90 Miles From Tyranny : The Socialist Party Platform Is Pathetic and Ignorant

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Thursday, August 23, 2018

The Socialist Party Platform Is Pathetic and Ignorant

The socialists in the U.S. have been attempting to reject capitalism and our constitutional system for over 100 years. They have never controlled the House or the Senate and never won the presidency. The most votes a Socialist Party candidate ever received was 6% of the popular vote in 1912, when Eugene V. Debs was the candidate. Nevertheless, the striking reality is that a large percentage of the Socialist Party platform of 1912 has been implemented, including the graduated income tax. Most of the implementation came during the New Deal under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Only in their program of "Collective Ownership" were the goals of the Socialist Party not met over time. The people of the U.S. decided on regulation instead of ownership. The socialists wanted ownership of all banks, all transportation, all mines, all means of communication, and all land.

Now, the Socialist Party has updated its platform of 106 years ago. A century of monumental historical events has transpired since 1912, and we can see that while the rhetoric has changed, the contempt for and vilification of the USA are the fundamental premises of the socialists' 2018-2019 document.

No matter what an uninformed, inconsequential figurehead like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or her mentor, the ever bloviating Bernie Sanders, may say, on one tiresome Marxist point, there is continuity from 100 years ago. Although they are running as democratic socialists within the Democratic Party, their emphasis on "socialism" warrants our looking at the platform of the Socialist Party 2018-2019. This latest platform states, "[W]e call for social ownership and democratic control of productive resources, for a guarantee to all of the right to participate in societal production, and to a fair share of society's product, in accordance with individual needs." That point expresses the desire for governmental ownership of the means of production, an axiom of Marxist theory.

Further, the socialists designate who will have control over the wealth and means of production. It won't be the multinational corporations or the millions of smaller corporations and mom-and-pop businesses that still exist. No. They state, "Socialism will establish a new social and economic order in which workers and community members will take responsibility for and control of their interpersonal relationships, their neighborhoods, their local government, and the production and distribution of all goods and services." This is nothing less than a restatement of the Leninist-Stalinist idea of workers' councils ("soviets"), but it throws in the words "community" or "neighborhoods" to make the socialists' vision seem more America-friendly. They want their vision to sound less centralized than it really is. They want it to sound more...
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