Posted on 03/30/2010 10:00:03 AM PDT by listenhillary
I value these history lessons that are so pertinent to today’s news! I’m not completely typical but am another history-ignorant American.
Thank you!
for later...
"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
Source: WikiThe 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 197273, these strategic differences had become so acute that the Socialist Party shattered into three successor groups...
...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 labornot 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 productionthat is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goodsmay 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 productionalthough 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
btt
good post
Great find and thanks for posting this excellent read from American Thinker!
Government in charge of student loans? Cool! 4 or 5 more years of indoctrination at the hands of the socialists.
I keep asking myself with each move this administration makes “Does this program or law create more government dependents” the answer has become monotonous.
“I.S.S. chapters were soon formed at Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton”
*********
What a coincidinky- the librul progressives love the Ivy League.
Young minds, what a terrible thing to waste.
Infecting them with socialism and the idea that more government is alway the right answer to any problem.
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