The socialism clock is ticking...wake up people.

Headline on Drudgereport.com this morning reads, "OBAMA MOVES TOWARD 'SWEDISH MODEL' FOR BANKS."

This idea of Government controlling banks is the next logical step toward the socialistic failures of eastern Europe, Russia and others. Below are some excerpts from, "The Collapse of Socialism."

A View from the Left
By Eugene Genovese


Those who indulge in the fantasy of a socialism risen phoenix-like from the ashes no longer equate socialism with workingclass power and the abolition of private property. Rather, they embrace a caricature of classic liberalism that would free individuals from virtually all social restraint. But, with startling inconsistency and bad faith, they project this liberation under the watchful eye of a bureaucratic state that makes sure we all do the right thing. I am tempted to pursue the psychological underpinnings, but shall content myself with recalling a wonderful cartoon from the Sixties. It showed a sit-in in which a hippie was shouting, "I hate people who can't love everybody!"

World-historic events compel a reassessment of first principles as well as political and social policies. For those on the Left, that need not lead to a retreat from our lifelong struggle for social justice--our struggle against economic exploitation, racism, male supremacy, and the atomization of social life. But this struggle has often blinded us to the historic achievements of capitalism, upon which any civilized society must build, and not the least of those achievements has been an economic performance that has created expanded possibilities for individual freedom and political democracy for enormous numbers of people throughout the world.

The Left wishes to forget Marx's materialist premise--and promise--namely, that a socialist society would outproduce its capitalist rival and thereby provide the material foundations for an unprecedented human liberation. The woeful failure of socialism as an economic system has laid bare the delusive nature of the dream. For better and worse, capitalism, not socialism, has once again emerged as the world's greatest revolutionary--and self-revolutionizing--system, and, in so doing, it has established its claims to being immeasurably more congruent with human nature. But it has not thereby refuted the charge of its also being an economic system that undermines the foundations of civilized life by atomizing individuals, and undermines the inspiring concept of citizenship that it created in the first place. Rather, when considered in the light of the failure of socialism, capitalism today poses anew the challenge to construct a decent social order.


What lessons has the Anglo-American Left learned from the collapse of the socialist countries? Here we may turn to a book of essays edited by Robin Blackburn, the talented editor of Britain's New Left Review. Entitled After the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism, it contains contributions by such big guns as Eric Hobsbawm--easily the ablest intellectual on the English-speaking Left--as well as E. P. Thompson, Fred Halliday, Frederick Jameson, Juergen Habermas, and others. The good news is that the left-wing intellectuals have discovered that markets and even private property are necessary to economic rationality, growth, and development. Mr. Blackburn, to his credit, even calls for a belated engagement with the thought of von Mises and Hayek. Those of us who for decades unsuccessfully pleaded for such a course, and for a recognition that private property is necessary for a civilized political life, ought to be pleased. But alas, to invoke a famous line from Lenin, it is one step forward, two steps back.

Despite some good moments, After the Fall makes dreary reading. The collapse of the socialist countries, it seems, has little to do with socialism per se; indeed, it opens the way to a "true" socialism freed of Stalinist perversion. That no socialist regime--no regime of the radical Left at any time in history--has ever avoided political tyranny and mass murder goes unremarked, apparently on the dubious premise that there is a first time for everything.