The Dirty "S" Word

The dirty S word is back, and gaining popularity. Young Americans (ages 18 -29) are growing disillusioned with the capitalist system post 2008 crash, and look more favorably upon... socialism. The ideas put forward by Karl Marx are back in mainstream. Listen to podcast: http://www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition/shows/2013/02/24/is-marxism-facing-a-rebirth/

The survey by Pew Research indicates shift in perception on social policies, despite decades long propaganda war of vilification:

"powerful and wealthy private interests and special interest groups have taken almost full control of most democracies, their money and influence increasingly dictating the political and social agendas for these nations, agendas beneficial to them alone.

All democratic governments to some extent, but again primarily the US, have essentially abandoned their responsibility as “managers” of their nations and societies, have lost the thread of “management for the people”, and instead have relegated their nations to a condition of “management for the benefit of private interests”. ...

The management of these nations for the benefit of special interest groups has become so embedded that 'socialism', which is nothing more than a concern for the overall welfare of the nation and its people, has become a dirty word.

As evidence, most Americans are energetically, and sometimes almost violently, opposed to socialism though few appear to have any understanding of the term's actual meaning.

Socialism – caring about the people of a nation and about their welfare, is equated in the American mind to a hateful dictatorship with no rights or freedoms – in fact, to the precise opposite of the term's real meaning. Such is the power of propaganda." From: http://www.spyghana.com/democracy-and-income-inequality-america-the-worlds-richest-banana-republic/

Solution for Latin America and beyond

American business and government are bound up with the ruling minorities in Latin America - with the rural and industrial property holders. Our interests are their interests - stability, return on investment - are the same. Meanwhile the masses of the people keep on suffering because they lack even minimal educational facilities, healthcare, housing, and diet. They could have these benefits if national income were not so unevenly distributed.

The only real alternative to injustice in Latin America is socialism [...]

American capitalism, based as it is on exploitation of the poor, with its fundamental motivation in personal greed, simply cannot survive without force - without a secret police force. The argument is with capitalism and it is capitalism that must be opposed, with its CIA, FBI and other security agencies understood as logical, necessary manifestations of a ruling class’s determination to retain power and privilege.

Now, more than ever, indifference to injustice at home and abroad is impossible. Now, more clearly than ever, the extremes of poverty and wealth demonstrate the irreconcilable class conflicts, that only socialist revolution can resolve. Now, more than ever, each of us is forced to make a conscious choice whether to support the system of minority comfort and privilege with all its security apparatus and repression, or whether to struggle for real equality of opportunity and fair distribution of benefits for all of society, in the domestic as well as the international order.

Philip Agee in CIA DIARY, Inside the Company

I had a conversation with my grandmother who grew up in pre-communist Poland in a privileged class family. She talked about appalling poverty, only step above middle ages feudalism, that gripped majority of the population. After WWII, after loosing family properties due to nationalization of industries and land, hating communism all her life, she still found enough objectivity to observe that socialism, or more specifically - communism, as oppressive as it was, eliminated poverty of the masses, equalized the society and, from the perspective of time, "was inevitable, and probably the only solution" to injustice.