We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, April 14, 2023

Grand Thesis: Socialism is not only necessary, it is a matter of survival of the human species and other species (This is an essay in its final edited form except for needed improvements.)

(This essay draws on important previous essays found here and here.) 


I am a socialist. This paper is not an argument that you should be socialist, but a perspective after a lifetime studying geopolitical realities. (I have been a socialist from 19 years of age, but I have fleshed-out my simplistic 19-year-old ideology by subsequent world events. (I am presently nearly 87 years of age.)

 

I am a socialist as China defines it: socialism with Chinese characteristics, that is, history and culture of each nation should reflect national characteristics of socialism. In China private enterprises are under the firm control of the Chinese Communist Party, and as such the billionaires are not allowed to takeover the government. Nowadays, socialism means the ownership and control by ordinary people of economic institutions instead of a class of "owners" (billionaire capitalists). In the USA, which has a capitalist system, the ruling capitalist class largely serve themselves in the forms of wealth and power as a class instead of society as a whole behind a facade of "democracy". I choose socialism with American characteristics as a system that can save humanity--if it's not too late. That means the level of ownership and control should be decided by ordinary people excluding the outsized, even exclusvie, infuence of the billionaire capitalists. In the future (if we have one--capitalism: its wars and its compulsive use of fossil fuels are driving us to extinction) ordinary people, instead of a billionaire capitalist class of directors (mostly financial capitalists) in a well-hidden in the Deep State will decide what constitutes "public ownership" of a society. It means that our government will be directed by ordinary people instead major capitalists, and in which the economy serves the interests of the entire society instead of transnational capitalists or even major industrial capitalists. There would be no "deep state" in our nation, or any nation. The government will represent the people and will reflect the wishes of ordinary people instead of the well-hidden financial capitalists who control the government and our nation with democratic pretenses. 

 

Billionaires have taken control of our nation and have built a US/British/Zionist Empire in which a transnational capitalist class maintains control. They started in 1940 with individuals in the Foreign Relation Committee and the Dept. of State and aided by capitalists such as Henry Luce of Time Magazine to foment such a fascist coup. (The coup was recently approvingly described by Stephen Wertheim in his book Tomorrow, the World.) During the 1920s & 1930s, there were many US capitalists, when you read the literature as I have, beginning with Henry Ford who didn't hesitate to support what the Nazis were doing in Germany, and many US corporations promoted authoritarian capitalism (fascism) in Germany. In as early as 1920 Ford wrote in The International Jew in which he reflected his essentially racist orientation: 

 

 ... the genius of the Jew is to live off people; not off land, nor off the production of commodities from raw material, but off people. Let other people till the soil; the Jew, if he can, will live off the tiller. Let other people toil at trades and manufacture; the Jew will exploit the fruits of their work. That is his peculiar genius. If this genius be described as parasitic, the term would seem to be justified by a certain fitness. 

 

Because left-wing Jews were prominent in the 1917 Russian Revolution, Ford, like Hitler and most anti-Semites (simple-minded supporters of capitalism) mistakenly blamed the Jews for capitalism's failures. In the run-up to WWII the existing ruling capitalist classes chose authoritarian capitalism (fascism) and largely backed the Nazis. Others backed the US-Great Britain combination to support authoritarian capitalism behind a faux ideology of "democracy" in which you have essentially two capitalist capitalist political parties to choose from. Ford Inc. and other corporations went on to build trucks for the armies of the 3rd Reich (read Big Business and Hitler by Jacques R. Pauwels). All during WWII, Ford, General Motors (Opel) as well as other US corporations never stopped doing business for the Nazi government of Germany, but due to the work of US censors you will hardly find a graduate of US universities knowing these facts. 

 

Today, finance capitalists have largely replaced industrial capitalists in the ruling class, but they have not changed the goal of a dominant world empire. Billionaire financial capitalists in the USA, Britain, Zionist (right-wing Jews) Israel dominate much of Europe and Latin America now control the world's economies on behalf of transnational capitalism from a well-hidden Deep State. (Contemporary far left-wing Jews are illustrated by Norman Finklestein, a former professor at DePaul University and was hassled by academic exponents of capitalism that led to his denial of tenure.) 

 

The well-hidden Deep State of the Empire fear economic repressions and depressions typical of capitalist nations where the opportunities are few for ordinary people to increase their wealth and influence. This new ruling class, the majority of whom, now prefers to issue debt to private corporations at reduced rates, but by printing money they issue debt to government at an increasing rates of interest in order to sell government securities, and to any ordinary "cooperative" individual at high rates to guarantee their wealth and influence. The US ruling capitalist or the Deep State now have obligated the government (mostly ordinary Americans) to to pay over 31 trillion dollars of debt while the ruling capitalist class, whose purchase of debt securities enables them merely to live off the interest! 

 

This class-based system of the de-facto US/British/Zionist Empire uses violence and the threat of violence together with trade sanctions to attain compliance. That is why the USA is involved in many wars and has over 800 military bases scattered all over the world. That is precisely the reason that the transnational ruling financial capitalist class and their Empire have been engaged in many wars. They keep their populations ignorant of history, and control mainstream media and other social institutions with appointments in key positions and issue self-serving propaganda via their ownship of media corporations to maintain their Empire. Ordinary people of the USA and Britain don’t closely follow events in other countries, instead are mostly focused on their immediate family welfare--and the ruling capitalist class knows that, and their censorship of news and self-serving propaganda helps to keep the ordinary people in ignorance. However, that may change due to expensive efforts to maintain their Empire along with efforts to de-dollarize the world and the resulting decline of Empire economies. The Empire is expected to use military adventures in place of propaganda as they are currently doing in Ukraine. This will impact ordinary people in the lands of the Empire that they are being deceived, and lessen the effectiveness of censorship and propaganda.


Socialism applies to Russia that has nearly 10 decades of experience with it as a system: 7.3 of extreme socialism, more recently 2.5 decades of a milder kind, and a remaining decade of capitalist confusion in which the Soviet bureaucrats robbed the nation and nearly destroyed it. Russia has now maintained the ownership of a large sector of the economy, and they will not tolerate comproming their independence and sovereignty to the de-facto US/British/Zionist-Israeli Empire. As a result, ruling capitalist classes of the capitalist "West" have not liked the existence of Russia (and the Soviet Union) and China, and they do everything they can to destabilize their governments. China has allowed billionaires to exist, but under the firm control of China's Communist party. In the early days Putin, the President of Russia, gathered all the oligarchs together and warned them not to become involved in politics in return for his not interfering in their profit-making opportunities. (This article is how NPR reported the event.) The point is this: ordinary people of each nation of the Empire should decide, given their history and culture, what are allowed to be private enterprises, and with no "deep state" or a well-hidden ruling capitalist class that largely serves themselves with more wealth and power--at the expense of ordinary people--and with pretenses that their system represents a "democracy". Along with the decline of Empire, ordinary people will increasing distrust the propaganda that is fed to them by the ruling capitalist class.


We now see our government officials provoking both China and Russia, following orders of the capitalist ruling class, with visits to Taiwan, a recalcitrant province of China, and shooting down with missiles their weather balloons and other ballons--labeling them "spy balloons".  They provoked Russia with NATO bases up to their border despite protests from Russia; and according to German Chancelor Merkle, the capitalist ruling classes of the Empire hypocritically entered the Minsk agreements with less the honest motives to provide time to build up Ukraine's military forces. Furthermore, they blew up the Nord Stream pipelines to furnish Germany with cheaper gas than the US could provide in order to interfere the growing relationship between Germany and Russia.


The war in Ukraine is an illustration of the result of Empire policies, but this war is no ordinary war. It is a final stand of the de-facto US/British/Zionist Empire and its ambition to rule the world before the climate has destabilized to threaten all humans. Various members of the Biden administration have repeatedly said that the are in the Ukraine war for the long-haul and they have backed up this determination by huge investments in the support of their installed backing of the fascist Zelensky regime in Ukraine in 2014. The transnational ruling capitalist classes cannot hold their Empire together if they lose Europe. The neocons like Asst. Secretary of State's Victoria Nuland's phone conversation expressed only the Zionist component of the Empire that regards Europe with utter contempt. The war in Ukraine maintains the objectives of the Empire: 1) to keep the European nations from trading and cooperating with Russia with the result to prevent them from developing ties with Russia; 2) by scaring Europeans and other monetary rewards, to keep European nations from withdrawing from NATO; and 3) to prevent the ultimate demise of the transnational ruling capitalist class and their project to rule the world. This was their project from the start in 2014: to establish a fascist regime in Ukraine knowing this would provoke Russia followed by billions of dollars to purchase weapons to fully back Ukraine and to prepare for war with Russia. The leaders of the Empire thought that this was a method to destabilize the Russian government and to wreck Russian-China combination. That is why the directors of the capitalist Empire feel that they don't consider any option other than victory in Ukraine and destroying Putin's administration together with a more compliant government of Russia. 

 

This dominant, class-based system of capitalism has fooled nearly everybody in the USA combined with their use of propaganda, psy-ops, gaslighting, censorship, and other means of manipulating people's consciousness of the real world. We see today how the transnational capitalist class inspects our every move over the internet and other media. Worst of all, so that they can better control us, they propose new digital IDs and digital currency. Dissident people and real democracy are disappearing from the USA. With this authoritarian capitalism (fascist) methods, instead of real democracy, our masters are attempting, and largely succeeded, to shape public opinion; and for everything that goes wrong, they attribute to Putin. However, this faux political reality will not save this ruling class from on-the-ground reality and the growing understanding of the reality of ordinary people throughout the world. Their ultimate defeat of NATO (the Empire's army) will come as ordinary people experience this on-the-ground reality of wages that can't keep up with inflation and the general decline in living standards. The contrast between the imposed "reality" with the on-the-ground reality will be too much for ordinary people to tolerate as their economic condition declines. Once this of personal experience sets in, the defeat of the Empire will be only a matter of time before socialism will replace capitalism everywhere in the world. 

 

However, will it be too late to save us from the growing challenges of abrupt climate destabilization as explained by climate scientists Guy McPherson and James Hansen (10 years ago)? These scientists predict that it is only matter of a short time. McPherson predicts this year, or only a few more years, before climate destabilization sets in and destroys most species on Earth. This is a major existential challenge for humans.