[Thread on Socialism] I've been reading some of the debates around the candidacy of @SenSanders for the US presidency. Bernie is a Democratic Socialist. This is a powerful tradition within the United States that begins with the Workingmen's Party of the United States (1876).
@SenSanders The Workingmen's Party - which becomes the Socialist Party - is only twenty years younger than the Republican Party. It has its roots firmly in the soil of US politics, and emerged into the mainstream as the principle defender of the railroad workers in the strike of 1877.
@SenSanders Quite importantly, in 1878, the Workingmen's Party - an openly Marxist party - won 5 of the 7 seats in the Kentucky state legislature, the state now represented by the execrable @senatemajldr.
@SenSanders @senatemajldr The Socialist Party put forward Eugene V. Debs as its candidate for president several times, most importantly in 1912 and 1920, when he got nearly a million votes. The party sent two men to Congress in the House - Victor Berger and Meyer London.
@SenSanders @senatemajldr When Bernie Sanders was getting involved in the Socialist movement, the leaders of the Socialist Party were Bayard Rustin - Martin Luther King Jr.'s very close advisor - and Sasha Zimmerman - leader of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union; two authentic mass leaders.
@SenSanders @senatemajldr One of the long-standing bricks thrown at Socialism is that it is expensive - socialist want to spend money on this and that, and where is the money coming from, and this is just idealistic claptrap. That's the general criticism. It comes without much thought.
@SenSanders @senatemajldr It comes without much thought because it does not consider the massive waste inherent in capitalism. For example, $6.4 trillion dollars spent on warfare by the US since 9/11 (as per the Cost of War project at Brown University - watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/). That's capitalist waste.
@SenSanders @senatemajldr Or the uncounted trillions of dollars from the public exchequer given, yes given, to corporations in tax breaks and in public funds through the central banks (in the case of the US, the Federal Reserve). This is just money turned over that could be used on the social side.
@SenSanders @senatemajldr That capitalists have been hoarding wealth - a minimum of $32 trillion in tax havens - is a reason to consider socialism, to consider the use of social wealth for the social good, the use of people's money to solve people's problems not to solve financiers' liquidity problems.
@SenSanders @senatemajldr When Debs - the political ancestor of Sanders - moved towards socialism in 1897, he said, 'I am for socialism because I am for humanity. . . . Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization'.
@SenSanders @senatemajldr It's worth reading Carl Sandburg's Socialist Party pamphlet - You and Your Job (1900).
He writes, 'We are born social creatures. We live as social creatures'. A great reason to be a socialist.
Read it all here: debs.indstate.edu/s2133y6_1900.p….
He writes, 'We are born social creatures. We live as social creatures'. A great reason to be a socialist.
Read it all here: debs.indstate.edu/s2133y6_1900.p….
@SenSanders @senatemajldr You should turn to 'How I Became a Socialist Agitator' (1908) by Kate Richards O'Hare. 'I lived again with new aims, new hopes, new aspirations, and the dazzling view of the new and wonderful work to do'.
archive.org/details/HowIBe…
archive.org/details/HowIBe…
@SenSanders @senatemajldr I suspect all that talk of socialism being somehow alien to the planet does not appreciate the long history of the socialist movement in the United States, a movement that culminates - for now - in the mass-based campaign of Bernie Sanders.
@SenSanders @senatemajldr Phew.
