Tag: democracy

‘American Democratic Socialism’ Has a Proud, Diverse, and Inspiring History | Portside

The Marxist left has often been challenged on its prophetic declarations but here we find the reverse (see below): ‘…will never become a socialist country…’
We have no proof here that this is so.
The legacy of Marxism despite its overall cogency was self-defeating from the start and if socialism never happened in the US it is in part due to the fact that socialism was never defined and like a bad pointer in programming simply became analogous to a computer crash.
In our time the issue has shifted: in a crisis of creeping rightist fascism and climate change the issue of capitalism will have a new judge: the logic of events in a rapidly dwindling planetary ecology.
In The Last Revolution the issue has been given a re-compute and system reset: we might acknowledge that ‘socialism’ cannot be realized, but the same can’t be said for ‘democratic market neo-communism (DMNC)’: it has never been tried and doesn’t stand for anything in the Bolshevik, second international, or even Marxist legacy. The strictures therefore do not apply.
But more than that our new model is a careful trompe l’oeuil and blends or remorphs liberalism as neo-communism, and neo-communism as liberalism.
We cannot say this is impossible unless we also say that liberalism is impossible.
In any case, the choice will soon be fascism and a new leftist alternative, one that must be wary of its past and cease and desist from Marxist/Bolshevik boilerplate with a formulation that is failsafed, democratic, yet an ecosocialism empowered to deliver liberal/capitalist networks from their democratic revolutions to their social democratic successors. We can’t say that the original brand is valid at the end times of liberalism destined otherwise to fascist barbarism…

America was never, is not, and will never become a socialist country. It is where socialism goes to die. Just over a week ago, the Republican led House of Representatives handily passed a resolution denouncing the “crimes” of socialist autocrats like Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot and rejecting the implementation of socialist policies in the United States.

Source: ‘American Democratic Socialism’ Has a Proud, Diverse, and Inspiring History | Portside

 A True and Visionary Radical, Martin Luther King Jr. Was No Moderate 

In his absorbing profile of the writer Alex Haley (author of “Roots” and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”) in the New York Times Book Review a year ago, Michael Patrick Hearn made a familiar mistake. He wrote: “Politically [Haley] he was a moderate, philosophically more Martin than Malcolm.”

Source: Opinion | A True and Visionary Radical, Martin Luther King Jr. Was No Moderate | Common Dreams

Washington’s “Democracy Promotion” Fails Spectacularly in Venezuela 

We have commented on Venezuela many times here, with the criticism that it is a democracy, of sorts, that should become a democratic market socialism after the model of our DMNC. In any case, the stance of the US is almost pathetic and after so many fascist interventions in South American states the idea the US can preach democracy to anyone is ridiculous.
https://redfortyeight.com/?s=venezuela+DMNC

Regardless of US efforts to overthrow the government and cause the populace to turn against their elected officials in the face of punishing sanctions, President Maduro has endured and resisted. Even the follow-the-flag Washington Post must acknowledge that “a recent poll from Andrés Bello Catholic University and pollster Delphos indicated that more respondents would vote for Maduro than Guaidó.” Of course, no one ever voted for Guaidó in the first place because the US-anointed “interim president” had never run for national office.

Source: Washington’s “Democracy Promotion” Fails Spectacularly in Venezuela – CounterPunch.org