What It Means to Be a Socialist
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_it_means_to_be_a_socialist_20150920
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Posted on Sep 20, 2015
By Chris Hedges
A giant American flag hangs on the facade of the New York Stock Exchange.
(Mary Altaffer / AP)
Chris Hedges gave this speech Sunday at a Santa Ana, Calif., event sponsored
by the Green Party of Orange County.
We live in a revolutionary moment. The disastrous economic and political
experiment that attempted to organize human behavior around the dictates of
the global marketplace has failed. The promised prosperity that was to have
raised the living standards of workers through trickle-down economics has
been exposed as a lie. A tiny global oligarchy has amassed obscene wealth,
while the engine of unfettered corporate capitalism plunders resources,
exploits cheap, unorganized labor and creates pliable, corrupt governments
that abandon the common good to serve corporate profit. The relentless drive
by the fossil fuel industry for profits is destroying the ecosystem,
threatening the viability of the human species. And no mechanisms to
institute genuine reform or halt the corporate assault are left within the
structures of power, which have surrendered to corporate control. The
citizen has become irrelevant. He or she can participate in heavily
choreographed elections, but the demands of corporations and banks are
paramount.
History has amply demonstrated that the seizure of power by a tiny cabal,
whether a political party or a clique of oligarchs, leads to despotism.
Governments that cater exclusively to a narrow interest group and redirect
the machinery of state to furthering the interests of that group are no
longer capable of responding rationally in times of crisis. Blindly serving
their masters, they acquiesce to the looting of state treasuries to bail out
corrupt financial houses and banks while ignoring chronic unemployment and
underemployment, along with stagnant or declining wages, crippling debt
peonage, a collapsing infrastructure, and the millions left destitute and
often homeless by deceptive mortgages and foreclosures.
A bankrupt liberal class, holding up values it does nothing to defend,
discredits itself as well as the purported liberal values of a civil
democracy as it is swept aside, along with those values. In this moment, a
political, economic or natural disasterin short a crisiswill ignite
unrest, lead to instability and see the state carry out draconian forms of
repression to maintain order. This is what lies ahead.
We will, as Friedrich Engels wrote, make a transition to either socialism or
barbarism. If we do not dismantle global capitalism we will descend into the
Hobbesian chaos of failed states, mass migrationswhich we are already
witnessingand endless war. Populations, especially in the global South,
will endure misery and high mortality rates caused by collapsing ecosystems
and infrastructures on a scale not seen since perhaps the black plague.
There can be no accommodation with global capitalism. We will overthrow this
system or be crushed by it. And at this moment of crisis we need to remind
ourselves what being a socialist means and what it does not mean.
First and foremost, all socialists are unequivocal anti-militarists and
anti-imperialists. They understand that there is no genuine social,
political, economic or cultural reform as long as the militarists and their
corporatist allies in the war industry continue to loot and pillage the
state budget, leaving the poor to go hungry, workingmen and -women in
distress, the infrastructure to collapse and social services to be slashed
in the name of austerity. The psychosis of permanent war, which infected the
body politic after World War I with the internal and external war on
communism, and which today has mutated into the war on terror, is used by
the state to strip us of civil liberties, redirect our resources to the war
machine and criminalize democratic dissent. We have squandered trillions of
dollars and resources in endless and futile wars, from Vietnam to the Middle
East, at a time of ecological and fiscal crisis. The folly of endless war is
one of the signs of a dying civilization. One F-22 Raptor fighter plane
costs $350 million. We have 187 of them. One Tomahawk cruise missile costs
$1.41 million. We fired 161 of them when we attacked Libya. This missile
attack on Libya alone cost us a quarter of a billion dollars. We spend an
estimated $1.7 trillion a year on war, far more than the official 54 percent
of discretionary spending, or roughly $600 billion. If we dont break the
back of the war machine, profound change will be impossible.
We have been at war almost continuously since the first Gulf War in 1991,
followed by Somalia in 1992, Haiti in 1994, Bosnia in 1995, Serbia-Kosovo in
1999, Afghanistan in 2001, where we have now been fighting for 14 years, and
Iraq in 2003. And we can toss in Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Syria, along
with Israels proxy war against the Palestinian people.
The human cost has been horrendous. Over 1 million dead in Iraq. Millions
more are displaced or are refugees. Iraq will never be reconstituted as a
unified state. And it was our war industry that created the mess. We
attacked a country that did not threaten us, and had no intention of
threatening its neighbors, and destroyed one of the most modern
infrastructures in the Middle East. We brought not only terror and
deathincluding the Shiite death squads we armed and trainedbut power
outages, food shortages and the collapse of basic services, from garbage
collection to sewer and water treatment. We dismantled Iraqs institutions,
disbanded its security forces, threw its health service into crisis and
engineered massive poverty and unemployment. And out of the chaos rose
insurgents, gangsters, kidnapping rings, jihadists and rogue paramilitary
groupsincluding our hired mercenaries, like [the current army of] Iraq.
Gary Leupp in an article in Counterpunch titled How George W. Bush
Destroyed the Temple of Baal got it when he wrote:
Bush destroyed the law and order which had permitted girls to walk to
school, heads uncovered, in modern western dress. He destroyed the freedom
of physicians and other professionals to go about their work and caused
masses of them to exit their country. He destroyed neighborhoods whose
residents were forced to flee for their lives. He destroyed the Christian
community, which dropped from 1.5 million in 2001 to perhaps 200,000 a
decade later. He destroyed the prevalent ideology of secularism and ushered
in an era of bitterly contested sectarian rule. He destroyed the right to
broadcast rock n roll music, or sell liquor and DVDs.
He destroyed the stability of Anbar province by sowing the chaos that
allowed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to establishfor the first timean al-Qaeda
branch in Iraq.
He destroyed the stability of Syria when Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (now
ISIL) retreated into that neighboring country during the surge of 2007. By
creating power vacuums and generating new chapters and spin-offs of
al-Qaeda, he destroyed Yazidi communities and their freedom from genocide
and slavery. By hatching the forerunner of ISIL, he destroyed the prospects
for a peaceful Arab Spring in Syria three years after his presidency
ended.
Through his actions he destroyed the border between Syria and Iraq. He
destroyed the Tomb of Jonah in Mosul. He destroyed 3,300 year old monuments,
the glorious art of the Assyrians, in Nimrud. On August 23 while sitting in
his home artists studio in Crawford, Texas, he destroyed the 2,000-year-old
Temple of Baalshamin in Palmyra, Syria.
The most complete structure in that gorgeous pearl of an ancient preserved
city, a mix of Roman, Syrian and Egyptian artistic influences, is now a pile
of rubble.
Foreign battlefields are laboratories for the architects of industrial
slaughter. They perfect the tools of control and annihilation on the
demonized and the destitute. But these tools eventually make their way back
to the heart of empire. As the corporatists and the militarists disembowel
the nation, rendering our manufacturing centers boarded-up wastelands and
tossing our citizens into poverty and despair, the methods of subjugation
familiar to those on the outer reaches migrate back to uswholesale
surveillance, indiscriminate use of lethal force in the streets of our
cities against unarmed citizens, a stripping away of our civil liberties, a
dysfunctional court system, drones, arbitrary arrest, detention and mass
incarceration. The tyranny empire imposes on others, as Thucydides reminded
us, it finally imposes on itself. Those who kill in our name abroad soon
kill in our name at home. Democracy is snuffed out. As the German socialist
Karl Liebknecht said during the First World War: The main enemy is at
home. We will destroy the engines of endless war and shut down the war
profiteers or we will become the next victims; indeed many in our marginal
communities already are its victims.
You cannot be a socialist and an imperialist. You cannot, as Bernie Sanders
has done, support the Obama administrations wars in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen and be a socialist. You cannot, as
Sanders has done, vote for every military appropriations bill, including
every bill and resolution that empowers and sanctions Israel to carry out
its slow-motion genocide of the Palestinian people, and be a socialist. And
you cannot laud, as Sanders has done, military contractors because they
bring jobs to your state. Sanders may have the rhetoric of inequality down,
but he is a full-fledged member of the Democratic Caucus, which kneels
before the war industry and their lobbyists. And no genuine grass-roots
movement will ever be born within the bowels of the Democratic Party
establishment, which is currently attempting to shut down Sanders to make
sure its anointed candidate is the nominee. No elected official dares to
challenge any weapons system, no matter how costly or redundant. And
Sanders, who votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time, steers clear
of confronting the master of war.
Sanders, of course, like all elected officials, profits from this Faustian
pact. The Vermont Democratic Party leadership, in return for his deference,
has not supported any candidate to run against Sanders since 1990. Sanders
endorses Democratic candidates, no matter how much they push neoliberalism
down our throats, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. And Sanders,
carrying water for the Democrats, is the primary obstacle to the building of
a third party in Vermont.
There is a reason no establishment politician, including Sanders, dares say
a word against the war industry. If you do, you end up like Ralph Nader,
tossed into the political wilderness. Nader was not afraid to speak this
truth. And it is in the wilderness, I am afraid, that real socialists must
for the moment reside. Socialists understand that if we do not dismantle the
war industry, nothing, absolutely nothing, will change; indeed, things will
only get worse.
War is a business. Imperial wars seize natural resources on behalf of
corporations and ensure the profits of the arms industry. This is as true in
Iraq as it was in our campaigns of genocide against Native Americans. And,
as A. Philip Randolph said, it is only when it is impossible to profit from
war that wars will be dramatically curtailed, if not stopped. No one sitting
in the boardroom of General Dynamics is hoping peace breaks out in the
Middle East. No one in the Pentagon, especially the generals who build their
careers by fighting and managing wars, prays for a cessation of conflict.
War, wrapped in the cant of nationalism and the euphoria that comes with the
giddy celebration of power and violence, is used by ruling elites to thwart
and destroy the aspirations of workingmen and -women and distract us from
our disempowerment.
Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. ... And
that is war, in a nutshell, the [five-time] socialist presidential
candidate Eugene V. Debs said during World War I. The master class has
always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
Debs, who in 1912 received almost a million votes, was sentenced to 10 years
in prison for saying this. The judge who sentenced him denounced those who
would strike the sword from the hand of this nation while she is engaged in
defending herself against a foreign and brutal power.
I have been accused of obstructing the war, Debs said in court. I admit
it. I abhor war. I would oppose war if I stood alone.
Debs, who would spend 32 months in prison, until 1921, also delivered to
many a socialist credo at his sentencing after being found guilty of
violating the Espionage Act:
Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I
made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I
said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it.
While there is a criminal element, I am of it. While there is a soul in
prison, I am not free.
The capitalist class and its doppelgängers in the military establishment
have carried out what John Ralston Saul calls a coup détat in slow motion.
The elites use war, as they always have, as a safety valve for class
conflict. War, as W.E.B. Du Bois said, creates an artificial community of
interest between the oligarchs and the poor, diverting the poor from their
natural interests. The redirecting of national frustrations and emotions
into the struggle against a common enemy, the cant of patriotism, the
endemic racism that is the fuel of all ideologies that sustain war, the
false bonding that comes with the sense of comradeship, seduces those on the
margins of society. They feel in wartime that they belong. They feel they
have a place. They are offered the chance to be heroes. And off they march
like sheep to the slaughter. By the time they find out, it is too late.
Modern totalitarianism can integrate the masses so completely into the
political structure, through terror and propaganda, that they become the
architects of their own enslavement, wrote Dwight Macdonald. This does not
make slavery less, but on the contrary morea paradox there is no space to
unravel here. Bureaucratic collectivism, not capitalism, is the most
dangerous future enemy of socialism.
War, as Randolph Bourne wrote, is the health of the state. It allows the
state to accrue to itself power and resources that in peacetime a citizenry
would never permit. And that is why the war state, like the one we live in,
has to make certain that we are always afraid. Constant violence by the war
machine, we are assured, will alone make us safe. Any attempt to rein in
spending or expanding power will profit the enemy.
It was the militarists and the capitalists that at the end of World War II
conspired to roll back the gains made by workingmen and -women under the New
Deal. They used the rhetoric of the Cold War to cement into place an economy
geared towards total war, even in peacetime. This permitted the arms
industry to continue to make weapons, with guaranteed profits from the
state, and permitted the generals to continue to preside over their
fiefdoms. The incestuous relations between the corporatists and the
militarists see retired generals and officers offered lucrative jobs in the
war industry.
The manufacturing of weapons systems and the waging of war is today the
chief activity of the state. It is no longer one among other means of
advancing the national interest, as Simone Weil pointed out, but has become
the sole national interest.
These corporatists and militarists are the enemy of socialists. They
bankrolled and promoted movements in the early 20th century that called for
reforms within these structures of capitalismthat spoke in the language of
the politics of productivism, that eschewed the language of class conflict
and talked only about economic growth and a partnership with the capitalist
class. The NAACP, for example, was formed to lure African-Americans away
from the Communist Party, the only radical organization in the early 20th
century that did not discriminate. The AFL-CIO was [later] fed CIA money to
help crush and supplant radical unions abroad and at home. The AFL-CIO, like
the NAACP, is today a victim of its own corruption and bureaucratic
senility. Its bloated leadership pulls down huge salaries as its dwindling
rank and file is stripped of benefits and protections. The capitalists no
longer need what they once called responsible unionismwhich meant pliable
unionism. And once the capitalists and the militarists killed off the
radical movements and unions they finished off the dupes who had helped them
do it. And that is why less than 12 percent of our countrys workforce is
unionized and why we have such vast income disparities and chronic
unemployment and underemployment. Surplus labor, desperate for work and
unwilling to challenge the bosses to retain a job, is the bulwark of
capitalism.
The radicals, such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or
Wobblies, founded by Mother Jones and Big Bill Haywood in 1905, were
destroyed by the state. Department of Justice agents in 1912 made
simultaneous raids on 48 IWW meeting halls across the country and arrested
165 IWW union leaders. One hundred one went to trial, including Big Bill
Haywood, who testified for three days. One of the IWW leaders told the
court:
You ask me why the I.W.W. is not patriotic to the United States. If you were
a bum without a blanket; if you had left your wife and kids when you went
west for a job, and had never located them since; if your job had never kept
you long enough in a place to qualify you to vote; if you slept in a lousy,
sour bunkhouse, and ate food just as rotten as they could give you and get
by with it; if deputy sheriffs shot your cooking cans full of holes and
spilled your grub on the ground; if your wages were lowered on you when the
bosses thought they had you down; if there was one law for Ford, Suhr, and
Mooney and another for Harry Thaw: if every person who represented law and
order and the nation beat you up, railroaded you to jail, and the good
Christian people cheered and told them to go to it, how in hell do you
expect a man to be patriotic?
This war is a business mans war and we dont see why we should go out and
get shot in order to save the lovely state of affairs that we now enjoy.
The Wobblies once led strikes involving hundreds of thousands of workers and
preached an uncompromising doctrine of class warfare. It went the way of the
passenger pigeon. The Socialist Party by 1912 had 126,000 members, 1,200
officeholders in 340 municipalities, and 29 English and 22 foreign-language
weeklies, along with three English and six foreign-language dailies. It
included in its ranks tenant farmers, garment workers, railroad workers,
coal miners, hotel and restaurant workers, dock workers and lumberjacks. It
too was liquidated by the state. Socialist leaders were jailed or deported.
Socialist publications such as The Masses and Appeal to Reason were banned.
The assault, aided later by McCarthyism, has left us without the vocabulary
to make sense of our own reality, to describe the class war being waged
against us by our corporate oligarchs. And it has left us without the
radical movements that, as Howard Zinn made clear, opened up all the spaces
in American democracy.
We will regain this militancy, this uncompromising commitment to socialism,
or the system the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls inverted
totalitarianism will establish the most efficient security and surveillance
state in human history and a species of neofeudalism. We must stop pouring
our energy into mainstream political campaigns. The game is rigged. We will
rebuild our radical movements or become hostages to the capitalists and the
war industry. Fear is the only language the power elite understands. This is
a dark fact of human nature. It is why Richard Nixon was our last liberal
president. Nixon was not a liberal [personally]. He was devoid of empathy
and lacked a conscience. But he was frightened of movements. You do not make
your enemy afraid by selling out. You make your enemy afraid by refusing to
submit, by fighting for your vision and by organizing. It is not our job to
take power. It is our job to build movements to keep power in check. Without
these movements nothing is possible.
You get freedom by letting your enemy know that youll do anything to get
your freedom; then youll get it, Malcolm X said. When you get that kind
of attitude, theyll label you as a crazy Negro, or theyll call you a
crazy niggerthey dont say Negro. Or theyll call you an extremist or a
subversive, or seditious, or a red, or a radical. But when you stay radical
long enough, and get enough people to be like you, youll get your freedom.
... So dont you run around here trying to make friends with somebody whos
depriving you of your rights. Theyre not your friends, no, theyre your
enemies. Treat them like that and fight them, and youll get your freedom;
and after you get your freedom, your enemy will respect you. And I say that
with no hate. I dont have hate in me. I have no hate at all. I dont have
any hate. Ive got some sense. Im not going to let anybody who hates me
tell me to love him.
The New Dealwhich as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a charter member of the
oligarchic class, saidsaved capitalism, was put in place because socialists
were strong and a serious threat. The oligarchs understood that with the
breakdown of capitalismsomething I expect we will again witness in our
lifetimesthere was a real possibility of a socialist revolution. They were
terrified they would lose their wealth and power. Roosevelt, writing to a
friend in 1930, said there was no question in my mind that it is time for
the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation. History
shows that where this occurs occasionally, nations are saved from
revolution.
In other words, Roosevelt went to his fellow oligarchs and said hand over
some of your money or you will lose all your money in a revolution. And his
fellow capitalists complied. And that is how the government created 15
million jobs, Social Security, unemployment benefits and public works
projects. The capitalists did not do this because the suffering of the
masses moved them. They did this because they were scared. And they were
sacred of radicals and socialists.
George Bernard Shaw got it right in his play Major Barbara. The greatest
crime is poverty. It is the crime every socialist is dedicated to
eradicating. As Shaw wrote:
All the other crimes are virtues beside it; all the other dishonors are
chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities, spreads
horrible pestilences, strikes dead the very souls of all who come within
sight, sound, or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here
and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then. What do they matter? They
are only the accidents and illnesses of life; there are not fifty genuine
professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people,
abject people, dirty people, ill-fed, ill-clothed people. They poison us
morally and physically; they kill the happiness of society; they force us to
do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear
they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools
fear crime; we all fear poverty.
We must stop looking for our salvation in strong leaders. Strong people, as
Ella Baker said, do not need strong leaders. Politicians, even good
politicians, play the game of compromise and are too often seduced by the
privileges of power. Sanders, from all I can tell, began his political life
as a socialist in the 1960s when this was hardly a bold political statement,
but quickly figured out he was not going to have a seat at the table if he
remained one. He wants his seniority in the Senate. He wants his committee
chairmanships. He wants his ability to retain his seat unchallenged. This
was no doubt politically astute. But in this process he sold us out.
Jeremy Corbyn, the new head of the [British] Labour Party, offers another
example. He spent three decades marginalized even within his own party
because he held fast to the central tenets of socialism. And as the lie of
neoliberalism, championed by the two ruling parties in Britain, became
apparent, people knew whom they could trust. Corbyn never made an astute
career move in his life. And that is why the establishment is so frightened
of him. They know they cannot buy Corbyn off, any more than you could buy
off Mother Jones or Big Bill Haywood. Integrity and courage are powerful
weapons. We have to learn how to use them. We have to stand up for what we
believe in. And we have to accept the risks and even the ridicule that comes
with this stance. We will not prevail any other way.
As a socialist I am not concerned with what is expedient or what is popular.
I am concerned with what is right. I am concerned with holding fast to the
core ideals of socialism, if for no other reason than keeping this option
alive for future generations. And these ideals are the only ones that make
possible a better world.
If you will not call for an arms embargo along with the boycott, divestment
and sanctions against Israel, you are not a socialist. If you will not
demand we dismantle our military establishment, which is managing the
governments wholesale surveillance of every citizen and storing all our
personal information in perpetuity in government computer banks, and if you
will not abolish the for-profit arms industry, you are not a socialist. If
you will not call for the prosecution of those leaders, including George W.
Bush and Barack Obama, who engage in aggressive acts of pre-emptive war,
which under post-Nuremberg laws is a criminal act, you are not a socialist.
If you will not stand with the oppressed across the globe you are not a
socialist. Socialists do not pick and choose whom among the oppressed it is
convenient to support. Socialists understand that you stand with all the
oppressed or none of the oppressed, that this is a global fight for life
against global corporate tyranny. We will win only when we stand together,
when we see the struggle of workingmen in Greece, Spain and Egypt as our own
struggle.
If you will not call for full employment and unionized workplaces you are
not a socialist. If you will not call for inexpensive mass transit,
especially in impoverished communities, you are not a socialist. If you will
not call for universal, single-payer health care and a banning of for-profit
health care corporations you are not a socialist. If you will not raise the
minimum wage to $15 an hour you are not a socialist. If you are not willing
to provide a weekly income of $600 to the unemployed, the disabled,
stay-at-home parents, the elderly and those unable to work you are not a
socialist. If you will not repeal anti-union laws, like the Taft-Hartley
Act, and trade agreements from NAFTA to the TPP and CAFTA, you are not a
socialist. If you will not guarantee all Americans a pension in old age you
are not a socialist. If you will not support two years of paid maternity
leave, as well as shorter workweeks with no loss in pay and benefits, you
are not a socialist. If you will not repeal the Patriot Act and Section 1021
of the National Defense Authorization Act as well as halt government spying
on citizens, along with mass incarceration, you are not a socialist. If you
will not put into place laws that prohibit all forms of male violence
against women and criminalize the trafficking and pimping out of prostituted
girls and women, while not criminalizing the exploited girls and women, you
are not a socialist. If you do not support a womans right to control her
own body you are not a socialist. If you do not support full equality for
our GBLT community you are not a socialist. If you will not declare global
warming a national and global emergency and divert our energy and resources
to saving the planet through public investment in renewable energy and an
end to our reliance on fossil fuels you are not a socialist. If you will not
nationalize public utilities, including the railroads, energy companies and
banks, you are not a socialist. If you will not support government funding
for the arts and public broadcasting to create places where creativity,
self-expression and voices of dissent can be heard and seen you are not a
socialist. If you will not terminate our nuclear weapons programs and build
a nuclear-free world you are not a socialist. If you will not demilitarize
our police, meaning that police no longer carry weapons when they patrol our
streets but rely on specialized armed units that have to be authorized
case-by-case to use lethal force, you are not a socialist. If you will not
support government training and rehabilitation programs for the poor and
those in our prisons, along with the abolition of the death penalty, you are
not a socialist. If you will not grant full citizenship to undocumented
workers you are not a socialist. If you do not declare a moratorium on
foreclosures and bank repossessions you are not a socialist. If you will not
provide free education from day care to university, and forgive all student
debt, you are not a socialist. And if you will not provide free, state-run
mental health care, especially for those now caged in our prisons, you are
not a socialist. If you will not dismantle our empire and bring our soldiers
and Marines home you are not a socialist.
Socialists do not sacrifice the weak and the vulnerable, especially
children, on the altars of profit. And the measure of a successful society
for a socialist is not the GDP or the highs of the stock market but the
right of everyone, especially children, never go to bed hungry, to live in
safety and security, to be nurtured and educated, and to grow up fulfill his
or her potential. Work is not only about a wage, it is about dignity and a
sense of self-worth.
I am not naive about the forces arrayed against us. I understand the
difficulty of our struggle. But we will never succeed if we attempt to
accommodate the current structures of power. Our strength lies in our
steadfastness and our integrity. It lies in our ability to hold fast to our
ideals, as well as our willingness to sacrifice for those ideals. We must
refuse to cooperate. We must march to the beat of a different drum. We must
rebel. And we must grasp that rebellion is not carried out finally for what
it achieves, but for whom it allows us to become. Rebellion sustains in an
age of darkness hope and the capacity for love. Rebellion must become our
vocation.
You do not become a dissident just because you decide one day to take up
this most unusual career, Vaclav Havel said when he battled the communist
regime in Czechoslovakia. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of
responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You
are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict
with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being
branded an enemy of society. ... The dissident does not operate in the realm
of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for
office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public.
He offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his
own skinand he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming
the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a
citizen, regardless of the cost.
These neoliberal forces are rapidly destroying the earth. Polar ice caps and
glaciers are melting. Temperatures and sea levels are rising. Species are
gong extinct. Floods, monster hurricanes, mega-droughts and wildfires have
begun to eat away at the planet. The great mass migrations predicted by
climate scientists have begun. And even if we stopped all carbon emissions
today we would still endure the effects of catastrophic climate change. Out
of the disintegrating order comes the nihilistic violence that always
characterizes societies that fall apartmass shootings at home and religious
persecution, beheadings and executions by individuals that neoliberalism and
globalism have demonized, attacked and discarded as human refuse.
I cannot promise you we will win. I cannot promise you we will even survive
as a species. But I can promise you that an open and sustained defiance of
global capitalism and the merchants of death, along with the building of a
socialist movement, is our only hope. I am a parent, as are many of you. We
have betrayed our children. We have squandered their future. And if we rise
up, even if we fail, future generations, and especially those who are most
precious to us, will be able to say we tried, that we stood up and fought
for life. The call to resistance, which will require civil disobedience and
jail time, is finally a call to the moral life. Resistance is not about what
we achieve, but about what it allows us to become. In the end, I do not
fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are
fascists.
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What It Means to Be a Socialist
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_it_means_to_be_a_socialist_20150920
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Posted on Sep 20, 2015
By Chris Hedges
A giant American flag hangs on the facade of the New York Stock Exchange.
(Mary Altaffer / AP)
Chris Hedges gave this speech Sunday at a Santa Ana, Calif., event sponsored
by the Green Party of Orange County.
We live in a revolutionary moment. The disastrous economic and political
experiment that attempted to organize human behavior around the dictates of
the global marketplace has failed. The promised prosperity that was to have
raised the living standards of workers through trickle-down economics has
been exposed as a lie. A tiny global oligarchy has amassed obscene wealth,
while the engine of unfettered corporate capitalism plunders resources,
exploits cheap, unorganized labor and creates pliable, corrupt governments
that abandon the common good to serve corporate profit. The relentless drive
by the fossil fuel industry for profits is destroying the ecosystem,
threatening the viability of the human species. And no mechanisms to
institute genuine reform or halt the corporate assault are left within the
structures of power, which have surrendered to corporate control. The
citizen has become irrelevant. He or she can participate in heavily
choreographed elections, but the demands of corporations and banks are
paramount.
History has amply demonstrated that the seizure of power by a tiny cabal,
whether a political party or a clique of oligarchs, leads to despotism.
Governments that cater exclusively to a narrow interest group and redirect
the machinery of state to furthering the interests of that group are no
longer capable of responding rationally in times of crisis. Blindly serving
their masters, they acquiesce to the looting of state treasuries to bail out
corrupt financial houses and banks while ignoring chronic unemployment and
underemployment, along with stagnant or declining wages, crippling debt
peonage, a collapsing infrastructure, and the millions left destitute and
often homeless by deceptive mortgages and foreclosures.
A bankrupt liberal class, holding up values it does nothing to defend,
discredits itself as well as the purported liberal values of a civil
democracy as it is swept aside, along with those values. In this moment, a
political, economic or natural disasterin short a crisiswill ignite
unrest, lead to instability and see the state carry out draconian forms of
repression to maintain order. This is what lies ahead.
We will, as Friedrich Engels wrote, make a transition to either socialism or
barbarism. If we do not dismantle global capitalism we will descend into the
Hobbesian chaos of failed states, mass migrationswhich we are already
witnessingand endless war. Populations, especially in the global South,
will endure misery and high mortality rates caused by collapsing ecosystems
and infrastructures on a scale not seen since perhaps the black plague.
There can be no accommodation with global capitalism. We will overthrow this
system or be crushed by it. And at this moment of crisis we need to remind
ourselves what being a socialist means and what it does not mean.
First and foremost, all socialists are unequivocal anti-militarists and
anti-imperialists. They understand that there is no genuine social,
political, economic or cultural reform as long as the militarists and their
corporatist allies in the war industry continue to loot and pillage the
state budget, leaving the poor to go hungry, workingmen and -women in
distress, the infrastructure to collapse and social services to be slashed
in the name of austerity. The psychosis of permanent war, which infected the
body politic after World War I with the internal and external war on
communism, and which today has mutated into the war on terror, is used by
the state to strip us of civil liberties, redirect our resources to the war
machine and criminalize democratic dissent. We have squandered trillions of
dollars and resources in endless and futile wars, from Vietnam to the Middle
East, at a time of ecological and fiscal crisis. The folly of endless war is
one of the signs of a dying civilization. One F-22 Raptor fighter plane
costs $350 million. We have 187 of them. One Tomahawk cruise missile costs
$1.41 million. We fired 161 of them when we attacked Libya. This missile
attack on Libya alone cost us a quarter of a billion dollars. We spend an
estimated $1.7 trillion a year on war, far more than the official 54 percent
of discretionary spending, or roughly $600 billion. If we dont break the
back of the war machine, profound change will be impossible.
We have been at war almost continuously since the first Gulf War in 1991,
followed by Somalia in 1992, Haiti in 1994, Bosnia in 1995, Serbia-Kosovo in
1999, Afghanistan in 2001, where we have now been fighting for 14 years, and
Iraq in 2003. And we can toss in Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Syria, along
with Israels proxy war against the Palestinian people.
The human cost has been horrendous. Over 1 million dead in Iraq. Millions
more are displaced or are refugees. Iraq will never be reconstituted as a
unified state. And it was our war industry that created the mess. We
attacked a country that did not threaten us, and had no intention of
threatening its neighbors, and destroyed one of the most modern
infrastructures in the Middle East. We brought not only terror and
deathincluding the Shiite death squads we armed and trainedbut power
outages, food shortages and the collapse of basic services, from garbage
collection to sewer and water treatment. We dismantled Iraqs institutions,
disbanded its security forces, threw its health service into crisis and
engineered massive poverty and unemployment. And out of the chaos rose
insurgents, gangsters, kidnapping rings, jihadists and rogue paramilitary
groupsincluding our hired mercenaries, like [the current army of] Iraq.
Gary Leupp in an article in Counterpunch titled How George W. Bush
Destroyed the Temple of Baal got it when he wrote:
Bush destroyed the law and order which had permitted girls to walk to
school, heads uncovered, in modern western dress. He destroyed the freedom
of physicians and other professionals to go about their work and caused
masses of them to exit their country. He destroyed neighborhoods whose
residents were forced to flee for their lives. He destroyed the Christian
community, which dropped from 1.5 million in 2001 to perhaps 200,000 a
decade later. He destroyed the prevalent ideology of secularism and ushered
in an era of bitterly contested sectarian rule. He destroyed the right to
broadcast rock n roll music, or sell liquor and DVDs.
He destroyed the stability of Anbar province by sowing the chaos that
allowed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to establishfor the first timean al-Qaeda
branch in Iraq.
He destroyed the stability of Syria when Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (now
ISIL) retreated into that neighboring country during the surge of 2007. By
creating power vacuums and generating new chapters and spin-offs of
al-Qaeda, he destroyed Yazidi communities and their freedom from genocide
and slavery. By hatching the forerunner of ISIL, he destroyed the prospects
for a peaceful Arab Spring in Syria three years after his presidency
ended.
Through his actions he destroyed the border between Syria and Iraq. He
destroyed the Tomb of Jonah in Mosul. He destroyed 3,300 year old monuments,
the glorious art of the Assyrians, in Nimrud. On August 23 while sitting in
his home artists studio in Crawford, Texas, he destroyed the 2,000-year-old
Temple of Baalshamin in Palmyra, Syria.
The most complete structure in that gorgeous pearl of an ancient preserved
city, a mix of Roman, Syrian and Egyptian artistic influences, is now a pile
of rubble.
Foreign battlefields are laboratories for the architects of industrial
slaughter. They perfect the tools of control and annihilation on the
demonized and the destitute. But these tools eventually make their way back
to the heart of empire. As the corporatists and the militarists disembowel
the nation, rendering our manufacturing centers boarded-up wastelands and
tossing our citizens into poverty and despair, the methods of subjugation
familiar to those on the outer reaches migrate back to uswholesale
surveillance, indiscriminate use of lethal force in the streets of our
cities against unarmed citizens, a stripping away of our civil liberties, a
dysfunctional court system, drones, arbitrary arrest, detention and mass
incarceration. The tyranny empire imposes on others, as Thucydides reminded
us, it finally imposes on itself. Those who kill in our name abroad soon
kill in our name at home. Democracy is snuffed out. As the German socialist
Karl Liebknecht said during the First World War: The main enemy is at
home. We will destroy the engines of endless war and shut down the war
profiteers or we will become the next victims; indeed many in our marginal
communities already are its victims.
You cannot be a socialist and an imperialist. You cannot, as Bernie Sanders
has done, support the Obama administrations wars in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen and be a socialist. You cannot, as
Sanders has done, vote for every military appropriations bill, including
every bill and resolution that empowers and sanctions Israel to carry out
its slow-motion genocide of the Palestinian people, and be a socialist. And
you cannot laud, as Sanders has done, military contractors because they
bring jobs to your state. Sanders may have the rhetoric of inequality down,
but he is a full-fledged member of the Democratic Caucus, which kneels
before the war industry and their lobbyists. And no genuine grass-roots
movement will ever be born within the bowels of the Democratic Party
establishment, which is currently attempting to shut down Sanders to make
sure its anointed candidate is the nominee. No elected official dares to
challenge any weapons system, no matter how costly or redundant. And
Sanders, who votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time, steers clear
of confronting the master of war.
Sanders, of course, like all elected officials, profits from this Faustian
pact. The Vermont Democratic Party leadership, in return for his deference,
has not supported any candidate to run against Sanders since 1990. Sanders
endorses Democratic candidates, no matter how much they push neoliberalism
down our throats, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. And Sanders,
carrying water for the Democrats, is the primary obstacle to the building of
a third party in Vermont.
There is a reason no establishment politician, including Sanders, dares say
a word against the war industry. If you do, you end up like Ralph Nader,
tossed into the political wilderness. Nader was not afraid to speak this
truth. And it is in the wilderness, I am afraid, that real socialists must
for the moment reside. Socialists understand that if we do not dismantle the
war industry, nothing, absolutely nothing, will change; indeed, things will
only get worse.
War is a business. Imperial wars seize natural resources on behalf of
corporations and ensure the profits of the arms industry. This is as true in
Iraq as it was in our campaigns of genocide against Native Americans. And,
as A. Philip Randolph said, it is only when it is impossible to profit from
war that wars will be dramatically curtailed, if not stopped. No one sitting
in the boardroom of General Dynamics is hoping peace breaks out in the
Middle East. No one in the Pentagon, especially the generals who build their
careers by fighting and managing wars, prays for a cessation of conflict.
War, wrapped in the cant of nationalism and the euphoria that comes with the
giddy celebration of power and violence, is used by ruling elites to thwart
and destroy the aspirations of workingmen and -women and distract us from
our disempowerment.
Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. ... And
that is war, in a nutshell, the [five-time] socialist presidential
candidate Eugene V. Debs said during World War I. The master class has
always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
Debs, who in 1912 received almost a million votes, was sentenced to 10 years
in prison for saying this. The judge who sentenced him denounced those who
would strike the sword from the hand of this nation while she is engaged in
defending herself against a foreign and brutal power.
I have been accused of obstructing the war, Debs said in court. I admit
it. I abhor war. I would oppose war if I stood alone.
Debs, who would spend 32 months in prison, until 1921, also delivered to
many a socialist credo at his sentencing after being found guilty of
violating the Espionage Act:
Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I
made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I
said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it.
While there is a criminal element, I am of it. While there is a soul in
prison, I am not free.
The capitalist class and its doppelgängers in the military establishment
have carried out what John Ralston Saul calls a coup détat in slow motion.
The elites use war, as they always have, as a safety valve for class
conflict. War, as W.E.B. Du Bois said, creates an artificial community of
interest between the oligarchs and the poor, diverting the poor from their
natural interests. The redirecting of national frustrations and emotions
into the struggle against a common enemy, the cant of patriotism, the
endemic racism that is the fuel of all ideologies that sustain war, the
false bonding that comes with the sense of comradeship, seduces those on the
margins of society. They feel in wartime that they belong. They feel they
have a place. They are offered the chance to be heroes. And off they march
like sheep to the slaughter. By the time they find out, it is too late.
Modern totalitarianism can integrate the masses so completely into the
political structure, through terror and propaganda, that they become the
architects of their own enslavement, wrote Dwight Macdonald. This does not
make slavery less, but on the contrary morea paradox there is no space to
unravel here. Bureaucratic collectivism, not capitalism, is the most
dangerous future enemy of socialism.
War, as Randolph Bourne wrote, is the health of the state. It allows the
state to accrue to itself power and resources that in peacetime a citizenry
would never permit. And that is why the war state, like the one we live in,
has to make certain that we are always afraid. Constant violence by the war
machine, we are assured, will alone make us safe. Any attempt to rein in
spending or expanding power will profit the enemy.
It was the militarists and the capitalists that at the end of World War II
conspired to roll back the gains made by workingmen and -women under the New
Deal. They used the rhetoric of the Cold War to cement into place an economy
geared towards total war, even in peacetime. This permitted the arms
industry to continue to make weapons, with guaranteed profits from the
state, and permitted the generals to continue to preside over their
fiefdoms. The incestuous relations between the corporatists and the
militarists see retired generals and officers offered lucrative jobs in the
war industry.
The manufacturing of weapons systems and the waging of war is today the
chief activity of the state. It is no longer one among other means of
advancing the national interest, as Simone Weil pointed out, but has become
the sole national interest.
These corporatists and militarists are the enemy of socialists. They
bankrolled and promoted movements in the early 20th century that called for
reforms within these structures of capitalismthat spoke in the language of
the politics of productivism, that eschewed the language of class conflict
and talked only about economic growth and a partnership with the capitalist
class. The NAACP, for example, was formed to lure African-Americans away
from the Communist Party, the only radical organization in the early 20th
century that did not discriminate. The AFL-CIO was [later] fed CIA money to
help crush and supplant radical unions abroad and at home. The AFL-CIO, like
the NAACP, is today a victim of its own corruption and bureaucratic
senility. Its bloated leadership pulls down huge salaries as its dwindling
rank and file is stripped of benefits and protections. The capitalists no
longer need what they once called responsible unionismwhich meant pliable
unionism. And once the capitalists and the militarists killed off the
radical movements and unions they finished off the dupes who had helped them
do it. And that is why less than 12 percent of our countrys workforce is
unionized and why we have such vast income disparities and chronic
unemployment and underemployment. Surplus labor, desperate for work and
unwilling to challenge the bosses to retain a job, is the bulwark of
capitalism.
The radicals, such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or
Wobblies, founded by Mother Jones and Big Bill Haywood in 1905, were
destroyed by the state. Department of Justice agents in 1912 made
simultaneous raids on 48 IWW meeting halls across the country and arrested
165 IWW union leaders. One hundred one went to trial, including Big Bill
Haywood, who testified for three days. One of the IWW leaders told the
court:
You ask me why the I.W.W. is not patriotic to the United States. If you were
a bum without a blanket; if you had left your wife and kids when you went
west for a job, and had never located them since; if your job had never kept
you long enough in a place to qualify you to vote; if you slept in a lousy,
sour bunkhouse, and ate food just as rotten as they could give you and get
by with it; if deputy sheriffs shot your cooking cans full of holes and
spilled your grub on the ground; if your wages were lowered on you when the
bosses thought they had you down; if there was one law for Ford, Suhr, and
Mooney and another for Harry Thaw: if every person who represented law and
order and the nation beat you up, railroaded you to jail, and the good
Christian people cheered and told them to go to it, how in hell do you
expect a man to be patriotic?
This war is a business mans war and we dont see why we should go out and
get shot in order to save the lovely state of affairs that we now enjoy.
The Wobblies once led strikes involving hundreds of thousands of workers and
preached an uncompromising doctrine of class warfare. It went the way of the
passenger pigeon. The Socialist Party by 1912 had 126,000 members, 1,200
officeholders in 340 municipalities, and 29 English and 22 foreign-language
weeklies, along with three English and six foreign-language dailies. It
included in its ranks tenant farmers, garment workers, railroad workers,
coal miners, hotel and restaurant workers, dock workers and lumberjacks. It
too was liquidated by the state. Socialist leaders were jailed or deported.
Socialist publications such as The Masses and Appeal to Reason were banned.
The assault, aided later by McCarthyism, has left us without the vocabulary
to make sense of our own reality, to describe the class war being waged
against us by our corporate oligarchs. And it has left us without the
radical movements that, as Howard Zinn made clear, opened up all the spaces
in American democracy.
We will regain this militancy, this uncompromising commitment to socialism,
or the system the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls inverted
totalitarianism will establish the most efficient security and surveillance
state in human history and a species of neofeudalism. We must stop pouring
our energy into mainstream political campaigns. The game is rigged. We will
rebuild our radical movements or become hostages to the capitalists and the
war industry. Fear is the only language the power elite understands. This is
a dark fact of human nature. It is why Richard Nixon was our last liberal
president. Nixon was not a liberal [personally]. He was devoid of empathy
and lacked a conscience. But he was frightened of movements. You do not make
your enemy afraid by selling out. You make your enemy afraid by refusing to
submit, by fighting for your vision and by organizing. It is not our job to
take power. It is our job to build movements to keep power in check. Without
these movements nothing is possible.
You get freedom by letting your enemy know that youll do anything to get
your freedom; then youll get it, Malcolm X said. When you get that kind
of attitude, theyll label you as a crazy Negro, or theyll call you a
crazy niggerthey dont say Negro. Or theyll call you an extremist or a
subversive, or seditious, or a red, or a radical. But when you stay radical
long enough, and get enough people to be like you, youll get your freedom.
... So dont you run around here trying to make friends with somebody whos
depriving you of your rights. Theyre not your friends, no, theyre your
enemies. Treat them like that and fight them, and youll get your freedom;
and after you get your freedom, your enemy will respect you. And I say that
with no hate. I dont have hate in me. I have no hate at all. I dont have
any hate. Ive got some sense. Im not going to let anybody who hates me
tell me to love him.
The New Dealwhich as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a charter member of the
oligarchic class, saidsaved capitalism, was put in place because socialists
were strong and a serious threat. The oligarchs understood that with the
breakdown of capitalismsomething I expect we will again witness in our
lifetimesthere was a real possibility of a socialist revolution. They were
terrified they would lose their wealth and power. Roosevelt, writing to a
friend in 1930, said there was no question in my mind that it is time for
the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation. History
shows that where this occurs occasionally, nations are saved from
revolution.
In other words, Roosevelt went to his fellow oligarchs and said hand over
some of your money or you will lose all your money in a revolution. And his
fellow capitalists complied. And that is how the government created 15
million jobs, Social Security, unemployment benefits and public works
projects. The capitalists did not do this because the suffering of the
masses moved them. They did this because they were scared. And they were
sacred of radicals and socialists.
George Bernard Shaw got it right in his play Major Barbara. The greatest
crime is poverty. It is the crime every socialist is dedicated to
eradicating. As Shaw wrote:
All the other crimes are virtues beside it; all the other dishonors are
chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities, spreads
horrible pestilences, strikes dead the very souls of all who come within
sight, sound, or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here
and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then. What do they matter? They
are only the accidents and illnesses of life; there are not fifty genuine
professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people,
abject people, dirty people, ill-fed, ill-clothed people. They poison us
morally and physically; they kill the happiness of society; they force us to
do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear
they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools
fear crime; we all fear poverty.
We must stop looking for our salvation in strong leaders. Strong people, as
Ella Baker said, do not need strong leaders. Politicians, even good
politicians, play the game of compromise and are too often seduced by the
privileges of power. Sanders, from all I can tell, began his political life
as a socialist in the 1960s when this was hardly a bold political statement,
but quickly figured out he was not going to have a seat at the table if he
remained one. He wants his seniority in the Senate. He wants his committee
chairmanships. He wants his ability to retain his seat unchallenged. This
was no doubt politically astute. But in this process he sold us out.
Jeremy Corbyn, the new head of the [British] Labour Party, offers another
example. He spent three decades marginalized even within his own party
because he held fast to the central tenets of socialism. And as the lie of
neoliberalism, championed by the two ruling parties in Britain, became
apparent, people knew whom they could trust. Corbyn never made an astute
career move in his life. And that is why the establishment is so frightened
of him. They know they cannot buy Corbyn off, any more than you could buy
off Mother Jones or Big Bill Haywood. Integrity and courage are powerful
weapons. We have to learn how to use them. We have to stand up for what we
believe in. And we have to accept the risks and even the ridicule that comes
with this stance. We will not prevail any other way.
As a socialist I am not concerned with what is expedient or what is popular.
I am concerned with what is right. I am concerned with holding fast to the
core ideals of socialism, if for no other reason than keeping this option
alive for future generations. And these ideals are the only ones that make
possible a better world.
If you will not call for an arms embargo along with the boycott, divestment
and sanctions against Israel, you are not a socialist. If you will not
demand we dismantle our military establishment, which is managing the
governments wholesale surveillance of every citizen and storing all our
personal information in perpetuity in government computer banks, and if you
will not abolish the for-profit arms industry, you are not a socialist. If
you will not call for the prosecution of those leaders, including George W.
Bush and Barack Obama, who engage in aggressive acts of pre-emptive war,
which under post-Nuremberg laws is a criminal act, you are not a socialist.
If you will not stand with the oppressed across the globe you are not a
socialist. Socialists do not pick and choose whom among the oppressed it is
convenient to support. Socialists understand that you stand with all the
oppressed or none of the oppressed, that this is a global fight for life
against global corporate tyranny. We will win only when we stand together,
when we see the struggle of workingmen in Greece, Spain and Egypt as our own
struggle.
If you will not call for full employment and unionized workplaces you are
not a socialist. If you will not call for inexpensive mass transit,
especially in impoverished communities, you are not a socialist. If you will
not call for universal, single-payer health care and a banning of for-profit
health care corporations you are not a socialist. If you will not raise the
minimum wage to $15 an hour you are not a socialist. If you are not willing
to provide a weekly income of $600 to the unemployed, the disabled,
stay-at-home parents, the elderly and those unable to work you are not a
socialist. If you will not repeal anti-union laws, like the Taft-Hartley
Act, and trade agreements from NAFTA to the TPP and CAFTA, you are not a
socialist. If you will not guarantee all Americans a pension in old age you
are not a socialist. If you will not support two years of paid maternity
leave, as well as shorter workweeks with no loss in pay and benefits, you
are not a socialist. If you will not repeal the Patriot Act and Section 1021
of the National Defense Authorization Act as well as halt government spying
on citizens, along with mass incarceration, you are not a socialist. If you
will not put into place laws that prohibit all forms of male violence
against women and criminalize the trafficking and pimping out of prostituted
girls and women, while not criminalizing the exploited girls and women, you
are not a socialist. If you do not support a womans right to control her
own body you are not a socialist. If you do not support full equality for
our GBLT community you are not a socialist. If you will not declare global
warming a national and global emergency and divert our energy and resources
to saving the planet through public investment in renewable energy and an
end to our reliance on fossil fuels you are not a socialist. If you will not
nationalize public utilities, including the railroads, energy companies and
banks, you are not a socialist. If you will not support government funding
for the arts and public broadcasting to create places where creativity,
self-expression and voices of dissent can be heard and seen you are not a
socialist. If you will not terminate our nuclear weapons programs and build
a nuclear-free world you are not a socialist. If you will not demilitarize
our police, meaning that police no longer carry weapons when they patrol our
streets but rely on specialized armed units that have to be authorized
case-by-case to use lethal force, you are not a socialist. If you will not
support government training and rehabilitation programs for the poor and
those in our prisons, along with the abolition of the death penalty, you are
not a socialist. If you will not grant full citizenship to undocumented
workers you are not a socialist. If you do not declare a moratorium on
foreclosures and bank repossessions you are not a socialist. If you will not
provide free education from day care to university, and forgive all student
debt, you are not a socialist. And if you will not provide free, state-run
mental health care, especially for those now caged in our prisons, you are
not a socialist. If you will not dismantle our empire and bring our soldiers
and Marines home you are not a socialist.
Socialists do not sacrifice the weak and the vulnerable, especially
children, on the altars of profit. And the measure of a successful society
for a socialist is not the GDP or the highs of the stock market but the
right of everyone, especially children, never go to bed hungry, to live in
safety and security, to be nurtured and educated, and to grow up fulfill his
or her potential. Work is not only about a wage, it is about dignity and a
sense of self-worth.
I am not naive about the forces arrayed against us. I understand the
difficulty of our struggle. But we will never succeed if we attempt to
accommodate the current structures of power. Our strength lies in our
steadfastness and our integrity. It lies in our ability to hold fast to our
ideals, as well as our willingness to sacrifice for those ideals. We must
refuse to cooperate. We must march to the beat of a different drum. We must
rebel. And we must grasp that rebellion is not carried out finally for what
it achieves, but for whom it allows us to become. Rebellion sustains in an
age of darkness hope and the capacity for love. Rebellion must become our
vocation.
You do not become a dissident just because you decide one day to take up
this most unusual career, Vaclav Havel said when he battled the communist
regime in Czechoslovakia. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of
responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You
are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict
with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being
branded an enemy of society. ... The dissident does not operate in the realm
of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for
office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public.
He offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his
own skinand he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming
the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a
citizen, regardless of the cost.
These neoliberal forces are rapidly destroying the earth. Polar ice caps and
glaciers are melting. Temperatures and sea levels are rising. Species are
gong extinct. Floods, monster hurricanes, mega-droughts and wildfires have
begun to eat away at the planet. The great mass migrations predicted by
climate scientists have begun. And even if we stopped all carbon emissions
today we would still endure the effects of catastrophic climate change. Out
of the disintegrating order comes the nihilistic violence that always
characterizes societies that fall apartmass shootings at home and religious
persecution, beheadings and executions by individuals that neoliberalism and
globalism have demonized, attacked and discarded as human refuse.
I cannot promise you we will win. I cannot promise you we will even survive
as a species. But I can promise you that an open and sustained defiance of
global capitalism and the merchants of death, along with the building of a
socialist movement, is our only hope. I am a parent, as are many of you. We
have betrayed our children. We have squandered their future. And if we rise
up, even if we fail, future generations, and especially those who are most
precious to us, will be able to say we tried, that we stood up and fought
for life. The call to resistance, which will require civil disobedience and
jail time, is finally a call to the moral life. Resistance is not about what
we achieve, but about what it allows us to become. In the end, I do not
fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are
fascists.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_republican_assault_planned_parenthoo
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