The chasm between huge individual wealth and the abject misery of hundreds of millions of people persists and can, in many cases, be said to be widening. The author's view is that the conflict between the rapaciousness of the system and popular discontent has to provide the conditions for a new social order. Socialism, in some form, argues Silber, is an essential element in a future for the whole human race.
Why socialism has failed to play a significant role in the United States - the most developed capitalist industrial society and hence, ostensibly, fertile ground for socialism - has been a critical question of American history and political development. This study surveys the various explanations for this phenomenon of American political exceptionalism.
Socialism is strangely impervious to refutation by real-world experience. Over the past hundred years, there have been more than two dozen attempts to build a socialist society, from the Soviet Union to Maoist China to Venezuela. All of them have ended in varying degrees of failure. But, according to socialism’s adherents, that is only because none of these experiments were “real socialism”. This book documents the history of this, by now, standard response. It shows how the claim of fake socialism is only ever made after the event. As long as a socialist project is in its prime, almost nobody claims that it is not real socialism. On the contrary, virtually every socialist project in history has gone through a honeymoon period, during which it was enthusiastically praised by prominent Western intellectuals. It was only when their failures became too obvious to deny that they got retroactively reclassified as “not real socialism”.
"DiLorenzo's book is a pleasure to read and should be put in the hands of every young person in this country - and elsewhere!" —FORMER CONGRESSMAN RON PAUL "It is a worthwhile investment for parents with college-age children to buy two copies of The Problem with Socialism -one for their children and one for themselves." —WALTER E. WILLIAMS, John M Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics, George Mason University and nationally syndicated columnist "Ever wonder what one book you should give a young person to make sure he doesn't fall for leftist propoganda? You're looking at it." —THOMAS E. WOODS, JR., host of The Tom Woods Show, author of the New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History What’s the Problem with Socialism? Let’s start with...everything. So says bestselling author and professor of economics Thomas J. DiLorenzo, who sets the record straight in this concise and lively primer on an economic theory that’s gaining popularity—with help from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders—despite its universal failure as an economic model and its truly horrific record on human rights. In sixteen eye-opening chapters, DiLorenzo reveals how socialism inevitably makes inequality worse, why socialism was behind the worst government-sponsored mass murders in history, the myth of “successful” Scandinavian socialism; how socialism is worse—far worse—for the environment than capitalism, and more. As DiLorenzo shows, and history proves, socialism is the answer only if you want increasing unemployment and poverty, stifling bureaucracy if not outright political tyranny, catastrophic environmental pollution, rotten schools, and so many social ills that it takes a book like this to cover just the big ones. Provocative, timely, essential reading, Thomas J. DiLorenzo’s The Problem with Socialism is an instant classic comparable to Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.' In the words of Thomas E. Woods - "Dance on socialism's grave by reading this book."
Argues that the same impulse for control that governed the Soviet Union is present in the American health care and educational systems and that socialism can never work because of human nature.
What is wrong with capitalism, and how can we change it? Capitalism has transformed the world and increased our productivity, but at the cost of enormous human suffering. Our shared values—equality and fairness, democracy and freedom, community and solidarity—can provide both the basis for a critique of capitalism and help to guide us toward a socialist and democratic society. Erik Olin Wright has distilled decades of work into this concise and tightly argued manifesto: analyzing the varieties of anticapitalism, assessing different strategic approaches, and laying the foundations for a society dedicated to human flourishing. How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century is an urgent and powerful argument for socialism, and an unparalleled guide to help us get there. Another world is possible. Included is an afterword by the author’s close friend and collaborator Michael Burawoy.
The success of Jeremy Corbyn's left-led Labour Party and Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign revived a political idea many had thought dead. But what, exactly, is socialism? And what would a socialist system look like today? In The Socialist Manifesto, Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin magazine, argues that socialism offers the means to achieve economic equality, and also to fight other forms of oppression, including racism and sexism. The ultimate goal is not Soviet-style planning, but to win rights to healthcare, education, and housing and to create new democratic institutions in workplaces and communities. The book both explores socialism's history and presents a realistic vision for its future. A primer on socialism for the 21st century, this is a book for anyone seeking an end to the vast inequities of our age.
The bastard step-child of Milton Friedman and Anthony Bourdain, Socialism Sucks is a bar-crawl through former, current, and wannabe socialist countries around the world. Free market economists Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell travel to countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and Sweden to investigate the dangers and idiocies of socialism—while drinking a lot of beer.
A new translation from the original Russian manuscript with a new afterword by the translator and a timeline of Stalin's life and works. In one of his last works written in 1952, Stalin addresses various economic challenges facing the Soviet Union in its pursuit of socialism. He discusses topics ranging from commodity production under socialism to the role of the law of value, offering insights and solutions based on Marxist-Leninist theory.
This volume is a valuable re-assessment of the Nicaraguan Revolution by a Marxist historian of Latin American political history. It shows that the FSLN (‘the Sandinistas’), with politics principally shaped by Soviet and Cuban Communism, never had a commitment to genuine democracy either within the revolutionary movement or within society at large; that the FSLN’s lack of commitment to democracy was a key factor in the way that revolution was betrayed from the 1970s to the 1990s; and that the FSLN’s lack of rank-and-file democracy left all decision-making to the National Directorate and ultimately placed that power in the hands of Daniel Ortega. Pursuing his narrative into the present, La Botz shows that, once their would-be bureaucratic ruling class project was defeated, Ortega and the FSLN leadership turned to an alliance with the capitalist class.
