"...In fact, socialism did work at one period in history: during the 1930s, and again in the '50s and '60s, socialist economies like that of the U.S.S.R. grew faster than their capitalist counterparts. But they stopped working sometime during the 1970s and '80s ....."
Socialism cannot compete in a globalized capitalist system nor can it work independently of other countries. As Marx also said, it cannot be built in one country.
"It is clear that socialism cannot be rebuilt in a single country. Workers pushing too hard for higher wages in Michigan will simply see their jobs disappear to Guadalajara or Penang. Only if all workers around the world were unionized, pushing simultaneously for a global rise in wages, would companies be unable to play off one group of workers against another. Karl Marx's exhortation "Workers of the world, unite!" has never seemed more apt."
"In theory, then, what the left needs today is a Fourth International uniting the poor and dispossessed around the world in an organization that would be as global as the multinational corporations and financial institutions they face. This Fourth International could push for powerful new institutions to constrain global capitalism. One analogy is the Progressive Era in the early 20th century, when labor unions began to mobilize and the U.S. government developed regulatory powers to catch up with the reach of such powerful corporations as Ford and Standard Oil."
Not only the Third World is worse off than they were a decade or even a century ago, so too is the vast majority who live in the United States. We speak of change, and the United States is changing - not to any great advantage or positive benefit for working classes. Reforming the system is not the way to change our lives, the only way forward for positive change would be a radical departure from the logic of an accumulation orientated economic system to a system which is not based on profit, accumulation and extraction of surplus labor for the benefit of a few.
The reformist perspective seems to be only successful in so far as partial improvements can be made, which may last for awhile, until the social contract is tweaked by the ruling elite and those reforms are withdrawn.
The process of globalization and compeitition is at a stage where no longer will it be possible to grant any significant gains to the working classes. Rather than provide for social needs corporatations which have no national allegiences relocate to countries where they can exploit freely without the need for the degree of social concerns which those in the U.S. have become accustomed to and now are seeing those gains disappear.
The military and the police are all the instruments of the ruling classes, indoctrinated to guard over the interests of the state and property and impose the will of the minority ruling class interests of the state and the violence of the state is institutionalized and part of the daily course of affairs and knows no borders or boundaries and no laws seem able to restrain this power of the state.
Unrestrained abuse by Police and military power representing the government characterizes the structure of present relations. Most cops are arrogant. It is part of their nature by virtue of being cops, that is, representing the state with all the power that implies. And taking young men and women and putting them in positions of power and giving them guns and telling them to kill the enemy and then defining the enemy as anyone the president and officers say it is, including it's own citizens when there is a state need to control the masses, is mind numbing and essential to the implementation of power through state violence.
The capitalist economic system controls a social system which is not only on occasion explicitly and directly violent but at all times implicitly or covertly violent and coercive. The laws and those who administer those laws are elements of the system. The business of life in capitalist society is the life of business under capitalism and the law of supply and demand is taken to be a natural and unalterable law that rules all human life.
The oppression of workers is inherent in an exploitative economic/political system that cleverly alters language and those who live under this system are brainwashed while being denied access to "real" information. The government hides the truth with their classified documents, which they justify as "national security" concerns while it is as always, "business as usual." The government carries on its business as usual with "secret" armies which conduct special operations without accountability and those few reporters who take on the ruling classes are quickly put in their place. It is business as usual.
Sweat shops are again a reality in America, as it is in Third World countries, and labor unions have been smashed by the strong arm, the police authority of the state.
All gains in social progress are real achievements, however the system continues to protect itself from substantive serious questioning and especially those which lobby for change.
But, once one recognizes the broadly violent character of capitalist life, as Marx describes it, i.e. the implicit ethics of freedom and the relationship of violence in the marketplace to alienation (because violence is the real lack of freedom and one can easily equate alienation with violence). As Marx wrote this alienation of labor is not something that is voluntary but coerced, thus it becomes `forced labor' (Complete Works, 3:274), and once realizing that, we cannot acquiesce in the continued existence of such a system.
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Today is Friday November 21, 2008