Yet the emphasis on this, contrasted with “interfering big government” – a standard topos of the Right, can be broadly correlated to the interests of big capital. This means that for the wealthy involved in the Tea Party conference, they’re acting directly in their own self-interest, even if they frame it in terms where that is not immediately apparent.

The more interesting bit, which I hoped you would pick up on, is that a lot of the seventy thousand people who marched on Washington with the Tea Party crowd, carrying banners equating Lenin, Hitler and Obama are acting against their own interests.

In fact, there are also new and very dangerous aspects to American ‘culture’ that over the last number of decades – almost parallel to the expansion of neo-liberal doctrines within the US economy – have expanded past the original narrative of the self-sufficient individual towards Christian eschatology. The grassroots of this movement are tied, through the Republican Party, to an anti-redistributive, pro-business agenda, and it’s not an implicit link. You merely have to listen to US talk radio to understand how demagogues can jump from one to the other.

I think it was Umberto Eco who said that if Fascism comes to American shores it’ll be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

My point in all this is of course to contradict myself, if I gave the impression that people think in terms of self-interest in an uncomplicated fashion. Ideological narratives are involved that not only negate the stark selfishness which you point out, but will cause thousands of supporters – perhaps the ones who couldn’t afford the hundred dollar tickets and were angry that Palin et al got paid five/ six figure sums – to act against their own interest.

Fascinated by that answer. Does every person or class think that way? Do you – i.e. everyone for themselves, larger interests than mine don’t work, etc. I’d be surprised. And is capitalism the REASON they think that way – would those fat rich Americans be better citizens if they were somehow schooled in some other system? Or would they just lack the means of expressing their odious views?

In socialist systems do people have more altruistic motives, intrinsically, than in others?

What I don’t get is that, when asked to choose a system, a small sector of American society is so determined to choose one that hurts a small minority. I don’t think people are generally like that. I think most people are more moral than that – regardless of the economic system. There seems to be something odd in American culture, IMHO

Liberals should not pretend that capitalism has the capacity to be a moral economy. Whether it’s drugs, weapons or any other substance that results in human suffering, if it makes money, under a system based on private property and personal accumulation, then it will spawn industry. It just makes them look disingenuous.

What do these people think they will say when they meet St Peter at the Pearly Gates?

But how sad America the land of the free, should hate socialism so much, then again over the last twelve years or rather the last 30 odd years in the UK I’ve not seen a hell of a lot of socialism here.

I still don’t understand why you brought up Karl Kautsky. Kautsky wasn’t especially central to European or any other social-democracy. Even foregoing that, I don’t see how one jumps from Kautsky to Obama, or what lessons one is to take from it.

I have no intention of formulating a list of my own view of what socialism is or should be – my point was not to argue against your definition of what socialism is, it was to ask why the list of demands was relevant to an article which challenged Tom Tancredo’s view that people should be disfranchised based on their education.

Finally, with regard to your concrete suggestions as to what we should demand, some of what you say is valid if your purpose was to outline a programme liable to pick up support from the workers of the United States.

However when you say things like “of course I countenance inequality” but also maintain that through reigning in inequality a little we can abolish the class system – without making reference to the underpinning of the class system, which is private property, or to market, which can translate inequality into entrenched, multi-generational benefit – then what you’re calling for sounds muddled.

If this is what socialism means for you, you’re right Obama’s not a socialist. No one here, however, is maintaining that he is. He is in fact pro-capitalist. Perhaps his spending plans have some of the social content of the New Deal, but if so it is minuscule. This is what makes the claims of the Tea Party movement so outrageous.

02. Perhaps I do not know what I am talking about. Kautsky—to whom I was somewhat remotely connected—is considered a pivotal force in Europ’s Democratic Socialism.

03. Please correct my impression of what Socialists wants. Having been a Socialist my entire life (minus a few years in the beginning). I do not think that I was off target. I learned little from the Kaustky we rarely saw and not at all after Hitler.However I have come to find in his life and writing a lot that appeals.

05. Of course I countenance inequality—what I speak about is firtsly: that the loewest paid in a concern still is adequately paid, that the workers (whether those of intellect or brawn); secondly: that the difference between the higher paid and the lowest paid is not as vast as it is roday and that what people earn is—as long as it is sufficient to live a decent life—is decided by those who contribite their skill to a particular concern. If the workers (broadly sketched to include anyone contributing intellectually or physically to a concern) “own the concern” (o stocks or bonds for people who sit at home and take what is rightfully that of the workers in that concern) I doubt that CEO’s will often have several miliions pay + large bonuses and a golden parachute such conditions might vanish.

06. That Socialists in fact do not have a party line which must be rigidly adhere to even when the person disagrees. That to me is Communism that I could do without.

Dr. Erich H. Loewy
Prof & F’dg Chair, Bioethics (Emeritus)
U of CA, Davis
ehloewy@ucdavis.edu

Those of them who are thinking entirely in terms of eschatological religious terms are probably lost already – but their pull on the rest of the American working class can be stopped.

If we do stop it, and re-organize the US working class, buffer the unions and begin to assert an anti-capitalist alternative, grounded in liberal values and solidarity with all workers – whether supposedly middle class or not – then those elements we can’t convince, the movement will be able to sideline.