I stole this from someone’s page that seems to be public, but I am not sure, which is why I do not identify the author except by initials. It is too good not to share.
Did the New Deal, so nostalgically cited by our democratic socialist intelligentsia today, break the power of these capitalists, who sat at the pinnacle of the economy and the politics that helped enable their wanton accumulation of capital? Did the social democracy of the post-WW2 “golden age” do so (of course, new capitalists came to be and shared power with the old money and supplanted it in a few cases)? Did the social democracy of Europe and Scandinavia, far, far more developed than in the US, break the power of the great houses of wealth there? Did it even end the influence of Nazis in West Germany? Did the power of the working class last long enough to permanently countervail that of its class enemy? Is the world today at all comparable to that of the heyday of social democracy? Is there any longer a socialist world large enough to strike fear into the heart of capital, one that could force concessions in favor of workers in the social democracies and even the United States?
Is Bernie Sanders, the hope of the fanatics at Jacobin magazine and in an important faction of the DSA, even one-tenth the politician FDR was, or even LBJ? In a global world, hasn’t the power of capital multiplied and become almost immune to the weak-tea socialism of Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, et. al.? And most of all, is not the ecological crisis facing us so great and so daunting, that only something far more radical than a Green New Deal has any chance of coping with it? And if the power of capital is global to an unprecedented degree, how will anything but a global movement, led by workers and peasants in the Global South, have any hope of ending capitalism and birthing a full-blown eco-socialism, built upon a foundation of agro-ecology and substantive democracy and equality?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 