The specter that still haunts capitalism

[TBF]

" ... the opening words of the Manifesto still resonate because we too are haunted. Unlike the European upper crust that Marx taunted
for being frightened of a socialist future, today it's ordinary people who are scared of the future that capitalism seems to promise."

The specter that still haunts capitalism
September 8, 2015

Despite being declared dead and buried for decades, recent opinion polls show that almost a third of Americans prefer socialism to capitalism. Socialism beats capitalism outright among people in their 20s, low-income people of all ages, and especially among African Americans and Latinos. But while the idea of socialism is in the air, what it means is vague to most people, and how to achieve it even more so.

SocialistWorker.org journalist Danny Katch is the author of a new book that is an entertaining and insightful introduction to what the socialist tradition has to say about democracy, economics and the potential of human beings to be something more than being bomb-dropping, planet-destroying racist fools. Here, we print an excerpt from "Ghost Stories," one of the opening chapters of Socialism...Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation ...

More here: http://socialistworker.org/2015/09/08/the-specter-that-still-haunts-capitalism

[Warpy]

2. Pure socialism can only work on a small scale, like anarchy, also

The problem with it on a large scale is that members of the dominant political families become de facto aristocrats, their children taking over their positions of power when they die and the lot of them making sure they're more equal than the others because, hey, they're the leaders!

It's why Russian Communism was more of a right wing than a left wing system, Party bosses taking over the palaces and fancy dachas of the deposed aristocrats, passing power to their children. The people were tightly controlled by totalitarianism.

Purity has never really appealed to me. The messier a system is, the more likely it is to be humane. A messy mixture of capitalism and socialism will supply both goods and services, respectively. The only argument will be about which area belongs in which system, some things moving back and forth as necessary.

Your idea of socialist conformity is silly, of course, no system has ever policed things like body type, no matter the degree of totalitarian control.

[nichomachus]

3. But then capitalism isn't even perfect in theory

And libertarianism -- even in theory -- is a cruel joke.