Socialism

Portugal As A Model For A New Socialism?

April 25, 2014 Leila Dregger, www.terranovavoice.tamera.org Educate! Capitalism, Portugal, Socialism

Lisbon, December 1960. In a bar two students clink their glasses to freedom – “A Liberdade!” They are spied on, denounced and finally sentenced to seven years in prison. Under the Portuguese military dictatorship the word ‘freedom’ is prohibited. It was reading about this incident in the London Times which moved the lawyer, Peter Benenson, to found Amnesty International. It would still be thirteen years to the end of the dictatorship in Portugal. On April 25, 1974 left-leaning troops move into Lisbon and within hours take over all key strategic places in the country. The head of state and secret service give up after a short resistance. Forty-eight years of dictatorship are over. The dream of socialism awakens. Today Portugal suffers under a dictatorship again – the dictatorship of capital, as countless graffiti on the walls attest. Austerity measures, debt and tax regulations pressure the workers, small business owners, craftsmen and farmers above all others. The wave of privatization pushes masses of people into unemployment. The number of young people leaving the country today is almost as high as during the dictatorship – back then they fled military service and prison, today they flee from the prospect of a bleak future.

Seattle’s Elite Begin Their Counter Attack

April 18, 2014 Shamus Cooke, www.commondreams.org Organize! Minimum Wage, Socialism

Seattle’s corporations were blindsided, it all happened so fast. Socialist candidate Kshama Sawant’s successful City Council campaign tore through Seattle politics like a tornado, leaving the 1% devastated, unable to cope with a storm they didn't see coming. The Seattle elite had no way to counter her arguments, silence her supporters, or keep her from gathering a tidal wave of support for the $15 campaign. The establishment was paralyzed, powerless. But Sawant’s election victory was just the beginning of the humiliation for Seattle’s super wealthy. After singlehandedly transforming city politics, Sawant used her newly elected bully pulpit to torment the mayor and City Council and harangue Seattle's corporations, while simultaneously mobilizing thousands in the streets to bulldoze through her progressive agenda. The 1% had absolutely no idea what to do — they’d never experienced anything like it. They conceded defeat and agreed to a $15 minimum wage — in words.

Why No Sustained Protests (Yet)?

April 14, 2014 Richard D. Wolff, www.truth-out.org Strategize! Austerity, Protest, Socialism

The post-1945 destruction of the New Deal coalition - unionists, socialists and communists - keeps influencing Americans' lives. Today, its effects help explain why popular actions have been so muted against US economic changes since the 1970s and especially against the bailouts and austerity since the crash of 2008. Those effects also suggest what could reignite sustained protests and demands for change. First to be destroyed after 1945 were the communists. Coordinated attacks came from business, conservatives, government and media. Most academics and liberals (including many who had supported the New Deal coalition) were complicit in that destruction. Once again we witnessed that old repressive tool: rebranding domestic social movements as mere agents of an evil foreign puppet-master. More important, demonizing the communists served to tar other social criticism that included the capitalist economic system with much the same brush.

Occupy Sandy And The Future Of Socialism

April 6, 2014 Sam Knight, www.truth-out.org Educate! Occupy, Socialism

At St. Margaret Mary's Church in the Midland Beach neighborhood of Staten Island, Matthew 5:3 adorns the back of the congregation, declaring the poor blessed in spirit, "for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." The locals, however, seemed to think that Her Majesty's Spirit was plagued by pangs of torturous anxiety roughly two weeks after Superstorm Sandy - donations of clothing and blankets flooded the church's pews. But whatever one makes of the promise of posthumous bliss as a reward for pious poverty, the scene portrayed a less controversial tenet of Christianity - being one's brother's keeper. The impromptu relief effort at the church and beyond - as in every crisis - quashed the notions that humans are inherently selfish and that they believe profit-maximizing produces the optimal social outcome.

Politicians Come Not To Praise Tony Benn But Bury His Ideas

March 17, 2014 Matt Carr, www.stopwar.org.uk Educate! Democracy, Palestine, Socialism, Wars and Militarism, Worker Rights and Jobs

"I remember Benn calling for an ambulance from the stage because someone had had a heart attack, while the police horsemen roamed the field cracking heads. This mayhem was quite routine, but it was never condemned and rarely even mentioned in parliament or the media. I don’t recall any other senior Labour politician who went anywhere near Wapping throughout the year of the strike. Then, as now, trade union struggles were something to be avoided, by a party that had already embraced the essential tenets of Thatcherism in order to make itself ‘electable’ and has continued to do so ever since. Even then, it was obvious that Benn was different. In the years that followed he remained a tireless and ubiquitous figure in the extra-parliamentary left who was always present in every popular movement, every demonstration, and every popular mobilization, the living embodiment of the British socialist tradition of Blake, Robert Owen, William Morris, Keir Hardie and Nye Bevan."

Out of Occupy, a New Populist Political Party Forms

March 13, 2014 Dennis Trainor Jr, www.PopularResistance.org Resistance Report Anarchism, Capitalism, Carl Gibson, Dennis Trainor Jr, Green party, Occupy, Socialism, Socialist alternative

Carl Gibson, co-founder of U.S. Uncut, is joining with other Occupy Wall Street organizers to launch a new populist political party. While more details (including the name of the party and the identities of other key organizers) will be available when the group launches on March 20, the party will be explicitly anti-capitalist. Says Gibson: “A new party that actively opposes capitalism and unites people around the basic ideas of meeting human needs would be widely respected and immediately acknowledged. This new party could stand apart from the two corporate-owned parties by refusing to take campaign donations from corporations, banks and developers, standing up for the rights of immigrants and indigenous people, calling for sustainable energy and development, making education for all a top priority, and believing in universal access to healthcare as a human right. While it would take time, focusing on building power first at the local and county level is the surest way to make lasting change.”

How Do We Get Past Capitalism?

February 6, 2014 Robert Jensen, www.resilience.org Educate! Capitalism, Communism, Finance and Economy, Socialism

The main argument of the book is that capitalism is constituted by a varied of different practices, and so challenging capitalism needs to be about a variety of struggles. I draw on the important work of J.K. Gibson-Graham, who argues that we should model anti-capitalist struggle on feminist struggles. Second-wave feminists didn’t look for an overthrow of patriarchy. Instead, they analyzed what they were up against and fought it in all of its varied manifestations. One of the problems with traditional anti-capitalist thought is that it defines capitalism as a totality, which encourages us to imagine another totality, socialism, which we can try to replace it with. This totalizing perspective has colonized the imagination of anti-capitalism and left us waiting for a revolution we can never have. In the book I argue that we see ourselves as inhabiting a complex social world that has some capitalist things going on in it as well as some socialist ones, some communist ones, and many where economics are not separated out of the broader fabric of life (such as sharing and gift giving, and mutual support). The way we get past capitalism is by building on the healthy non-capitalist aspects of our world while we also do pitched battle with the capitalist ones that we have a fair chance of winning against. In that way we build a better world and shrink the destructive capitalist practices that are part of the social fabric.

Economic Prosperity and Economic Democracy: The Worker Co-Op Solution

January 13, 2014 Richard D. Wolff, www.democracyatwork.info Create! Cooperatives, Socialism, Worker Rights and Jobs

The importance of such micro-level transformations of enterprises into WSDEs cannot be overstated. Because it had located key economic powers in state hands (regulating or owning enterprises and imposing planning above or in place of market exchanges), traditional socialism usually accumulated too much power in the state alone or in the state together with the major capitalist businesses it “regulated.” Far too little real, institutionalized countervailing power resided with the workers inside enterprises. As a result, accountability and transparency were absent from economic life, as was economic democracy. That in turn undermined real political democracy.

“I Wear the Badge of Socialist With Honor”

January 10, 2014 Kshama Sawant, www.www.commondreams.org Resist! Kshama Sawant, Socialism

"Here in Seattle, political pundits are asking about me: will she compromise? Can she work with others? Of course, I will meet and discuss with representatives of the establishment. But when I do, I will bring the needs and aspirations of working-class people to every table I sit at, no matter who is seated across from me. And let me make one thing absolutely clear: There will be no backroom deals with corporations or their political servants. There will be no rotten sell-out of the people I represent. I wear the badge of socialist with honor. To the nearly hundred thousand who voted for me, and to the hundreds of you who worked tirelessly on our campaign, I thank you. Let us continue."

Radicals In City Hall: An American Tradition

December 19, 2013 Peter Dreier, www.dissentmagazine.org Create! Democracy, Socialism

In fact, the United States has a long tradition of municipal socialism. One hundred years ago, at the Socialist Party’s high point, about 1,200 party members held public office in 340 cities, including seventy‑nine mayors in cities such as Milwaukee, Buffalo, Minneapolis, Reading, and Schenectady. (Before Sawant, the last socialist to get elected in Seattle was journalist Anna Louise Strong, who won a seat on the School Board in 1916). These local leaders, whose ranks included working-class labor union members and middle-class radicals such as teachers, clergy, and lawyers, worked alongside progressive reformers to improve living and working conditions in the nation’s burgeoning cities. In today’s hyper-capitalist economy, their experience may still offer some lessons for contemporary activists.

Growing Wealth Gap Spurs On Socialist in Seattle Council Race

August 15, 2013 Lewis Kamb, www.http://seattletimes.com Educate! Finance and the Economy, Socialism, Worker Rights and Jobs

"When was the last time a Seattle City Council candidate argued there was nothing extraordinary about herself? Or volunteered details about her recent arrest? Or freely admitted she expects her opponent to raise more money — by tens of thousands of dollars? It’s been awhile, if ever, is the safe bet, which is also the answer to yet another question about the curious campaign of Kshama Sawant: When was the last time a socialist advanced to the city’s general-election ballot?"

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