Kshama Sawant: Return of the Alternative - Why You Must Vote for a Real, Genuine Socialist

Reproduced here for fair use and discussion purposes. Original article found here. My comments in bold.
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I found this article accidently. Though Ms. Sawant has since won the election, I thought it would be useful to examine the thinking process of a self-avowed socialist.
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by Charles Mudede

For the first time in my life, I will vote for a candidate who actually holds my political views. Her name is Kshama Sawant. She is running for the city council seat held by Richard Conlin. She, like me, is a socialist. She, like me, sees no future, in environmental terms, for a capitalist market system that's not regulated by democratic institutions, (This is the fundamental false premise on which socialism is based, and it's a typical leftist approach to rhetoric. The capitalist market system is not unregulated. It never has been. There is no such thing as unregulated capitalism, and in fact, capitalism cannot exist outside an environment of the rule of law. Capitalism REQUIRES laws to punish wrongdoers, create contracts, and establish the rules of the game.) 

and believes that the solutions to many of our social problems (lack of real police accountability, lack of meaningful investments in public modes of transportation, and lack of adequate protection from financial and other job- related risks) will be found on the open terrain of class struggle. 

When I turned 18 in Zimbabwe, I had no reason to vote, because the president of that country, who claimed to be a Marxist, was in fact a tribalist, a dictator, and really quite mad. (The problem with implemented socialism in a nutshell: It invests too much power in the hands of people who cannot be held accountable.) 

(The joke at the time: You can vote for Bob, Bobby, or Robert Mugabe.) As for the US, after I became a citizen in 2005, the politicians I voted for were loosely or distantly committed to core socialist principles. Patty Murray, Barack Obama, and even Mike McGinn were on the left of American politics, but none were deaf to the loud and constant demands of the rich and their moneymaking mania. (Socialism ultimately means, to use Karl Polanyi's words, "the subordination of the economy to society.") (And none of them ever will be as long as government has so much power to dictate the flow of money in society. An avowed socialist is simply more of the same.)

Obama really does believe in the greatness of a free and competitive market, (I frankly doubt this.) 

Murray helps Boeing obtain defense contracts, and McGinn (though far better and more liberal than Ed Murray) is at the end of the day a deficit hawk (apparently a bad thing...) 

who has and will cut jobs to balance the city's budget.

None of these politicians would be in power today if they, like Sawant, were members of an actual socialist party. (Ah, there we have it. The Left must hide its agenda, because no one would vote for them if they said what they really want to do. Here we have a tacit admission that socialism is not only unpopular, it is unpalatable. And this despite decades of indoctrination by leftists in positions of power.)

Indeed, Sawant's rise in the local political world has the potential to generate international attention. During a recent phone conversation I had with Leo Panitch, the editor of the Socialist Register, a journal that was cofounded by none other than Ralph Miliband (yes, the father of the current leader of Britain's Labour Party, Ed Miliband—unlike his father, Ed is no socialist), he expressed great amazement and enthusiasm when I shared the news that an actual socialist had a chance of winning a significant political position in Seattle. "Wow, that's just fantastic... That's phenomenal," said Panitch. Now why would a world-famous and influential socialist like Panitch, who recently coauthored an excellent book, The Making of Global Capitalism, published by Verso (the most highly regarded radical leftist publisher in the English-speaking world), be so impressed with what appears to be a minor political achievement of a virtually unknown economics professor? (I'll answer that. Because socialism is so bad, so wrong, so corrupted, so murderous, so destructive, that no one in their right mind would want it.) 

To appreciate the answer to this question, we need a little historical background.

Let's begin with a British economist named John Maynard Keynes. At the end of World War II, Keynes provided Western governments with a great solution to the real internal and external threat of socialism—internally in the form of the labor movements (that were radicalized by the Great Depression) and externally by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (which emerged from the war as a new superpower). Keynes's solution: Give workers higher wages, reliable social welfare programs, and a real shot at the middle class, and basically they will shut up and be nicer to rich people. (Ummm, yeah. These things are exactly what Ms. Sawant, as a socialist, is in favor of. The author injects a bit of editorializing when he says, "be nicer to rich people." This is not a feature of Keynes' theory, nor has it ever been a feature of social democracy. Therefore, this little canard, inserted to suggest the difference between socialism and social democracy, is moot. In fact, there is no difference between socialism and social democracy in kind, only in degree.) 

This solution, which is called social democracy (or Keynesianism or demand-side economics), was implemented and in 1947 initiated in the US, Europe, and Japan a long period of great economic performance that's now called the Golden Age of Capitalism. (He attributes, without evidence, the post war economic boom to social democracy. I would suggest that the boom happened in spite of social democracy, largely because the most egregious parts of social democracy [like Social Security] hadn't had enough time at that point to weigh down the economy as they are doing now.)

Socialism in the West could not compete with social democracy, (Because it wasn't and because socialism cannot compete with any system that allows people to freely choose and freely associate. Socialism is contrary to human nature.) 

and it also wanted to distance itself from the USSR, whose leaders turned out to be nothing more than criminals. (Example #2 of corruption in socialism. This suggests to me that the author is not operating in reality. He seems to think that the corruption in socialistic societies is not because of socialism. But I guarantee you he thinks that corruption in capitalistic societies is because of capitalism.)

But then something bad happened to social democracy in the early '70s. The rich became convinced that the high wages being handed to workers were exerting greater and greater downward pressure on their profits. (An unsupported claim.)

This belief, which was not in fact correct (but that's another story for another time), led to the rise of a new economic program, neoliberalism (or supply-side economics), that basically attacked labor, aggressively privatized state institutions, and ripped social services to pieces. (None of this happened.) 

Keynesianism was eventually replaced by neoliberalism in the early '80s. (No, keynesianism is still the predominate economics philosophy embraced by government to this day.)

In the US, this moment is called "the Reagan revolution." (The Reagan revolution was a short-lived success, an aberration, in fact. Keynesian liberalism was able to beat down the benefits of Reagan's greatness. The Reagan revolution was never able to do more than co-exist with big government liberalism.)

After the fall of the Soviet Union in the late '80s, Margaret Thatcher's famous declaration, "There is no alternative" (also known as TINA), became a fact of life. Social democracy, socialism, communism, it was said, had all been tried and failed. (Quite true.)

Concern for workers' rights and wages proved to be a bad foundation for economic policies. (Artfully phrased. However, it's never been about concern for workers' rights and wages, it's about the rising up of the proletariat to overthrow the bourgeois. A socialist ought to know this. Unless, of course, he's doing what the Left typically does, hiding his true agenda.) 

From now on, the rich would be the real job creators. (This has always been the case. People with money are the ones who can afford to pay people to do the work. Poor people do not hire anyone.) 

"Adolph Reed [a black American political scientist and contributor to the Nation] described [this] situation as capitalism in a moment of no working-class opposition," Sam Gindin, the coauthor of The Making of Global Capitalism, explained to me during a phone conversation.

But check this out: Because capitalism became our only reality, (As mentioned before, capitalism has not been our reality at all.) 

all people ever saw in the papers, on TV, and on the internet was the devastation and misery it causes. (It is true that the horror stories are celebrated in the media, because the media is largely Left. But it is not true that the misery and devastation was caused by capitalism.) 

There was the Mobutu-level corruption of Enron, the expensive wars for oil and Halliburton's stockholders, the spectacular rise of student debt, the Hurricane Katrina mess, the crash of 2008, the bailout of the rich, the foreclosures in poor and middle-class neighborhoods, and so on and so on. (Each of these events was caused by people who violated capitalism.) 

Everyone has forgotten the propaganda images of bland food, ugly cars, and long lines in the former Eastern Bloc. But everyone can easily recall the images of a major capitalist corporation spewing millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico and creating an oil slick that was visible from space. (Does the writer not remember Chernobyl? If he wants to attribute an oil spill to capitalism, he must attribute Chernobyl to socialism. The fact is, neither event is a political eventuality.)

Suddenly, calling someone a socialist seemed not as bad as calling someone a capitalist. Teabaggers could throw the word socialism at Obama or Obamacare, and it just did not stick or have much of an effect. Occupy protesters, however, could call Wall Street bankers capitalists, and the word not only stuck, but hurt. Indeed, in 2010, the Texas Board of Education voted to replace the word "capitalism" in school texts with the much friendlier term "free-enterprise system." (The Left has been using the word capitalism as an epithet for decades, aided by a complicit media and punched up by leftist academics. All we have here is a statement of the success of leftist propaganda.)

It is in this context that Sawant, who is a member of a real-deal socialist party, the Socialist Alternative (which is also running a competitive candidate for a council seat in Minneapolis, Ty Moore), has risen from obscurity to the mainstream of Seattle politics. True, the Socialist Alternative party is running a smart campaign, and Sawant is a smart candidate, and the idea to focus on tangible campaign agendas such as pay increases, rent control, and taxing the rich is proving to be efficacious. And true, Socialist Alternative's program has the kind of political pragmatism that many find absent from the Socialist Workers Party—a local group that has a reputation for promoting ideas and programs that even most on the left find downright kooky. (Sawant's positions and rhetoric, by and large, are indistinguishable from what a typical Democrat believes. It turns out that the only real difference is she's being a little more honest about what she intends. Just a little.)

But the Socialist Alternative savvy is also being rewarded by a political climate that is less hostile to socialist-leaning programs like universal health care, progressive taxes, and affordable higher education. Indeed, many basic government programs like Medicaid and Social Security are by their very nature socialist. (Bingo.)

It's no accident that the period of the greatest economic growth in the US was between 1947 and 1973, the peak moment for social democracy. (Correlation is not causation.)

For the past 30 years, we have given capitalism everything it wants—low taxes, low wages, budget cuts— (This is so false as to be laughable.) 

and in return, all we got back are demands for even lower taxes, lower wages, and deeper budget cuts. What if for once we just stopped giving capitalism anything? How bad would that be? TINA? There is an alternative. Her name is Sawant. Vote for her.

(He never did tell use why we must vote for a real, genuine socialist?, did he?)