Socialism Rising, With Bernie Sanders Leading the Charge

By Selwyn Duke

“Libertarians and conservatives talk a lot about freedom,” writes Jacobin magazine, “but the most important kind of freedom is freedom from domination — and if you take that seriously, you should oppose capitalism.” This article, running Friday and titled “Socialism Is All About Expanding Freedom,” might hardly warrant mention, except that MSN.com saw fit to publicize it on its homepage.

The “freedom” bit is all about a rebranding. One might think that 200 years of abject failure, punctuated with 100 million dead bodies in socialism’s wake, would be enough to bury the misbegotten ideology. Not at all. In fact, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is helping lead its latest reincarnation, with a new book titled It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.

According to historian and sociologist Rainer Zitelmann, Sanders’ new effort reads like Marx and Engels, except that they actually had some positive words about “capitalism” — the senator has not a one.

Sanders “calls for a political revolution in which working people come together,” which, of course, is just a rephrasing of Marx’s “Workers of the world, unite!” He also, Zitelmann informs, demonizes the rich, stoking envy by infusing his book with numerous tales of the wealthy’s opulent lifestyles. Yet he doesn’t mention that they generally made their money by, as late economist Dr. Walter Williams would put it, “serving their fellow man” through the market system.

Read the rest here.

Comments

[Robert Berger]

The premise of Duke's argument is false . He is implying that Berne Sanders is a. Soviet style or Maoist communist and that he advocates turning the US into another Soviet Union, which is just plain ludicrous . And even if he were such a now mythical creature , doing this would not even be possible .
All Sanders advocates is dismantling our government's disastrous supply side "trickle down " economic system , which is a terrible form of capitalism which has done nothing but create a tiny handful of greedy superrich Americans while destroying our middle class and. making it almost impossible for the poor to escape poverty . Sanders realizes that prosperity does not trickle . It never has and never will .
You cannot create general prosperity in a country by giving massive tax breaks to the wealthy while destroying its social safety net .
The crumbs from the tables of the rich do not fall down and make the poor and middle class prosper . And you cannot allow wages to remain stagnant for decades while allowing the cost of living to rise steadily . This is exactly what the Republican party has been doing for decades, with disastrous results .
If the rich and the churches do not pay their fair share of taxes , overall poverty for those who are not rich is inevitable .

[Robert Berger]

Conservatives like Duke are always reminding us about the millions who died under atheist communism in the 20th century . But Stalin, Mao et al did not kill millions of people because they were atheists and socialists . They did so because they were ruthless, power-hungry sociopaths .