Back in the U.S.S.R.

By David Sirota

When I worked for then-Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the late 1990s, Washington was in the panting throes of a deregulatory orgy. Many lampooned my boss's opposition to the grotesquerie, and his notoriety as the only self-described socialist in Congress. Nobody guessed that a few [RETURN TO ARTICLE]

  • Reader Comments

     Page 1 of 1 pages

    Mr. Sirota may like to think he’s dropping ironic anti-socialist rhetoric in an effort to stick it to the bailout and its supporters. He does them more a service than I think he realizes. The anti-socialist rhetoric comes from within the damaged ideology that is scrambling to make sense of the financial meltdown.

    On the one hand, there are those who would like to, as it were, socialize the losses in the form of this bailout, while the gains remained privatized. If we had to, we could probably call them bourgeois socialists. On the other hand, there’re those who do not want the bailout, but cast the potential collapse in the safe and tidy terms of self-regulating competition.

    If Mr. Sirota wants to be ironic, he needs to either use the well analyzed phenomena Marx gives us, Bourgeois Socialism, or else do what the House Republicans won’t do: call this meltdown for what it is: a failure emerging out of the very structure of Capitalism. Otherwise, he’s just another opinion writer in the echo-chamber. What’s worse is that by using anti-socialist rhetoric in a polemic against certain Capitalist excesses, he’s making for an alliance between corporate Capitalism and socialism that makes me and should make everyone else very uneasy—-an alliance at other times known as National Socialism.

    United States Posted by pdxjoe on Sep 26, 2008 at 10:39 PM
     Page 1 of 1 pages

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