The Enigma of Socialism

Socialism.  All of my life I have been surrounded,
cajoled, nearly  drowned by the very idea.  It was
and is everywhere.  My three-novenas-a-year Catholic
mother proudly voted for Norman Thomas,
the gentle Ohio theologian and American socialist
in 1928. Somehowthis aggravating idea that societies
should take care of folks appealed to her gentle soul.
I wanted to be a playwright, just like George
Bernard Shaw no less....and he was a very active
socialist.  Shaw and his fellow "Fabians" believed
in a "gradual" not "revolutionary" change.   I went
 to Antioch College which was swimming in at
least 75 different brands of socialism all the way
from something gentle and agrarian to a couple of
bitter Stalinists and, believe it or not, one of the
actual honest-to-God founders of the American
Communist Workers Party...an economics professor
named Louis Corey, nee Louis "Fraina". By the way
by the time I got to him Corey-Fraina had evolved
like many...into a Social Democrat, a person who
wants to put the humanistic values of Socialism into
a Democratic society.  Something I still aspire to.

Like it or not, socialism was born in the great
secular struggles to humanize our lives...so it is
often a chameleon, hiding in capital economies
or disappearing into dictatorships of allsorts.
It has both a gentle and violent episodic life and
has been claimed in one form or another by saints,
oligarchs, fascists, American presidents, Kings
and Queens.

I just plain don't know where to begin or where
it began. What a minestrone!  Did it start with
a Russian anarchist like Bakunin, should I begin
with the mess of the Spanish Civil War?  What
about the Greeks who invented "demos" a voting
if class-limited democracy?  Then there was
Plato's paternal philospher kings, Erasmus'
aundiced eye...or do I reach all the way forward to
Norman Thomas or Eugene V. Debs...both
brave and passionate advocates for the working
 man.  They were all socialist in whole or in part.

:Perhaps its jsut too damn much, perhaps the
 enigma of socialismis that it nevery stood
 still...that it swept back and forth across the
brutality of society trying to find a way for folks
to live decent lives, be fair to one another.  Am
I a socialist?  Or a social-democrat?  Do I want
the government to run everything, or some things
or just a few things or nothing at all?  Is it proper
to denounce folks as "socialist" if they advocate
generous and humane solutions?  Was Jane
Addams, the saint of the settlement house
movement somehow poisoned by the word
"socilist" which she used so generously. What
about Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker's
advocate...do we dump her in the socialist
landfill?

This is the first few paragraphs of a much longer
study of socialism  that I wrote in response to the
asses who have been shouting "socialist" at my
president and my friends. More is coming.

Messing with socialism

I'm committed to talking this year about the history of
socialism and I've been reading everything I can lay my
hands on to try to add something new to a subject older
than most.   For instance, I just finished a New Yorker
article on Hugo Chavez and Venezuela that blew much of the
optimism I might have about socialism in the 21st Century
right out of the water....oh my God..According to this
writer, it's a disaster down there,
folks camping in Caracas in unfinished high rises like the homeless
poor, violence everywhere, a medieval prison system and
a crop of guys (no women) spouting unutterable nonsense that
bears no relation to the dreams of Michelet, Proudhom, Owen,
Marx, Luxemburg....or even the Brits  Morrison or
Bevan.

Ideas don't necessarily have their own momentum or sets of
rules.  Christianity sure ain't Christ-like, and Judaism bergan to
lose sight of Moses  a dozen or so centuries ago.   And,"oh my
God" again, modern Islam has unfetched the Qran.   So why
should I be surprised that Socialism is hard to find in anything
like its ideological model.

Having said that, let me hurry to say that the  squirmy conser-
vatives that ran around in the 2012 presidential campaign here
accusing Obama and his squad of being "socialists" had any
idea what socialism is, was and might be.   There are, in the endless
history of socialism, moments of success.....like the early days
in New Harmony, Indiana  or the Swedish cooperatives....and, on
the other hand of course, is the terrible deterioration of the idea
into the mindless tyranny in the Soviet Union....But, and this is a big
"but," socialism can be traced to the noblest, most altruistic
instincts of the human being...it is, in the raw, of course, an
effort to give us a decent life, a decent shot at a future.....coming
in its modern form out of the savagery to the workers in the industrial
revolution.

So its a big subject.....it daunts this old man, but I'll be damned if
I'll let it go even if Hugo Chavez' broke my heart.

Much more later.