According to a recent PEW poll fourty-nine percent of voters under the age of thirty had a positive view socialism whereas only fourty-six percent had a positive view of capitalism. Socialism beating out capitalism in popularity with young voters represents a massive change in public opinion. Not long ago socialism was a smear term conservatives used to scare people with but now it's not so scary but has instead become down right popular. What does this mean for the future of America? Could we see the rise of a new socialist party or the "take over" of the Democratic party for socialism simmilar to the far right tea party take over of the Republican party?
The New Yorker :
"A 2011 Pew Research Center survey found that, among voters under the age of thirty, forty-nine per cent had a positive view of socialism. (Only forty-six per cent had a positive view of capitalism.) Peter Dreier, a professor of politics at Occidental College, who has written about Sanders, says that younger voters “may not be willing to entertain a whole new system, but they are open to a pretty profound critique of the current one. They’re not as naïve as Americans used to be during the Cold War—they know that there are varieties of capitalism, that there is social democracy in Scandinavia and Canada, where the government plays a bigger role in regulating corporations and in expanding the safety net.”
Honestly...
As I've said before in the past, Most people are already fearful of socialism in any/all forms because they think of the U.S.S.R and assume that communism began with socialism. But that's not necessary, IMHO, when considering the many variation of socialism just as there are variations of capitalism.
One form of socialism that's often not discussed is
the Bottoms-Up kind where people take action themselves, from the bottom up instead of being directed by small elites, top down. It can be seen as a forn of communalism.....and technically, as much as many capitalists say socialists want the government to have more control, it's always interesting how much the government is used to look out for/enforce the interests of the big buisnesses---especially when certain people in government will favor (via lobbying) some buisnesses more so than others and effectively have a socialism for the rich. ..and a capitalism for the poor where resources are taken and people are still told to compete with each other/do their best.
For many countries that were communists, it was never the case that it was ever 100% communist - as the economics allowed them to keep communist ideology while also having markets to a limited degree. In example, China has long been an economic giant - even in times where it has not sought to play by the rules - and has advanced in a myriad of ways since Deng Xiaoping brought China into limited capitalist-socialist hybrid territory while retaining their Communist Ethos ( #
68 ) - State Capitalism - and it has allowed them to reach the point where they are really the ones who are calling A LOT of the shots in the Economic world...including our own debt/tabs. They are already tied to the history of the U.S in its economic success due to how China even extended its reach in the U.S to help build much of what made U.S expansion possibly in the first place....as seen in the
ways that China supplied many of its people to the U.S for construction projects and the Chinese Americans were abused during the government building of the railroad systems throughout the history of the U.S...and
still have many of their rights consistently ignored by the government...despite how hard they work and seek to make buisnesses/adapt to many of the struggles coming their way.
I may disagree with others such as Marx - as well as Lenin, who I can sympathize with on some level - but I do think there are many aspects of history which get directly left out that we have to consider. Historically, Karl Marx promoted Marxist-Leninist socialism (communism from a Western perspective), not "democratic socialism" - which might account for the difference between North Korea, Laos, Vietnam, Nepal, Cuba, and the People's Republic of China as compared to Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands (which have similarities with communist governments)
The Communist Revolution did involve others fighting against tyranny in one form of government - and yet later, they found themselves doing a lot of the same things that may've been done to them.....and even Lenin was betrayed when many started to see how the talk of "equality" was used to hide the fact that others were deemed more "equal" than others - and later, it was taken over/became nothing more than another form of oppressive monarchy that spoke as if it was against a monarch concept.
The book
"Animal Farm" by George Orwell is truly one of the best critiques/satires on the issue. The revolt of the animals against Farmer Jones is Orwell's analogy with the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and Jones's attempt to regain control, with the aid of neighbouring farmers, parallels the Western powers' efforts in 1918-21 to crush the Bolsheviks. The pigs' rise to pre-eminence mirrors the rise of a Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR, just as Napoleon's emergence as the farm's sole leader reflects Stalin's emergence..and the pigs' appropriation of milk and apples for their own use, "the turning point of the story" as Orwell termed it in a letter to Dwight Macdonald, stands as an analogy for the crushing of the left-wing 1921 Kronstadt revolt against the Bolsheviks, and the difficult efforts of the animals to build the windmill suggest the various Five Year Plans...while the pigs' treatment of the other animals on the farm recalls the internal terror faced by the populace in the 1930s. Orwell had deep conviction that the Bolshevik revolution had been corrupted and the Soviet system become dark - as Orwell supported the goals of the socialists and yet condemned what it was turned into with the Soviets/U.S.S.R and Orwell himself wrote in 1946, "
Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution..[and] that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters [-] revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert.." What happened is that the Trotskyists sought to fight one form of corruption but opened the door for others to use the movement that was started to address an issue...and in the process, hijack a movement for their own ends in the name of good - and the same occurred with many fighting for Capitalism/Democracy.
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