Howard Zinn
The song Franco Un-American off the 2003 album The War on Errorism by American punk rock band NOFX references lead singer Fat Mike reading Howard Zinn as part of learning more about the world.
Showing posts with label socialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label socialism. Show all posts
Friday, July 27, 2012
Socialism
"Let's talk about socialism. I think it's very important to bring back the idea of socialism into the national discussion to where it was at the turn of the [last] century before the Soviet Union gave it a bad name. Socialism had a good name in this country. Socialism had Eugene Debs. It had Clarence Darrow. It had Mother Jones. It had Emma Goldman. It had several million people reading socialist newspapers around the country. Socialism basically said, hey, let's have a kinder, gentler society. Let's share things. Let's have an economic system that produces things not because they're profitable for some corporation, but produces things that people need. People should not be retreating from the word socialism because you have to go beyond capitalism."
Howard Zinn
The song Franco Un-American off the 2003 album The War on Errorism by American punk rock band NOFX references lead singer Fat Mike reading Howard Zinn as part of learning more about the world.
Howard Zinn
The song Franco Un-American off the 2003 album The War on Errorism by American punk rock band NOFX references lead singer Fat Mike reading Howard Zinn as part of learning more about the world.
Thursday, July 26, 2012
The Class Struggle (magazine)
The Left Wing movement
Even prior to the establishment of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) in the summer of 1901, there had been a more or less conscious left wing movement, which looked with disdain upon advocacy of a "minimum program" of ameliorative reform, instead arguing for the wholesale revolutionary transformation of politics and society. World War I intensified the feelings of alienation of the left wing from the moderate leadership of the SPA and their almost exclusive concentration upon electoral politics.[1] The Left saw the failure of the parliamentary Socialists of Europe to avert the catastrophe of war as indicative of what one historian has aptly characterized as the "fatal dilution of revolutionary principles by the party."[2] The radicals, in ever more strident terms, objected to the "parliamentary cretinism" and "sausage socialism" of the moderate wing of the socialist movement, gradually coming to view its existence as an impediment on the achievement of socialist change.
Further impetus to the Left Wing was provided by the victory of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party, headed by V.I. Lenin in November 1917. The Bolshevik triumph seemed to validate the perspective of the radicals that socialist change would come through revolutionary upheaval rather than through piecemeal parliamentary reform. Parallel revolutionary efforts in Germany, Finland, and Hungary seemed to signal a new historical moment to the often young and always enthusiastic Left Wing movement. This movement sought to organize itself and to give voice to its ideas via the printed word. The magazine The Class Struggle, established late in the spring of 1917, was a particularly important vehicle for this emerging Left Wing.
Even prior to the establishment of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) in the summer of 1901, there had been a more or less conscious left wing movement, which looked with disdain upon advocacy of a "minimum program" of ameliorative reform, instead arguing for the wholesale revolutionary transformation of politics and society. World War I intensified the feelings of alienation of the left wing from the moderate leadership of the SPA and their almost exclusive concentration upon electoral politics.[1] The Left saw the failure of the parliamentary Socialists of Europe to avert the catastrophe of war as indicative of what one historian has aptly characterized as the "fatal dilution of revolutionary principles by the party."[2] The radicals, in ever more strident terms, objected to the "parliamentary cretinism" and "sausage socialism" of the moderate wing of the socialist movement, gradually coming to view its existence as an impediment on the achievement of socialist change.
Further impetus to the Left Wing was provided by the victory of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party, headed by V.I. Lenin in November 1917. The Bolshevik triumph seemed to validate the perspective of the radicals that socialist change would come through revolutionary upheaval rather than through piecemeal parliamentary reform. Parallel revolutionary efforts in Germany, Finland, and Hungary seemed to signal a new historical moment to the often young and always enthusiastic Left Wing movement. This movement sought to organize itself and to give voice to its ideas via the printed word. The magazine The Class Struggle, established late in the spring of 1917, was a particularly important vehicle for this emerging Left Wing.
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