BRUCE LEVINE—Wilson’s venom for Debs was such that even after the end of the war, Wilson announced, “This man was a traitor to his country and he will never be pardoned during my administration.” Wilson even denied a pardon for Debs when it was recommended because of Debs’s poor health by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer (notorious for his “Palmer Raids,” incarcerating and deporting dissenters). It was the Republican president Warren Harding, following Wilson, who commuted Debs’s sentence in 1921.
READ ONCategory: CAPITALIST FRONTS
How Inequality is Killing Us
SUSAN ROSENTHAL—Despite their many benefits, worker-owned co-operatives cannot transform society. As Rosa Luxemburg pointed out more than 100 years ago, “Producers’ co-operatives are excluded from the most important branches of capital production — the textile, mining, metallurgical and petroleum industries, machine construction, locomotive and shipbuilding. For this reason alone, co-operatives in the field of production cannot be seriously considered as the instrument of a general social transformation…Within the framework of present society, producers’ co-operatives are limited to the role of simple annexes to consumers’ co-operatives.”
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Understanding American Capitalism (Revised)
PATRICE GREANVILLE—From the ruling orders’ perspective the wages of propaganda have been substantial. In the countries that pretend to operate as democracies, false consciousness among the masses allows the upper classes to run society in their own narrow self-interest while pretending to do so in the interest of all, as true democracy would require. Enormous, mind-boggling wealth and power are thus rapidly accumulated by the tip of the social pyramid in all societies riddled with inequality. In America, an empire on the move for at least a century now, and one of the most income-polarized nations in the developed world, the ideological stranglehold has allowed the US ruling class not only to make a mess of domestic policy, but the freedom to engage with relative impunity in constant and murderous meddling in the affairs of scores of other nations, as the case of Iran, Korea and Vietnam a generation ago, and Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria today, so eloquently confirm.
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Caleb Maupin dissects Jim Carrey’s idea of socialism
COMMENT BY PATRICE GREANVILLE
Terribly lucid, as usual. But I think Caleb is wrong in saying the US post office is not an example of socialism (as are all public libraries of one kind or another). In fact, we could also argue that emergency municipal ambulances and the fire department in most localities are also examples of the idea of socialism far more than capitalism. They are islands of socialism in the ocean of capitalism, constantly buffetng them. Does anyone get a bill from the fire deparment after they put out a fire in their homes? True, the boundaries are sometimes fluid, so I’ll just leave it at that. —PG