Why I am a Socialist

The corporate forces that are looting the
Treasury and have plunged us into a depression will not be contained by
the two main political parties. The Democratic and Republican parties
have become little more than squalid clubs of privilege and wealth,
whores to money and corporate interests, hostage to a massive arms
industry, and so adept at deception and self-delusion they no longer
know truth from lies. We will find our way out of this mess by
embracing an uncompromising democratic socialism-one that will insist
on massive government relief and work programs, the nationalization of
electricity and gas companies, a universal, not-for-profit government
health care program, the outlawing of hedge funds, a radical reduction
of our bloated military budget and an end to imperial wars-or we will
continue to be fleeced and impoverished by our bankrupt elite and
shackled and chained by our surveillance state.

The free market and globalization,
promised as the route to worldwide prosperity, have been exposed as a
con game. But this does not mean our corporate masters will disappear.
Totalitarianism, as George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of
faith as an age of schizophrenia. "A society becomes totalitarian when
its structure becomes flagrantly artificial," Orwell wrote, "that is
when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to
power by force or fraud." Force and fraud are all they have left. They
will use both.

There is a political shift in Europe
toward an open confrontation with the corporate state. Germany has seen
a surge of support for Die Linke
(The Left), a political grouping formed 18 months ago. It is co-led by
the veteran socialist "Red" Oskar Lafontaine, who has built his career
on attacking big business. Two-thirds of Germans in public opinion
polls say they agree with all or some of Die Linke's platform. The
Socialist Party of the Netherlands is on the verge of overtaking the
Labor Party as the main opposition party on the left. Greece, beset
with street protests and violence by disaffected youths, has seen the
rapid rise of the Coalition of the Radical Left. In Spain and Norway
socialists are in power. Resurgence is not universal, especially in
France and Britain, but the shifts toward socialism are significant.

Corporations have intruded into every
facet of life. We eat corporate food. We buy corporate clothes. We
drive corporate cars. We buy our vehicular fuel and our heating oil
from corporations. We borrow from corporate banks. We invest our
retirement savings with corporations. We are entertained, informed and
branded by corporations. We work for corporations. The creation of a
mercenary army, the privatization of public utilities and our
disgusting for-profit health care system are all legacies of the
corporate state. These corporations have no loyalty to America or the
American worker. They are not tied to nation states. They are vampires.

"By now the [commercial] revolution has
deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples
of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water," Wendell Berry
wrote in "The Unsettling of America." "Air remains the only necessity
that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution had
imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is
far more thorough and final than military defeat."

The corporation is designed to make money
without regard to human life, the social good or impact on the
environment. Corporate laws impose a legal duty on corporate executives
to make as much money as possible for shareholders, although many have
moved on to fleece shareholders as well. In the 2003 documentary film "The Corporation"
the management guru Peter Drucker says: "If you find an executive who
wants to take on social responsibilities, fire him. Fast."

A corporation that attempts to engage in
social responsibility, that tries to pay workers a decent wage with
benefits, that invests its profits to protect the environment and limit
pollution, that gives consumers fair deals, can be sued by
shareholders. Robert Monks, the investment manager, says in the film:
"The corporation is an externalizing machine, in the same way that a
shark is a killing machine. There isn't any question of malevolence or
of will. The enterprise has within it, and the shark has within it,
those characteristics that enable it to do that for which it was
designed." Ray Anderson,
the CEO of Interface Corp., the world's largest commercial carpet
manufacturer, calls the corporation a "present day instrument of
destruction" because of its compulsion to "externalize any cost that an
unwary or uncaring public will allow it to externalize."

"The notion that we can take and take and
take and take, waste and waste, without consequences, is driving the
biosphere to destruction," Anderson says.

In short, the film, based on Joel Bakan's book
"The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power,"
asserts that the corporation exhibits many of the traits found in
people clinically defined as psychopaths.

Psychologist Dr. Robert Hare lists in the film psychopathic traits and ties them to the behavior of corporations:

• callous unconcern for the feelings for others;
• incapacity to maintain enduring relationships;
• reckless disregard for the safety of others;
• deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit;
• incapacity to experience guilt;
• failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior.

And yet, under the American legal system,
corporations have the same legal rights as individuals. They give
hundreds of millions of dollars to political candidates, fund the army
of some 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state
capitals to write corporate-friendly legislation, drain taxpayer funds
and abolish government oversight. They saturate the airwaves, the
Internet, newsprint and magazines with advertisements promoting their
brands as the friendly face of the corporation. They have high-priced
legal teams, millions of employees, skilled public relations firms and
thousands of elected officials to ward off public intrusions into their
affairs or halt messy lawsuits. They hold a near monopoly on all
electronic and printed sources of information. A few media
giants-AOL-Time Warner, General Electric, Viacom, Disney and Rupert
Murdoch's NewsGroup-control nearly everything we read, see and hear.

"Private capital tends to become
concentrated in [a] 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 the smaller ones," Albert Einstein wrote
in 1949 in the Monthly Review in explaining why he was a socialist.
"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. This is true since the
members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties,
largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who,
for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the
legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people
do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the
underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing
conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or
indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education).
It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite
impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions
and to make intelligent use of his political rights."

Labor and left-wing activists, especially
university students and well-heeled liberals, have failed to unite.
This division, which is often based on social rather than economic
differences, has long stymied concerted action against ruling elites.
It has fractured the American left and rendered it impotent.

"Large sections of the middle class are
being gradually proletarianized; but the important point is that they
do not, at any rate not in the first generation, adopt a proletarian
outlook," Orwell wrote in 1937 during the last economic depression.
"Here I am, for instance, with a bourgeois upbringing and a
working-class income. Which class do I belong to? Economically I belong
to the working class, but it is almost impossible for me to think of
myself as anything but a member of the bourgeoisie. And supposing I had
to take sides, whom should I side with, the upper class which is trying
to squeeze me out of existence, or the working class whose manners are
not my manners? It is probable that I, personally, in any important
issue, would side with the working class. But what about the tens or
hundreds of thousands of others who are in approximately the same
position? And what about that far larger class, running into millions
this time-the office-workers and black-coated employees of all
kinds-whose traditions are less definite middle class but who would
certainly not thank you if you called them proletarians? All of these
people have the same interests and the same enemies as the working
class. All are being robbed and bullied by the same system. Yet how
many of them realize it? When the pinch came nearly all of them would
side with their oppressors and against those who ought to be their
allies. It is quite easy to imagine a working class crushed down to the
worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working-class
in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made Fascist party."

Coalitions of environmental,
anti-nuclear, anti-capitalist, sustainable-agriculture and
anti-globalization forces have coalesced in Europe to form and support
socialist parties. This has yet to happen in the United States. The
left never rallied in significant numbers behind Cynthia McKinney
or Ralph Nader. In picking the lesser of two evils, it threw its lot in
with a Democratic Party that backs our imperial wars, empowers the
national security state and does the bidding of corporations.

If Barack Obama does not end the flagrant
theft of taxpayer funds by corporate slugs and the disgraceful
abandonment of our working class, especially as foreclosures and
unemployment mount, many in the country will turn in desperation to the
far right embodied by groups such as Christian radicals. The failure by
the left to offer a democratic socialist alternative will mean there
will be, in the eyes of many embittered and struggling working- and
middle-class Americans, no alternative but a perverted Christian
fascism. The inability to articulate a viable socialism has been our
gravest mistake. It will ensure, if this does not soon change, a
ruthless totalitarian capitalism.