Alan Maass - The Case for Socialism

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

The Case for Socialism

Capitalism isnt working.

For millions and millions of people, in the United States and around the world, there just isnt any other way to put it. Every day, every week, every month seems to bring more evidencehunger and poverty getting worse, jobs lost and homes in foreclosure, war and environmental destruction. And all the while, a tiny elite enjoys a life of unbelievable wealth and privilege, completely removed from what the rest of us go through.

The claims made in support of the capitalist systemthat if you work hard and sacrifice, youll be rewarded, youll get ahead, your children will have better opportunities than youhave been revealed as frauds for the majority of people in society. Instead, its gotten harder and harder to make ends meet. And if you should have the bad luck to face an accident or unexpected crisisor if, like so many people in the United States, you were born into poverty and never had a chance to get ahead in the first placethen watch out.

Ask Evan Gutierrez. In December 2008, he lost his job on the staff of a church and community center in Los Angeles because of cuts in funding connected to the Wall Street financial crisis. He was hired as a music teacher at a charter school, but had only just started when the school shut down. With a child on the way, Evan and his wife moved to a 500-square-foot apartment to save money. They still fell behind on rent, and Evan had to ask for help from the churchs goodwill fund that he used to help administer. We grow up with the impression theres a correlation between effort and the fruits of your labor, he told the New York Times. To be honest with you, I have very little confidence Im going to be able to turn this around. It just feels completely, completely out of my control.

A few hundred miles north, the Ferrell family is struggling to get by in Lincoln, California. Thankfully, Jeff Ferrell still had his jobas a state worker inspecting workplaces for health hazardsas the holidays approached in 2009. But Governor Arnold Schwarzeneggers budget-cutting government had imposed a two-day-a-month furlough, which added up to a 10 percent pay cut for the Ferrells. Now, before she goes grocery shoppingat the WinCo discount chainSharon Ferrell calls her banks toll-free number to find out how much money is left in their account, and she keeps a calculator in the cart to make sure she doesnt go over. Weve cut the fat all along, she says, and so this is really pushing us close to the bone now.

Jeff and Sharon must fear that their twin girls will face the same difficulties in a few years that Colleen Riley does now on the other side of the country. Colleen graduated from the University of Rhode Island in May 2009, but the best job she could find was for only twenty hours a week. There was no way for her to keep her apartmentshe moved back in with her parents. At the end of the year, still looking for full-time work, she had her first repayment on $10,000 in student loans staring her in the facealong with the loss of health insurance coverage under her parents policy.

Taking care of his family was the reason Ignacio Sanchez came to the United States from Mexico. He found work as a laborer in New York City, making up to $200 a day sometimes, and he sent home as much as he could. Then the crisis hit, and the jobs dried up. Ignacio, too, could no longer afford the rent. Fearful that the shelters would ask for identification, he and other undocumented workers spend their nights on the streets, often camped out under a train bridge in Queens. By the railroad tracks, the ground was sprinkled with the instruments of coping: empty beer bottles, a tattered Bible, a crumpled picture of a young boy, the New York Times reported. Ignacio summed up his bleak situation: This is no life.

Stories like these arent the exception. They can be found in every corner of the United States. They are the grim consequences of an economic crisis that pushed unemployment, poverty, hunger, home foreclosures, health insurance coverageliterally any indicator of working-class living standards you could nameto the worst levels in at least a generation. And with the second decade of the twenty-first century getting under way, most people agreed with Evan Gutierrez that there didnt seem to be much reason to expect better times. For people like Evan and so many others, the whole system seems to be stacked against them.

No wonder an April 2009 Rasmussen Reports poll found that only a bare majority of Americans believed capitalism was a better system than socialismand that people under thirty were evenly split in their preference for socialism or capitalism. Theres a growing discontent with capitalism and its upside-down priorities, even in the worlds richest country, not to mention around the globe. The idea that there ought to be an alternative to the misery and injustice of the world today sounds good to more and more people.

Now, to someone like Glenn Beck, this doesnt sound very good at all. You might even say that its a specter haunting him. Socialism, Beck declared on his radio show in January 2009, with that trademark teary quaver in his voice, doesnt seem to be a bad thing in America anymore. Most people are like, Yeah, socialism isnt so bad.

Of course, for him and the other ranters of the right wing, the chief evidence that socialism is washing over America was the election of Barack Obama as president. That presents a problem, since Obama is quite insistent that he isnt a socialistand hes gone far out of his way to prove it, filling his Treasury Department with refugees from Goldman Sachs, expanding U.S. wars, and generally acting like his highest priority is preserving the status quo.

If that were all there was to it, Beck could sleep soundly. But the return of socialism to the political discussion in the United States has deeper sources than the right wings misplaced fears about Obama. There was the near-implosion of the world financial system at the end of 2008. The federal governments rush, under Bush and Obama alike, to save the bankers with taxpayer money. The ongoing effects of the Great Recession. The disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq. The Hurricane Katrina nightmare in New Orleans and the attitude of callous contempt it exposed in Washington, D.C. The Christian rights shrill intolerance. And, increasingly, the frustrations with a new president who said one thing on the campaign trail to get peoples votes, but is doing another in office.

The certainties of previous decadesthat capitalism, whatever its flaws, is the only workable systemhave broken down, leaving a sense that something different is badly needed. The question is what that something different should be. What is the alternative?

This book proposes socialism. But real socialism. Not the hysterical caricatures of blowhards like Glenn Beck and others on the right. Socialism is also not the former USSR, or any of the remaining outposts of Stalinist totalitarianism, like North Korea or the corporate-friendly, sweatshop haven of China. Nor is it the center-left parties in European countries that call themselves socialist, but govern with pro-capitalist policies little different from their conservative counterparts.

The genuine socialist tradition is fundamentally different from all these. At its heart, socialism is about the creation of a new society, built from the bottom up, through the struggles of ordinary working people against exploitation, oppression, and injusticeone that eliminates profit and power as the prime goals of life, and instead organizes our world around the principles of equality, democracy, and freedom.

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