WHEN Karl Marx and Frederich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in the 19th Century, they never knew how early thereafter it would influence events that would later shape world politics.
When V.I. Lenin led the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), no one predicted that eighty years later the Soviet Union would have been surrendered into dissolution.
When Mao Tse Tung led the revolution that created the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, he never saw China becoming, just over half-a-century later, the dominant economy on the global stage that it now is.
And when Fidel and Raul Castro led the Cuban Revolution to victory on January 1, 1959 no one ever envisioned a day when a US President would undertake such a friendly visit to Havana as Barack Obama just did, six decades later.
Likewise, one year ago, no one thought an independent candidate describing himself as ‘a socialist’ would do so well in a US Presidential Election as has been happening so far in 2016.
Bernie Sanders — the independent socialist Mayor of Vermont — is a former member of the Socialist Party of America. He describes himself as a ‘democratic socialist’ and is also the longest-serving independent in US congressional history.
Twenty-five years ago, Sanders was the lone socialist serving in Congress, even though as an alienated back-bencher. Today, he can be the next US President.
When he first surged there earlier this year, Sanders told a cheering crowd of supporters: “What Iowa has begun tonight is a political revolution.”
Later in New Hampshire, he trounced Democratic front runner Hillary Clinton. One third of voters that night said the most important issue in the election was “income inequality”—and 71% voted for Sanders.
Sanders the socialist is appealing to ordinary Americans across the country. His small-donor campaign-finance fundraising operation drew more than 3.5 million donations, at an individual rate of US $27 per person. That nearly matched ‘dollar-for-dollar’ what Clinton had raised in the last six months of 2015. Then, after his New Hampshire win, Sanders’s campaign raised $6.4 million in less than a day.
Sanders’ support is baffling his critics, who just can’t understand why so many Americans today are saying they’re ready to vote a socialist for President. In 1982, 72% of Americans polled told the Continental Group they thought the United States would be ‘worse off’ if it moved toward socialism. But, 33 years later (in 2015), a Gallup poll found that 47% of Americans overall were ‘willing to vote for a Socialist for President’; and the number shot up to 69% among younger Americans aged 18 to 29.
Interestingly, Obama’s domestic-policy programme failures are generally blamed — or thanked — for ‘socialism’s rise’ in the USA in 2016. While more Democratic voters say they see nothing wrong with ‘socialism’, the Republicans claim Obama’s ‘socialist programmes’ have made the term more acceptable.
The Republican right-wingers opposing Sanders are now attacking the educational institutions – especially campuses at colleges and universities — which they see as safe havens for today’s socialist campaigners.
Jonathan Chait, in an article entitled ‘Bernie Sanders and the Brazen Return of Socialism’ (published in the New Yorker Magazine on November 2, 2015) noted: “The Cold War further served to identify socialism with communism. But this deep and very American hostility may be breaking down. Recent polls have shown that voters in their 20s think just as highly of socialism as they do of capitalism. That socialism is no longer a dirty word has freaked out conservatives.”
Arthur Brooks, of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), worried in 2010 that: “The young sympathizers of socialism today may be the grown-up defenders of socialism tomorrow.”
Even Rand Paul (who claims to be ‘hip’) has been trying to keep young Americans from embracing socialism. He recently told Glenn Beck: “I’ve been trying to point out — because I’m on a lot of college campuses, as we have a big following in college campuses — that there’s nothing sexy and there’s nothing cool about socialism.”
But even while those bent on locking him out of the White House continue their war on the campuses and in the mainstream media, Sanders continues to eat into Clinton’s lead. After defeating her with over 70% of the overall vote in Washington, Alaska and Hawaii, she led by 1,243 to 975. No other challenger to the preferred Democratic nominee has ever come this close and that far, far less an independent who’s also a declared socialist.
Sanders has shown (several times) that he can beat Clinton in a fair race. But the decks are very stacked-up against him. After Clinton won an amazing six consecutive coin tosses to get more votes in an early caucus, her backers in the leadership of the Democratic Party have long reserved a trump card in the hundreds of ‘super delegates’ who they expect to be her winning ace when the cards hit the nomination table.
Against that background — and notwithstanding that the FBI continues to hold her possible indictment in the so-called ‘private e-mail’ affair as a Sword of Damocles at her throat — Mrs. Clinton continues to be the one the top dog Democrats would prefer to return to the White House. That would make her not only the first former first lady, but also the first woman to sit in the Oval Office — and the first female commander-in-chief of the US armed forces.
After her first bid to return following her first eight years at Pennsylvania Ave were eclipsed by another eight years of the first Black American in the White House, Mrs Clinton’s backers will stop at absolutely nothing to lock Bernie Sanders out of the presidency.
But even if he isn’t allowed to win Mrs Clinton, Sanders’ performance to date has amounted to a ringing endorsement of his anti-Establishment platform and the best proof positive that Americans are no longer cowed into cowering fear by the sound of the word ‘socialism’.
As Chait says, “Sanders’s campaign has made socialism relevant to the national political debate for the first time since Eugene V. Debs garnered 6% of the vote in 1912.”
And he concludes that “Even in the face of likely defeat, Sanders has brought new life to an old tradition!”
Socialism has been practised in various forms around the world in the past century. Put to work in Western Europe following World War II, it continues to be flagged there today in different forms. Indeed Denmark, which flags its own brand of socialism with Scandinavian characteristics, started 2016 with the globally-envied title of the country with “The happiest people in the world.” (The position was previously held by Switzerland.)
Today’s people – young and old everywhere – no longer need to be lectured to by those wishing the world to take a good look at socialism. Information is at everyone’s fingertips and socialism’s documented historical successes and experiences exist galore, which simply cannot be erased.
Today, global capitalism is being challenged on its own turf by the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa) entity which, led by China and Russia, is surely changing the name and face of the game in world finance, offering new developmental support alternatives and possibilities for developing countries.
In such a situation, socialism will never die. As history has shown these past 100 years, it will decline, fall and rise, it will suffer and recover. But, ever on the rebound over time, socialism always makes a comeback somewhere, sometime.
Now is definitely one of those times!
Earl,
I read your article a couple of times, and I still cannot find an example of socialism being on the rebound. So many words, and nothing substantial – are you trying to emulate ‘Gros Chas’?