By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
For the past couple of centuries, the leading politicians and church leaders and the corporate mass media across North America have been telling us all that “socialism” is something “Satanic,” something that should be shunned at all costs.
But when the greed, incompetence, corruption and criminality of corporate capitalism brought the world’s economy to its knees over the past couple of years, all those captains of industry and bankster barons were lined up at the public trough like the dying victims of a Third-World famine.
One would have been forgiven for assuming the econocorporate socioeconomic elite had actually had to miss a meal for a change. Nothing of the sort had actually happened, of course.
Their bellies still full, the avatars of material excess simply could not stomach the possibility that the collective holders of excessive wealth and power might actually see their share of the pie shrink for a change instead of forever increasing, as is the norm under their amoral socioeconomic system.
For centuries, the econcorporate socioeconomic elite have waged class warfare against the poor, the working class and the middle class in both the U.S. and Canada.
The social safety net was kept threadbare. The gap between the rich and the rest was allowed to constantly widen. And the spectacle of abject poverty co-existing side-by-side with boundless wealth came to be accepted as “just the way things are.”
But when the unbridled greed, incompetence, corruption and criminality of the “master class” threatened to catapult the world economy into chaos, something had to be done.
While “democratic” governments had always been constrained from implementing a redistribution of wealth, income and power that would favour the masses – the poor, the working class, and the middle class – there was no political compunction in the last couple of years about implementing the most massive redsidtriution of wealth ever – and all in favour of the established socioeconomic elite.
Banks and corporations were declared “too big to fail.” The public was exercised into a great panic and docile acceptance of this upward redistribution of wealth, income and power from the “Have-Nots” to the “Haves.”
And in keeping with the corporate capitalist political agenda, our governments chose to socialize not the failing banks and corporations but the insolvency of those banks and corporations and the relative insolvency of their billionaire and mega-millionaire controllers.
The captains of industry, the corporate executive and the bankster barons are not some unprivileged sector of society. They are parasites skimming the cream from the milk society as a whole produces.
But that is not “socialism.” It is “reverse socialism”.
Socialism is the common or collective ownership and control of the means of material production and distribution and the impetus for an equitable distribution of the goods and services a society produces.
Let’s face it: The economic pie is only so big. And while the elite claims credit for allegedly growing that pie, they don’t really grow it; they merely siphon off the high-octane fuel.
This world can probably provide a decent standard of living for all its present inhabitants.
But it can’t eliminate abject poverty and powerless without also eliminating inordinate private wealth and power.
That is “socialism.”