Regarding your comment, "I have not watched TV for the last 15 years."
Big deal. Everyone else does. And you gotta live among them and survive. So you are still fucked. I finally gave up on trying. I now watch "The Office," "The Good Wife," and "Law and Order" nightly. Even here in Mexico. However, you have saved yourself the endless insult of having the capitalist corporate cartels wipe their asses on your brain daily. That's at least something. It's more than I can claim.
As to: "I don't think socialism hasn't fared well in the past. A few horrible examples come to mind such as several periods in Russia as well as Maoist China. Hell, China is much more capitalistic now and they actually put their criminals to death rather than reward them with large bonuses. I've always been technical and not much of a history buff, but want to learn so what examples do you have of socialism working well?"
I can tell by your letter that understanding socialism is going to be a long slog for you. For starters, the American technical and scientific education usually amputates human insight, if at all possible, and bludgeons the humanistic spirit in order to support its absolute claims to all rightness, logic and reason. From the tiniest sub particle to the magnificent complexity of the human mind ("Why hell son, the brain is just a sack of chemicals! Have some more Prozac."), all things are deemed mechanistic and the world is one big Newtonian clockwork, stars, human emotions ... Everything.
Fortunately for those maimed by an American scientific/technical education, our corporatist government cherishes the technician and the scientist, and rewards them well. They are absolutely necessary for surveillance of the people, the production of bunker bombs, carcinogens, corn syrup, high tech dissemination of propaganda, and dazzling the proles with phony "technological progress." As in, "Wow! Would you look at that! A car that eats corn. The environment is saved!" And understandably those being rewarded are generally supportive of the capitalist system that values them so highly. That most have never read Rimbaud doesn't bother them one bit.
One the other hand, these people have absolute faith in reading and the benefits of the textual world of information. So I'd suggest reading some real history, absorb some background. Then throw the books away and think for yourself. Historians, like American scientists and the medical establishment, are whores for the empire. Generally speaking they are duly accredited and licensed propagandists and commissars for whatever regime they live under in their time. Unfortunately, one has to consume a lot of their published tripe to grasp how the history or economics rackets work.
Whether by leftist or rightist historians, you'll get the full treatment about Maoist China, Stalinist Russia. Yada yada. Neither of them was socialism any more than what we have here is democracy.
China as the new face of the successful state? China has simply gone to Confucian capitalism, which is the same gangsterism as the old capitalism, but without any civil liberties or human rights. This of course, is seen as an advance in the eyes of the world capitalist syndicates go. This is why the corporations all moved their operations to China. Slaves were cheaper there than in the US. "At last," they smiled, to themselves, "We can now fuck the worker blind, pay them shit and beat the hell out of them for laughs. Sell their second kidney on the medical market if we chose, what the hell."
People being people though, Chinese folks fresh from the farm and working 70 hours a week so they can save up for a microwave or something, declare it to be now the best system in the world. Just like Americans do. And the workers watch the "emergence of China's dynamic new middle class," consisting mostly of state educated city folks trained in newer, more sophisticated ways to work the peasantry to death, so the middle class can buy a three hundred square foot apartments and cars. Janked on nationalism, patriotism takes hold and they all say to one another: "Is this a great country or what?" I would further add that China is by no means more advanced because it executes more "criminals" (Stalin would have loved your definition of advanced Bubba!) than the US. Given that China has one and a third billion people. I would be curious to see if per capita executions exceed the US. Maybe it does. However, a high execution rate is a curious standard by which to judge the success of a civilization.
Examples of socialism working well? Various types and degrees of socialism are working well all over the planet, ranging from the communal sharing of certain indigenous peoples, to the adaptations one sees in Scandinavian countries and elsewhere in Europe. Toss the political rhetoric and just look. The common citizens are secure, at least until the innumerable world corporatists plotting to blow them out of the water succeed.
And they will. They can't lose. Capitalist corporations have a grip on the world's monetary system, and most importantly, the means of production to supply the world's human needs. Especially in the so-called "advanced countries." People everywhere salute advancement. And world's corporate cartels get to define advancement. To them advancement is the degree of cheap unnecessary crap you can ram down the people's throats, and how much you can blackmail human beings for such things as health care. Not to mention convince them that the rest of the world is not safe, that it is not made up of ordinary folks who just wanna raise families, screw and sleep well at nights, but rather is full of murderous heathens out to enslave the local Cub Scout Troop and blow up the neighborhood 7-Eleven.
To my mind, socialism is this:
A community and national philosophy, a commonly shared and not necessarily politicized way of life wherein the first priority is the fundamental well-being of the people (also known as "the masses," a term you have probably been programmed to wrinkle your brow in ominous suspicion of.) "Fundamental well-being" means that everyone eats well, enjoys safe and adequate homes and a common standard of good health. It means that children are educated to do more than just the rote tasks that serve corporate empires. It means the man actually doing the work man negotiates the value of his labor. It means that somewhere in the last third or quarter of his life, that working man, after enjoying his freedom, bacon and common work, and diligently sustaining his fellow men, is released from his toil. Released into security and peace and modest but guaranteed sustenance. He is free to nurse his aches, chase old women or take up Bourbon or Buddhism. Or both, as I have. Whatever he chooses as a free man in a free and benevolent socialist society.
Don't let the ideologues, demagogues and half-assed spoiled little middle class jerks who call themselves socialists in this country fool you. Socialism has to do with man's innate longing for justice, the undying heart within us, and all that is generous and good in that heart. That's why so many have so willingly died for it, and will continue to do so in corners of the world we will never see or hear about because we are not allowed to, but which are never the less part of this world, and therefore affective of this world.
You wrote, "I feel it was quite socialist/fascist giving future tax money to people for cars and houses that did not earn it rather than to have given every man, woman and child that was a US citizen $50,000 equally."
Nah, it's just your standard mugging of the people, then giving them some part of their own money back to prime the pump for another mugging. Doesn't matter how it was handed out. A crack addict will score crack, creating prison jobs and payday for lawyers. The mild spirited school teacher and bookkeeper will bank or invest it in some financial institution, where it can again be stolen, once "consumer confidence" and "faith in the economy has been restored." Under capitalism, everybody's life turns a profit for the empire. Capitalism's golden calf, the gross domestic product, makes no distinctions between good and evil. Both are profitable.
Lastly, then I gotta run, there was:
"[I] do not want to be forced to help anyone else, but rather want that to be my own personal decision ... don't put them on the installment plan for free, just to secure their votes at the expense of everyone else ... when society gets nothing out of it but a permanent leech ..."
For the sake of blog space, I cut the crap out of your rambling effort to define who is worthy of help and who is not, which is not yours to judge anyway, but God's, if such a judgment can indeed be made. We are all brothers and as such are our brother's keeper. Besides, when I look around me, I do not see a nation of leeches. I see damned few folks getting something for nothing. I see the top dogs, who actually are getting something for nothing, using the bullhorn of media to convince us that one of our brothers and neighbors is getting everything. They would have us believe that the most miserable among us -- the poorly educated and those whose souls have been brutalized from birth by the system's failure to provide the basic security necessary for the development of whole people -- are indeed getting something for nothing. And further believe that the most wretched deprived among us are a causal factor in the upcoming and rightful collapse of the overall meanest economic system ever devised. I see an empire of theft and coercion -- both of our own people and others around the world in our name -- which names the victim as the perp.
And I see a people who no longer feel the bonds of coursing humanity and their species, the sustaining earth under their feet, and beneath whose carpet their eternity waits. Rather I see a people conditioned to believe in the state and obey the state's designated bosses. And I see the moving hand of the corporate state active in all things from birth to death -- opening the eyes of the newly born and closing those of the newly dead. There's a profit to be made in both, and every human activity in between.
Even those among us who can see, who can observe the hardening condition induced by the enemies of human liberty and well being, feel powerless in the face of this darkening and omniscient order. Despite the quadrennial claims of our political parties during national election years, no savior has arrived and none is coming. No Obama, no miracle of "green science," no national genius will emerge to lead us. We have only the simple, direct, undeceived intelligence of ordinary men and women to rely upon. We must regain respect for the seemingly meager and often lonely powers an individual does have, and choose work and a way of living upon which we can all rely.
Acknowledgment of that, and living accordingly, engenders humility, success and the physical and spiritual thrivance of men and women and children everywhere. It is the animating spirit of socialism.
And, oh yeah, Obama ain't no socialist. I wish the hell he was.
In art and labor,
Joe Bageant
Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico
[emphasis added]
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