by WorldTribune Staff, June 28, 2018
In celebrating the 200th birthday of Karl Marx last month, Teen Vogue noted that “The communist scholar’s ideas are more prevalent than you might realize.”
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, in a poll of Millennials last year, found that most would prefer to live in a socialist or communist country. When asked for their preferred socioeconomic order, 44 percent said socialism, 42 percent said capitalism and 7 percent said communism.
A New York Times op-ed on May 5 exclaimed, “Happy birthday, Karl Marx. You were right!”
“Millennials who prefer socialism to capitalism are helping shift the Democratic Party to the left on the economy,” Bradford Richardson noted in a May 15 report for The Washington Times. “You would think any political theory that resulted in the deaths of 100 million people would have been discredited by now, but socialism is back in style.”
The Democratic Socialists of America reports that membership has grown from about 5,000 to 35,000 since the 2016 elections. The number of chapters has swelled from 40 to 181.
One dues-paying member of the socialist group, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, on June 26 defeated a longtime establishment candidate in the Democratic primary for New York’s District 14 U.S. House seat.
Some Democrats who have been mentioned as contenders for the 2020 presidential nomination also embrace socialism.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont have endorsed a “federal jobs guarantee” program introduced last month by Sen. Cory A. Booker of New Jersey.
“The federal jobs guarantee is an idea that demands to be taken seriously,” Booker said. “Creating an employment guarantee would give all Americans a shot at a day’s work and, by introducing competition into the labor market, raise wages and improve benefits for all workers.”
Sanders said he would introduce a plan that would divide America into 12 districts that would give initial approval to regional jobs programs and pass them along to the federal Labor Department for final approval, Richardson’s report said.
In a speech last month, Hillary Clinton said being a capitalist probably did not help her win the 2016 Democratic nomination against Sanders.
“It’s hard to know,” Clinton said at the Shared Value Leadership Summit in New York City. “But I mean, if you’re in the Iowa caucuses and 41 percent of Democrats are socialists or self-described socialists, and I’m asked, ‘Are you a capitalist?’ and I say, ‘Yes, but with appropriate regulation and appropriate accountability.’ You know, that probably gets lost in the ‘Oh my gosh, she’s a capitalist!’ “
David North, national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States, said there are “growing signs that a new period of mass revolutionary struggles by the working class has begun.”
“The ascendancy of Trump is of not only symbolic significance,” North said. “Throughout the 20th century, and especially in the aftermath of World War II, the United States functioned as the ultimate guarantor of the stability and survival of the world capitalist system. It is incapable of playing that role any longer.”
Marion Smith, executive director of the nonpartisan Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, said both parties should be able to get behind opposition to Marxism.
“It’s important that neither of America’s two major parties embrace the failed ideology of communism,” Smith said. “We have 100 years of proof – Marxism doesn’t work.”
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