Socialism, Then and Now
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By MARK T. HARRIS Not long ago I watched an online video segment from conservative writer Wil liam F. Buckley, Jr.’s old TV public affairs program, “Firing Line” (http://www.you tube.com/watch?v=tkiN3__OyXc).
The year was 1968 and Buckley’s guests were two socialists, Fred Halstead and Paul Boutelle, who were then running as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) candidates for President and Vice President of the United States.
They were the minor-party candidates, while Buck ley was the well-known founder of the conservative magazine, National Review. Son of a wealthy oil man, Buckley liked to cultivate an image as one of conser vatism’s more erudite minds, the “civilized” intellec tual who enjoyed sailing and Bach and clever raillery in pursuit of “the truth.” Of course, Buckley wasn’t all that civilized. His political track record included de fending both white supremacy in the South and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt against communists in the 1950s. He was also a defender of that orgy of vio lence known as the U.S. government’s war in Vietnam.
His socialist guests were cut from a different cloth. In fact, Halstead, a garment cutter by trade, was a prominent figure in the American peace movement (He would later write an impressive history of the anti -Vietnam War movement.) Boutelle (now known as Kwame Somburu) was an articulate young civil rights activist who had been involved in the Freedom Now Party.
The show’s viewers may not have known this, but Buckley was certainly already familiar with the SWP. One of his colleagues at National Review was James Burnham, a philosophy professor, founding member of the SWP in 1938, and later author of a 1940s best seller, “The Managerial Revolution.” On the eve of World War II, Burnham had a change of heart about socialism, beginning a political turn that by the 1950s (Above) Fred Halstead in 1968.
the war that constitutes the larger story of the antiwar movement. It’s a story told in the history of the many peaceful marches, teach-ins, student strikes, draft resistance campaigns and other organizing efforts. Mainstream media—then and now As I watched the “Firing Line” show with Halstead and Boutelle, I was thinking first how unusual such a media debate would be today. Buckley was a pretentious boor, but he was a wise old sage on the mountain compared to the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin, and other bloviators of today’s right-wing media. Buck ley allowed left-wing guests and radicals on his show (Noam Chomsky, Saul Alinsky, Ed Sanders, and oth ers were guests), and, if the guests could rise above the host’s posturing and condescension, a real debate might take place.
Today, serious debate in the mainstream media with ideological opponents of capitalism is rare. If it does happen, it’s usually reduced to a few minutes of sound-bite jabs, loudly delivered and in which egotis tical hosts feel free to interrupt or shout down their guests. Certainly it’s far past time for socialist ideas to be taken seriously in American politics.
Ironically, it’s only been the relegation of genuine so cialist views to a locked drawer marked taboo that’s enabled the Republican right to ludicrously label the moderate, corporatist politics of Barack Obama as “socialist,” or the Affordable Care Act as “socialized medicine.”
It’s a positive sign at least of the potential for politi cal change that a left-wing socialist, Kshama Sawant, was recently elected to Seattle’s city council. Remark ably, Sawant is the first socialist elected to city office in Seattle since Anna Louise Strong won election to the school board in 1916. The Socialist Alternative leader defeated a liberal (i.e. corporate-friendly) city council veteran, winning over 90,000 votes on a plat form of support for raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, unionizing low-paid service workers, imple menting a “Millionaire’s Tax” to fund and expand edu cation and social services, and rent control.
Obviously, organized socialist groups and left poli tics generally remains a relatively small political force in the United States. Nor is fighting spirit exactly the phrase associated with most U.S. labor leaders, for whom standing up to corporate greed mostly involves giving occasional speeches on economic injustice at annual conventions held at upscale hotels.
Whatever the obstacles, signs of change are in the air. The widening economic divide between rich and poor represents a tinderbox of explosive political po tential. In New York City, there are now as many as 55,000 fast food workers living, for the most part, on less than $9 per hour, and often for a minimum wage (continued on page 9, in “OCAP says no to welfare merger cuts”)
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