Why is being called a socialist now considered pejorative?

You might not have heard, but Barack Obama is a socialist (and a Nazi at the same time), Julia Gillard is a socialist. And no, these are not meant to be complimentary.

My dearest wish is that these people really were socialists, even a little bit. But they aren't.
When politicians who are a tiny bit to the left of centre-right are called socialists, what is meant is that they're not conservative enough. Obama has been accused of wishing for, believing in and working toward wealth re-distribution. Which is the policy that resources ought to be shared by all citizens equally. I think that equitable sharing of resources is a noble idea.

We ought not be able to watch members of our society starve, lose their homes or die of treatable infections and diseases simply because they aren't allocated a reasonable share of communal resources.

It's even more appalling when some nations of the world own or control the resources of other nations and live well or far too well, while the citizens of their client nations live in deplorable conditions, suffer, starve and die of easily controlled diseases.

So how do we know that Obama and Gillard are not socialists?

If they were, their governments would be more concerned with the well-being of citizens that ensuring that the corporations that bank roll their election campaigns are well looked after. Hospitals, schools, soup kitchens, and accommodation for the poor and the homeless would be priorities.

Instead, we see corporations being involved in negotiating the legislation that concerns them so that they're not overly impacted by any negative effects of new laws. We see legislation that ought to alleviate the disparity between the poor and the very rich watered down so that the very rich don't have their noses put out of joint.

The much vaunted "universal health care reform" legislation passed  March 23, 2010 was initially intended to be a single-payer, universal cover, health-care system much like many European countries and others have. Instead, for example, one of the policies that was negotiated was mandatory health care, meaning that  consumers HAD to purchase policies from the same insurers they'd already had problems with!

Julia's socialist credentials read like a conservative manifesto:

Treating refugees as criminals and lurching to the right to appease the less inclusive, redneck, voting bloc;
Following the lead of the conservative party in regards to supporting unfair and punitive wars in the oil and heroin hemisphere;
Continuing the insane policy of abrogating gay rights. Then minister, Penny Wong, herself and out gay, was responsible for Labor's policy of human rights for some, but not for gays;

It is a fact of modern political life that Socialists get very little respect, but the reason for this is not clear.

Socialism in a nutshell is concerned not with ripping your wallet from your hip pocket but with fairness for all; equal opportunity for all; human rights for all; free education for all and a safety net if you fall.

Why then is socialism seen as so evil?

Socialism isn't evil, not even close.

Lately socialism has been getting some very bad press. If you believe those on the right, the world of ideas can be broken down into a few simple dichotomies.

Under their assumptions; war is just great - but peace activism is evil.
Further, gender rights are not human rights but a ghettoised, separate set of rights that only apply to individual interest groups. Just like the right not to be hungry only applies to the starving and not to the rest of us.

According to the "Right*", capitalism isn't just the best way to run an economy, it's the only way to run an economy. Some of them actually equate Democracy with capitalism. This is manifestly untrue, capitalism is one of the ways an economy can be managed. It allows market forces (Greed) to set prices, It allows enormous corporations to accrue masses of power and influence beholden to none but their share holders.

Democracy on the other hand is a political system of most of the western world and much of the rest of the world where individuals have an equal right to determine the composition of their government, subject to rules that preclute the very young, the mentally infirm and the criminally insane from participation in the process.

The simple illustration that capitalism and Democracy are not equivalent is the obvious fact that many non-democratic nations are also capitalistic. Nations like the Argentina of pinochet, the Italy of Mussolini, the many and varied dictatorships of South America, Asia and Africa are almost all capitalistic, run purely on greed and avarice. 

Democracy not at all incompatible with Socialism, in fact many of the happiest and most forward thinking nations in the world are socialist democracies in all but name. Sweden, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and others are far in advance of the petty sloganism of countries like the USA, England and Australia.


There's much more to write about this, we need to move further to the left, toward caring for all and finding ways to foster independencce from insane growth economics and greedy capitalism.

Next time ...



*who are far too often wrong.