The specter that still haunts capitalism [View all]

Despite being declared dead and buried for decades, recent opinion polls show that almost a third of Americans prefer socialism to capitalism. Socialism beats capitalism outright among people in their 20s, low-income people of all ages, and especially among African Americans and Latinos. But while the idea of socialism is in the air, what it means is vague to most people, and how to achieve it even more so.

SocialistWorker.org journalist Danny Katch is the author of a new book that is an entertaining and insightful introduction to what the socialist tradition has to say about democracy, economics and the potential of human beings to be something more than being bomb-dropping, planet-destroying racist fools. Here, we print an excerpt from "Ghost Stories," one of the opening chapters of Socialism...Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation.


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A ghost is haunting the United States--the ghost of socialism. All the old powers are united in their aim to eliminate this demon: Presidents and preachers, Hillary and Rush, Wall Street CEOs, and NSA spies.

Where is the Republican who doesn't claim that his Democratic opponent is a socialist? Where is the Democrat who doesn't run away screaming from this horrible accusation?

This means two things:

1. Socialism is widely seen by the One Percent as a threat to its rule.

2. It's about time that socialists should openly make our case to the world and replace the boogeyman version of socialism with a declaration of what we're really all about.

Read more: http://socialistworker.org/2015/09/08/the-specter-that-still-haunts-capitalism