Stealing Capitalism: The Crime of the Century

It's been 105 years since a clandestine plot was hatched to purloin America's capitalist system and replace it with socialism. Most of us were unaware of what was taking place right under our naïve noses, but recent events have now made it clear. Here's how it happened:

Autumn of 1905 was chock-full of historic people and events. Teddy Roosevelt was president. His cousins Franklin and Eleanor were settling down as newlyweds in New York. Novelist Upton Sinclair had recently published his infamous novel The Jungle in serial form.

A young baseball player named Ty Cobb was enjoying his rookie year, and inventor Orville Wright was recovering from a recent airplane crash. The science community was atwitter with talk of new physics theories just published by a 26-year old nobody named Einstein.

The U.S. population was around 83 million people. Fifteen million of them had a bathtub; six million had a telephone, and fifty of them were about to embark on a plan to replace American capitalism with Marxist socialism.

On September 12, 1905, a group of community organizers assembled in the loft of Peck's restaurant in New York City. Among those in attendance were Upton Sinclair, Jack London, John Dewey, Clarence Darrow, Mary "Mother" Jones, and Walter Lippman.

They named their group the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (I.S.S.). Governing and membership rules were established. Officers were chosen and goals were identified:

1. Promote an intelligent interest in Socialism among college men and women [1]; 2. Familiarize students with the inherent evils of American economic and social system based on laissez-faire policies [2]; 3. Promote the establishment of a socialist order [2].

The I.S.S. determined to achieve its goals in three ways: organize I.S.S. chapters on college campuses; graduate socialist adherents into society; and permeate labor unions, schools, and government with their followers.

Initial efforts met with resistance, as socialism was despised in America at this time. But with persistence and occasional obfuscation, I.S.S. chapters were soon formed at Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton, and by 1917, there were 61 college campus chapters and twelve alumni groups.

At about the same time the Intercollegiate Socialist Society was organized, the Rand School of Social Science opened for business in New York City. The school was funded primarily by the British Fabians. Various Intercollegiate Socialist Society officers were also on the board of the Rand School, whose purpose aligned with that of the I.S.S.:

The school had a very definite object -- that of providing an auxiliary or specialized agency to serve the Socialist and Trade Union Movement of the United States in an educational capacity ... to offer training along the lines calculated to make them more efficient workers for the Cause. [3]

As they were expanding their reach through college campuses and the Rand School, I.S.S. members were also busy building other organizations to advance their cause. The Industrial Workers of the World, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Civil Liberties Union, the New Republic magazine, and multiple teachers' unions were all founded by Society members. And in 1919, this tireless group launched yet another weapon against our economic system: The New School for Social Research.

Continued http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/03/stealing_capitalism_the_crime.html

"No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc."

The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx

Socialist Party of America

The Socialist Party of America (SPA or SP) was a democratic socialist political party in the United States, formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party which had split from the main organization in 1899.
In the first decades of the 20th Century, it drew significant support from many different groups, including trade unionists, progressive social reformers, populist farmers, and immigrant communities. Its presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, won over 900,000 votes in 1912 and 1920, while the party also elected members of the United States House of Representatives (Victor L. Berger and Meyer London) and numerous state legislators and mayors. The party's staunch opposition to American involvement in World War I, although welcomed by many, also led to prominent defections, official repression and vigilante persecution. The organization was further shattered by a factional war over how it should respond to Russia's Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the establishment of the Communist International in 1919.
After endorsing Robert LaFollette's presidential campaign in 1924, the Socialist Party returned to independent action and experienced modest growth in the early 1930s behind presidential candidate Norman Thomas. After the 1920s, however, the Party's appeal was weakened by the popularity of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the superior organization and tactical flexibility of the Communist Party under Earl Browder, and the resurgent labor movement's need for friendly government policies. A divisive and ultimately-unsuccessful attempt to broaden the party by admitting followers of Leon Trotsky and Jay Lovestone caused the traditional "Old Guard" to leave and form the Social Democratic Federation. While the party was always strongly anti-Fascist, as well as anti-Stalinist, the SP's ambivalent attitude towards World War II cost it both internal and external support.
The SP stopped running Presidential candidates after 1956, when its nominee Darlington Hoopes won fewer than 3,000 votes. In the party's last decades, its members, many of them prominent in the labor, peace, civil rights and civil liberties movements, fundamentally disagreed about the socialist movement's relationship to the Democratic Party domestically and how best to advance democracy abroad. In 1972–73, these strategic differences had become so acute that the Socialist Party shattered into three successor groups...

Source: Wiki

Why Socialism?

by Albert Einstein This essay was originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1949).

...The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules.
In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.
For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call “workers” all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production—although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist.
The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. Insofar as the labor contract is “free,” what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists' requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society...
Further Readings: Socialism: Utopian and Scientific - [The Development of Utopian Socialism] Frederick Engels UCLA: FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate

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