Topic: The Symbiotic Relationship Between Socialism and Public Education:
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| Ayn Rand, early 20th Century right wing philosopher and literary author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead |
"When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer."
-Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Part 2, Ch. 6
Ladies and gentlemen, I do apologize for remaining away from blogging for the time being. I have felt under the weather lately, and as a result, needed some time to gather myself. As I quoted Ayn Rand just above, I am well aware she differs in principle with conservatives regarding religion and ethics, but in terms of self-determination and the rights of man, we diverge almost none at all. I consider the philosophy behind Objectivism to be far superior as it advocates social infrastructure at it barest necessity over Murray Rothbard's anarcho-capitalist core principle behind libertarianism. As there have been women such as former Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) who were pro choice or in the case of a man, none other than George Will who is an atheist, conservatism as defined by Edmund Burke is a diverse ideology based firmly upon the principle of adding national and cultural traditions into the concept of classical realism as was presented in 1689 by John Locke. As Ayn Rand was a citizen of the Soviet Union prior to her arrival in the United States, she could not have helped for some of her background to have rubbed off on her personality and life's perspectives, for what once had been many centuries of predominantly a Orthodox Christian legitimacy of the tsarist tradition within Russia, communism had destroyed this and left her barren for 75 years of any culture that did not emanate directly from the state. Those were the social traditions of the Soviet Union, and that was what she never quite psychologically-renounced with regards to personal ethics or her decision to remain an atheist. She was, however, very cognizant of the right to choose to practice a faith, which socialists here have attempted for years to abolish its legality, with libertarians supporting this tenet by means of simply saying government should not encourage nor deny others the right to practice their faith - ironic only in how this is a very similar position to socialism.
For the past calendar year, America and now the world have witnessed a series of crises pile atop one after so many others at an unprecedented scale in her history. America has faced crises all her existence, and we would mistaken to born its origins if we did not saying she was born from the American Revolution, or a crisis in denying our right to representation in the British Parliament. So too do we face not one, but many today, with countless others yet to have been reported and likely never will until the president is out of office either due to the term limit or by force. At the same time, as America and the world burn, our borders have been breached and terrorists welcomed with open arms and with funding to attack our sovereignty by President Obama, so too do we read of news that the United Nations is poised to usurp controls of our borders by demanding the president to describe these illegal aliens as refugees, which therefore grants the White House the capacity to hand over America's sovereignty to Ban Ki-moon.
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| Ban Ki-moon, current Secretary-General of the United Nations from South Korea |
Ban Ki-moon, who is the United Nations Secretary General, not only is poised to forcibly control our borders by deploying UN troops to wrest it away from the Texas National Guard if Obama sees fit to support it with our own military personnel in theory, but as the issue with Detroit's water supply is another place he could set up shop as it has reached the point where the city is completely bankrupt and the city growing more morbid in its level of poverty post-bankruptcy, civic leaders are calling for the UN to send humanitarian supplies. Today, it was reported that water is being shipped across the lake from Canada, which means America has lost North America to a nation approximately one-tenth our total population. As our mounting crises continue to dominate the news, CNN's President Jeff Zucker remains intent upon not covering any House investigations into Benghazi nor for the IRS targeting conservative, Christian and pro-Israeli groups, what we have now is a battle for information that is also unprecedented in our history, with Fox News Channel, despite what the socialists along the Far Left both domestically and around the globe will tell you, doing the best job at providing as much information as it can where others either heavily edit film coverage as with the Clive Bundy comment in April or simply choosing to ignore it to support the White House in a public announcement. As these items are true, the die is indeed cast, and I will inform you that as this is true to how I have always run my blog, I will continue to use every available resource - socialist, conservative and libertarian - alongside international news media, both privately-owned as well as state-run. And as I just pledged to you my continual commitment to ensure I provide the most eclectic foundation of information anywhere I may find it, you can count on me to keep it straight, and to crucify in writing socialists, conservatives and libertarians as I see it fit to do so.
This article, however, will again address another very important domestic issue having plagued America for more than a century, but which has been largely swept beneath the rug by the media in fear that if it continues to catch fire, it will be, as Thomas Jefferson stated in 1820 during the Missouri crisis at the start of the slavery issue increasing in intensity, "as if a firebell in the night." But why is the media and more importantly, the federal government, so filled with angst by providing the people with greater autonomy in choosing the standards, curricula and cultural environment for their children? As one politician stated to The Houston Chronicle, it is because they would not be capable of regulating it. Sadly, this lawmaker apparently did not receive the flash bulletin where it stated how America's parents are finally fed up with government's brainwashing our youth, our future generation of leaders, and furthermore to mold an infinite numbers of generations filled with dependents upon them to live and to do so with no design upon achieving their own lives and standards themselves.
This post, like several others before it, is a response I provided Rush Limbaugh's Facebook page (not Rush Limbaugh and the EIB Network) when he discussed our education system, how not all is faltering like most, but nevertheless that it is devolving like the rest of what has made America so exceptional since the first permanent settlement by English merchants at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. When you read the points I made as to why one of the principle founders of public education named W.E.B. DuBois considered this a crucial step in manifesting his ideal American society followed by a very infamous list to those who virulently oppose the political and social doctrine, you will firmly grasp why.
Why Do Socialists Insist Upon Public Education? It is Not As Clean-Cut as You Have Been Led On:
With a few 'brief' comments I will provide with the appropriate primary sources, this will simply comprise of Mr. Limbaugh's article, and my response as a regular reader:
Rush Limbaugh: Not every school system is lost, but more and more the multicultural curriculum is taking over, and the truth and the greatness and the specialty -- the special-ness, the uniqueness -- of this country's being written out.And to you, I provide finally my reply:
I support School Choice NOW's ultimate goal: the privatization of public education. America was far more educated and involved in civic responsibilities in all demographics of our population than we see today under socialized education, which veered far left of Horace Mann's advocating of significant parental involvement in the learning process. Even W.E.B. DuBois, a renowned socialist, acknowledged this was the ultimate goal for why public education was manifested more than one century ago when uttered these lines in a speech before the Communist Party of America:
"But this, Debs would say correctly, is not enough. It may come after some outrageous occurrence. However, for the long run and the continuing education of the people, Debs must learn that few reputable publishers today will take any book that deviates from respectable lines of thought as laid down by the National Association of Manufacturers; that no reputable book store will carry hooks advocating or not attacking communism; that public libraries will neither buy nor place hooks of which the FBI does not approve, and that none of our leading literary journals would mention a book by Debs himself should it appear today with a Heavenly imprint. Debs would learn with distress that the tendency apparent in his day of the readers of newspapers and magazines refusing to pay for the full cost of what they read has today sunk to the place where they expect to have their news and literature furnished them free and with pictures and gifts by the purveyors of tobacco, neckties and toothpaste."And when you read the following list...1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c... you might be interested to know that this is the tenth plank in Marx's The Communist Manifesto (1848), which I have read multiple times in college. It really is no surprise why socialists demand that no one have the right to choose where they attend school or if parents insist to home school their children. Many say that if they lost this, they would not be able to regulate what children learn. And of course, that is the entire point: to return to the standards of Horace Mann, who advocated for a family experience in education, which has since been dissolved in favor of total statist control. If the state did not enjoy its role as the sole arbiters of America's children's lives, how would they be able to discourage thinking outside the box and then to vote for Democrats?
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While few civic leaders at the local municipalities have read any of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels' landmark piece, the basic foundation is there. If socialism has no capacity to regulate what America's youth learns, how might it be able to spread its influence across America and then the world? This is the sole purpose for why the United Nations exists, and why America and Israel are in danger of facing annihilation or at the least, a fundamental transformation in the quality of living for one and all. And once that happens, the domino effect will commence until Jerusalem is suddenly considered globally to reside at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
Why do the United Nations exist? This can be answered in its official capacity within its Preamble.
PREAMBLEWE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINEDto save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, andto reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, andto establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, andto promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,AND FOR THESE ENDSto practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, andto unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, andto ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, andto employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples,HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMSAccordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.
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It really is quite peculiar that when you consider the UN intends to ensure all nations have provided for them machinery and the quest is for social and economic advancement, they speak curiously like Marxists, which would explain why the organization honored the 65th birthday of North Korea just last year.
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calendar>>September 5. 2013 Juche 102
Pyongyang, September 5 (KCNA) -- Staff members of the missions of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the World Food Program here laid floral baskets before the statues of President Kim Il Sung and leader Kim Jong Il on Mansu Hill Thursday on the occasion of the 65th birthday of the DPRK.
They placed floral baskets before the statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il and paid tribute in the humblest reverence to them who made immortal contributions to accomplishing the cause of global independence.
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In the spirit of my deciding to use the English transliteration to the North Korean state news agency, I just want everyone to understand that I did not launch The John Birch Society in my prior life. I will say, however, in considering the U.S. spearheaded the UN assault to stop the North's armies under Kim Il-Sung, it rather is peculiar how it now champions despotism in any form - communism or radical Islam - over democracy. It defines human rights as a matter of equity, and the international governing body has no qualms in achieving it through Marxist measures, and it has.
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Conclusion: The Full Text to Chapter II of The Communist Manifesto and Speech by W.E.B. DuBois:
As promised, I shall again delivered. This is perhaps the key section to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels' work on The Communist Manifesto, and I will again provide you the direct link to the page on which the literature is provided:
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| First addition of The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Marx and Engels |
Chapter II. Proletarians and Communists
In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?
The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.
They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.
They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism.
All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.
The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property.
The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.
Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.
When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.
Let us now take wage-labour.
The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.
In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.
By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.
But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes.
You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.
All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the Communistic mode of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.
That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.
But don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, &c. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.
The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property – historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production – this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.
Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.
But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.
The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.
He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.
For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.
Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.
Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.
The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.
The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.
The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?
What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
When people speak of the ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express that fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge.
“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical, and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change.”
“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.”
What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.
But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.
The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.
We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.
These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.
Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
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And lastly, W.E.B. DuBois's speech. Not surprisingly, he founded the NAACP, which still exists today to spur more class warfare just as DuBois intended:
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| W.E.B. DuBois, founder of the NAACP |
American Socialist, January 1956
If Debs could have returned to life for his Centennial, he would have found much progress towards socialism, but a grim battle still ahead, especially in his native land.
If Eugene Debs Returned
A Speech by W.E.B. Du Bois
IN the year 1920 when 919,000 American voters wanted Eugene Debs to be president of the United States, the socialist platform on which he ran demanded in general terms that eventually the ownership of the means of production be transferred from private to public control. The steps toward this end were not altogether agreed upon. But Debs demanded the supreme power of the workers ‘as the one class that can and will bring permanent peace to the world.’ He declared that then ‘we shall transfer the title deeds of the railroads, the telegraph lines, the mines, mills and great industries to the people in their collective capacity; we shall take possession of all these social utilities in the name of the people. We shall then have industrial democracy. We shall be a free nation whose government is of and by and for the people.’
If tonight Mr. Debs should saunter back to celebrate with us this his one-hundredth birthday, he would feel considerable gratification at the progress of his cause in 35 years. Capital is still mainly in private hands but not entirely. Increasing public control of capital is the rule in the United States while over most of the world public ownership is rapidly increasing. In our country public regulation of utilities, including railroads, water power and communications, has increased. We direct private business in numerous instances; we tax wealth in new ways, we defend the right of labor to organize and we pay out $1,500 million a year in social insurance. This is not yet socialism, but it is far from the uncontested rule of wealth.
EUGENE Debs, however, being an astute man and a logical thinker, would not be inclined to spend his birthday in celebrating the triumph of socialism in the United States. He would, on the contrary, see clearly that this nation, despite its advances toward socialism, is spending more money utterly to destroy socialism than it spends on education, health and general social uplift together.
He would realize with distress that advance toward the objects of socialism does not necessarily mean that the socialist state is at hand. Socialism includes planned production and distribution of wealth. But a completely socialistic result depends on who does the planning and for what ends. A state socialism planned by the rich for their own survival is quite possible, but it is far from the state where the rule rests in the hands of those who produce wealth and services and whose aim is the welfare of the mass of the people.
If Mr. Debs, during his absence from this earthly scene, has followed events of which we are too painfully aware, he will know that not all that is called socialism is socialistic in the sense that he used to understand it. He will know of Hitler’s National Socialism, which, indeed, built a magnificent system of roads and excellent public housing, controlled finance and wages, owned railroads, telegraphs and telephones and yet was not socialism as Debs envisioned it. He would note that widespread socialist methods in Britain, France, Holland and Belgium have not prevented these nations from exploiting labor in Europe, Asia, Africa and America and that their own laboring classes have been willing to base their increased wage and higher standard of living on the poverty, ignorance and disease of most of the working people of the world. This again can hardly be called socialism, and Debs would know that socialistic methods in the United States have succeeded in staving off financial collapse and may continue to do this for a considerable time, but that this social effort is for and by Big Business and financial monopoly and not for the farm and the shop. It bribes organized labor with high wages built on war industry and by this very act threatens the welfare of the mass of the people of the world.
The matter which would, I think, bother Eugene Debs most in the present scene would be the failure of democracy to change all this. If he arrived in time to look in on the polling places during our recent election, he would have seen with dismay that most Americans who have the right to vote do not make any effort to use it. It is unusual for a majority of voters to attend elections, not to mention the millions legally disfranchised by color and poverty.
NOW, the socialism of Eugene Debs was founded on the democratic state in which the law of the land was to be determined by the will of the people. If and when this prerequisite of the socialist state failed, I am sure that Mr. Debs, like Charlie Chaplin, would not think of returning to America, even for this celebration.
If then, Mr. Debs is nonplussed by the apathy of voters, he would learn in any barroom, barbershop or prayer-meeting, or even in the subway, that the reason lay in the fact that Americans have had no chance lately to vote on the matters in which they have the greatest interest. We have not had a chance to vote on peace or war, and will not next year, if we must choose between Eisenhower and Stevenson, or Nixon and Harriman. We have never voted on universal military service. We never voted to spend more than half our income on war; we never voted to make war in Korea. We never voted to beg, borrow or steal one hundred military bases all over the world to overthrow communism.
Why then should we vote if we cannot vote on matters which seem of greatest importance to us?
Mr. Debs’ reaction would be: If this be true, then it is our own fault that we have not talked to the people. He would say: Tell them the truth! Publish books and pamphlets; agitate! And then if Eugene Debs, forgetting that he is dead, should attempt to hire a hall, or stage a mass meeting on Union Square, or get time on radio or television, or get a book on the shelves of the Public Library, he would find himself guilty of subversion, proven a Communist quite unnecessarily by Budenz, Bentley and Philbrick, Inc., and since the courts have almost said that all Communists are criminals set to bring on violent revolution, Debs would soon be back in the very jail where imprisonment had already killed him.
BUT naturally, before Debs started on this impossible effort, we his friends and admirers would have coached him on the facts of life as we know them in this our America of today. It is not only true that Johnnie does not learn to read, but even if he could read he would have difficulty in reading the truth; that the vast monopolies which collect news from all over the world omit what they do not want known, distort what they submit and often deliberately lie about the rest.
‘But,’ I imagine Debs saying, waxing a bit hysterical, ‘why do not people insist on knowing the facts?’ Our only answer would be that since we have become a nation of the rich, run by the rich for the rich (a statement which Mr. Stevenson says he did not originate but merely quoted) the voters do not and cannot know that their best interests are not paramount aims of government; that as their education deteriorates during this the most illiterate government we have endured since Jackson, as their news becomes tainted, suppressed and slanted, it is Increasingly difficult for science and good will to usher in the state where the welfare of the mass of the people is the aim of government, where capital is owned by the people, where private profit is never the sole object of industry and where exploitation of labor is always a crime. We are no longer a democracy free to think, hut a frightened people scared of the socialism and communism which we dare not know nor study. We are threatened by mounting crime and facing jails full not only of criminals but increasingly of honest men whose fault is that they believe in the socialism for which Debs gave his life.
In the midst of this losing of our moral and intellectual integrity we are permitting almost unchallenged a concentrated power of industry and commerce and a monopoly of wealth and natural resources which is not only a threat to the United States but so great a threat to the world that the world with increasing unanimity is resenting it and organizing to oppose it. However, we could assure Mr. Debs that at times public opinion bursts the bonds of organized politics and wealth-control, and screams. We would for instance today be in the midst of a third and fatal world war if Nixon and Knowland had not been stopped in their tracks by an extraordinary avalanche of letters which made even the dumbest politicians in Washington realize that the nation wanted peace even if they got no chance to vote for it.
But this, Debs would say correctly, is not enough. It may come after some outrageous occurrence. However, for the long run and the continuing education of the people, Debs must learn that few reputable publishers today will take any book that deviates from respectable lines of thought as laid down by the National Association of Manufacturers; that no reputable book store will carry hooks advocating or not attacking communism; that public libraries will neither buy nor place hooks of which the FBI does not approve, and that none of our leading literary journals would mention a book by Debs himself should it appear today with a Heavenly imprint. Debs would learn with distress that the tendency apparent in his day of the readers of newspapers and magazines refusing to pay for the full cost of what they read has today sunk to the place where they expect to have their news and literature furnished them free and with pictures and gifts by the purveyors of tobacco, neckties and toothpaste.
IF Debs were still able to listen, he would learn that our representatives in Congress and legislature, our scientists, our preachers, teachers and students are afraid to think or talk lest they starve or disgrace their families and friends. Thus our basic culture patterns are vitiated.
To which Debs would reply: Those who believe in truth and know from slavery, poverty and crime what falsehood can do, must if possible save the truth from burial. Such action is not mere alms-giving, it is a great crusade Without unpaid crusaders and unknighted chivalry we plunge back into new Dark Ages, where ‘Guys and Dolls’ regale us with a crap game in a sewer.
And so Eugene Debs, returning with both sorrow and relief to the blessed peace of Heaven or the genial warmth of Hell (this depending on whether one reads the Timer or the Worker) will, I imagine, after a season of rest and reflection, look carefully about and say:
‘What really I fear for America is not merely loss of freedom, degeneration of schools, failure of the free press or failure of democracy. These, reason in time will combat. Rather I fear the threat of insanity; the loss of ability to reason. You’d hardly believe this, he’d say, but intelligent Americans cannot today see the direct connection between war, murder, lying, stealing, and juvenile crime. Their leaders actually propose to gain peace by war, to stop poverty by making the rich richer and to prevent force and violence by preparing force and violence on a scale of which the world never before dreamed anywhere at any time.
‘And furthermore, (this you will never believe, but I swear it’s true)’ says Debs, ‘the man who succeeded me as leader of Socialism in the United States and ran on the Socialist ticket for president five times, is today the most bitter and hysterical enemy of the only governments or earth which approach complete socialism. Brethren, I firmly believe that what my country needs today above all else is more and better insane asylums strategically placed.’
***
Whatever you believed you knew about public education before, you now know it is both the Tenth Planck of The Communist Manifesto and a key talking point in why DuBois wanted to discard all books in direct conflict of its base tenets. It is a great deal like Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. And like libertarianism, what socialism - and our president - does not approve from what one may read within our history texts, it simply revises.
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