The other day I was talking to one of my grandson's and, well, I was
talking toward my grandson while he was facing me, texting to one
friend or another. "Isolated?" he said, "I'm not isolated. I got
Face Book and I'm Liked by dozens of friends."
"But don't you miss going to the game, or hitting the surf, or joining
the boys for a hand ball game after work?"
"Well, I actually work out of my apartment these days, and my legs
don't hold me up on the surf board anymore. Gosh Gramps, I am turning
35 this July, you know."
My grandson does not feel isolated. He has a world of close friends.
As close as his iPad.
Now I'm not going to suggest that the development of all these
electronic gadgets was some well planned Corporate Capitalistic plot,
but if their goal was to isolate our youth, and then give them the
sense of being connected electronically, and then taking control of
that media and controlling them with Corporate Empire propaganda, they
couldn't have done a better job.
Chris Hedges hits another home run with this article. Isolate and
dominate. But always leave them believing that they are connected.
And they are. They are connected to the big Teat of the Empire.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/29/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> The Lonely American
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_lonely_american_20150628/
> Posted on Jun 28, 2015
> By Chris Hedges
>
> Sandy Johal uses a selfie stick to take a picture of herself in New
> York's
> Times Square in January. (Seth Wenig / AP)
> Michael P. Printup, president of Watkins Glen International, one of the
> country's largest racetracks, stood with a group of about a dozen race fans
> at 8:30 a.m. Saturday. Next to him were boxes of free doughnuts and coffee.
> A line of men with towels, who had spent the night in nearby RV campers,
> pop-up campers and tents, stood patiently outside the door to a shower
> room.
> A light drizzle, one that would turn into a torrential downpour and lead to
> the races being canceled in the afternoon, coated the group, all
> middle-aged
> or older white men. They were discussing, amid the high-pitched whine of
> cars practicing on the 3.4-mile, 11-turn circuit racetrack, the aging
> demographic of race fans and the inability to lure a new generation to the
> sport.
> "Maybe if you installed chargers for phones around the track they would
> come," suggested one gray-haired man.
> But it is not just sporting events. Public lectures, church services, labor
> unions, Veterans of Foreign Wars halls, Masonic halls, Rotary clubs, the
> Knights of Columbus, the Lions Club, Grange Hall meetings, the League of
> Women Voters, Daughters of the American Revolution, local historical
> societies, town halls, bowling leagues, bridge clubs, movie theater
> attendance (at a 20-year low), advocacy groups such as the NAACP and
> professional and amateur theatrical and musical performances cater to a
> dwindling and graying population. No one is coming through the door to take
> the place of the old members. A generation has fallen down the rabbit hole
> of electronic hallucinations—with images often dominated by violence and
> pornography. They have become, in the words of the philosopher Hannah
> Arendt, "atomized," sucked alone into systems of information and
> entertainment that cater to America's prurient fascination with the tawdry,
> the cruel and the deadening cult of the self.
> The entrapment in a world of nonstop electronic sounds and images, begun
> with the phonograph and radio, advanced by cinema and television and
> perfected by video games, the Internet and hand-held devices, is making it
> impossible to build relationships and structures that are vital for civic
> engagement and resistance to corporate power. We have been transformed into
> commodities. The steady decline of the white male heaven that is
> NASCAR—which has stopped publishing the falling attendance at its tracks
> and
> at some speedways has begun to tear down bleachers—is ominous. It is the
> symbol of a captive society.
> "We don't see the youth coming in," Printup said. "The millennial, the
> younger adults 18 to 35, is our target. We spend millions of dollars a year
> to target that group. But it's hard. Look around. Who's the youngest person
> here? That's our problem. Every sport from the NFL to NHL is struggling
> with
> the 18 to 35 demographic. They call them weird. They call them difficult.
> They only want to look at their computers."
> Printup's parent company, the International Speedway Corp. (ISC), has
> invested significant sums to reach this demographic with little to show for
> it.
> "We have a digital firm that represents nearly all our tracks in the ISC,"
> he went on, noting that Watkins Glen, which drew about 16,000 fans this
> past
> weekend, is one of the few exceptions to the decline in numbers. "The
> digital platform is about the only way you can get to them. We target them.
> We buy lists. We hire an agency that tracks their Web and Internet
> interactions. If they bring up racing, we want to be there. When a kid
> Googles 'Ferrari—racing—sports car' we are one of the top 10 lists. We pay
> for that. It is not cheap. That's how you have got to get these kids. But
> it's not working the way it should."
> Robert D. Putnam pointed out the decline of independent civic engagement,
> or
> what he called our "social capital," in his book "Bowling Alone: The
> Collapse and Revival of American Community." He noted that our severance
> from local communal and civic groups brought with it not only loneliness
> and
> alienation, but also a dangerous and passive reliance on the state.
> Totalitarian societies, including our own, inundate the public with a
> steady
> stream of propaganda accompanied by mindless entertainment. They seek to
> destroy independent organizations. In Nazi Germany the state provided
> millions of cheap, state-subsidized radios and then dominated the airwaves
> with its propaganda. Radio receivers were mounted in public locations in
> Stalin's Soviet Union; and citizens, especially illiterate peasants, were
> required to gather to listen to the state-controlled news and the
> dictator's
> speeches. These totalitarian states also banned civic organizations that
> were not under the iron control of the party.
> The corporate state is no different, although unlike past totalitarian
> systems it permits dissent in the form of print and does not ban fading
> civic and community groups. It has won the battle against literacy. The
> seductiveness of the image lures most Americans away from the print-based
> world of ideas. The fascination with the image swallows the time and energy
> required to attend and maintain communal organizations. If no one reads,
> why
> censor books? Let Noam Chomsky publish as much as he wants. Just keep his
> voice off the airwaves. If no one attends community meetings, group events
> or organizations, why prohibit them? Let them be held in near-empty rooms
> and left uncovered by the press until they are shuttered.
> The object of a totalitarian state is to keep its citizens locked within
> the
> parameters of official propaganda and permanently isolated. Propaganda and
> isolation make it difficult for an individual to express or carry out
> dissent. Official opinions, little more than digestible slogans and
> clichés,
> are crafted and disseminated by public relations specialists on behalf of
> the power elite. They are repeated endlessly over the airwaves until the
> public unconsciously ingests them. And the isolated public in a
> totalitarian
> society is unable to connect its personal experience of despair, anxiety,
> fear, frustration and economic insecurity to the structures that create
> these conditions. The isolated citizen is left feeling that his or her
> personal misfortune is an exception. The portrayal of society by systems of
> state propaganda—content, respectful of authority, just, economically
> secure
> and free—is mistaken for reality.
> Totalitarian propaganda, accompanied by isolation, or what Arendt called
> "atomization," makes it possible for a population not to "believe in
> anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust
> their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by
> anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself." This
> propaganda, Arendt went on, "gave the masses of atomized, undefinable,
> unstable and futile individuals a means of self-definition and
> identification."
> Corporate propaganda saturates the public, especially a generation wedded
> to
> new technology, with these lies. Its power, however, comes from the
> meticulous study of the moods, prejudices, whims and desires of the public,
> to manipulate the masses in their own language and emotions. Konrad Heiden
> made this point when he examined fascist propaganda in Nazi Germany, noting
> that propaganda must detect the murmur of the public "and translate it into
> intelligible utterance and convincing action."
> "The true aim of political propaganda is not to influence, but to study,
> the
> masses," Heiden wrote. "The speaker is in constant communication with the
> masses; he hears an echo, and senses the inner vibration." Heiden, forced
> to
> flee Nazi Germany, went on: "When a resonance issues from the depths of the
> substance, the masses have given him the pitch; he knows in what terms he
> must finally address them. Rather than a means of directing the mass mind,
> propaganda is a technique for riding with the masses. It is not a machine
> to
> make wind but a sail to catch the wind."
> Dissent will only be possible when we break the dark spell of corporate
> propaganda and the isolation that accompanies it. We must free ourselves
> from corporate tyranny, which means refusing to invest our emotional and
> intellectual energy in electronic images. We must build what the Russian
> anarchist Peter Kropotkin called "voluntary associations for study and
> teaching, for industry, commerce, science, art, literature, exploitation,
> resistance to exploitation, amusement, serious work, gratification and
> self-denial."
> "We know well the means by which this association of the lord, priest,
> merchant, judge, soldier, and king founded its domination," Kropotkin
> wrote.
> "It was by the annihilation of all free unions: of village communities,
> guilds, trades unions, fraternities, and medieval cities. It was by
> confiscating the land of the communes and the riches of the guilds; it was
> by the absolute and ferocious prohibition of all kinds of free agreement
> between men; it was by massacre, the wheel, the gibbet, the sword, and the
> fire that Church and State established their domination, and that they
> succeeded henceforth to reign over an incoherent agglomeration of subjects,
> who had no direct union more among themselves."
> Corporate propaganda has become so potent that many Americans are addicted.
> We must leave our isolated rooms. We must shut out these images. We must
> connect with those around us. It is only the communal that will save us. It
> is only the communal that will allow us to build a movement to resist. And
> it is only the communal that will sustain us through mutual aid as climate
> change and economic collapse increasingly dominate our future.
>
>
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
> The Lonely American
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_lonely_american_20150628/
> Posted on Jun 28, 2015
> By Chris Hedges
>
> Sandy Johal uses a selfie stick to take a picture of herself in New York's
> Times Square in January. (Seth Wenig / AP)
> Michael P. Printup, president of Watkins Glen International, one of the
> country's largest racetracks, stood with a group of about a dozen race fans
> at 8:30 a.m. Saturday. Next to him were boxes of free doughnuts and coffee.
> A line of men with towels, who had spent the night in nearby RV campers,
> pop-up campers and tents, stood patiently outside the door to a shower
> room.
> A light drizzle, one that would turn into a torrential downpour and lead to
> the races being canceled in the afternoon, coated the group, all
> middle-aged
> or older white men. They were discussing, amid the high-pitched whine of
> cars practicing on the 3.4-mile, 11-turn circuit racetrack, the aging
> demographic of race fans and the inability to lure a new generation to the
> sport.
> "Maybe if you installed chargers for phones around the track they would
> come," suggested one gray-haired man.
> But it is not just sporting events. Public lectures, church services, labor
> unions, Veterans of Foreign Wars halls, Masonic halls, Rotary clubs, the
> Knights of Columbus, the Lions Club, Grange Hall meetings, the League of
> Women Voters, Daughters of the American Revolution, local historical
> societies, town halls, bowling leagues, bridge clubs, movie theater
> attendance (at a 20-year low), advocacy groups such as the NAACP and
> professional and amateur theatrical and musical performances cater to a
> dwindling and graying population. No one is coming through the door to take
> the place of the old members. A generation has fallen down the rabbit hole
> of electronic hallucinations—with images often dominated by violence and
> pornography. They have become, in the words of the philosopher Hannah
> Arendt, "atomized," sucked alone into systems of information and
> entertainment that cater to America's prurient fascination with the tawdry,
> the cruel and the deadening cult of the self.
> The entrapment in a world of nonstop electronic sounds and images, begun
> with the phonograph and radio, advanced by cinema and television and
> perfected by video games, the Internet and hand-held devices, is making it
> impossible to build relationships and structures that are vital for civic
> engagement and resistance to corporate power. We have been transformed into
> commodities. The steady decline of the white male heaven that is
> NASCAR—which has stopped publishing the falling attendance at its tracks
> and
> at some speedways has begun to tear down bleachers—is ominous. It is the
> symbol of a captive society.
> "We don't see the youth coming in," Printup said. "The millennial, the
> younger adults 18 to 35, is our target. We spend millions of dollars a year
> to target that group. But it's hard. Look around. Who's the youngest person
> here? That's our problem. Every sport from the NFL to NHL is struggling
> with
> the 18 to 35 demographic. They call them weird. They call them difficult.
> They only want to look at their computers."
> Printup's parent company, the International Speedway Corp. (ISC), has
> invested significant sums to reach this demographic with little to show for
> it.
> "We have a digital firm that represents nearly all our tracks in the ISC,"
> he went on, noting that Watkins Glen, which drew about 16,000 fans this
> past
> weekend, is one of the few exceptions to the decline in numbers. "The
> digital platform is about the only way you can get to them. We target them.
> We buy lists. We hire an agency that tracks their Web and Internet
> interactions. If they bring up racing, we want to be there. When a kid
> Googles 'Ferrari—racing—sports car' we are one of the top 10 lists. We pay
> for that. It is not cheap. That's how you have got to get these kids. But
> it's not working the way it should."
> Robert D. Putnam pointed out the decline of independent civic engagement,
> or
> what he called our "social capital," in his book "Bowling Alone: The
> Collapse and Revival of American Community." He noted that our severance
> from local communal and civic groups brought with it not only loneliness
> and
> alienation, but also a dangerous and passive reliance on the state.
> Totalitarian societies, including our own, inundate the public with a
> steady
> stream of propaganda accompanied by mindless entertainment. They seek to
> destroy independent organizations. In Nazi Germany the state provided
> millions of cheap, state-subsidized radios and then dominated the airwaves
> with its propaganda. Radio receivers were mounted in public locations in
> Stalin's Soviet Union; and citizens, especially illiterate peasants, were
> required to gather to listen to the state-controlled news and the
> dictator's
> speeches. These totalitarian states also banned civic organizations that
> were not under the iron control of the party.
> The corporate state is no different, although unlike past totalitarian
> systems it permits dissent in the form of print and does not ban fading
> civic and community groups. It has won the battle against literacy. The
> seductiveness of the image lures most Americans away from the print-based
> world of ideas. The fascination with the image swallows the time and energy
> required to attend and maintain communal organizations. If no one reads,
> why
> censor books? Let Noam Chomsky publish as much as he wants. Just keep his
> voice off the airwaves. If no one attends community meetings, group events
> or organizations, why prohibit them? Let them be held in near-empty rooms
> and left uncovered by the press until they are shuttered.
> The object of a totalitarian state is to keep its citizens locked within
> the
> parameters of official propaganda and permanently isolated. Propaganda and
> isolation make it difficult for an individual to express or carry out
> dissent. Official opinions, little more than digestible slogans and
> clichés,
> are crafted and disseminated by public relations specialists on behalf of
> the power elite. They are repeated endlessly over the airwaves until the
> public unconsciously ingests them. And the isolated public in a
> totalitarian
> society is unable to connect its personal experience of despair, anxiety,
> fear, frustration and economic insecurity to the structures that create
> these conditions. The isolated citizen is left feeling that his or her
> personal misfortune is an exception. The portrayal of society by systems of
> state propaganda—content, respectful of authority, just, economically
> secure
> and free—is mistaken for reality.
> Totalitarian propaganda, accompanied by isolation, or what Arendt called
> "atomization," makes it possible for a population not to "believe in
> anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust
> their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by
> anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself." This
> propaganda, Arendt went on, "gave the masses of atomized, undefinable,
> unstable and futile individuals a means of self-definition and
> identification."
> Corporate propaganda saturates the public, especially a generation wedded
> to
> new technology, with these lies. Its power, however, comes from the
> meticulous study of the moods, prejudices, whims and desires of the public,
> to manipulate the masses in their own language and emotions. Konrad Heiden
> made this point when he examined fascist propaganda in Nazi Germany, noting
> that propaganda must detect the murmur of the public "and translate it into
> intelligible utterance and convincing action."
> "The true aim of political propaganda is not to influence, but to study,
> the
> masses," Heiden wrote. "The speaker is in constant communication with the
> masses; he hears an echo, and senses the inner vibration." Heiden, forced
> to
> flee Nazi Germany, went on: "When a resonance issues from the depths of the
> substance, the masses have given him the pitch; he knows in what terms he
> must finally address them. Rather than a means of directing the mass mind,
> propaganda is a technique for riding with the masses. It is not a machine
> to
> make wind but a sail to catch the wind."
> Dissent will only be possible when we break the dark spell of corporate
> propaganda and the isolation that accompanies it. We must free ourselves
> from corporate tyranny, which means refusing to invest our emotional and
> intellectual energy in electronic images. We must build what the Russian
> anarchist Peter Kropotkin called "voluntary associations for study and
> teaching, for industry, commerce, science, art, literature, exploitation,
> resistance to exploitation, amusement, serious work, gratification and
> self-denial."
> "We know well the means by which this association of the lord, priest,
> merchant, judge, soldier, and king founded its domination," Kropotkin
> wrote.
> "It was by the annihilation of all free unions: of village communities,
> guilds, trades unions, fraternities, and medieval cities. It was by
> confiscating the land of the communes and the riches of the guilds; it was
> by the absolute and ferocious prohibition of all kinds of free agreement
> between men; it was by massacre, the wheel, the gibbet, the sword, and the
> fire that Church and State established their domination, and that they
> succeeded henceforth to reign over an incoherent agglomeration of subjects,
> who had no direct union more among themselves."
> Corporate propaganda has become so potent that many Americans are addicted.
> We must leave our isolated rooms. We must shut out these images. We must
> connect with those around us. It is only the communal that will save us. It
> is only the communal that will allow us to build a movement to resist. And
> it is only the communal that will sustain us through mutual aid as climate
> change and economic collapse increasingly dominate our future.
> http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/will_the_machines_ever_rise_up_201
> 50629/
> http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/will_the_machines_ever_rise_up_201
> 50629/
> http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/will_the_machines_ever_rise_up_201
> 50629/
> http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/greek_banks_close_indefinitely_a
> fter_weekend_that_shook_the_euro_20150629/
> http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/greek_banks_close_indefinitely_a
> fter_weekend_that_shook_the_euro_20150629/
> http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/greek_banks_close_indefinitely_a
> fter_weekend_that_shook_the_euro_20150629/
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/americas_got_war_poverty_drugs_the_middl
> e_east_and_terror_20150629/
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/americas_got_war_poverty_drugs_the_middl
> e_east_and_terror_20150629/
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/americas_got_war_poverty_drugs_the_middl
> e_east_and_terror_20150629/
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/stress_on_water_resources_threatens_live
> s_and_livelihoods_20150629/
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/stress_on_water_resources_threatens_live
> s_and_livelihoods_20150629/
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/stress_on_water_resources_threatens_live
> s_and_livelihoods_20150629/ http://www.truthdig.com/
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Monday, June 29, 2015
[blind-democracy] Re: Socialism Means Abolishing the Distinction Between Bosses and Employees
Corporate Capitalism is a cancer. As such, it devours anything from
which it derives nourishment.
The examples in the article, public schools, Amtrak, Postal Service,
PUD's, etc., are all under attack by the Private Mega Corporations.
Even local, state and national government is under attack by the
out-of-control Virus. In my opinion, Public Enterprises cannot exist
alongside Private Corporations. Indeed, when not feeding on public
owned businesses, these corporations devour one another, creating even
larger and more frightening monsters. And some among us think that we
can integrate into the System and take it over. So far the track
record for this idea is bad, to horrible. While I am initially
supporting Bernie Sanders, I make no mistake in thinking he could
bring about reforms. The Cancer will infect him, or anyone who rises
in their System, and turn them into a Puppet.
Corporate Capitalism will not allow itself to be slowly replaced. No
transition will end up in socialism. Every attempt so far has failed.
The nations that claim to be socialistic or communistic are blowing
smoke up our noses. If a System that is of the People, by the People
and for the People is going to succeed, it must be organized, planned,
thought out and agreed upon, and set in place. So long as there are
bosses, there will be power tripping. Any sort of temporary
transitional management will morph into a new Ruling Class. Can the
Human Species change its spots and begin to think as one People, one
Class, one World? It's crazy to even think that it could happen. But
so long as two nations exist, instead of one World, and so long as one
individual claims dominance over others, true Socialism will not
exist. And Planet Earth will not be safe. We Humans chose ourselves
to rule this Garden of Eden. And to date, we've done a real crappy
job. If we want to avoid being tossed out, banned, annihilated, we'd
better get serious.
But hey, the big game's this afternoon. I'll worry about survival
later next winter.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/29/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> I posted the article partly, to get your response. I thought that he said
> over and over again that his point was that real socialism means that the
> workers own the means of production, not the state.
>
> Miriam
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Roger Loran
> Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81@aol.com" for DMARC)
> Sent: Sunday, June 28, 2015 9:59 PM
> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Socialism Means Abolishing the Distinction
> Between Bosses and Employees
>
> Like I said, if you call everything socialism then the word socialism means
> nothing. I do note, however, that after distinguishing state capitalism
> from
> socialism this author goes right ahead and accepts that if a group calls
> itself socialist it is socialist and then what does he get? Socialists have
> captured state power in France?
>
> On 6/28/2015 9:43 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
>> Socialism Means Abolishing the Distinction Between Bosses and
>> Employees Saturday, 27 June 2015 00:00 By Richard D. Wolff, Truthout |
> News Analysis
>> An enterprise only qualifies as "socialist" once the distinction
>> between employers and employees within it has been abolished. (Image:
>> Jared Rodriguez / Truthout) The support of readers like you got this
>> story published - and helps Truthout stay free from corporate
>> advertising. Can you sustain our work with a tax-deductible donation
>> today?
>> Regulated private capitalism. State capitalism. Socialism. These three
>> systems are entirely different from each other. We need to understand
>> the differences between them to move beyond today's dysfunctional
> economies.
>> With confidence waning in whether modern private capitalism can truly
>> be fixed, the debate shifts to a choice between two systemic
>> alternatives that we must learn to keep straight: state capitalism and
> socialism.
>> State capitalism exists when the state apparatus - rather than a group
>> of private citizens - positions state officials to function as
>> capitalist employers. Thus, under state capitalism it is state
>> officials placed in charge of enterprises who hire employees, organize
>> and supervise their activities within enterprises, sell the resulting
>> outputs (goods or services), receive the sales revenues and thus
>> realize any profits. State officials occupy the key directorial
>> positions within such state capitalist enterprises.
>> In contrast, in private capitalist enterprises, shareholders assign
>> these positions instead to private individuals - not state officials -
>> within structures such as corporate boards of directors. Hybrid
>> capitalist enterprises (part private and part state) also exist. Goods
>> and services produced in state capitalist enterprises are often sold
>> in markets alongside those produced by private capitalist enterprises.
>> Likewise, state capitalist enterprises typically buy their inputs in
>> markets alongside parallel purchases made by private capitalist
> businesses.
>> The Difference Between State Capitalism and Socialism In all countries
>> today, state capitalist enterprises coexist and transact in markets
>> with private capitalist enterprises. The proportions of the different
>> types of capitalist enterprise vary from country to country. Only in
>> some countries are state capitalist enterprises the socially dominant
>> kind of enterprise. In the United States, state capitalist enterprises
>> are definitely not socially dominant, but they do exist: Amtrak, TVA,
>> public colleges and universities, the post office, the Bank of North
>> Dakota, public power companies owned and operated by thousands of US
>> municipalities, and the New York City subway system are all examples.
>> Some state capitalist enterprises in the US obtain subsidies from the
>> government, but then many private capitalist enterprises obtain
>> subsidies,
> too.
>> The state directly regulates state capitalism. It does this through
>> the state officials it assigns to direct state enterprise activities.
>> The state indirectly regulates private capitalism. It does this by
>> means of rules and laws that limit the enterprise-directing decisions
>> made by private capitalists.
>> AN ENTERPRISE ONLY QUALIFIES AS "SOCIALIST" ONCE THE DISTINCTION
>> BETWEEN EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYEES WITHIN IT HAS BEEN ABOLISHED.
>> The fact that the state regulates private capitalist enterprises and
>> operates state capitalist enterprises does not reduce the capitalist
>> structure of an economy. So long as employers, private or state, hire
>> laborers to produce commodities and generate profits that the
>> employers exclusively receive, the economy has a capitalist structure.
>> So long as it is exclusively the employers (whether private, state or
>> hybrid; whether more or less regulated) who decide how to use those
>> profits, it is a capitalist structure.
>> An enterprise only qualifies as "socialist" once the distinction
>> between employers and employees within it has been abolished. When
>> workers collectively and democratically produce, receive and
>> distribute the profits their labor generates, the enterprise becomes
>> socialist. Such enterprises can then become the base of a socialist
>> economy - its micro-level foundation
>> - supporting whatever ownership system (public and/or private) and
>> distribution system (planning and/or market) constitute that economy's
>> macro level.
>> Actual large-scale socialism would thus predominantly entail worker
>> cooperative enterprises such as these. Like the capitalist enterprises
>> that once emerged from European feudalism, these new cooperative
>> enterprises would seek to solve problems such as how to organize their
>> interdependencies with one another and with the public, how to relate
>> to private and public property, and how to manage transitions from
>> smaller- to larger-scale enterprises. Different forms of societal
>> socialisms will emerge: some with markets, private property and large
>> corporations, and others with centralized and/or decentralized
>> planning systems, socialized property, constraints on enterprise size
>> etc. Debates, experiments and choices among them will likely characterize
> the multiple forms that socialism will take.
>> Previous economic systems likewise often displayed coexistences among
>> more or less regulated private enterprises and state enterprises. In
>> slave societies, for example, alongside the private masters of slaves
>> working on plantations, states often owned and operated slave
>> plantations. In feudal societies, private feudal manors interacted
>> with the feudal manors operated by kings, to take a European example.
>> In short, slavery and feudalism, like capitalism, display varying
> combinations of private and state enterprises.
>> Historical Debates Within Socialism
>> The European socialism that emerged in the19th century was not
>> initially much concerned with issues of state versus private. It began
>> and evolved - especially with the work of Marx and his followers - as
>> a systemic critique of capitalism, not of regulation or the balance
>> between state and private enterprises. Socialists wanted to go beyond
>> capitalism to an altogether different system, one that fundamentally
>> rejected the basic division between employers and employees.
>> Socialists generally favored organizing society as "classless" where
>> all would be workers who democratically made society's basic economic and
> political decisions.
>> During the 19th century, as the socialist criticism of capitalism grew
>> and spread globally alongside capitalism itself, socialists debated
>> how to accomplish the transition from capitalism to socialism. The
>> debate fixed upon the state as the key means to make that transition.
>> If capitalism's critics could capture the state, state power could
>> then be utilized for the subsequent transition to socialism. The state
>> could, under socialists, usher the new system into being.
>> A transition to socialistically reorganized enterprises, once
>> accomplished by a state, would also transform the state as an
>> institution. With capitalists' power over the state removed, that
>> power would be wielded instead by the workers controlling the
>> socialized enterprises. Ending classes would end the need for a
>> repressive
> state to secure class divisions.
>> Both Marx's early and important association with the anarchist Mikhail
>> Bakunin and Lenin's later concept of the "withering away of the state"
>> shared presumptions that any state apparatus remaining in socialism
>> would
>> (a) be reduced to coordinating socialized enterprises' interactions,
>> and (b) depend on workers' socialized enterprises for its resources and
> powers.
>> AS SOME PUT IT, SOCIALISM EITHER SHOULD OR COULD ONLY BE ACHIEVED BY
>> MEANS OF EVOLUTION, NOT REVOLUTION.
>> Some socialists have believed in and strategized for a revolutionary
>> seizure of state power from capitalists and their associates. They
>> have sought to replicate the action of revolutionaries in 1789 France
>> who took state power from the feudal lords, the feudal king and their
>> associates. Where the French revolutionary state enabled and
>> facilitated the transition from feudalism to capitalism, a socialist
>> revolution would proceed similarly for a transition from capitalism to
> socialism.
>> Other socialists have disagreed and argued instead for a
>> parliamentary/electoral strategy. They have argued that socialists
>> should form political parties and win elections as the way to capture
>> the state. As some put it, socialism either should or could only be
>> achieved by means of evolution, not revolution. As socialism became a
>> powerful global movement, socialists pursued one or the other or both
>> strategies depending on the specific conditions in each place and time.
>> Since 1900, proponents of both strategies claimed some victories. In
>> Western Europe, socialists built political parties that eventually
>> captured state power such as socialists in France possess today. In
>> Russia, China and Cuba, revolutions brought state power to socialists.
>> However, neither socialist strategy took the next step. Socialists in
>> power could not or would not make transitions to socialism (and ever
>> since have furiously debated whether that is what happened and if so,
> why).
>> Looking back now, it seems clear that socialists in power moved to
>> economic systems that mixed state capitalism with more or less
>> regulated private capitalism. That is, they used state power to
>> construct larger or smaller state capitalist sectors alongside often
>> heavily regulated private capitalist sectors. In Western Europe, the
>> state capitalist sectors tended to be smaller than those in Russia, China
> and Cuba.
>> Stalin Spreads Confusion
>> Shortly after the 1917 Soviet revolution, Lenin described the Bolsheviks'
>> achievement as having constructed "a state capitalism" that he
>> applauded as a necessary step toward a transition to socialism. By the
>> early 1930s, the subsequent leader, Stalin, made a pointedly different
>> declaration: Socialism had been achieved in the USSR. Yet precisely
>> what Lenin had named state capitalism remained the Soviet industrial
>> reality; indeed, Stalin extended state capitalism into Soviet
>> agriculture.
>> CONCEPTUAL CONFUSIONS SET IN ABOUT WHAT EXACTLY SEPARATED
>> STATE-REGULATED PRIVATE CAPITALISM FROM STATE CAPITALISM FROM SOCIALISM.
>> In effect, Stalin had pronounced a new and daring definitional equation:
>> State capitalism was socialism. Many other socialists, including those
>> who otherwise denounced Stalin and reviled Stalinism, sooner or later
>> agreed with this new definition. So too did most of socialism's
>> enemies. In practice, when socialists achieved state power, they
>> either could not or would not use that power to go beyond varying
>> mixtures of regulated private and state capitalism. Yet socialists and
>> their enemies increasingly defined those mixtures as socialism
>> (although some socialists always disagreed and promoted other
>> formulations of what the key terms meant). Conceptual confusions set
>> in about what exactly, if anything, separated state-regulated private
> capitalism from state capitalism from socialism.
>> For most of the last century those confusions proliferated across the
>> statements of workers, capitalists, politicians, academics, media
>> personalities and the broad general public. For example, the term
>> "socialism" was often applied to almost anything done by or through
>> state power (such as President Obama's Affordable Care Act or the
>> IRS's efforts to increase tax collection). In much of Europe and
>> beyond, socialism refers mostly to the broad social welfare results
>> (national health insurance, pensions etc.) of using government power
>> to regulate, control and tax what are still largely private capitalisms.
>> A similar concept of socialism is more or less embraced by US
>> presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Thus, he seeks higher mass
>> consumption levels and better working conditions through state
>> regulatory policies that redistribute power and wealth from
>> corporations and the rich to the rest of the society. Yet Sanders'
>> celebration of worker cooperatives suggests some interest in going
>> further toward a non-capitalist system. Definitions of socialism in
>> places like China and the USSR specified socially dominant state
>> capitalist sectors with only marginal allowances for heavily regulated
> private capitalism.
>> The Limitations of State Capitalism and Regulated Private Capitalism
>> Many socialists struggled and eventually succeeded, often at great
>> costs, to construct regulated private capitalisms that delivered
>> public services, wealth and income redistribution, and social welfare
>> far beyond what less regulated private capitalisms had done. Other
>> socialists went further to implement state capitalisms that prevailed
>> in their countries. Those could and often did deliver public services
>> and social welfare beyond what even worker-friendly regulated private
> capitalisms did.
>> Yet socialists in power who presided over combinations of regulated
>> private capitalisms and state capitalisms suffered two severe
>> limitations. First, they could not prevent capitalist crises with
>> profound
> social consequences.
>> Second, they could not build sufficient confidence in or loyalty to
>> the systems they constructed to prevent those crises from provoking
>> reversions from state to private capitalism and from more to less
>> regulated private capitalism. The capitalist crises of the 1970s thus
>> led to neoliberalism and the crises of the late 1980s, to the
>> implosions in Eastern Europe. Even the deep global crisis since 2008
>> could not stop that reversion as many socialists and socialist parties
>> embraced austerity policies while failing seriously to reregulate.
>> Because the mixtures of highly regulated private and state capitalisms
>> were often run by socialists and called socialism, their decline over
>> recent decades has been widely and mistakenly understood as the "end" of
> socialism.
>> The workers in state capitalisms that were defined as socialism (the
>> USSR, China etc.) almost never themselves collectively and
>> democratically directed state capitalist enterprises. That key
>> function was reserved for state officials who had replaced the
>> corporate boards of directors. In state capitalist enterprises, the
>> workers did not have command of and responsibility for their
>> enterprises' performances. In the aftermath of their crises, the
>> "actually existing socialisms" of the late 20th century exhausted the
>> political and historical possibilities of such state capitalisms.
>> Similarly, the welfare-state-regulated private capitalisms have shown,
>> through their periods of neoliberalism since the 1970s and then
>> post-2008 austerity policies, that they were fundamentally insecure
>> and thus temporary. The New Deal in the US and social democracies in
>> Europe proved unable to reproduce the political alliances that once
>> forced their states to enable and facilitate their emergence. They
>> were rolled back in a determined counterattack by corporations and the
> rich.
>> Securing social democratic reforms of the sort won in the 1930s (such
>> as taxation of corporations and the rich to support mass social
>> services and
>> jobs) requires much more than mere state regulation of private
>> capitalism.
>> The forces behind private capitalism mobilized to retake full control
>> of the state in ways designed to preclude any repeat of New Deal or
>> social democratic responses to crises. Socialist parties and movements
>> failed to preserve the New Deal and social democracy, and failed to
>> prevent or destroy austerity policies after 2008. They thereby
>> exhausted the political appeal and foundation of socialisms based on
>> state regulation of private capitalism as utterly as the experiences
>> of the USSR and China largely exhausted the socialisms based on state
> capitalism.
>> Does Socialism Have a Future?
>> If socialism is to have a future, it will likely have to cut its
>> residual ties to both state-regulated private capitalism and state
>> capitalism. It will have to come full circle in the 21st century to
>> rediscover and update its 19th century differentiation from capitalism
>> as a fundamentally different mode of organizing the production and
>> distribution of goods and services.
>> Self-criticism by socialists must account for the decline of socialist
>> parties in Western Europe as well as the collapse of state capitalisms
>> ("actually existing socialisms"). Doing so culminates in new
>> definitions of socialism for the 21st century focused increasingly on
>> democratizing the workplace - at the micro-level. That is the key
>> change that was missing from previous socialisms. It must be added to
>> old definitions that were over-focused on substituting socialized for
>> privately owned means of production and substituting planning for
>> markets. This is the significance of the remarkable recent Cuban
>> policy decision to refocus its economic development strategy
>> relatively more on worker cooperatives and relatively less on state
>> enterprises. This is likewise the significance of the remarkable surge
>> of interest in workers' self-directed enterprises among anti-capitalist
> social movements and social critics.
>> Capitalism is relocating from its old centers in Western Europe, North
>> America and Japan, to new centers in China, India, Brazil and so on.
>> This relocation is also generating a vast new global criticism of the
>> private capitalism that proclaimed its absolute victory in the
>> aftermath of the USSR's implosion in 1989. Workers in the old centers
>> are slowly grasping that capitalism's relocation will no longer offset
>> their rising exploitation with rising consumption. They are feeling
>> abandoned by capitalism and raising increasingly critical voices. They
>> do not want a socialism defined in terms of Soviet or other state
>> capitalisms that had serious problems and imploded. They do not want a
>> private capitalism whose regulations proved reversible and whose
>> qualities of decline they deeply resent. A new socialism built around
>> democratized workplaces appeals to them in ways old socialisms no longer
> can.
>> Socialism in and for the 21st century must now define itself in clear
>> distinction from both regulated private capitalism and state capitalism.
>> Only then can we begin our strategic debates over precisely which
>> socialist goal to set and pursue.
>> Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
>> RICHARD D. WOLFF
>> Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of
>> Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He
>> is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in
>> International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He
>> also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan.
>> Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the
>> City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994,
>> he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris
>> (France), I (Sorbonne). His work is available at rdwolff.com and at
> democracyatwork.info.
>> RELATED STORIES
>> Richard D. Wolff | Capitalism's Deeper Problem By Richard D. Wolff,
>> Moyers & Company | News Analysis and Video System Change, or There and
>> Back Again: Capitalism, Socialism, Fascism By Richard D. Wolff,
>> Truthout | News Analysis Richard D. Wolff | Critics of Capitalism Must
>> Include Its Definition By Richard D. Wolff, Truthout | News Analysis
>> ________________________________________
>> Show Comments
>> Hide Comments
>> <a href="http://truthout.disqus.com/?url=ref">View the discussion
>> thread.</a> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
>> Socialism Means Abolishing the Distinction Between Bosses and
>> Employees Saturday, 27 June 2015 00:00 By Richard D. Wolff, Truthout |
> News Analysis
>> . font size Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
>> reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error!
>> Hyperlink reference not valid.
>> . An enterprise only qualifies as "socialist" once the distinction
>> between employers and employees within it has been abolished. (Image:
>> Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)
>> . http://truth-out.org/members/donateThe support of readers like you
>> got this story published - and helps Truthout stay free from corporate
>> advertising. Can you sustain our work with a tax-deductible donation
> today?
>> Regulated private capitalism. State capitalism. Socialism. These three
>> systems are entirely different from each other. We need to understand
>> the differences between them to move beyond today's dysfunctional
> economies.
>> With confidence waning in whether modern private capitalism can truly
>> be fixed, the debate shifts to a choice between two systemic
>> alternatives that we must learn to keep straight: state capitalism and
> socialism.
>> State capitalism exists when the state apparatus - rather than a group
>> of private citizens - positions state officials to function as
>> capitalist employers. Thus, under state capitalism it is state
>> officials placed in charge of enterprises who hire employees, organize
>> and supervise their activities within enterprises, sell the resulting
>> outputs (goods or services), receive the sales revenues and thus
>> realize any profits. State officials occupy the key directorial
>> positions within such state capitalist enterprises.
>> In contrast, in private capitalist enterprises, shareholders assign
>> these positions instead to private individuals - not state officials -
>> within structures such as corporate boards of directors. Hybrid
>> capitalist enterprises (part private and part state) also exist. Goods
>> and services produced in state capitalist enterprises are often sold
>> in markets alongside those produced by private capitalist enterprises.
>> Likewise, state capitalist enterprises typically buy their inputs in
>> markets alongside parallel purchases made by private capitalist
> businesses.
>> The Difference Between State Capitalism and Socialism In all countries
>> today, state capitalist enterprises coexist and transact in markets
>> with private capitalist enterprises. The proportions of the different
>> types of capitalist enterprise vary from country to country. Only in
>> some countries are state capitalist enterprises the socially dominant
>> kind of enterprise. In the United States, state capitalist enterprises
>> are definitely not socially dominant, but they do exist: Amtrak, TVA,
>> public colleges and universities, the post office, the Bank of North
>> Dakota, public power companies owned and operated by thousands of US
>> municipalities, and the New York City subway system are all examples.
>> Some state capitalist enterprises in the US obtain subsidies from the
>> government, but then many private capitalist enterprises obtain
>> subsidies,
> too.
>> The state directly regulates state capitalism. It does this through
>> the state officials it assigns to direct state enterprise activities.
>> The state indirectly regulates private capitalism. It does this by
>> means of rules and laws that limit the enterprise-directing decisions
>> made by private capitalists.
>> An enterprise only qualifies as "socialist" once the distinction
>> between employers and employees within it has been abolished.
>> The fact that the state regulates private capitalist enterprises and
>> operates state capitalist enterprises does not reduce the capitalist
>> structure of an economy. So long as employers, private or state, hire
>> laborers to produce commodities and generate profits that the
>> employers exclusively receive, the economy has a capitalist structure.
>> So long as it is exclusively the employers (whether private, state or
>> hybrid; whether more or less regulated) who decide how to use those
>> profits, it is a capitalist structure.
>> An enterprise only qualifies as "socialist" once the distinction
>> between employers and employees within it has been abolished. When
>> workers collectively and democratically produce, receive and
>> distribute the profits their labor generates, the enterprise becomes
>> socialist. Such enterprises can then become the base of a socialist
>> economy - its micro-level foundation
>> - supporting whatever ownership system (public and/or private) and
>> distribution system (planning and/or market) constitute that economy's
>> macro level.
>> Actual large-scale socialism would thus predominantly entail worker
>> cooperative enterprises such as these. Like the capitalist enterprises
>> that once emerged from European feudalism, these new cooperative
>> enterprises would seek to solve problems such as how to organize their
>> interdependencies with one another and with the public, how to relate
>> to private and public property, and how to manage transitions from
>> smaller- to larger-scale enterprises. Different forms of societal
>> socialisms will emerge: some with markets, private property and large
>> corporations, and others with centralized and/or decentralized
>> planning systems, socialized property, constraints on enterprise size
>> etc. Debates, experiments and choices among them will likely characterize
> the multiple forms that socialism will take.
>> Previous economic systems likewise often displayed coexistences among
>> more or less regulated private enterprises and state enterprises. In
>> slave societies, for example, alongside the private masters of slaves
>> working on plantations, states often owned and operated slave
>> plantations. In feudal societies, private feudal manors interacted
>> with the feudal manors operated by kings, to take a European example.
>> In short, slavery and feudalism, like capitalism, display varying
> combinations of private and state enterprises.
>> Historical Debates Within Socialism
>> The European socialism that emerged in the19th century was not
>> initially much concerned with issues of state versus private. It began
>> and evolved - especially with the work of Marx and his followers - as
>> a systemic critique of capitalism, not of regulation or the balance
>> between state and private enterprises. Socialists wanted to go beyond
>> capitalism to an altogether different system, one that fundamentally
>> rejected the basic division between employers and employees.
>> Socialists generally favored organizing society as "classless" where
>> all would be workers who democratically made society's basic economic and
> political decisions.
>> During the 19th century, as the socialist criticism of capitalism grew
>> and spread globally alongside capitalism itself, socialists debated
>> how to accomplish the transition from capitalism to socialism. The
>> debate fixed upon the state as the key means to make that transition.
>> If capitalism's critics could capture the state, state power could
>> then be utilized for the subsequent transition to socialism. The state
>> could, under socialists, usher the new system into being.
>> A transition to socialistically reorganized enterprises, once
>> accomplished by a state, would also transform the state as an
>> institution. With capitalists' power over the state removed, that
>> power would be wielded instead by the workers controlling the
>> socialized enterprises. Ending classes would end the need for a
>> repressive
> state to secure class divisions.
>> Both Marx's early and important association with the anarchist Mikhail
>> Bakunin and Lenin's later concept of the "withering away of the state"
>> shared presumptions that any state apparatus remaining in socialism
>> would
>> (a) be reduced to coordinating socialized enterprises' interactions,
>> and (b) depend on workers' socialized enterprises for its resources and
> powers.
>> As some put it, socialism either should or could only be achieved by
>> means of evolution, not revolution.
>> Some socialists have believed in and strategized for a revolutionary
>> seizure of state power from capitalists and their associates. They
>> have sought to replicate the action of revolutionaries in 1789 France
>> who took state power from the feudal lords, the feudal king and their
>> associates. Where the French revolutionary state enabled and
>> facilitated the transition from feudalism to capitalism, a socialist
>> revolution would proceed similarly for a transition from capitalism to
> socialism.
>> Other socialists have disagreed and argued instead for a
>> parliamentary/electoral strategy. They have argued that socialists
>> should form political parties and win elections as the way to capture
>> the state. As some put it, socialism either should or could only be
>> achieved by means of evolution, not revolution. As socialism became a
>> powerful global movement, socialists pursued one or the other or both
>> strategies depending on the specific conditions in each place and time.
>> Since 1900, proponents of both strategies claimed some victories. In
>> Western Europe, socialists built political parties that eventually
>> captured state power such as socialists in France possess today. In
>> Russia, China and Cuba, revolutions brought state power to socialists.
>> However, neither socialist strategy took the next step. Socialists in
>> power could not or would not make transitions to socialism (and ever
>> since have furiously debated whether that is what happened and if so,
> why).
>> Looking back now, it seems clear that socialists in power moved to
>> economic systems that mixed state capitalism with more or less
>> regulated private capitalism. That is, they used state power to
>> construct larger or smaller state capitalist sectors alongside often
>> heavily regulated private capitalist sectors. In Western Europe, the
>> state capitalist sectors tended to be smaller than those in Russia, China
> and Cuba.
>> Stalin Spreads Confusion
>> Shortly after the 1917 Soviet revolution, Lenin described the Bolsheviks'
>> achievement as having constructed "a state capitalism" that he
>> applauded as a necessary step toward a transition to socialism. By the
>> early 1930s, the subsequent leader, Stalin, made a pointedly different
>> declaration: Socialism had been achieved in the USSR. Yet precisely
>> what Lenin had named state capitalism remained the Soviet industrial
>> reality; indeed, Stalin extended state capitalism into Soviet
>> agriculture.
>> Conceptual confusions set in about what exactly separated
>> state-regulated private capitalism from state capitalism from socialism.
>> In effect, Stalin had pronounced a new and daring definitional equation:
>> State capitalism was socialism. Many other socialists, including those
>> who otherwise denounced Stalin and reviled Stalinism, sooner or later
>> agreed with this new definition. So too did most of socialism's
>> enemies. In practice, when socialists achieved state power, they
>> either could not or would not use that power to go beyond varying
>> mixtures of regulated private and state capitalism. Yet socialists and
>> their enemies increasingly defined those mixtures as socialism
>> (although some socialists always disagreed and promoted other
>> formulations of what the key terms meant). Conceptual confusions set
>> in about what exactly, if anything, separated state-regulated private
> capitalism from state capitalism from socialism.
>> For most of the last century those confusions proliferated across the
>> statements of workers, capitalists, politicians, academics, media
>> personalities and the broad general public. For example, the term
>> "socialism" was often applied to almost anything done by or through
>> state power (such as President Obama's Affordable Care Act or the
>> IRS's efforts to increase tax collection). In much of Europe and
>> beyond, socialism refers mostly to the broad social welfare results
>> (national health insurance, pensions etc.) of using government power
>> to regulate, control and tax what are still largely private capitalisms.
>> A similar concept of socialism is more or less embraced by US
>> presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Thus, he seeks higher mass
>> consumption levels and better working conditions through state
>> regulatory policies that redistribute power and wealth from
>> corporations and the rich to the rest of the society. Yet Sanders'
>> celebration of worker cooperatives suggests some interest in going
>> further toward a non-capitalist system. Definitions of socialism in
>> places like China and the USSR specified socially dominant state
>> capitalist sectors with only marginal allowances for heavily regulated
> private capitalism.
>> The Limitations of State Capitalism and Regulated Private Capitalism
>> Many socialists struggled and eventually succeeded, often at great
>> costs, to construct regulated private capitalisms that delivered
>> public services, wealth and income redistribution, and social welfare
>> far beyond what less regulated private capitalisms had done. Other
>> socialists went further to implement state capitalisms that prevailed
>> in their countries. Those could and often did deliver public services
>> and social welfare beyond what even worker-friendly regulated private
> capitalisms did.
>> Yet socialists in power who presided over combinations of regulated
>> private capitalisms and state capitalisms suffered two severe
>> limitations. First, they could not prevent capitalist crises with
>> profound
> social consequences.
>> Second, they could not build sufficient confidence in or loyalty to
>> the systems they constructed to prevent those crises from provoking
>> reversions from state to private capitalism and from more to less
>> regulated private capitalism. The capitalist crises of the 1970s thus
>> led to neoliberalism and the crises of the late 1980s, to the
>> implosions in Eastern Europe. Even the deep global crisis since 2008
>> could not stop that reversion as many socialists and socialist parties
>> embraced austerity policies while failing seriously to reregulate.
>> Because the mixtures of highly regulated private and state capitalisms
>> were often run by socialists and called socialism, their decline over
>> recent decades has been widely and mistakenly understood as the "end" of
> socialism.
>> The workers in state capitalisms that were defined as socialism (the
>> USSR, China etc.) almost never themselves collectively and
>> democratically directed state capitalist enterprises. That key
>> function was reserved for state officials who had replaced the
>> corporate boards of directors. In state capitalist enterprises, the
>> workers did not have command of and responsibility for their
>> enterprises' performances. In the aftermath of their crises, the
>> "actually existing socialisms" of the late 20th century exhausted the
>> political and historical possibilities of such state capitalisms.
>> Similarly, the welfare-state-regulated private capitalisms have shown,
>> through their periods of neoliberalism since the 1970s and then
>> post-2008 austerity policies, that they were fundamentally insecure
>> and thus temporary. The New Deal in the US and social democracies in
>> Europe proved unable to reproduce the political alliances that once
>> forced their states to enable and facilitate their emergence. They
>> were rolled back in a determined counterattack by corporations and the
> rich.
>> Securing social democratic reforms of the sort won in the 1930s (such
>> as taxation of corporations and the rich to support mass social
>> services and
>> jobs) requires much more than mere state regulation of private
>> capitalism.
>> The forces behind private capitalism mobilized to retake full control
>> of the state in ways designed to preclude any repeat of New Deal or
>> social democratic responses to crises. Socialist parties and movements
>> failed to preserve the New Deal and social democracy, and failed to
>> prevent or destroy austerity policies after 2008. They thereby
>> exhausted the political appeal and foundation of socialisms based on
>> state regulation of private capitalism as utterly as the experiences
>> of the USSR and China largely exhausted the socialisms based on state
> capitalism.
>> Does Socialism Have a Future?
>> If socialism is to have a future, it will likely have to cut its
>> residual ties to both state-regulated private capitalism and state
>> capitalism. It will have to come full circle in the 21st century to
>> rediscover and update its 19th century differentiation from capitalism
>> as a fundamentally different mode of organizing the production and
>> distribution of goods and services.
>> Self-criticism by socialists must account for the decline of socialist
>> parties in Western Europe as well as the collapse of state capitalisms
>> ("actually existing socialisms"). Doing so culminates in new
>> definitions of socialism for the 21st century focused increasingly on
>> democratizing the workplace - at the micro-level. That is the key
>> change that was missing from previous socialisms. It must be added to
>> old definitions that were over-focused on substituting socialized for
>> privately owned means of production and substituting planning for
>> markets. This is the significance of the remarkable recent Cuban
>> policy decision to refocus its economic development strategy
>> relatively more on worker cooperatives and relatively less on state
>> enterprises. This is likewise the significance of the remarkable surge
>> of interest in workers' self-directed enterprises among anti-capitalist
> social movements and social critics.
>> Capitalism is relocating from its old centers in Western Europe, North
>> America and Japan, to new centers in China, India, Brazil and so on.
>> This relocation is also generating a vast new global criticism of the
>> private capitalism that proclaimed its absolute victory in the
>> aftermath of the USSR's implosion in 1989. Workers in the old centers
>> are slowly grasping that capitalism's relocation will no longer offset
>> their rising exploitation with rising consumption. They are feeling
>> abandoned by capitalism and raising increasingly critical voices. They
>> do not want a socialism defined in terms of Soviet or other state
>> capitalisms that had serious problems and imploded. They do not want a
>> private capitalism whose regulations proved reversible and whose
>> qualities of decline they deeply resent. A new socialism built around
>> democratized workplaces appeals to them in ways old socialisms no longer
> can.
>> Socialism in and for the 21st century must now define itself in clear
>> distinction from both regulated private capitalism and state capitalism.
>> Only then can we begin our strategic debates over precisely which
>> socialist goal to set and pursue.
>> Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
>> Richard D. Wolff
>> Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of
>> Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He
>> is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in
>> International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He
>> also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan.
>> Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the
>> City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994,
>> he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris
>> (France), I (Sorbonne). His work is available at rdwolff.com and at
> democracyatwork.info.
>> Related Stories
>> Richard D. Wolff | Capitalism's Deeper Problem By Richard D. Wolff,
>> Moyers & Company | News Analysis and VideoSystem Change, or There and
>> Back Again: Capitalism, Socialism, Fascism By Richard D. Wolff,
>> Truthout | News AnalysisRichard D. Wolff | Critics of Capitalism Must
>> Include Its Definition By Richard D. Wolff, Truthout | News Analysis
>>
>> Show Comments
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
which it derives nourishment.
The examples in the article, public schools, Amtrak, Postal Service,
PUD's, etc., are all under attack by the Private Mega Corporations.
Even local, state and national government is under attack by the
out-of-control Virus. In my opinion, Public Enterprises cannot exist
alongside Private Corporations. Indeed, when not feeding on public
owned businesses, these corporations devour one another, creating even
larger and more frightening monsters. And some among us think that we
can integrate into the System and take it over. So far the track
record for this idea is bad, to horrible. While I am initially
supporting Bernie Sanders, I make no mistake in thinking he could
bring about reforms. The Cancer will infect him, or anyone who rises
in their System, and turn them into a Puppet.
Corporate Capitalism will not allow itself to be slowly replaced. No
transition will end up in socialism. Every attempt so far has failed.
The nations that claim to be socialistic or communistic are blowing
smoke up our noses. If a System that is of the People, by the People
and for the People is going to succeed, it must be organized, planned,
thought out and agreed upon, and set in place. So long as there are
bosses, there will be power tripping. Any sort of temporary
transitional management will morph into a new Ruling Class. Can the
Human Species change its spots and begin to think as one People, one
Class, one World? It's crazy to even think that it could happen. But
so long as two nations exist, instead of one World, and so long as one
individual claims dominance over others, true Socialism will not
exist. And Planet Earth will not be safe. We Humans chose ourselves
to rule this Garden of Eden. And to date, we've done a real crappy
job. If we want to avoid being tossed out, banned, annihilated, we'd
better get serious.
But hey, the big game's this afternoon. I'll worry about survival
later next winter.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/29/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> I posted the article partly, to get your response. I thought that he said
> over and over again that his point was that real socialism means that the
> workers own the means of production, not the state.
>
> Miriam
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Roger Loran
> Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81@aol.com" for DMARC)
> Sent: Sunday, June 28, 2015 9:59 PM
> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Socialism Means Abolishing the Distinction
> Between Bosses and Employees
>
> Like I said, if you call everything socialism then the word socialism means
> nothing. I do note, however, that after distinguishing state capitalism
> from
> socialism this author goes right ahead and accepts that if a group calls
> itself socialist it is socialist and then what does he get? Socialists have
> captured state power in France?
>
> On 6/28/2015 9:43 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
>> Socialism Means Abolishing the Distinction Between Bosses and
>> Employees Saturday, 27 June 2015 00:00 By Richard D. Wolff, Truthout |
> News Analysis
>> An enterprise only qualifies as "socialist" once the distinction
>> between employers and employees within it has been abolished. (Image:
>> Jared Rodriguez / Truthout) The support of readers like you got this
>> story published - and helps Truthout stay free from corporate
>> advertising. Can you sustain our work with a tax-deductible donation
>> today?
>> Regulated private capitalism. State capitalism. Socialism. These three
>> systems are entirely different from each other. We need to understand
>> the differences between them to move beyond today's dysfunctional
> economies.
>> With confidence waning in whether modern private capitalism can truly
>> be fixed, the debate shifts to a choice between two systemic
>> alternatives that we must learn to keep straight: state capitalism and
> socialism.
>> State capitalism exists when the state apparatus - rather than a group
>> of private citizens - positions state officials to function as
>> capitalist employers. Thus, under state capitalism it is state
>> officials placed in charge of enterprises who hire employees, organize
>> and supervise their activities within enterprises, sell the resulting
>> outputs (goods or services), receive the sales revenues and thus
>> realize any profits. State officials occupy the key directorial
>> positions within such state capitalist enterprises.
>> In contrast, in private capitalist enterprises, shareholders assign
>> these positions instead to private individuals - not state officials -
>> within structures such as corporate boards of directors. Hybrid
>> capitalist enterprises (part private and part state) also exist. Goods
>> and services produced in state capitalist enterprises are often sold
>> in markets alongside those produced by private capitalist enterprises.
>> Likewise, state capitalist enterprises typically buy their inputs in
>> markets alongside parallel purchases made by private capitalist
> businesses.
>> The Difference Between State Capitalism and Socialism In all countries
>> today, state capitalist enterprises coexist and transact in markets
>> with private capitalist enterprises. The proportions of the different
>> types of capitalist enterprise vary from country to country. Only in
>> some countries are state capitalist enterprises the socially dominant
>> kind of enterprise. In the United States, state capitalist enterprises
>> are definitely not socially dominant, but they do exist: Amtrak, TVA,
>> public colleges and universities, the post office, the Bank of North
>> Dakota, public power companies owned and operated by thousands of US
>> municipalities, and the New York City subway system are all examples.
>> Some state capitalist enterprises in the US obtain subsidies from the
>> government, but then many private capitalist enterprises obtain
>> subsidies,
> too.
>> The state directly regulates state capitalism. It does this through
>> the state officials it assigns to direct state enterprise activities.
>> The state indirectly regulates private capitalism. It does this by
>> means of rules and laws that limit the enterprise-directing decisions
>> made by private capitalists.
>> AN ENTERPRISE ONLY QUALIFIES AS "SOCIALIST" ONCE THE DISTINCTION
>> BETWEEN EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYEES WITHIN IT HAS BEEN ABOLISHED.
>> The fact that the state regulates private capitalist enterprises and
>> operates state capitalist enterprises does not reduce the capitalist
>> structure of an economy. So long as employers, private or state, hire
>> laborers to produce commodities and generate profits that the
>> employers exclusively receive, the economy has a capitalist structure.
>> So long as it is exclusively the employers (whether private, state or
>> hybrid; whether more or less regulated) who decide how to use those
>> profits, it is a capitalist structure.
>> An enterprise only qualifies as "socialist" once the distinction
>> between employers and employees within it has been abolished. When
>> workers collectively and democratically produce, receive and
>> distribute the profits their labor generates, the enterprise becomes
>> socialist. Such enterprises can then become the base of a socialist
>> economy - its micro-level foundation
>> - supporting whatever ownership system (public and/or private) and
>> distribution system (planning and/or market) constitute that economy's
>> macro level.
>> Actual large-scale socialism would thus predominantly entail worker
>> cooperative enterprises such as these. Like the capitalist enterprises
>> that once emerged from European feudalism, these new cooperative
>> enterprises would seek to solve problems such as how to organize their
>> interdependencies with one another and with the public, how to relate
>> to private and public property, and how to manage transitions from
>> smaller- to larger-scale enterprises. Different forms of societal
>> socialisms will emerge: some with markets, private property and large
>> corporations, and others with centralized and/or decentralized
>> planning systems, socialized property, constraints on enterprise size
>> etc. Debates, experiments and choices among them will likely characterize
> the multiple forms that socialism will take.
>> Previous economic systems likewise often displayed coexistences among
>> more or less regulated private enterprises and state enterprises. In
>> slave societies, for example, alongside the private masters of slaves
>> working on plantations, states often owned and operated slave
>> plantations. In feudal societies, private feudal manors interacted
>> with the feudal manors operated by kings, to take a European example.
>> In short, slavery and feudalism, like capitalism, display varying
> combinations of private and state enterprises.
>> Historical Debates Within Socialism
>> The European socialism that emerged in the19th century was not
>> initially much concerned with issues of state versus private. It began
>> and evolved - especially with the work of Marx and his followers - as
>> a systemic critique of capitalism, not of regulation or the balance
>> between state and private enterprises. Socialists wanted to go beyond
>> capitalism to an altogether different system, one that fundamentally
>> rejected the basic division between employers and employees.
>> Socialists generally favored organizing society as "classless" where
>> all would be workers who democratically made society's basic economic and
> political decisions.
>> During the 19th century, as the socialist criticism of capitalism grew
>> and spread globally alongside capitalism itself, socialists debated
>> how to accomplish the transition from capitalism to socialism. The
>> debate fixed upon the state as the key means to make that transition.
>> If capitalism's critics could capture the state, state power could
>> then be utilized for the subsequent transition to socialism. The state
>> could, under socialists, usher the new system into being.
>> A transition to socialistically reorganized enterprises, once
>> accomplished by a state, would also transform the state as an
>> institution. With capitalists' power over the state removed, that
>> power would be wielded instead by the workers controlling the
>> socialized enterprises. Ending classes would end the need for a
>> repressive
> state to secure class divisions.
>> Both Marx's early and important association with the anarchist Mikhail
>> Bakunin and Lenin's later concept of the "withering away of the state"
>> shared presumptions that any state apparatus remaining in socialism
>> would
>> (a) be reduced to coordinating socialized enterprises' interactions,
>> and (b) depend on workers' socialized enterprises for its resources and
> powers.
>> AS SOME PUT IT, SOCIALISM EITHER SHOULD OR COULD ONLY BE ACHIEVED BY
>> MEANS OF EVOLUTION, NOT REVOLUTION.
>> Some socialists have believed in and strategized for a revolutionary
>> seizure of state power from capitalists and their associates. They
>> have sought to replicate the action of revolutionaries in 1789 France
>> who took state power from the feudal lords, the feudal king and their
>> associates. Where the French revolutionary state enabled and
>> facilitated the transition from feudalism to capitalism, a socialist
>> revolution would proceed similarly for a transition from capitalism to
> socialism.
>> Other socialists have disagreed and argued instead for a
>> parliamentary/electoral strategy. They have argued that socialists
>> should form political parties and win elections as the way to capture
>> the state. As some put it, socialism either should or could only be
>> achieved by means of evolution, not revolution. As socialism became a
>> powerful global movement, socialists pursued one or the other or both
>> strategies depending on the specific conditions in each place and time.
>> Since 1900, proponents of both strategies claimed some victories. In
>> Western Europe, socialists built political parties that eventually
>> captured state power such as socialists in France possess today. In
>> Russia, China and Cuba, revolutions brought state power to socialists.
>> However, neither socialist strategy took the next step. Socialists in
>> power could not or would not make transitions to socialism (and ever
>> since have furiously debated whether that is what happened and if so,
> why).
>> Looking back now, it seems clear that socialists in power moved to
>> economic systems that mixed state capitalism with more or less
>> regulated private capitalism. That is, they used state power to
>> construct larger or smaller state capitalist sectors alongside often
>> heavily regulated private capitalist sectors. In Western Europe, the
>> state capitalist sectors tended to be smaller than those in Russia, China
> and Cuba.
>> Stalin Spreads Confusion
>> Shortly after the 1917 Soviet revolution, Lenin described the Bolsheviks'
>> achievement as having constructed "a state capitalism" that he
>> applauded as a necessary step toward a transition to socialism. By the
>> early 1930s, the subsequent leader, Stalin, made a pointedly different
>> declaration: Socialism had been achieved in the USSR. Yet precisely
>> what Lenin had named state capitalism remained the Soviet industrial
>> reality; indeed, Stalin extended state capitalism into Soviet
>> agriculture.
>> CONCEPTUAL CONFUSIONS SET IN ABOUT WHAT EXACTLY SEPARATED
>> STATE-REGULATED PRIVATE CAPITALISM FROM STATE CAPITALISM FROM SOCIALISM.
>> In effect, Stalin had pronounced a new and daring definitional equation:
>> State capitalism was socialism. Many other socialists, including those
>> who otherwise denounced Stalin and reviled Stalinism, sooner or later
>> agreed with this new definition. So too did most of socialism's
>> enemies. In practice, when socialists achieved state power, they
>> either could not or would not use that power to go beyond varying
>> mixtures of regulated private and state capitalism. Yet socialists and
>> their enemies increasingly defined those mixtures as socialism
>> (although some socialists always disagreed and promoted other
>> formulations of what the key terms meant). Conceptual confusions set
>> in about what exactly, if anything, separated state-regulated private
> capitalism from state capitalism from socialism.
>> For most of the last century those confusions proliferated across the
>> statements of workers, capitalists, politicians, academics, media
>> personalities and the broad general public. For example, the term
>> "socialism" was often applied to almost anything done by or through
>> state power (such as President Obama's Affordable Care Act or the
>> IRS's efforts to increase tax collection). In much of Europe and
>> beyond, socialism refers mostly to the broad social welfare results
>> (national health insurance, pensions etc.) of using government power
>> to regulate, control and tax what are still largely private capitalisms.
>> A similar concept of socialism is more or less embraced by US
>> presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Thus, he seeks higher mass
>> consumption levels and better working conditions through state
>> regulatory policies that redistribute power and wealth from
>> corporations and the rich to the rest of the society. Yet Sanders'
>> celebration of worker cooperatives suggests some interest in going
>> further toward a non-capitalist system. Definitions of socialism in
>> places like China and the USSR specified socially dominant state
>> capitalist sectors with only marginal allowances for heavily regulated
> private capitalism.
>> The Limitations of State Capitalism and Regulated Private Capitalism
>> Many socialists struggled and eventually succeeded, often at great
>> costs, to construct regulated private capitalisms that delivered
>> public services, wealth and income redistribution, and social welfare
>> far beyond what less regulated private capitalisms had done. Other
>> socialists went further to implement state capitalisms that prevailed
>> in their countries. Those could and often did deliver public services
>> and social welfare beyond what even worker-friendly regulated private
> capitalisms did.
>> Yet socialists in power who presided over combinations of regulated
>> private capitalisms and state capitalisms suffered two severe
>> limitations. First, they could not prevent capitalist crises with
>> profound
> social consequences.
>> Second, they could not build sufficient confidence in or loyalty to
>> the systems they constructed to prevent those crises from provoking
>> reversions from state to private capitalism and from more to less
>> regulated private capitalism. The capitalist crises of the 1970s thus
>> led to neoliberalism and the crises of the late 1980s, to the
>> implosions in Eastern Europe. Even the deep global crisis since 2008
>> could not stop that reversion as many socialists and socialist parties
>> embraced austerity policies while failing seriously to reregulate.
>> Because the mixtures of highly regulated private and state capitalisms
>> were often run by socialists and called socialism, their decline over
>> recent decades has been widely and mistakenly understood as the "end" of
> socialism.
>> The workers in state capitalisms that were defined as socialism (the
>> USSR, China etc.) almost never themselves collectively and
>> democratically directed state capitalist enterprises. That key
>> function was reserved for state officials who had replaced the
>> corporate boards of directors. In state capitalist enterprises, the
>> workers did not have command of and responsibility for their
>> enterprises' performances. In the aftermath of their crises, the
>> "actually existing socialisms" of the late 20th century exhausted the
>> political and historical possibilities of such state capitalisms.
>> Similarly, the welfare-state-regulated private capitalisms have shown,
>> through their periods of neoliberalism since the 1970s and then
>> post-2008 austerity policies, that they were fundamentally insecure
>> and thus temporary. The New Deal in the US and social democracies in
>> Europe proved unable to reproduce the political alliances that once
>> forced their states to enable and facilitate their emergence. They
>> were rolled back in a determined counterattack by corporations and the
> rich.
>> Securing social democratic reforms of the sort won in the 1930s (such
>> as taxation of corporations and the rich to support mass social
>> services and
>> jobs) requires much more than mere state regulation of private
>> capitalism.
>> The forces behind private capitalism mobilized to retake full control
>> of the state in ways designed to preclude any repeat of New Deal or
>> social democratic responses to crises. Socialist parties and movements
>> failed to preserve the New Deal and social democracy, and failed to
>> prevent or destroy austerity policies after 2008. They thereby
>> exhausted the political appeal and foundation of socialisms based on
>> state regulation of private capitalism as utterly as the experiences
>> of the USSR and China largely exhausted the socialisms based on state
> capitalism.
>> Does Socialism Have a Future?
>> If socialism is to have a future, it will likely have to cut its
>> residual ties to both state-regulated private capitalism and state
>> capitalism. It will have to come full circle in the 21st century to
>> rediscover and update its 19th century differentiation from capitalism
>> as a fundamentally different mode of organizing the production and
>> distribution of goods and services.
>> Self-criticism by socialists must account for the decline of socialist
>> parties in Western Europe as well as the collapse of state capitalisms
>> ("actually existing socialisms"). Doing so culminates in new
>> definitions of socialism for the 21st century focused increasingly on
>> democratizing the workplace - at the micro-level. That is the key
>> change that was missing from previous socialisms. It must be added to
>> old definitions that were over-focused on substituting socialized for
>> privately owned means of production and substituting planning for
>> markets. This is the significance of the remarkable recent Cuban
>> policy decision to refocus its economic development strategy
>> relatively more on worker cooperatives and relatively less on state
>> enterprises. This is likewise the significance of the remarkable surge
>> of interest in workers' self-directed enterprises among anti-capitalist
> social movements and social critics.
>> Capitalism is relocating from its old centers in Western Europe, North
>> America and Japan, to new centers in China, India, Brazil and so on.
>> This relocation is also generating a vast new global criticism of the
>> private capitalism that proclaimed its absolute victory in the
>> aftermath of the USSR's implosion in 1989. Workers in the old centers
>> are slowly grasping that capitalism's relocation will no longer offset
>> their rising exploitation with rising consumption. They are feeling
>> abandoned by capitalism and raising increasingly critical voices. They
>> do not want a socialism defined in terms of Soviet or other state
>> capitalisms that had serious problems and imploded. They do not want a
>> private capitalism whose regulations proved reversible and whose
>> qualities of decline they deeply resent. A new socialism built around
>> democratized workplaces appeals to them in ways old socialisms no longer
> can.
>> Socialism in and for the 21st century must now define itself in clear
>> distinction from both regulated private capitalism and state capitalism.
>> Only then can we begin our strategic debates over precisely which
>> socialist goal to set and pursue.
>> Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
>> RICHARD D. WOLFF
>> Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of
>> Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He
>> is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in
>> International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He
>> also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan.
>> Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the
>> City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994,
>> he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris
>> (France), I (Sorbonne). His work is available at rdwolff.com and at
> democracyatwork.info.
>> RELATED STORIES
>> Richard D. Wolff | Capitalism's Deeper Problem By Richard D. Wolff,
>> Moyers & Company | News Analysis and Video System Change, or There and
>> Back Again: Capitalism, Socialism, Fascism By Richard D. Wolff,
>> Truthout | News Analysis Richard D. Wolff | Critics of Capitalism Must
>> Include Its Definition By Richard D. Wolff, Truthout | News Analysis
>> ________________________________________
>> Show Comments
>> Hide Comments
>> <a href="http://truthout.disqus.com/?url=ref">View the discussion
>> thread.</a> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
>> Socialism Means Abolishing the Distinction Between Bosses and
>> Employees Saturday, 27 June 2015 00:00 By Richard D. Wolff, Truthout |
> News Analysis
>> . font size Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
>> reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error!
>> Hyperlink reference not valid.
>> . An enterprise only qualifies as "socialist" once the distinction
>> between employers and employees within it has been abolished. (Image:
>> Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)
>> . http://truth-out.org/members/donateThe support of readers like you
>> got this story published - and helps Truthout stay free from corporate
>> advertising. Can you sustain our work with a tax-deductible donation
> today?
>> Regulated private capitalism. State capitalism. Socialism. These three
>> systems are entirely different from each other. We need to understand
>> the differences between them to move beyond today's dysfunctional
> economies.
>> With confidence waning in whether modern private capitalism can truly
>> be fixed, the debate shifts to a choice between two systemic
>> alternatives that we must learn to keep straight: state capitalism and
> socialism.
>> State capitalism exists when the state apparatus - rather than a group
>> of private citizens - positions state officials to function as
>> capitalist employers. Thus, under state capitalism it is state
>> officials placed in charge of enterprises who hire employees, organize
>> and supervise their activities within enterprises, sell the resulting
>> outputs (goods or services), receive the sales revenues and thus
>> realize any profits. State officials occupy the key directorial
>> positions within such state capitalist enterprises.
>> In contrast, in private capitalist enterprises, shareholders assign
>> these positions instead to private individuals - not state officials -
>> within structures such as corporate boards of directors. Hybrid
>> capitalist enterprises (part private and part state) also exist. Goods
>> and services produced in state capitalist enterprises are often sold
>> in markets alongside those produced by private capitalist enterprises.
>> Likewise, state capitalist enterprises typically buy their inputs in
>> markets alongside parallel purchases made by private capitalist
> businesses.
>> The Difference Between State Capitalism and Socialism In all countries
>> today, state capitalist enterprises coexist and transact in markets
>> with private capitalist enterprises. The proportions of the different
>> types of capitalist enterprise vary from country to country. Only in
>> some countries are state capitalist enterprises the socially dominant
>> kind of enterprise. In the United States, state capitalist enterprises
>> are definitely not socially dominant, but they do exist: Amtrak, TVA,
>> public colleges and universities, the post office, the Bank of North
>> Dakota, public power companies owned and operated by thousands of US
>> municipalities, and the New York City subway system are all examples.
>> Some state capitalist enterprises in the US obtain subsidies from the
>> government, but then many private capitalist enterprises obtain
>> subsidies,
> too.
>> The state directly regulates state capitalism. It does this through
>> the state officials it assigns to direct state enterprise activities.
>> The state indirectly regulates private capitalism. It does this by
>> means of rules and laws that limit the enterprise-directing decisions
>> made by private capitalists.
>> An enterprise only qualifies as "socialist" once the distinction
>> between employers and employees within it has been abolished.
>> The fact that the state regulates private capitalist enterprises and
>> operates state capitalist enterprises does not reduce the capitalist
>> structure of an economy. So long as employers, private or state, hire
>> laborers to produce commodities and generate profits that the
>> employers exclusively receive, the economy has a capitalist structure.
>> So long as it is exclusively the employers (whether private, state or
>> hybrid; whether more or less regulated) who decide how to use those
>> profits, it is a capitalist structure.
>> An enterprise only qualifies as "socialist" once the distinction
>> between employers and employees within it has been abolished. When
>> workers collectively and democratically produce, receive and
>> distribute the profits their labor generates, the enterprise becomes
>> socialist. Such enterprises can then become the base of a socialist
>> economy - its micro-level foundation
>> - supporting whatever ownership system (public and/or private) and
>> distribution system (planning and/or market) constitute that economy's
>> macro level.
>> Actual large-scale socialism would thus predominantly entail worker
>> cooperative enterprises such as these. Like the capitalist enterprises
>> that once emerged from European feudalism, these new cooperative
>> enterprises would seek to solve problems such as how to organize their
>> interdependencies with one another and with the public, how to relate
>> to private and public property, and how to manage transitions from
>> smaller- to larger-scale enterprises. Different forms of societal
>> socialisms will emerge: some with markets, private property and large
>> corporations, and others with centralized and/or decentralized
>> planning systems, socialized property, constraints on enterprise size
>> etc. Debates, experiments and choices among them will likely characterize
> the multiple forms that socialism will take.
>> Previous economic systems likewise often displayed coexistences among
>> more or less regulated private enterprises and state enterprises. In
>> slave societies, for example, alongside the private masters of slaves
>> working on plantations, states often owned and operated slave
>> plantations. In feudal societies, private feudal manors interacted
>> with the feudal manors operated by kings, to take a European example.
>> In short, slavery and feudalism, like capitalism, display varying
> combinations of private and state enterprises.
>> Historical Debates Within Socialism
>> The European socialism that emerged in the19th century was not
>> initially much concerned with issues of state versus private. It began
>> and evolved - especially with the work of Marx and his followers - as
>> a systemic critique of capitalism, not of regulation or the balance
>> between state and private enterprises. Socialists wanted to go beyond
>> capitalism to an altogether different system, one that fundamentally
>> rejected the basic division between employers and employees.
>> Socialists generally favored organizing society as "classless" where
>> all would be workers who democratically made society's basic economic and
> political decisions.
>> During the 19th century, as the socialist criticism of capitalism grew
>> and spread globally alongside capitalism itself, socialists debated
>> how to accomplish the transition from capitalism to socialism. The
>> debate fixed upon the state as the key means to make that transition.
>> If capitalism's critics could capture the state, state power could
>> then be utilized for the subsequent transition to socialism. The state
>> could, under socialists, usher the new system into being.
>> A transition to socialistically reorganized enterprises, once
>> accomplished by a state, would also transform the state as an
>> institution. With capitalists' power over the state removed, that
>> power would be wielded instead by the workers controlling the
>> socialized enterprises. Ending classes would end the need for a
>> repressive
> state to secure class divisions.
>> Both Marx's early and important association with the anarchist Mikhail
>> Bakunin and Lenin's later concept of the "withering away of the state"
>> shared presumptions that any state apparatus remaining in socialism
>> would
>> (a) be reduced to coordinating socialized enterprises' interactions,
>> and (b) depend on workers' socialized enterprises for its resources and
> powers.
>> As some put it, socialism either should or could only be achieved by
>> means of evolution, not revolution.
>> Some socialists have believed in and strategized for a revolutionary
>> seizure of state power from capitalists and their associates. They
>> have sought to replicate the action of revolutionaries in 1789 France
>> who took state power from the feudal lords, the feudal king and their
>> associates. Where the French revolutionary state enabled and
>> facilitated the transition from feudalism to capitalism, a socialist
>> revolution would proceed similarly for a transition from capitalism to
> socialism.
>> Other socialists have disagreed and argued instead for a
>> parliamentary/electoral strategy. They have argued that socialists
>> should form political parties and win elections as the way to capture
>> the state. As some put it, socialism either should or could only be
>> achieved by means of evolution, not revolution. As socialism became a
>> powerful global movement, socialists pursued one or the other or both
>> strategies depending on the specific conditions in each place and time.
>> Since 1900, proponents of both strategies claimed some victories. In
>> Western Europe, socialists built political parties that eventually
>> captured state power such as socialists in France possess today. In
>> Russia, China and Cuba, revolutions brought state power to socialists.
>> However, neither socialist strategy took the next step. Socialists in
>> power could not or would not make transitions to socialism (and ever
>> since have furiously debated whether that is what happened and if so,
> why).
>> Looking back now, it seems clear that socialists in power moved to
>> economic systems that mixed state capitalism with more or less
>> regulated private capitalism. That is, they used state power to
>> construct larger or smaller state capitalist sectors alongside often
>> heavily regulated private capitalist sectors. In Western Europe, the
>> state capitalist sectors tended to be smaller than those in Russia, China
> and Cuba.
>> Stalin Spreads Confusion
>> Shortly after the 1917 Soviet revolution, Lenin described the Bolsheviks'
>> achievement as having constructed "a state capitalism" that he
>> applauded as a necessary step toward a transition to socialism. By the
>> early 1930s, the subsequent leader, Stalin, made a pointedly different
>> declaration: Socialism had been achieved in the USSR. Yet precisely
>> what Lenin had named state capitalism remained the Soviet industrial
>> reality; indeed, Stalin extended state capitalism into Soviet
>> agriculture.
>> Conceptual confusions set in about what exactly separated
>> state-regulated private capitalism from state capitalism from socialism.
>> In effect, Stalin had pronounced a new and daring definitional equation:
>> State capitalism was socialism. Many other socialists, including those
>> who otherwise denounced Stalin and reviled Stalinism, sooner or later
>> agreed with this new definition. So too did most of socialism's
>> enemies. In practice, when socialists achieved state power, they
>> either could not or would not use that power to go beyond varying
>> mixtures of regulated private and state capitalism. Yet socialists and
>> their enemies increasingly defined those mixtures as socialism
>> (although some socialists always disagreed and promoted other
>> formulations of what the key terms meant). Conceptual confusions set
>> in about what exactly, if anything, separated state-regulated private
> capitalism from state capitalism from socialism.
>> For most of the last century those confusions proliferated across the
>> statements of workers, capitalists, politicians, academics, media
>> personalities and the broad general public. For example, the term
>> "socialism" was often applied to almost anything done by or through
>> state power (such as President Obama's Affordable Care Act or the
>> IRS's efforts to increase tax collection). In much of Europe and
>> beyond, socialism refers mostly to the broad social welfare results
>> (national health insurance, pensions etc.) of using government power
>> to regulate, control and tax what are still largely private capitalisms.
>> A similar concept of socialism is more or less embraced by US
>> presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Thus, he seeks higher mass
>> consumption levels and better working conditions through state
>> regulatory policies that redistribute power and wealth from
>> corporations and the rich to the rest of the society. Yet Sanders'
>> celebration of worker cooperatives suggests some interest in going
>> further toward a non-capitalist system. Definitions of socialism in
>> places like China and the USSR specified socially dominant state
>> capitalist sectors with only marginal allowances for heavily regulated
> private capitalism.
>> The Limitations of State Capitalism and Regulated Private Capitalism
>> Many socialists struggled and eventually succeeded, often at great
>> costs, to construct regulated private capitalisms that delivered
>> public services, wealth and income redistribution, and social welfare
>> far beyond what less regulated private capitalisms had done. Other
>> socialists went further to implement state capitalisms that prevailed
>> in their countries. Those could and often did deliver public services
>> and social welfare beyond what even worker-friendly regulated private
> capitalisms did.
>> Yet socialists in power who presided over combinations of regulated
>> private capitalisms and state capitalisms suffered two severe
>> limitations. First, they could not prevent capitalist crises with
>> profound
> social consequences.
>> Second, they could not build sufficient confidence in or loyalty to
>> the systems they constructed to prevent those crises from provoking
>> reversions from state to private capitalism and from more to less
>> regulated private capitalism. The capitalist crises of the 1970s thus
>> led to neoliberalism and the crises of the late 1980s, to the
>> implosions in Eastern Europe. Even the deep global crisis since 2008
>> could not stop that reversion as many socialists and socialist parties
>> embraced austerity policies while failing seriously to reregulate.
>> Because the mixtures of highly regulated private and state capitalisms
>> were often run by socialists and called socialism, their decline over
>> recent decades has been widely and mistakenly understood as the "end" of
> socialism.
>> The workers in state capitalisms that were defined as socialism (the
>> USSR, China etc.) almost never themselves collectively and
>> democratically directed state capitalist enterprises. That key
>> function was reserved for state officials who had replaced the
>> corporate boards of directors. In state capitalist enterprises, the
>> workers did not have command of and responsibility for their
>> enterprises' performances. In the aftermath of their crises, the
>> "actually existing socialisms" of the late 20th century exhausted the
>> political and historical possibilities of such state capitalisms.
>> Similarly, the welfare-state-regulated private capitalisms have shown,
>> through their periods of neoliberalism since the 1970s and then
>> post-2008 austerity policies, that they were fundamentally insecure
>> and thus temporary. The New Deal in the US and social democracies in
>> Europe proved unable to reproduce the political alliances that once
>> forced their states to enable and facilitate their emergence. They
>> were rolled back in a determined counterattack by corporations and the
> rich.
>> Securing social democratic reforms of the sort won in the 1930s (such
>> as taxation of corporations and the rich to support mass social
>> services and
>> jobs) requires much more than mere state regulation of private
>> capitalism.
>> The forces behind private capitalism mobilized to retake full control
>> of the state in ways designed to preclude any repeat of New Deal or
>> social democratic responses to crises. Socialist parties and movements
>> failed to preserve the New Deal and social democracy, and failed to
>> prevent or destroy austerity policies after 2008. They thereby
>> exhausted the political appeal and foundation of socialisms based on
>> state regulation of private capitalism as utterly as the experiences
>> of the USSR and China largely exhausted the socialisms based on state
> capitalism.
>> Does Socialism Have a Future?
>> If socialism is to have a future, it will likely have to cut its
>> residual ties to both state-regulated private capitalism and state
>> capitalism. It will have to come full circle in the 21st century to
>> rediscover and update its 19th century differentiation from capitalism
>> as a fundamentally different mode of organizing the production and
>> distribution of goods and services.
>> Self-criticism by socialists must account for the decline of socialist
>> parties in Western Europe as well as the collapse of state capitalisms
>> ("actually existing socialisms"). Doing so culminates in new
>> definitions of socialism for the 21st century focused increasingly on
>> democratizing the workplace - at the micro-level. That is the key
>> change that was missing from previous socialisms. It must be added to
>> old definitions that were over-focused on substituting socialized for
>> privately owned means of production and substituting planning for
>> markets. This is the significance of the remarkable recent Cuban
>> policy decision to refocus its economic development strategy
>> relatively more on worker cooperatives and relatively less on state
>> enterprises. This is likewise the significance of the remarkable surge
>> of interest in workers' self-directed enterprises among anti-capitalist
> social movements and social critics.
>> Capitalism is relocating from its old centers in Western Europe, North
>> America and Japan, to new centers in China, India, Brazil and so on.
>> This relocation is also generating a vast new global criticism of the
>> private capitalism that proclaimed its absolute victory in the
>> aftermath of the USSR's implosion in 1989. Workers in the old centers
>> are slowly grasping that capitalism's relocation will no longer offset
>> their rising exploitation with rising consumption. They are feeling
>> abandoned by capitalism and raising increasingly critical voices. They
>> do not want a socialism defined in terms of Soviet or other state
>> capitalisms that had serious problems and imploded. They do not want a
>> private capitalism whose regulations proved reversible and whose
>> qualities of decline they deeply resent. A new socialism built around
>> democratized workplaces appeals to them in ways old socialisms no longer
> can.
>> Socialism in and for the 21st century must now define itself in clear
>> distinction from both regulated private capitalism and state capitalism.
>> Only then can we begin our strategic debates over precisely which
>> socialist goal to set and pursue.
>> Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
>> Richard D. Wolff
>> Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of
>> Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He
>> is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in
>> International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He
>> also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan.
>> Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the
>> City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994,
>> he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris
>> (France), I (Sorbonne). His work is available at rdwolff.com and at
> democracyatwork.info.
>> Related Stories
>> Richard D. Wolff | Capitalism's Deeper Problem By Richard D. Wolff,
>> Moyers & Company | News Analysis and VideoSystem Change, or There and
>> Back Again: Capitalism, Socialism, Fascism By Richard D. Wolff,
>> Truthout | News AnalysisRichard D. Wolff | Critics of Capitalism Must
>> Include Its Definition By Richard D. Wolff, Truthout | News Analysis
>>
>> Show Comments
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
Friday, June 26, 2015
Re: [blind-democracy] "It's Not Polite to Say Nigger in Public...."
First of all, I'd been thinking for some time now that Pat Boone was
dead. I had to quickly resurrect him. Born June 1, 1934, Boone is
about 11 and a half months older than me. But we are millions of
light years apart. The difference between his wealth and mine would
be enough. But that is not the million of light years I am referring
to. It is the difference in how each of us see our fellow human
beings.
But that's not what I set out to talk about. Pat Boone can talk for himself.
I want to focus on our strange habit of creating a bunch of symbols,
declaring that they have a certain meaning and then keep changing what
that meaning really means.
Take the word Gay, for example. My mother loved her gay coat. It was
a multicolored
cloth coat. Mother took good care of her things, having been a young
mother during the Great Depression. So that coat lasted her for many
years. But she was greatly disturbed when she mentioned to some
friends that she was wearing her Gay Coat. They quietly advised her
not to say that word. "Gay?" mother asked. "What's wrong with Gay?"
Tinker Bell was a little Fairy. Enough said about that. A fagot
referred to a young boy who gathered fire sticks in the forests of
Europe. Later the word was shortened to Fag, meaning a cigarette.
Sort of a short fire stick.
But when I was teaching Braille, one of my students, a young Lesbian,
objected violently to the word Fag in her Braille lesson book.
Naturally, knowing her to be a bright and understanding person, I
believed I could explain the meaning of the word back when the Braille
lesson book was put together. 1960. But it would not do. So I took
my handy Braille eraser and she and I rubbed out one Braille dot from
the "F", turning it into a "B", and the word became, Bag. I did not
tell my student that in the storage room I had an entire shelf of the
identical Braille books.
For me, the hardest word to push out of my mouth was, "Fuck". Four
letters succinctly defining a very fundamental activity. But we
decided that Fuck was a dirty word, while copulate was much "nicer".
Both describe the same activity. But although I write the word here,
I would most likely never say it in a presentation before a mixed
audience.
Nigger is a word that was part of the language of the Old South. That
Old South still exists in many places, and not all of them South of
the Border. But I have to tell you, I am damned sick and fucking
tired of saying, "The N Word". As if that makes it just hunky Dorey.
We used to say, Negroes. But we changed to Blacks as the word of
choice by Negroes. I have no idea if that's true or not. My grandma
Jarvis, born in Missouri back in 1874, said, "Niggrah". She talked
about her "Colored wet nurse". And the Black Mammy who cooked for the
family. And the little Pica ninnies, the little children who lived on
the plantation. Did I mention that my grandma Jarvis was raised on a
plantation? And her father had two or three slaves prior to the Civil
War. My own great grandfather Tom Hickman. Judged to be a fair and
kind man, by his family and the other white neighbors. But no one
ever wrote down what his slaves thought him to be. He owned other
human beings, for Gods Sake! And yet, my grandma adored her dad. She
followed him about the plantation, avoiding the Women's work inside
the house. Grandma ended up living on an old age pension, but always
believed she was better than the Niggrahs she lived among.
The word Niggrah was not what made my grandma think the way she did.
Force her to say, "Black People", and she would continue to think of
them as she had been trained to think of them back in the 1880's as a
young girl.
I know blind folk who avoid the word, "blind". But you know what?
They are just as blind as if they used the word. And the entire world
sees them as blind.
While I do not believe we can easily change people's attitudes, that
is the place we must work. And if stopping our use of certain words
or tearing down old rags of Confederate dogma helps, let's do it. But
only as a starting place.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/26/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Boardman writes: "An unintendedly brilliant example of self-induced moral
> blindness to racist behavior comes from Pat Boone, the octogenarian
> multi-millionaire musician whose fortune was built on racist exploitation
> of
> black music in a racist music industry devoted to catering to America's
> white racism."
>
> CNN discusses President Obama's use of the N-word. (photo: CNN)
>
>
> "It's Not Polite to Say Nigger in Public...."
> By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
> 26 June 15
>
> "Racism, we are not cured of it. And, and, and it's not just a matter of,
> uh, it not being polite to say nigger in public. That's not the measure of
> whether racism still exists or not. It's not just a matter of overt
> discrimination. Societies don't, overnight, completely erase everything
> that
> happened two to three hundred years prior."
> - President Obama, June 22,
> on Marc Maron podcast
>
> This piece will end with a brief personal experience I had recently, an
> experience that illuminates what the President is saying and raises the
> question of whether it's polite to say "nigger" in private. My experience
> underscores that what the President is saying is obviously and profoundly
> true, and has been since long before he was born. And my recent experience
> illustrates the abiding armor of denial and determined ignorance that
> allows
> people to enjoy the advantages of a racist society without having to
> acknowledge that it exists.
> An unintendedly brilliant example of self-induced moral blindness to racist
> behavior comes from Pat Boone, the octogenarian multi-millionaire musician
> whose fortune was built on racist exploitation of black music in a racist
> music industry devoted to catering to America's white racism. Boone's
> fundamentalist Christian self-delusions about race appeared on WND (aka
> WorldNetDaily), self-described as "an independent news company dedicated to
> uncompromising journalism, seeking truth and justice and revitalizing the
> role of the free press as a guardian of liberty."
> According to Boone, it's President Obama's fault for not preaching that
> "racial divides and prejudice had greatly diminished and that our society
> was truly becoming colorblind." Having said that, Boone provided a white
> racist analysis of the killing of two black children, Trayvon Martin and
> Michael Brown, unarmed and shot by reckless white men. As for Charleston,
> where an avowed white racist killed nine black people in church in hope of
> starting a race war, Boone explains it away as having a "racist element,"
> but being "inspired by Satan"! While blaming Obama for "erasing" God from
> public life, Boone pleads for a return to America as a Christian nation -
> but he does not mention that American Christianity was a powerful defender
> of American slavery.
> This mode of thinking, or rather this mode of avoiding real thought, is
> endemic to a large section of the American population and has been, in one
> form or another, since before there was a United States. How else do you
> get
> a Constitution in which slaves don't get to vote, but do get counted as
> three-fifths of a person in order to inflate Congressional representation
> of
> slave owners? Orwell called it Doublethink in "1984," but it's a much older
> American tradition.
> One form of denial is feigned shock that "Obama said the N-word!"
> Assorted television babble-heads on CNN, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, Fox and elsewhere
> got all a-twitter over the President's saying "nigger," which they
> sanitized
> to "the N-word" with such characterizations as "extremely direct language"
> and "shock value" and "jarring comment" and "electric" and "one of the most
> charged racial slurs in the English language" - all of which are
> projections
> of the commentators' subjectivity. They are not at all accurate
> descriptions
> of what the President said, which was detached, measured, analytical, and
> precisely accurate. But who wants to hear that on TV? As Wolf Blitzer put
> it
> on CNN, "Many people may find this offensive." CNN's black legal analyst
> said the word should never be used. In sharp disagreement, CNN black anchor
> Don Lemon articulately defended adult conversation about difficult issues
> on
> television (for example, on Democracy NOW).
> By paying attention only to the President's use of the word "nigger" and
> not
> to his much broader context, television's purveyors of conventional wisdom
> manage to deny the relevance of the President's larger point: that racism
> has been endemic to American (and pre-American) culture for some 300 years
> and that racist thinking remains alive and well in many forms. Focusing on
> the President's use of "nigger" as an excuse not to talk about racism in
> America is, arguably, just another form of racism in America.
> Larry Wilmore on The Nightly Show reduced the TV babble to its ultimate
> Fox-accusing absurdity, President Obama saying "nigger" in a State of the
> Union speech. Wilmore also played clips of other presidents saying
> "nigger,"
> albeit in a less thoughtful way than Obama:
> . Nixon: "Our niggers are better than their niggers"
>
> . LBJ: "there's more niggers voting there than white folks"
> Wilmore also indicated that, while there's apparently no record of
> presidents like Washington or Jefferson saying "nigger," they did own one
> or
> more.
> Another effect of all the empty blather about the President saying "nigger"
> is to distract from the empty gestures about various Confederate flags.
> American devotion to the Confederate flag is, literally, insane or
> dishonest
> or hypocritical, or all three, or pick your word. Why? All Confederate
> flags
> are symbols of treason against the United States of America, and somehow
> it's OK to celebrate them and merchandise them and pretend they're
> something
> they never were. The Confederacy committed treason as defined by the
> Constitution and too many people would do it all over again, for the same
> racist reasons.
> What does one young South Carolinian tell us about America today?
> So here's the personal experience I mentioned. Over the weekend of June
> 20-21, I was at a family wedding in northern Maryland. The Sunday before
> Obama's podcast became public, I was at a post-wedding cookout with maybe
> 20
> people of various ages, many in their twenties. It was a definitely
> non-political social gathering.
> One young man in his mid-twenties was there as the new beau of the bride's
> sister. He was pleasant, attractive, well-spoken, polite, and had grown up
> in South Carolina. During our first conversation with several other people
> in the kitchen, David (not his real name) spoke enthusiastically of his
> work
> with horses and Brahma cattle. He described a roping gone wrong when he was
> forced to jump his horse over a fallen Brahma cow, whose horn scored his
> horse's underbelly. He seemed comfortable and at ease as the conversation
> shifted from person to person. He gave no hint of any socially disruptive
> opinions or behavior. But he was drinking.
> Some time later I wandered into a conversation David was having with the
> bride's mother on the screen porch. This conversation was already
> political.
> David was complaining about Jon Stewart on The Daily Show for calling out
> Charleston for having streets named after Civil War generals and otherwise
> ridiculing South Carolina's history. Stewart was about to start a race war,
> David argued, without mentioning Dylann Roof killing nine people. David
> said
> he was concerned about a race war because someone had already shot at the
> Confederate flag at the Capitol. David said we should just let history be
> history, and besides some people treated their slaves well.
> By the time our hostess came into this conversation, David was talking
> about
> Obama being Kenyan and like that. Our hostess told him firmly not to talk
> like that in her house. When he didn't seem to get the point, I leaned in
> and suggested that maybe we should both be quiet. He admitted he'd been
> drinking, but throughout this conversation he remained polite, friendly,
> quiet, apparently sincere in beliefs he didn't seem to think anyone would
> find unusual. He came across as a basically sweet kid.
> The last thing he said to me, before others took him swimming, he said with
> the same earnest pleasantness. He said, "I don't hate niggers."
>
> ________________________________________
> William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
> print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
> judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America,
> Corporation
> for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award
> nomination
> from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
> Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
> Permission
> to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
> Supported News.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
> valid.
>
> CNN discusses President Obama's use of the N-word. (photo: CNN)
> http://readersupportednews.org/http://readersupportednews.org/
> "It's Not Polite to Say Nigger in Public...."
> By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
> 26 June 15
> "Racism, we are not cured of it. And, and, and it's not just a matter of,
> uh, it not being polite to say nigger in public. That's not the measure of
> whether racism still exists or not. It's not just a matter of overt
> discrimination. Societies don't, overnight, completely erase everything
> that
> happened two to three hundred years prior."
> - President Obama, June 22,
> on Marc Maron podcast
> his piece will end with a brief personal experience I had recently, an
> experience that illuminates what the President is saying and raises the
> question of whether it's polite to say "nigger" in private. My experience
> underscores that what the President is saying is obviously and profoundly
> true, and has been since long before he was born. And my recent experience
> illustrates the abiding armor of denial and determined ignorance that
> allows
> people to enjoy the advantages of a racist society without having to
> acknowledge that it exists.
> An unintendedly brilliant example of self-induced moral blindness to racist
> behavior comes from Pat Boone, the octogenarian multi-millionaire musician
> whose fortune was built on racist exploitation of black music in a racist
> music industry devoted to catering to America's white racism. Boone's
> fundamentalist Christian self-delusions about race appeared on WND (aka
> WorldNetDaily), self-described as "an independent news company dedicated to
> uncompromising journalism, seeking truth and justice and revitalizing the
> role of the free press as a guardian of liberty."
> According to Boone, it's President Obama's fault for not preaching that
> "racial divides and prejudice had greatly diminished and that our society
> was truly becoming colorblind." Having said that, Boone provided a white
> racist analysis of the killing of two black children, Trayvon Martin and
> Michael Brown, unarmed and shot by reckless white men. As for Charleston,
> where an avowed white racist killed nine black people in church in hope of
> starting a race war, Boone explains it away as having a "racist element,"
> but being "inspired by Satan"! While blaming Obama for "erasing" God from
> public life, Boone pleads for a return to America as a Christian nation -
> but he does not mention that American Christianity was a powerful defender
> of American slavery.
> This mode of thinking, or rather this mode of avoiding real thought, is
> endemic to a large section of the American population and has been, in one
> form or another, since before there was a United States. How else do you
> get
> a Constitution in which slaves don't get to vote, but do get counted as
> three-fifths of a person in order to inflate Congressional representation
> of
> slave owners? Orwell called it Doublethink in "1984," but it's a much older
> American tradition.
> One form of denial is feigned shock that "Obama said the N-word!"
> Assorted television babble-heads on CNN, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, Fox and elsewhere
> got all a-twitter over the President's saying "nigger," which they
> sanitized
> to "the N-word" with such characterizations as "extremely direct language"
> and "shock value" and "jarring comment" and "electric" and "one of the most
> charged racial slurs in the English language" - all of which are
> projections
> of the commentators' subjectivity. They are not at all accurate
> descriptions
> of what the President said, which was detached, measured, analytical, and
> precisely accurate. But who wants to hear that on TV? As Wolf Blitzer put
> it
> on CNN, "Many people may find this offensive." CNN's black legal analyst
> said the word should never be used. In sharp disagreement, CNN black anchor
> Don Lemon articulately defended adult conversation about difficult issues
> on
> television (for example, on Democracy NOW).
> By paying attention only to the President's use of the word "nigger" and
> not
> to his much broader context, television's purveyors of conventional wisdom
> manage to deny the relevance of the President's larger point: that racism
> has been endemic to American (and pre-American) culture for some 300 years
> and that racist thinking remains alive and well in many forms. Focusing on
> the President's use of "nigger" as an excuse not to talk about racism in
> America is, arguably, just another form of racism in America.
> Larry Wilmore on The Nightly Show reduced the TV babble to its ultimate
> Fox-accusing absurdity, President Obama saying "nigger" in a State of the
> Union speech. Wilmore also played clips of other presidents saying
> "nigger,"
> albeit in a less thoughtful way than Obama:
> . Nixon: "Our niggers are better than their niggers"
>
> . LBJ: "there's more niggers voting there than white folks"
> Wilmore also indicated that, while there's apparently no record of
> presidents like Washington or Jefferson saying "nigger," they did own one
> or
> more.
> Another effect of all the empty blather about the President saying "nigger"
> is to distract from the empty gestures about various Confederate flags.
> American devotion to the Confederate flag is, literally, insane or
> dishonest
> or hypocritical, or all three, or pick your word. Why? All Confederate
> flags
> are symbols of treason against the United States of America, and somehow
> it's OK to celebrate them and merchandise them and pretend they're
> something
> they never were. The Confederacy committed treason as defined by the
> Constitution and too many people would do it all over again, for the same
> racist reasons.
> What does one young South Carolinian tell us about America today?
> So here's the personal experience I mentioned. Over the weekend of June
> 20-21, I was at a family wedding in northern Maryland. The Sunday before
> Obama's podcast became public, I was at a post-wedding cookout with maybe
> 20
> people of various ages, many in their twenties. It was a definitely
> non-political social gathering.
> One young man in his mid-twenties was there as the new beau of the bride's
> sister. He was pleasant, attractive, well-spoken, polite, and had grown up
> in South Carolina. During our first conversation with several other people
> in the kitchen, David (not his real name) spoke enthusiastically of his
> work
> with horses and Brahma cattle. He described a roping gone wrong when he was
> forced to jump his horse over a fallen Brahma cow, whose horn scored his
> horse's underbelly. He seemed comfortable and at ease as the conversation
> shifted from person to person. He gave no hint of any socially disruptive
> opinions or behavior. But he was drinking.
> Some time later I wandered into a conversation David was having with the
> bride's mother on the screen porch. This conversation was already
> political.
> David was complaining about Jon Stewart on The Daily Show for calling out
> Charleston for having streets named after Civil War generals and otherwise
> ridiculing South Carolina's history. Stewart was about to start a race war,
> David argued, without mentioning Dylann Roof killing nine people. David
> said
> he was concerned about a race war because someone had already shot at the
> Confederate flag at the Capitol. David said we should just let history be
> history, and besides some people treated their slaves well.
> By the time our hostess came into this conversation, David was talking
> about
> Obama being Kenyan and like that. Our hostess told him firmly not to talk
> like that in her house. When he didn't seem to get the point, I leaned in
> and suggested that maybe we should both be quiet. He admitted he'd been
> drinking, but throughout this conversation he remained polite, friendly,
> quiet, apparently sincere in beliefs he didn't seem to think anyone would
> find unusual. He came across as a basically sweet kid.
> The last thing he said to me, before others took him swimming, he said with
> the same earnest pleasantness. He said, "I don't hate niggers."
>
>
>
> William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
> print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
> judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America,
> Corporation
> for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award
> nomination
> from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
> Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
> Permission
> to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
> Supported News.
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>
dead. I had to quickly resurrect him. Born June 1, 1934, Boone is
about 11 and a half months older than me. But we are millions of
light years apart. The difference between his wealth and mine would
be enough. But that is not the million of light years I am referring
to. It is the difference in how each of us see our fellow human
beings.
But that's not what I set out to talk about. Pat Boone can talk for himself.
I want to focus on our strange habit of creating a bunch of symbols,
declaring that they have a certain meaning and then keep changing what
that meaning really means.
Take the word Gay, for example. My mother loved her gay coat. It was
a multicolored
cloth coat. Mother took good care of her things, having been a young
mother during the Great Depression. So that coat lasted her for many
years. But she was greatly disturbed when she mentioned to some
friends that she was wearing her Gay Coat. They quietly advised her
not to say that word. "Gay?" mother asked. "What's wrong with Gay?"
Tinker Bell was a little Fairy. Enough said about that. A fagot
referred to a young boy who gathered fire sticks in the forests of
Europe. Later the word was shortened to Fag, meaning a cigarette.
Sort of a short fire stick.
But when I was teaching Braille, one of my students, a young Lesbian,
objected violently to the word Fag in her Braille lesson book.
Naturally, knowing her to be a bright and understanding person, I
believed I could explain the meaning of the word back when the Braille
lesson book was put together. 1960. But it would not do. So I took
my handy Braille eraser and she and I rubbed out one Braille dot from
the "F", turning it into a "B", and the word became, Bag. I did not
tell my student that in the storage room I had an entire shelf of the
identical Braille books.
For me, the hardest word to push out of my mouth was, "Fuck". Four
letters succinctly defining a very fundamental activity. But we
decided that Fuck was a dirty word, while copulate was much "nicer".
Both describe the same activity. But although I write the word here,
I would most likely never say it in a presentation before a mixed
audience.
Nigger is a word that was part of the language of the Old South. That
Old South still exists in many places, and not all of them South of
the Border. But I have to tell you, I am damned sick and fucking
tired of saying, "The N Word". As if that makes it just hunky Dorey.
We used to say, Negroes. But we changed to Blacks as the word of
choice by Negroes. I have no idea if that's true or not. My grandma
Jarvis, born in Missouri back in 1874, said, "Niggrah". She talked
about her "Colored wet nurse". And the Black Mammy who cooked for the
family. And the little Pica ninnies, the little children who lived on
the plantation. Did I mention that my grandma Jarvis was raised on a
plantation? And her father had two or three slaves prior to the Civil
War. My own great grandfather Tom Hickman. Judged to be a fair and
kind man, by his family and the other white neighbors. But no one
ever wrote down what his slaves thought him to be. He owned other
human beings, for Gods Sake! And yet, my grandma adored her dad. She
followed him about the plantation, avoiding the Women's work inside
the house. Grandma ended up living on an old age pension, but always
believed she was better than the Niggrahs she lived among.
The word Niggrah was not what made my grandma think the way she did.
Force her to say, "Black People", and she would continue to think of
them as she had been trained to think of them back in the 1880's as a
young girl.
I know blind folk who avoid the word, "blind". But you know what?
They are just as blind as if they used the word. And the entire world
sees them as blind.
While I do not believe we can easily change people's attitudes, that
is the place we must work. And if stopping our use of certain words
or tearing down old rags of Confederate dogma helps, let's do it. But
only as a starting place.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/26/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Boardman writes: "An unintendedly brilliant example of self-induced moral
> blindness to racist behavior comes from Pat Boone, the octogenarian
> multi-millionaire musician whose fortune was built on racist exploitation
> of
> black music in a racist music industry devoted to catering to America's
> white racism."
>
> CNN discusses President Obama's use of the N-word. (photo: CNN)
>
>
> "It's Not Polite to Say Nigger in Public...."
> By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
> 26 June 15
>
> "Racism, we are not cured of it. And, and, and it's not just a matter of,
> uh, it not being polite to say nigger in public. That's not the measure of
> whether racism still exists or not. It's not just a matter of overt
> discrimination. Societies don't, overnight, completely erase everything
> that
> happened two to three hundred years prior."
> - President Obama, June 22,
> on Marc Maron podcast
>
> This piece will end with a brief personal experience I had recently, an
> experience that illuminates what the President is saying and raises the
> question of whether it's polite to say "nigger" in private. My experience
> underscores that what the President is saying is obviously and profoundly
> true, and has been since long before he was born. And my recent experience
> illustrates the abiding armor of denial and determined ignorance that
> allows
> people to enjoy the advantages of a racist society without having to
> acknowledge that it exists.
> An unintendedly brilliant example of self-induced moral blindness to racist
> behavior comes from Pat Boone, the octogenarian multi-millionaire musician
> whose fortune was built on racist exploitation of black music in a racist
> music industry devoted to catering to America's white racism. Boone's
> fundamentalist Christian self-delusions about race appeared on WND (aka
> WorldNetDaily), self-described as "an independent news company dedicated to
> uncompromising journalism, seeking truth and justice and revitalizing the
> role of the free press as a guardian of liberty."
> According to Boone, it's President Obama's fault for not preaching that
> "racial divides and prejudice had greatly diminished and that our society
> was truly becoming colorblind." Having said that, Boone provided a white
> racist analysis of the killing of two black children, Trayvon Martin and
> Michael Brown, unarmed and shot by reckless white men. As for Charleston,
> where an avowed white racist killed nine black people in church in hope of
> starting a race war, Boone explains it away as having a "racist element,"
> but being "inspired by Satan"! While blaming Obama for "erasing" God from
> public life, Boone pleads for a return to America as a Christian nation -
> but he does not mention that American Christianity was a powerful defender
> of American slavery.
> This mode of thinking, or rather this mode of avoiding real thought, is
> endemic to a large section of the American population and has been, in one
> form or another, since before there was a United States. How else do you
> get
> a Constitution in which slaves don't get to vote, but do get counted as
> three-fifths of a person in order to inflate Congressional representation
> of
> slave owners? Orwell called it Doublethink in "1984," but it's a much older
> American tradition.
> One form of denial is feigned shock that "Obama said the N-word!"
> Assorted television babble-heads on CNN, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, Fox and elsewhere
> got all a-twitter over the President's saying "nigger," which they
> sanitized
> to "the N-word" with such characterizations as "extremely direct language"
> and "shock value" and "jarring comment" and "electric" and "one of the most
> charged racial slurs in the English language" - all of which are
> projections
> of the commentators' subjectivity. They are not at all accurate
> descriptions
> of what the President said, which was detached, measured, analytical, and
> precisely accurate. But who wants to hear that on TV? As Wolf Blitzer put
> it
> on CNN, "Many people may find this offensive." CNN's black legal analyst
> said the word should never be used. In sharp disagreement, CNN black anchor
> Don Lemon articulately defended adult conversation about difficult issues
> on
> television (for example, on Democracy NOW).
> By paying attention only to the President's use of the word "nigger" and
> not
> to his much broader context, television's purveyors of conventional wisdom
> manage to deny the relevance of the President's larger point: that racism
> has been endemic to American (and pre-American) culture for some 300 years
> and that racist thinking remains alive and well in many forms. Focusing on
> the President's use of "nigger" as an excuse not to talk about racism in
> America is, arguably, just another form of racism in America.
> Larry Wilmore on The Nightly Show reduced the TV babble to its ultimate
> Fox-accusing absurdity, President Obama saying "nigger" in a State of the
> Union speech. Wilmore also played clips of other presidents saying
> "nigger,"
> albeit in a less thoughtful way than Obama:
> . Nixon: "Our niggers are better than their niggers"
>
> . LBJ: "there's more niggers voting there than white folks"
> Wilmore also indicated that, while there's apparently no record of
> presidents like Washington or Jefferson saying "nigger," they did own one
> or
> more.
> Another effect of all the empty blather about the President saying "nigger"
> is to distract from the empty gestures about various Confederate flags.
> American devotion to the Confederate flag is, literally, insane or
> dishonest
> or hypocritical, or all three, or pick your word. Why? All Confederate
> flags
> are symbols of treason against the United States of America, and somehow
> it's OK to celebrate them and merchandise them and pretend they're
> something
> they never were. The Confederacy committed treason as defined by the
> Constitution and too many people would do it all over again, for the same
> racist reasons.
> What does one young South Carolinian tell us about America today?
> So here's the personal experience I mentioned. Over the weekend of June
> 20-21, I was at a family wedding in northern Maryland. The Sunday before
> Obama's podcast became public, I was at a post-wedding cookout with maybe
> 20
> people of various ages, many in their twenties. It was a definitely
> non-political social gathering.
> One young man in his mid-twenties was there as the new beau of the bride's
> sister. He was pleasant, attractive, well-spoken, polite, and had grown up
> in South Carolina. During our first conversation with several other people
> in the kitchen, David (not his real name) spoke enthusiastically of his
> work
> with horses and Brahma cattle. He described a roping gone wrong when he was
> forced to jump his horse over a fallen Brahma cow, whose horn scored his
> horse's underbelly. He seemed comfortable and at ease as the conversation
> shifted from person to person. He gave no hint of any socially disruptive
> opinions or behavior. But he was drinking.
> Some time later I wandered into a conversation David was having with the
> bride's mother on the screen porch. This conversation was already
> political.
> David was complaining about Jon Stewart on The Daily Show for calling out
> Charleston for having streets named after Civil War generals and otherwise
> ridiculing South Carolina's history. Stewart was about to start a race war,
> David argued, without mentioning Dylann Roof killing nine people. David
> said
> he was concerned about a race war because someone had already shot at the
> Confederate flag at the Capitol. David said we should just let history be
> history, and besides some people treated their slaves well.
> By the time our hostess came into this conversation, David was talking
> about
> Obama being Kenyan and like that. Our hostess told him firmly not to talk
> like that in her house. When he didn't seem to get the point, I leaned in
> and suggested that maybe we should both be quiet. He admitted he'd been
> drinking, but throughout this conversation he remained polite, friendly,
> quiet, apparently sincere in beliefs he didn't seem to think anyone would
> find unusual. He came across as a basically sweet kid.
> The last thing he said to me, before others took him swimming, he said with
> the same earnest pleasantness. He said, "I don't hate niggers."
>
> ________________________________________
> William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
> print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
> judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America,
> Corporation
> for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award
> nomination
> from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
> Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
> Permission
> to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
> Supported News.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
> valid.
>
> CNN discusses President Obama's use of the N-word. (photo: CNN)
> http://readersupportednews.org/http://readersupportednews.org/
> "It's Not Polite to Say Nigger in Public...."
> By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
> 26 June 15
> "Racism, we are not cured of it. And, and, and it's not just a matter of,
> uh, it not being polite to say nigger in public. That's not the measure of
> whether racism still exists or not. It's not just a matter of overt
> discrimination. Societies don't, overnight, completely erase everything
> that
> happened two to three hundred years prior."
> - President Obama, June 22,
> on Marc Maron podcast
> his piece will end with a brief personal experience I had recently, an
> experience that illuminates what the President is saying and raises the
> question of whether it's polite to say "nigger" in private. My experience
> underscores that what the President is saying is obviously and profoundly
> true, and has been since long before he was born. And my recent experience
> illustrates the abiding armor of denial and determined ignorance that
> allows
> people to enjoy the advantages of a racist society without having to
> acknowledge that it exists.
> An unintendedly brilliant example of self-induced moral blindness to racist
> behavior comes from Pat Boone, the octogenarian multi-millionaire musician
> whose fortune was built on racist exploitation of black music in a racist
> music industry devoted to catering to America's white racism. Boone's
> fundamentalist Christian self-delusions about race appeared on WND (aka
> WorldNetDaily), self-described as "an independent news company dedicated to
> uncompromising journalism, seeking truth and justice and revitalizing the
> role of the free press as a guardian of liberty."
> According to Boone, it's President Obama's fault for not preaching that
> "racial divides and prejudice had greatly diminished and that our society
> was truly becoming colorblind." Having said that, Boone provided a white
> racist analysis of the killing of two black children, Trayvon Martin and
> Michael Brown, unarmed and shot by reckless white men. As for Charleston,
> where an avowed white racist killed nine black people in church in hope of
> starting a race war, Boone explains it away as having a "racist element,"
> but being "inspired by Satan"! While blaming Obama for "erasing" God from
> public life, Boone pleads for a return to America as a Christian nation -
> but he does not mention that American Christianity was a powerful defender
> of American slavery.
> This mode of thinking, or rather this mode of avoiding real thought, is
> endemic to a large section of the American population and has been, in one
> form or another, since before there was a United States. How else do you
> get
> a Constitution in which slaves don't get to vote, but do get counted as
> three-fifths of a person in order to inflate Congressional representation
> of
> slave owners? Orwell called it Doublethink in "1984," but it's a much older
> American tradition.
> One form of denial is feigned shock that "Obama said the N-word!"
> Assorted television babble-heads on CNN, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, Fox and elsewhere
> got all a-twitter over the President's saying "nigger," which they
> sanitized
> to "the N-word" with such characterizations as "extremely direct language"
> and "shock value" and "jarring comment" and "electric" and "one of the most
> charged racial slurs in the English language" - all of which are
> projections
> of the commentators' subjectivity. They are not at all accurate
> descriptions
> of what the President said, which was detached, measured, analytical, and
> precisely accurate. But who wants to hear that on TV? As Wolf Blitzer put
> it
> on CNN, "Many people may find this offensive." CNN's black legal analyst
> said the word should never be used. In sharp disagreement, CNN black anchor
> Don Lemon articulately defended adult conversation about difficult issues
> on
> television (for example, on Democracy NOW).
> By paying attention only to the President's use of the word "nigger" and
> not
> to his much broader context, television's purveyors of conventional wisdom
> manage to deny the relevance of the President's larger point: that racism
> has been endemic to American (and pre-American) culture for some 300 years
> and that racist thinking remains alive and well in many forms. Focusing on
> the President's use of "nigger" as an excuse not to talk about racism in
> America is, arguably, just another form of racism in America.
> Larry Wilmore on The Nightly Show reduced the TV babble to its ultimate
> Fox-accusing absurdity, President Obama saying "nigger" in a State of the
> Union speech. Wilmore also played clips of other presidents saying
> "nigger,"
> albeit in a less thoughtful way than Obama:
> . Nixon: "Our niggers are better than their niggers"
>
> . LBJ: "there's more niggers voting there than white folks"
> Wilmore also indicated that, while there's apparently no record of
> presidents like Washington or Jefferson saying "nigger," they did own one
> or
> more.
> Another effect of all the empty blather about the President saying "nigger"
> is to distract from the empty gestures about various Confederate flags.
> American devotion to the Confederate flag is, literally, insane or
> dishonest
> or hypocritical, or all three, or pick your word. Why? All Confederate
> flags
> are symbols of treason against the United States of America, and somehow
> it's OK to celebrate them and merchandise them and pretend they're
> something
> they never were. The Confederacy committed treason as defined by the
> Constitution and too many people would do it all over again, for the same
> racist reasons.
> What does one young South Carolinian tell us about America today?
> So here's the personal experience I mentioned. Over the weekend of June
> 20-21, I was at a family wedding in northern Maryland. The Sunday before
> Obama's podcast became public, I was at a post-wedding cookout with maybe
> 20
> people of various ages, many in their twenties. It was a definitely
> non-political social gathering.
> One young man in his mid-twenties was there as the new beau of the bride's
> sister. He was pleasant, attractive, well-spoken, polite, and had grown up
> in South Carolina. During our first conversation with several other people
> in the kitchen, David (not his real name) spoke enthusiastically of his
> work
> with horses and Brahma cattle. He described a roping gone wrong when he was
> forced to jump his horse over a fallen Brahma cow, whose horn scored his
> horse's underbelly. He seemed comfortable and at ease as the conversation
> shifted from person to person. He gave no hint of any socially disruptive
> opinions or behavior. But he was drinking.
> Some time later I wandered into a conversation David was having with the
> bride's mother on the screen porch. This conversation was already
> political.
> David was complaining about Jon Stewart on The Daily Show for calling out
> Charleston for having streets named after Civil War generals and otherwise
> ridiculing South Carolina's history. Stewart was about to start a race war,
> David argued, without mentioning Dylann Roof killing nine people. David
> said
> he was concerned about a race war because someone had already shot at the
> Confederate flag at the Capitol. David said we should just let history be
> history, and besides some people treated their slaves well.
> By the time our hostess came into this conversation, David was talking
> about
> Obama being Kenyan and like that. Our hostess told him firmly not to talk
> like that in her house. When he didn't seem to get the point, I leaned in
> and suggested that maybe we should both be quiet. He admitted he'd been
> drinking, but throughout this conversation he remained polite, friendly,
> quiet, apparently sincere in beliefs he didn't seem to think anyone would
> find unusual. He came across as a basically sweet kid.
> The last thing he said to me, before others took him swimming, he said with
> the same earnest pleasantness. He said, "I don't hate niggers."
>
>
>
> William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
> print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
> judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America,
> Corporation
> for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award
> nomination
> from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
> Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
> Permission
> to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
> Supported News.
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>
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