I'm not saying we need socialism in this country, but we do need a socialist revolution tugging at capitalism, because right now we have capitalism running roughshot over our country.
Universal Healthcare
Workers rights
Anti-Imperialism
Women's rights
Rights for everyone
Education for everyone
These were all basic tenets of the early socialist movements, and they are all things we still need to accomplish in this country.
A mass socialist movement is needed in this country because our Bourgeoisie has gotten too comfortable. We used to have social democratic voices in leadership positions in Washington, and in the academic world. The below quote from a review of John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics. by Richard Parker sums up why we need a mass socialist movement in this country.
The Democratic establishment has lost it's nerve. Too many party intellectuals and politicians drink cocktails on Martha's Vineyard, in Parker's view, and too few spend time on the shop floor learning what issues are important to those sweeping up or manning an assembly line or tending the convenience-store cash register from midnight to six am. Thus, the mass base of the Democratic Party has withered, and without a mass base Democratic politicians listen too much to their rich contributors and turn into Eisenhower Republicans -- people who are interested above all in balancing the budget. Galbraith, a committed social democrat, has wielded his pen and his tongue in an effort to halt this decades-long rightward drift. But he has failed: his allies are too few, and the loss of nerve among the party elite is too complete.
We need to scare the bourgeoise, the soicialist and communist movements in this country are what helped us get the New Deal, and LBJs great society. Economic populism is the answer to what ails the Democratic party, and it's the exact foil we need for the current right wing movement, which started as a way to defend capitalism, this is a fact that shouldn't be overlooked.
It Didn't Happen Overnight
The story of the conservative rise that Stein portrays begins back in the early 1970s, when there was panic among conservatives, especially in corporate boardrooms, that capitalism was under serious attack, and something drastic had to be done about it. The National Chamber of Commerce asked Lewis Powell, a former head of the American Bar Association and member of 11 corporate boards, to write a blueprint of what had to be done. The result, says Stein, is one the most prescient documents of our time. The memo lays out the framework, the goals and the ingredients for the conservative revolution that has gained momentum and power ever since. Two months after penning the memo, then-President Richard M. Nixon appointed Powell, a Democrat, to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Powell told the conservatives that they needed to confront liberalism everywhere and needed a "scale of financing only available through a joint effort" focused on an array of principles including less government, lower taxes, deregulation and challenging the left agenda everywhere. The conservative right, starting with seed money from the Coors Brewing family and Richard Mellon Scaife's publishing enterprise, moved forward to implement virtually every element of the Powell memo. It is a story of how the conservatives - in spite of political differences, ego, and competing priorities - were able to cooperate and develop a methodology that drives their issues and values relentlessly.
We must want to help the poor, but understand that welfare can encourage dependency. We must want to protect those who lose their jobs, but admit that generous unemployment benefits can raise the long-term rate of unemployment. We must be willing to tax the affluent to help those in need, but accept that too high a rate of taxation can discourage investment and innovation. To the free-market conservative, these are all arguments for government to do nothing, to accept whatever level of poverty and insecurity the market happens to produce. A serious liberal does not reply to such conservatives by denying that there are any trade-offs at all; he insists, rather, that some trade-offs are worth making, that helping the poor and protecting the unlucky may have costs but will ultimately make for a better society. That is the best way I can explain my position, but in order for my middle ground to be accepted I need the radical socialists, I need them to be vocal, and I need them to scare the establishment in order for the elite to think my less radical rantings are a better alternative.
The United States political center has become some crony capitalistic Horatio Alger every man for himslef mess, where gays, god and guns has been used to split us all up into factions while the capitalists profit from the confusion.
I need some good ol fashioned socialism and I need it now!
I leave you with a quote from Rosa Luxemburg...
Social Democracy has always contended that it represents not only the class interests of the proletariat but also the progressive aspirations of the whole of contemporary society. It represents the interests of all who are oppressed by bourgeois domination. This must not be understood merely in the sense that all these interests are ideally contained in the socialist program. Historic evolution translates the given proposition into reality. In its capacity as a political party, the Social Democracy becomes the haven of all discontented elements in our society and thus of the entire people, as contrasted to the tiny minority of capitalist masters.