Smith (a friend of this site) says the reception has been surprisingly friendly, indicating a groundswell of support for socialist ideas. Alice Walker wrote him to say the timing couldn’t be better. Fox Radio had him on and wants to have him back.
“Things are changing…. This book is a contribution to that energy and movement.” 49 percent of people under 30 have a favorable view of the word socialism; the online Webster dictionary’s highest number of hits last year were for the words capitalism and socialism.
The first part of the book is “an indictment of capitalism” based on its two claims, Smith says: providing democracy and a decent standard of living for people. Smith cites NSA spying and the Citizens United decision as proof of the failed promise of democracy.
“I’ll believe a corporation is a person the day it gets a colonoscopy.”
Later Smith addresses the material failures of capitalism, including the widening gap between rich and poor and environmental destruction. “We can’t solve global warming under capitalism.” He also addresses the (high) average age of the panelists/contributors to the book by explaining that there have been “hills and valleys” in the history of American socialism. “And the 60s was a hill,” providing the experience to the folks on the panel. “And we’re coming up onto another hill.”
Socialism, if it’s to be taken seriously again, needs to demonstrate that it can be efficient, that it can produce sustained economic growth, and technological progress.
It used to be that socialists took for granted that not only could it match capitalism in these areas, but vastly outstrip it. This was a particularly popular idea during the 1930’s, when the U.S. and Europe were in depression and Stalin was, ruthlessly and through forced labor, rapidly industrializing the Soviet Union. But even until the 1960’s, this was a tenable view.
But today, not even socialists for the most part argue that their system will bring economic growth and sustained material progress. Instead, they try to erase their history of making such bold claims for building up the forces of production by making their failure into a virtue. So, socialism is needed not in order to bring material plenty and progress, but in order to create a sustainable zero or low growth society. The latter amounts to a liquidation of socialism and its submersion into anti-technological Deep Ecology radical environmentalism. These days, one gets the sense that socialism has ditched industry, the workers, and all talk of modes of production in favor of Malthusian environmentalism and relentless dehumanizing identity politics.
Oh, come on.
This trope that a corporation is a person just plays into stupidities like SCOTUS’s expansion of first amendment rights to corporations and insulating corporate executives from criminal actions because they operate corporations that are TBTF. People commit crimes and when they do it with corporations they should be charged based on the leverage gained in their managerial roles. Corporations have never been deemed human but rather entities with a selection of rights and responsibilities that are needed for their function.
Last I saw Corporations:
Can’t Vote.
Aren’t required to attend school.
Aren’t required to get vaccinated.
Don’t have spousal immunity if they pair up with another corporation.
I can see why a corporate entity needs to make contracts and such. Most all groups of people that get together for a purpose form a “corporation” or equivalent for purposes of contracting like leasing a church building or running a co-op.
But really, why on Earth should corporations have First Amendment rights. That is just weird.
I wouldn’t want to be in the room when a large corporation gets its colonoscopy.
Seriously: many criticisms may be levelled at corporations, but the most serious is not about them but about us: we have allowed them unlimited political power. And correcting “Citizens United” is by no means enough.
Americans must define the problem of the spending of big-money for political action broadly, and then arrange (legislate, amend, whatever it takes) that no-one can spend any money at all to pay for political action but human people — neither corporations, nor labor unions, nor sewing clubs, nor corn-husking bees, etc. Just people. And the spending of any one human-person must be limited.
People must, of course, be allowed to send money to PAOs (political action organizations) to make their spending effective. And there must be a cap (the millionaires-limitation-cap) on cumulative political spending per person per calendar year. Candidates, campaigns, political parties, and all lobbying groups will need to re-organize themselves as PAOs (subject to the millionaires-limitation-cap and no corporate contributions limits).
That’s it. The very rich will get to spend their money on yachts but not on political action. The publication of newspapers, books, etc., which are sold for enough money to cover costs will NOT be deemed a “political action” and so “freedom of press” will be preserved. But such publications will not be allowed to be subsidized outside the limitations for PAOs if the publications are of a political-persuasion nature.
After that (if we ever achieve it) it will be time to correct the other ills on capitalism. before that, it will be scarcely possible.
I’m quite prepared to support “economic democracy” if it begins with peacemeal reform: first one enterprise lead democratically – and thereafter one corporation, lead democratically – before socialists try to lead a whole country.
This would be the way by which socialists can analyze their failures and correct their errors, before their experiments are “too big to fail”.
I just happen to be reading Michael Smith’s memoir Notebook of a Sixties Lawyer (copyright 1992) at the moment. On page 15, he has this to say:
If that’s what Judaism is, Israel ain’t Jewish.