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.