—Sanders might be modeling a kind of pragmatism. Not the colloquial pragmatism of do what works, but something from the American philosophical tradition where the truth of the matter is in the doing, not the definitions.
He calls himself a “democratic socialist,” others call themselves “liberals,” but in the United States they’re part of a common project, fighting on a united front.
____________________________________
| Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠ | ||
|---|---|---|
| Bernie Sanders’ definition of socialism | ||
After watching Bernie Sanders try, for at least the second time, to defend himself as a “democratic socialist” by defining “democratic socialism” as something that is not actually socialism, I’m struggling to understand the purpose of it all. What does he gain from this? What is he trying to do?
Here’s how Sanders talked about his ideology in a recent speech at George Washington University:
|
The Manifesto Of The American Socialism
The Manifesto Of The American Socialism - Transcript: Here's Bernie Sanders' full commencement speech at Brooklyn College, as transcribed, adapted, and interpreted by Michael Novakhov - 1:51 PM 3/27/2019
https://trumpinvestigations.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-manifesto-of-american-socialism.html
Transcript: Here's Bernie Sanders' full commencement speech at Brooklyn College, as transcribed, adapted, and interpreted by Michael Novakhov
1:51 PM 3/27/2019
Not so fast, Vlad! Go wire your baby Donald $100 Mils in your illegal campaign contributions under the guise of loans. What can be a greater achievement for the Russian Mafia Boss-Godfather than to brag that he "put his boy in the White House"!
Go kiss Vlad's ass, Donald. It looks that he is the holder of your debt notes. Oh, he already did that? Well, he will do it again, dont' you worry about it! Bernie Sanders does not kiss anybody's ass, never did, never will; not like some bankrupt capitalist pigs. They are bankrupt financially, politically, and spiritually!
We have to eradicate the Global Organised Crime in all its reincarnations and under all the covers that we can find. The Mob is the ugly, evil, vicious, shrewd, treacherous, primitive, predatory, ever hungry Beast which went for the Jugular of Humanity.
"His nature squalid is, malicious, greedy;
He never sated gets,
Just hungrier"...
At the same time we have to understand and treat correctly our own problems, pains, and ills. The degree of inequality in today's America is staggering, and it is proportional only with our perpetual tendencies for the serial denials and self-congratulations. We want to live happily, before-and-thereafter but it does not work out this way. Our lives and existences are more of the dramatic struggles of the 95% Have Nots, and the many and the various problems of those under illusions that they "have".
The America's economic, political, emotional, and cultural lives will not be controlled by a handful of very wealthy families!
Our lives are too rich for that, and our country is too rich, too complex, and too multi-faceted for any despotic controls, be it the Government, the FBI, the Media, the Big Business, or the Big Money.
There is the great inequality in America today: one person out of thousands owns as much wealth as the rest. The difference between the CEO and the average worker pay is 350 folds. This beloved Society of ours is divided into the virtual slaves and the virtual slave owners. 43 million Americans live in poverty, this is the shame for the "Land of Plenty". Many people feel that they have nothing to live for, the rates of suicide, addictions, crimes, and imprisonment are very high for this rich and enlightened Society of ours which we like to think of as the "Land of the Free".
The political system in America is just as corrupt as its economic system, and this corruption threatens our Democracy where many people now feel that their President is not really their President but might be the agent of the foreign power. Our Democratic system became the hostage to the Big and Manipulative Money in Politics. No one, neither the local, domestic Money Bags nor the foreign ones should be under any illusions that they would be able to buy or to blackmail the American politicians, as many people feel it is happening now. We do need to reform our laws and regulations of the money in politics and the role they play. This is no less of the shame! Our political wills cannot be bought or sold or we seize to be the free humans capable of making and expressing our free and intelligent choices.
We need good and well functioning Health Care System and we proposed Medicare for all. This is the way to go. Health is not a commodity that is bought and sold. It is God's gift that is guarded and maintained by men. It is one of the inalienable rights. There are no reasons why the US cannot have the well functioning health care system like many advanced countries do.
Tax the rich and feed and provide for the poor, and this is only fair. The modern Society has to be paternalistic to a certain degree, not the deadly capitalist Jungle.
We also have to restore the America's standing in the World, and this thesis is not at contradiction with the Socialist ideas: what is good for America is good for the World and vice versa.
We do not need the bankrupt Muggers screaming "MAGA!" America was great before you, and America will be great after you, or more precisely, without you.
Make America free again, make America fair and equal again, make America healthy again, make America the dream again, and the Great it is and will be always. Amen.
And this is the 100% correct plan for all 100% of the American people.
Bernie Sanders for President!
America, vote for the yours and the World's future!
Links
Previous Posts
The MOB
(International Organized Crime, Red Mafia, Russian-Jewish-Israeli Mafia, etc., etc., use any other name you wish,"What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet;")
VS. The Western Civilization
(As we know it, including Europe, the U.S., Russia, and Israel, etc., etc.)
The most important historical and the Counterintelligence point is that it is specifically the New Abwehr, the survived and the well hidden, very secret and secretive organisation, the direct descendant of the German Military Intelligence after WW2, which is behind the Mob, and this point must be investigated relentlessly and very thoroughly by all the mentioned above modern powers.
Mr. Trump, Mr. Putin, Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Schroeder:
If you are not able to make all the necessary adjustments, and if you are not able to ally yourselves with the new, emerging anti-Mob movement and fight, you will be wiped out by this historical political hurricane personally and politically, with the very tragic consequences for yourselves and your supporting political groups. This is your choice, and this is your last choice. You have been warned.
The World needs to move forward from its post-WW2 stage to the qualitatively new set-ups and arrangements, including very much the Global Security arrangements, military alliances, social and economic Justice issues, transculturalism and multiculturalism within the Dominant Western Culture, and many others.
We do have to move forward. I came to the conclusion that the most vital force in fighting this mortal and invisible enemy is the Democratic Party of the U.S., and specifically Bernie Sanders.
Call them whatever name you wish, "What's in a name?" I think that the new coming era is the era of the AMERICAN SOCIALISM, which is and will be very different from the old, rotten, wounded, dying European Socialism, and, specifically, very different from the modern German Social Democracy which was appropriated, molested, and snuffed out to half-death by the New Abwehr.
The issue of the competition between the American and the European Socialism models is not talked about much but it is very important issue, and it might become the pivot point.
The Americans do not want to rule the world, they have plenty of issues at home. The New Abwehr wants nothing but to rule the world, this is their old, imperialist, power and the military power - centric concept and picture of the World and its affairs. The New Abwehr is anti-intellectual and anti-culture; they are the very well positioned group of the criminal predators, the "merchants of death, of oppression, of divisions and discords" and the money launderers under the guises of the political and military leaders.
Call them whatever name you wish, "What's in a name?" I think that the new coming era is the era of the AMERICAN SOCIALISM, which is and will be very different from the old, rotten, wounded, dying European Socialism, and, specifically, very different from the modern German Social Democracy which was appropriated, molested, and snuffed out to half-death by the New Abwehr.
The issue of the competition between the American and the European Socialism models is not talked about much but it is very important issue, and it might become the pivot point.
The Americans do not want to rule the world, they have plenty of issues at home. The New Abwehr wants nothing but to rule the world, this is their old, imperialist, power and the military power - centric concept and picture of the World and its affairs. The New Abwehr is anti-intellectual and anti-culture; they are the very well positioned group of the criminal predators, the "merchants of death, of oppression, of divisions and discords" and the money launderers under the guises of the political and military leaders.
Barak Obama, you are very smart cookie. Acknowledge your past errors (and you did make a lot of them), think about this concept in its depth, and help in this new fight and the political movement. Personally, I think I am going to support Sanders all the way. I do not see any other hope.
Returning to the subject of the Mob and money laundering, we have to consider the long neglected issue of the "Soviet Communist Party Gold" which apparently was handled and laundered by the Mob. This issue has to be investigated very thoroughly.
In general, I think, the War on the Mob will be effective if it is conducted on the global, international basis, and with the active participation of the UN.
________________________________________________
Russia declares the War on the Mob: Russia hits mob bosses with longer jail terms - TASS | Craig Unger: Trump is owned by the Russia mob - YT
_____________________________________________________
Trump and Pence (by extension) VS. "Socialism" - Google Search
M.N.: It is also "increasingly obvious", Mr. Pence, that this "choice between freedom and socialism" is a false choice for "the public debate" and it is a false dichotomy. The so called "Socialism" is just a word which has many different meanings and various significance for many very different groups and people.
Both the German "National Socialism" (and also Italian and Spanish "models" which were somewhat different) and the Russian "GULAG Socialism" were the deeply criminal perversions of this old notion of equality and fairness.
It is very easy for Trump and the Trumpistas to use this word and concept, and also the concept of "anti-Socialism" as the convenient political tool of their political struggle and their political survival. This is the old device of scapegoating and demonizing the word or idea in order to mobilize the masses. The concept of Socialism does not automatically imply the lack of freedom; the Scandinavian social democracies are the example.
Trump and the Trumpistas polarize the public, very much like the Nazis did in Germany in 1930-s. They intend to make a Boogeyman out of this word, this concept (without understanding what it is and without any efforts to understand it), and out of their rival and competitor Bernie Sanders as the symbol and the carrier of this concept.
I would reformulate this conflict and dilemma as: "Neo-Nazi Kleptocrats, Crooks, and Mobsters vs. the traditional, normal, healthy, liberal, democratic, American way of life, call it by any name you wish."
Pence rips 2020 Democrats as 'socialists,' threat to freedom
Washington Examiner-Mar 1, 2019
Vice President Mike Pence took the administration's war on ... It was freedom, not socialism, that ended slavery, won two world ... more perfect union and extend the blessings of liberty to Americans ... With an eye on the reelection, the vice president said that President Trump will make it a fight over freedom.
Pence warns: Dems embracing socialism to replace American prosperity
<a href="http://WND.com" rel="nofollow">WND.com</a>-Mar 1, 2019
<a href="http://WND.com" rel="nofollow">WND.com</a>-Mar 1, 2019
______________________________________________
Brooklyn native and one-time student Bernie Sanders gave a true-to-style address at the commencement for Brooklyn College’s class of 2017 on Tuesday (May 30). In a speech peppered with personal anecdotes and his political goals, the independent US senator from Vermont and former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination repeated many calls from his campaign, and slammed Washington and the Trump administration for introducing policies that only elevate the elites.
Sanders attended Brooklyn College for a year before transferring to the University of Chicago. The New York school awarded him an honorary degree.
Here are his remarks, as prepared:
Brothers and sisters,
Let me begin by congratulating the graduating class of 2017. Today is an important day in your lives, something that you’ve worked hard to attain, and I want to wish all of you the very best of luck in your future endeavors. May you all live healthy and happy lives, doing the work you enjoy and surrounded in love by family and friends.
Let me thank president Michelle Anderson, Nicole Haas, the Brooklyn College Administration, faculty and staff and all of you for inviting my wife, Jane, and me back to Brooklyn, where we were both born and raised. I am greatly appreciative of the honorary degree which you bestow on me today.
I grew up in Flatbush and graduated from James Madison High School. Jane was raised in Flatbush and Bed-Sty, and graduated from St. Savior’s High School a few miles away from here.
In 1959, I attended Brooklyn College for a year—a year which had a major impact in my life. Thank you, Brooklyn College. After that year I left for the University of Chicago, where I eventually graduated. My mom had died the previous year and I felt it was time to leave the neighborhood and see what the rest of the world looked like.
My childhood in Brooklyn was shaped by two profound realities. First, my mom, dad and older brother Larry, who graduated from Brooklyn College, lived in a 3 1/2 room rent-controlled apartment. As with many families who don’t have a lot of money, financial pressures caused friction and tension within our household. From those experiences I have never forgotten that there are millions of people throughout this country who struggle to put food on the table, pay the electric bill, try to save for their kids’ education or for retirement—people who face painful and stress-filled decisions every single day.
The second reality that impacted my life was that my father left Poland at the age of 17 from a community which was not only very poor, but from a country where anti-semitism, pogroms and attacks on Jews were not uncommon. While my father emigrated to the United States, and escaped Hitler and the holocaust, many in his family did not. For them, racism, right-wing extremism and ultra-nationalism were not “political issues.” They were issues of life and death—and they died.
From that experience, what was indelibly stamped on me was the understanding that we must never allow demagogues to divide us up by race, by religion, by national origin, by gender or sexual orientation. Black, white, Latino, Asian American, Native American, Christian, Jew, Muslim and every religion, straight or gay, male or female we must stand together. This country belongs to all of us.
As a United States senator from Vermont let me give you a very brief overview of some of the very serious crises we currently face—crises which do not often get the kind of discussion they deserve.
As a student at James Madison High School, many years ago, I recall my social-studies teacher talking about how there were small developing countries around the world that were oligarchic societies—places where the economic and political life of the nation were controlled by a handful of very wealthy families. It never occurred to me then that the United States of America, our great nation, could move in that direction. But that is precisely what is happening.
Today, the top 1/10 of 1% now owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%, 20 Americans now own as much wealth as the bottom half of America and one family—the Walton family—owns more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of our people. In the last 17 years, while the middle class continues to decline, we have seen a tenfold increase in the number of billionaires–going from 51 to 565. In America today, CEOs of major corporations now earn about 350 times more than the average worker makes. In terms of income, 52 percent of all new income goes to the top 1%. In other words, the very rich are becoming much richer.
At the same time as we have more income and wealth inequality than any other major nation, 43 million Americans live in poverty, we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country in earth, half of older workers have nothing in the bank as they approach retirement and in some inner cities and rural communities youth unemployment is sky high. Unbelievably, in many parts of this country today, as a result of hopelessness and despair, life expectancy is actually declining as a frightening number of people experience drug addiction, alcoholism and suicide. And, because of poverty, racism and a broken criminal justice system, we have more people in jail than any other country—disproportionately black, Latino and Native American.
Directly related to the oligarchic economy that we currently have is an oligarchic and corrupt political system which is undermining American democracy. As a result of the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, corporations and billionaires are able to spend unlimited sums of money on elections. The result is that today a handful of billionaire families are spending hundreds of millions a year to make sure that candidates who represent the rich and the powerful get elected.
And we are seeing the results of how oligarchy functions right now in Congress where the Republican leadership wants to throw 23 million people off of health insurance, cut Medicaid by over $800 billion, defund Planned Parenthood, cut food stamps and other nutrition programs by over $200 billion, cut Head Start and after school programs, make drastic cuts in Pell grants and other programs that help make college more affordable.
And, unbelievably, at exactly the same time, they want to provide the top one percent with $3 trillion in tax cuts. The very rich get much richer and they get huge tax cuts. The middle class shrinks and the poor struggle, and they will find it harder to get health care, housing, nutrition, education or clean water.
In response to these very serious problems it seems to me that we have two choices. First we can throw up our hands in despair. We can moan and groan. We can withdraw from the public reality that we face. We can loudly proclaim that we can’t beat the system.
That is one response. It is an understandable response but it is not an acceptable response.
It is not an acceptable response because the reality that we face today impacts not only our lives, but the lives of our children, the lives of our grandchildren and, with regard to climate change, the very future of this planet. The truth is that the only rational choice we have, the only real response we can make, is to stand up and fight back—reclaim American democracy and create a government that works for all of us, and not just the 1 percent.
Read the whole story
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
Bernie Sanders holds first 2020 campaign rally in Brooklyn
Next Page of Stories
Loading...
Page 2
Read the whole story
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
M.N.: My take on it, very simple: SOCIALISM IS HEALTH, SOCIALIST SOCIETY IS THE HEALTHY SOCIETY, in all respects; as the SOCIAL ORGANISM.
All the “RIGHTS” that Bernie Sanders had listed here, are the elements, the prerequisites, and the parts of the HEALTHY Society’s structure and functions:
“The right to quality health care, the right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society, the right to a good job that pays a living wage, the right to affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment.”
Democracy: the harmonious balance of forces and processes of the body politic and the governing modes. is the inseparable part of the HEALTHY SOCIETY as the the social organism and the self-regulating and self-organising, sui generis, SYSTEM.
Thus, the TRUE SOCIALISM, by my (Michael Novakhov’s) definition, can only be the DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM, as evidenced in commonly accepted practices and patterns of functioning of the democratic political systems, primarily minted by the WESTERN CULTURE, and its acceptable versions in other cultures.
This concept is gnostically opposite to Marxism, and it views its dogmas about the primacy of the economic forces (Marxist “political economy”), class struggle, and the role of working class, just as such: unscientific, incorrect, counterproductive, and historically dangerous dogmas. Employing their Hegelian “unity and conflict of the opposites”, the Marxists, in my humble uneducated opinion, overemphasize the “conflict”, and discount the “unity”, elaborating on the “false dichotomies” of these concept.
The Healthy Society contains both the Social Peace and class harmony, as well as the class tensions and class struggles, in the true mix of the real life complexity.
The biological, psychological, and the social-cultural forces and processes are the true, primary, and natural determinants of the social and historical processes, together with the economic ones. “Political Economy”, in a non-Marxian sense, is the Alimentary-Energy System of the Social Organism.
The idea of the Society as the Organism is very old, it descends to Plato, and it is a part of the Western Canon of Ideas, although it is referred to under the different, and sometimes confusing terms, in various sources.
The true leader of the Society, of course is not the Working Class, the most they aspire to become (as a class), is to move upper, to the middle strata, and these tendencies were well studied and well documented.
The true leaders of the Society are the Thinking, the Intellectual classes, in all their varieties, colors, affiliations, philosophies, etc., etc. It is them who move the Society forward. They are the head of the Social Organism.
The elaborations on all these ideas should follow, hopefully.
Michael Novakhov
9:21 AM 6/23/2019
| Michael_Novakhov shared this story . |
After watching Bernie Sanders try, for at least the second time, to defend himself as a “democratic socialist” by defining “democratic socialism” as something that is not actually socialism, I’m struggling to understand the purpose of it all. What does he gain from this? What is he trying to do?
Here’s how Sanders talked about his ideology in a recent speech at George Washington University:
“The right to quality health care, the right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society, the right to a good job that pays a living wage, the right to affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment.”
“That,” he continued, “is what I mean by democratic socialism.”
Compare this with the vision of his political hero Eugene Debs, whom Sanders profiled in the 1979 documentary Eugene Debs: Trade Unionist, Socialist, Revolutionary.
“Socialism,” Debs wrote in 1904, “is first of all a political movement of the working class, clearly defined and uncompromising, which aims at the overthrow of the prevailing capitalist system by securing control of the national government and by the exercise of the public powers, supplanting the existing capitalist class government with socialist administration.”
It is, Debs said, “the collective ownership and control of industry and its democratic management in the interest of all the people.”
More modern programs for American socialism started from the same place. In his 1978 essay “What Socialists Would Do in America—If They Could,” Michael Harrington, who would co-found the Democratic Socialists of America a few years later, assumed a “national planning process in which all the people would have an effective right to participate.” This would include democratically owned and managed property as well as a private sector where “many of the existing functions of corporate power” had been socialized.
Sanders has proposed a capital fund controlled by workers at major corporations, but that arrangement lies quite a distance from the direct ownership envisioned by Debs or Harrington. That, Sanders rejects.
“The next time you hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this,” he said in a 2015 speech at Georgetown, “I don’t believe the government should own the means of production.”
Instead of a Marxist, Sanders likes to frame himself as a New Dealer, an heir to the party of Franklin Roosevelt.
Roosevelt, Sanders said last week, “led a transformation of the American government and the American economy” and was “reviled by the oligarchs of his time,” who attacked his New Deal programs as “socialism.”
It’s clear that Sanders wants to drain those attacks of their power by leaning into them, by saying yes, the New Deal was socialist and that was a good thing. And he is right about the reactionary opposition to Roosevelt. They warned of creeping Bolshevism and imminent revolution under programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Works Progress Administration. But being attacked as a socialist doesn’t make one a socialist, and neither Roosevelt nor the New Deal was socialist.
Roosevelt came to office a fiscal conservative. He wanted to balance the budget. He also understood, however, that mass unemployment threatened the “profit system.” In the face of labor unrest and direct action by industrial workers, he was willing to change course, to meet the activists and movements to his left with policies that satisfied some of their demands. But Roosevelt’s goal was always preservation: to reform capitalism and harmonize labor and capital, not to forge a replacement.
What, then, should we make of Sanders’ decision to embrace a nearly revolutionary label, “democratic socialism,” but define it in terms of American left-liberal politics?
One answer is that as someone who did live and work in left-wing and Marxist circles for much of his adult life, he wants to bring the term into the mainstream of American politics. To not just embrace the “socialist” attacks as a badge of honor but to make “democratic socialism” an extension of the New Deal is to make it sound normal, even desirable.
More Americans may embrace the label. And because the term still implies a larger set of ideological commitments outside Democratic Party liberalism, some of Sanders’ followers will become bona fide socialists who want that Debsian transformation of economic relations in the United States.
It has already happened with the substantial growth of the Democratic Socialists of America since 2016 and an increasing (albeit still small) number of Americans with a positive view of “socialism,” including a bare majority of the youngest adults.
The term does other political work. It distinguishes him from his rivals in the Democratic primary and suggests he wants to go further than his stated views—that he’s also interested in fundamental transformation, even if his program isn’t more meaningfully progressive than that of his closest ideological rival, Elizabeth Warren.
There’s another way to understand Sanders’ rhetoric around “democratic socialism.” For Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect, Sanders embodies the not-always-clear divide between liberals and the left.
“In running as a democratic socialist who seeks to complete and update FDR’s agenda,” he writes, “Sanders straddles the very fuzzy border between social democracy and American left liberalism.” In both traditions, democracy is an economic project as well as a political one. Perhaps Sanders is just trying to make that explicit—to once and for all marginalize the centrist Democratic Party politics of the past three decades, in which the economic rights of workers were subordinate to the demands of capital—as well as show Americans how effective governance can include left-wing politics. It is the political project of his entire career, from Burlington to the Capitol Building.
At the beginning of his speech at George Washington, Sanders took note of the “growing movement toward oligarchy” in the United States and the world at large. He listed the leaders of several governments—Putin in Russia, Xi in China, Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Viktor Orban in Hungary—that “meld corporatist economics with xenophobia and authoritarianism.” I think this analysis, which I’ve written about in the past, can also help us make sense of Sanders’ idiosyncratic use of “democratic socialism.”
In a 1977 essay for Dissent magazine, “Socialism and Liberalism: Articles of Conciliation?,” socialist writer Irving Howe addressed the “tacit collaboration of right and left extremes in undermining the social and moral foundations of liberalism,” which he described as “a great intellectual scandal of the age.” Those critics failed, he wrote, “to consider what the consequences might be of their intemperate attacks upon liberalism.” To assault the foundations of liberal democracy, he added, “meant to bring into play social forces the intellectuals of both right and left could not foresee.”
In straddling the two sides of the left-wing divide—in tying “democratic socialism” to the legacy of the most important figure in American liberalism—Sanders might be modeling a kind of pragmatism. Not the colloquial pragmatism of do what works, but something from the American philosophical tradition where the truth of the matter is in the doing, not the definitions.
He calls himself a “democratic socialist,” others call themselves “liberals,” but in the United States they’re part of a common project, fighting on a united front.
____________________________________
Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠ |
|---|
| Bernie Sanders’ definition of socialism |
Read the whole story
· · · · · · · · · ·
M.N.: My take on it, very simple: SOCIALISM IS HEALTH, SOCIALIST SOCIETY IS THE HEALTHY SOCIETY, in all respects; as the SOCIAL ORGANISM.
All the "RIGHTS" that Bernie Sanders had listed here, are the elements, the prerequisites, and the parts of the HEALTHY Society's structure and functions:“The right to quality health care, the right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society, the right to a good job that pays a living wage, the right to affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment.”
Democracy: the harmonious balance of forces and processes of the body politic and the governing modes. is the inseparable part of the HEALTHY SOCIETY as the the social organism and the self-regulating and self-organising, sui generis, SYSTEM.
Thus, the TRUE SOCIALISM, by my (Michael Novakhov's) definition, can only be the DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM, as evidenced in commonly accepted practices and patterns of functioning of the democratic political systems, primarily minted by the WESTERN CULTURE, and its acceptable versions in other cultures.
This concept is gnostically opposite to Marxism, and it views its dogmas about the primacy of the economic forces (Marxist "political economy"), class struggle, and the role of working class, just as such: unscientific, incorrect, counterproductive, and historically dangerous dogmas. Employing their Hegelian "unity and conflict of the opposites", the Marxists, in my humble uneducated opinion, overemphasize the "conflict", and discount the "unity", elaborating on the "false dichotomies" of these concept.
The Healthy Society contains both the Social Peace and class harmony, as well as the class tensions and class struggles, in the true mix of the real life complexity.
The biological, psychological, and the social-cultural forces and processes are the true, primary, and natural determinants of the social and historical processes, together with the economic ones. "Political Economy", in a non-Marxian sense, is the Alimentary-Energy System of the Social Organism.
The idea of the Society as the Organism is very old, it descends to Plato, and it is a part of the Western Canon of Ideas, although it is referred to under the different, and sometimes confusing terms, in various sources.
The true leader of the Society, of course is not the Working Class, the most they aspire to become (as a class), is to move upper, to the middle strata, and these tendencies were well studied and well documented.
The true leaders of the Society are the Thinking, the Intellectual classes, in all their varieties, colors, affiliations, philosophies, etc., etc. It is them who move the Society forward. They are the head of the Social Organism.
The elaborations on all these ideas should follow, hopefully.
Michael Novakhov
9:21 AM 6/23/2019
__________________________________________________________
Donald Trump and his political movement | The New Abwehr Hypothesis of The Operation Trump: A Study In Political Psychology, Political Criminology, and Psychohistory, and as the aid for the General, Criminal and the Counterintelligence Investigations of Donald Trump – by Michael Novakhov, M.D. (Mike Nova): Web Research, Analysis, Hypotheses, and Opinions | Current News | Reviews of media reports | Selected reading lists | Sites: <a href="http://trumpinvestigations.org/" rel="nofollow">http://trumpinvestigations.org/</a> | <a href="https://trumpinvestigations.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">https://trumpinvestigations.blogspot.com/</a> | <a href="https://trumpandtrumpism.com/" rel="nofollow">https://trumpandtrumpism.com/</a>
M.N.: My take on it, very simple: SOCIALISM IS HEALTH, SOCIALIST SOCIETY IS THE HEALTHY SOCIETY, in all respects; as the SOCIAL ORGANISM.
All the “RIGHTS” that Bernie Sanders had listed here, are the elements, the prerequisites, and the parts of the HEALTHY Society’s structure and functions:
“The right to quality health care, the right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society, the right to a good job that pays a living wage, the right to affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment.”
Democracy: the harmonious balance of forces and processes of the body politic and the governing modes. is the inseparable part of the HEALTHY SOCIETY as the the social organism and the self-regulating and self-organising, sui generis, SYSTEM.
Thus, the TRUE SOCIALISM, by my (Michael Novakhov’s) definition, can only be the DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM, as evidenced in commonly accepted practices and patterns of functioning of the democratic political systems, primarily minted by the WESTERN CULTURE, and its acceptable versions in other cultures.
This concept is gnostically opposite to Marxism, and it views its dogmas about the primacy of the economic forces (Marxist “political economy”), class struggle, and the role of working class, just as such: unscientific, incorrect, counterproductive, and historically dangerous dogmas. Employing their Hegelian “unity and conflict of the opposites”, the Marxists, in my humble uneducated opinion, overemphasize the “conflict”, and discount the “unity”, elaborating on the “false dichotomies” of these concept.
The Healthy Society contains both the Social Peace and class harmony, as well as the class tensions and class struggles, in the true mix of the real life complexity.
The biological, psychological, and the social-cultural forces and processes are the true, primary, and natural determinants of the social and historical processes, together with the economic ones. “Political Economy”, in a non-Marxian sense, is the Alimentary-Energy System of the Social Organism.
The idea of the Society as the Organism is very old, it descends to Plato, and it is a part of the Western Canon of Ideas, although it is referred to under the different, and sometimes confusing terms, in various sources.
The true leader of the Society, of course is not the Working Class, the most they aspire to become (as a class), is to move upper, to the middle strata, and these tendencies were well studied and well documented.
The true leaders of the Society are the Thinking, the Intellectual classes, in all their varieties, colors, affiliations, philosophies, etc., etc. It is them who move the Society forward. They are the head of the Social Organism.
The elaborations on all these ideas should follow, hopefully.
Michael Novakhov
9:21 AM 6/23/2019
| Michael_Novakhov shared this story . |
After watching Bernie Sanders try, for at least the second time, to defend himself as a “democratic socialist” by defining “democratic socialism” as something that is not actually socialism, I’m struggling to understand the purpose of it all. What does he gain from this? What is he trying to do?
Here’s how Sanders talked about his ideology in a recent speech at George Washington University:
“The right to quality health care, the right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society, the right to a good job that pays a living wage, the right to affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment.”
“That,” he continued, “is what I mean by democratic socialism.”
Compare this with the vision of his political hero Eugene Debs, whom Sanders profiled in the 1979 documentary Eugene Debs: Trade Unionist, Socialist, Revolutionary.
“Socialism,” Debs wrote in 1904, “is first of all a political movement of the working class, clearly defined and uncompromising, which aims at the overthrow of the prevailing capitalist system by securing control of the national government and by the exercise of the public powers, supplanting the existing capitalist class government with socialist administration.”
It is, Debs said, “the collective ownership and control of industry and its democratic management in the interest of all the people.”
More modern programs for American socialism started from the same place. In his 1978 essay “What Socialists Would Do in America—If They Could,” Michael Harrington, who would co-found the Democratic Socialists of America a few years later, assumed a “national planning process in which all the people would have an effective right to participate.” This would include democratically owned and managed property as well as a private sector where “many of the existing functions of corporate power” had been socialized.
Sanders has proposed a capital fund controlled by workers at major corporations, but that arrangement lies quite a distance from the direct ownership envisioned by Debs or Harrington. That, Sanders rejects.
“The next time you hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this,” he said in a 2015 speech at Georgetown, “I don’t believe the government should own the means of production.”
Instead of a Marxist, Sanders likes to frame himself as a New Dealer, an heir to the party of Franklin Roosevelt.
Roosevelt, Sanders said last week, “led a transformation of the American government and the American economy” and was “reviled by the oligarchs of his time,” who attacked his New Deal programs as “socialism.”
It’s clear that Sanders wants to drain those attacks of their power by leaning into them, by saying yes, the New Deal was socialist and that was a good thing. And he is right about the reactionary opposition to Roosevelt. They warned of creeping Bolshevism and imminent revolution under programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Works Progress Administration. But being attacked as a socialist doesn’t make one a socialist, and neither Roosevelt nor the New Deal was socialist.
Roosevelt came to office a fiscal conservative. He wanted to balance the budget. He also understood, however, that mass unemployment threatened the “profit system.” In the face of labor unrest and direct action by industrial workers, he was willing to change course, to meet the activists and movements to his left with policies that satisfied some of their demands. But Roosevelt’s goal was always preservation: to reform capitalism and harmonize labor and capital, not to forge a replacement.
What, then, should we make of Sanders’ decision to embrace a nearly revolutionary label, “democratic socialism,” but define it in terms of American left-liberal politics?
One answer is that as someone who did live and work in left-wing and Marxist circles for much of his adult life, he wants to bring the term into the mainstream of American politics. To not just embrace the “socialist” attacks as a badge of honor but to make “democratic socialism” an extension of the New Deal is to make it sound normal, even desirable.
More Americans may embrace the label. And because the term still implies a larger set of ideological commitments outside Democratic Party liberalism, some of Sanders’ followers will become bona fide socialists who want that Debsian transformation of economic relations in the United States.
It has already happened with the substantial growth of the Democratic Socialists of America since 2016 and an increasing (albeit still small) number of Americans with a positive view of “socialism,” including a bare majority of the youngest adults.
The term does other political work. It distinguishes him from his rivals in the Democratic primary and suggests he wants to go further than his stated views—that he’s also interested in fundamental transformation, even if his program isn’t more meaningfully progressive than that of his closest ideological rival, Elizabeth Warren.
There’s another way to understand Sanders’ rhetoric around “democratic socialism.” For Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect, Sanders embodies the not-always-clear divide between liberals and the left.
“In running as a democratic socialist who seeks to complete and update FDR’s agenda,” he writes, “Sanders straddles the very fuzzy border between social democracy and American left liberalism.” In both traditions, democracy is an economic project as well as a political one. Perhaps Sanders is just trying to make that explicit—to once and for all marginalize the centrist Democratic Party politics of the past three decades, in which the economic rights of workers were subordinate to the demands of capital—as well as show Americans how effective governance can include left-wing politics. It is the political project of his entire career, from Burlington to the Capitol Building.
At the beginning of his speech at George Washington, Sanders took note of the “growing movement toward oligarchy” in the United States and the world at large. He listed the leaders of several governments—Putin in Russia, Xi in China, Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Viktor Orban in Hungary—that “meld corporatist economics with xenophobia and authoritarianism.” I think this analysis, which I’ve written about in the past, can also help us make sense of Sanders’ idiosyncratic use of “democratic socialism.”
In a 1977 essay for Dissent magazine, “Socialism and Liberalism: Articles of Conciliation?,” socialist writer Irving Howe addressed the “tacit collaboration of right and left extremes in undermining the social and moral foundations of liberalism,” which he described as “a great intellectual scandal of the age.” Those critics failed, he wrote, “to consider what the consequences might be of their intemperate attacks upon liberalism.” To assault the foundations of liberal democracy, he added, “meant to bring into play social forces the intellectuals of both right and left could not foresee.”
In straddling the two sides of the left-wing divide—in tying “democratic socialism” to the legacy of the most important figure in American liberalism—Sanders might be modeling a kind of pragmatism. Not the colloquial pragmatism of do what works, but something from the American philosophical tradition where the truth of the matter is in the doing, not the definitions.
He calls himself a “democratic socialist,” others call themselves “liberals,” but in the United States they’re part of a common project, fighting on a united front.
____________________________________
| Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠ | ||
|---|---|---|
| Bernie Sanders’ definition of socialism | ||
After watching Bernie Sanders try, for at least the second time, to defend himself as a “democratic socialist” by defining “democratic socialism” as something that is not actually socialism, I’m struggling to understand the purpose of it all. What does he gain from this? What is he trying to do?
Here’s how Sanders talked about his ideology in a recent speech at George Washington University:
|
Read the whole story
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
After watching Bernie Sanders try, for at least the second time, to defend himself as a “democratic socialist” by defining “democratic socialism” as something that is not actually socialism, I’m struggling to understand the purpose of it all. What does he gain from this? What is he trying to do?
Here’s how Sanders talked about his ideology in a recent speech at George Washington University:
“The right to quality health care, the right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society, the right to a good job that pays a living wage, the right to affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment.”
“That,” he continued, “is what I mean by democratic socialism.”
Compare this with the vision of his political hero Eugene Debs, whom Sanders profiled in the 1979 documentary Eugene Debs: Trade Unionist, Socialist, Revolutionary.
“Socialism,” Debs wrote in 1904, “is first of all a political movement of the working class, clearly defined and uncompromising, which aims at the overthrow of the prevailing capitalist system by securing control of the national government and by the exercise of the public powers, supplanting the existing capitalist class government with socialist administration.”
It is, Debs said, “the collective ownership and control of industry and its democratic management in the interest of all the people.”
More modern programs for American socialism started from the same place. In his 1978 essay “What Socialists Would Do in America—If They Could,” Michael Harrington, who would co-found the Democratic Socialists of America a few years later, assumed a “national planning process in which all the people would have an effective right to participate.” This would include democratically owned and managed property as well as a private sector where “many of the existing functions of corporate power” had been socialized.
Sanders has proposed a capital fund controlled by workers at major corporations, but that arrangement lies quite a distance from the direct ownership envisioned by Debs or Harrington. That, Sanders rejects.
“The next time you hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this,” he said in a 2015 speech at Georgetown, “I don’t believe the government should own the means of production.”
Instead of a Marxist, Sanders likes to frame himself as a New Dealer, an heir to the party of Franklin Roosevelt.
Roosevelt, Sanders said last week, “led a transformation of the American government and the American economy” and was “reviled by the oligarchs of his time,” who attacked his New Deal programs as “socialism.”
It’s clear that Sanders wants to drain those attacks of their power by leaning into them, by saying yes, the New Deal was socialist and that was a good thing. And he is right about the reactionary opposition to Roosevelt. They warned of creeping Bolshevism and imminent revolution under programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Works Progress Administration. But being attacked as a socialist doesn’t make one a socialist, and neither Roosevelt nor the New Deal was socialist.
Roosevelt came to office a fiscal conservative. He wanted to balance the budget. He also understood, however, that mass unemployment threatened the “profit system.” In the face of labor unrest and direct action by industrial workers, he was willing to change course, to meet the activists and movements to his left with policies that satisfied some of their demands. But Roosevelt’s goal was always preservation: to reform capitalism and harmonize labor and capital, not to forge a replacement.
What, then, should we make of Sanders’ decision to embrace a nearly revolutionary label, “democratic socialism,” but define it in terms of American left-liberal politics?
One answer is that as someone who did live and work in left-wing and Marxist circles for much of his adult life, he wants to bring the term into the mainstream of American politics. To not just embrace the “socialist” attacks as a badge of honor but to make “democratic socialism” an extension of the New Deal is to make it sound normal, even desirable.
More Americans may embrace the label. And because the term still implies a larger set of ideological commitments outside Democratic Party liberalism, some of Sanders’ followers will become bona fide socialists who want that Debsian transformation of economic relations in the United States.
It has already happened with the substantial growth of the Democratic Socialists of America since 2016 and an increasing (albeit still small) number of Americans with a positive view of “socialism,” including a bare majority of the youngest adults.
The term does other political work. It distinguishes him from his rivals in the Democratic primary and suggests he wants to go further than his stated views—that he’s also interested in fundamental transformation, even if his program isn’t more meaningfully progressive than that of his closest ideological rival, Elizabeth Warren.
There’s another way to understand Sanders’ rhetoric around “democratic socialism.” For Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect, Sanders embodies the not-always-clear divide between liberals and the left.
“In running as a democratic socialist who seeks to complete and update FDR’s agenda,” he writes, “Sanders straddles the very fuzzy border between social democracy and American left liberalism.” In both traditions, democracy is an economic project as well as a political one. Perhaps Sanders is just trying to make that explicit—to once and for all marginalize the centrist Democratic Party politics of the past three decades, in which the economic rights of workers were subordinate to the demands of capital—as well as show Americans how effective governance can include left-wing politics. It is the political project of his entire career, from Burlington to the Capitol Building.
At the beginning of his speech at George Washington, Sanders took note of the “growing movement toward oligarchy” in the United States and the world at large. He listed the leaders of several governments—Putin in Russia, Xi in China, Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Viktor Orban in Hungary—that “meld corporatist economics with xenophobia and authoritarianism.” I think this analysis, which I’ve written about in the past, can also help us make sense of Sanders’ idiosyncratic use of “democratic socialism.”
In a 1977 essay for Dissent magazine, “Socialism and Liberalism: Articles of Conciliation?,” socialist writer Irving Howe addressed the “tacit collaboration of right and left extremes in undermining the social and moral foundations of liberalism,” which he described as “a great intellectual scandal of the age.” Those critics failed, he wrote, “to consider what the consequences might be of their intemperate attacks upon liberalism.” To assault the foundations of liberal democracy, he added, “meant to bring into play social forces the intellectuals of both right and left could not foresee.”
In straddling the two sides of the left-wing divide—in tying “democratic socialism” to the legacy of the most important figure in American liberalism—Sanders might be modeling a kind of pragmatism. Not the colloquial pragmatism of do what works, but something from the American philosophical tradition where the truth of the matter is in the doing, not the definitions.
He calls himself a “democratic socialist,” others call themselves “liberals,” but in the United States they’re part of a common project, fighting on a united front.
Read the whole story
· · · · ·
Next Page of Stories
Loading...
Page 6
RIYADH/AMMAN/CAIRO/WASHINGTON - U.S. President Donald Trump’s economic vision as part of
Comments
Post a Comment