Republicans Plot to Steal White House (so ineptly that the Sydney Morning Herald uncovers their dastardly plot - hell, the Repubes are running MITTENS - they do NOT want to hold the white house at this time: disaster is ON ITS WAY)

June 2, 2012 by Sydney Morning Herald

Republicans Plot to Steal White House

by Paul McGeough

There's a fiendish cleverness in perpetrating a fraud in broad daylight, at the same time as you tell the people that it must be done to guard against - you guessed it - fraud.

The reality of voter fraud in the US is that it is virtually non-existent. It has been known to happen, but studies reveal its probability is less than that of being struck by lightning - just 0.0009 per cent in Washington State and a very remote 0.00004 per cent in Ohio.

So welcome to the state of Florida, where the state emblem is the hanging chad. Remember, it was here that just 537 votes in the recount drama of 2000 threw the presidency to George W. Bush.

Nothing can be left to chance. Like about 20 other Republican-controlled states, Florida has gone all out to stifle the likely Democratic vote before the presidential poll in November. Using the Bush rule of thumb, a tweak to the law that shaves the Democratic vote by just a few hundred at elections where about 10 million get to vote, is halfway to throwing the outcome.

Po-faced state governors and attorneys-general talk about each attack on the electoral roll rules as necessary to protect the integrity of the electoral process. But they are in the business of stealing votes.

So it was refreshing this week to see the Florida gang caught red-handed, as it were, by a federal judge who didn't mince his words in adjudicating on the Republicans' latest vote rigging. In so doing, US District Judge Robert Hinkle became the first jurist to hack into any of the so-called electoral reforms being enacted in states where Republican-controlled legislatures get to write the rules for local and federal polls.

Hinkle struck down a new provision that made it virtually impossible to organise traditional voter-registration drives. The law required organisers to register with the state, to return new registration documents to state officials within 48 hours and made it a criminal offence for the organisers to register someone later found to be ineligible.

As written, the law was a gift to any Republican candidate. Registration drives mostly were organised in black, Hispanic and student communities - all more inclined to vote Democrat than Republican. And the implicit threat had its intended effect - leading voter-registration organisations walked away.

Hinkle declared the 48-hour rule to be ''harsh, impractical''. He was especially scathing about a demand that organisers must sign a sworn statement that they would obey state laws, saying: ''[It can] have no purpose other than to discourage voluntary participation in legitimate, indeed constitutionally protected, activities.''

In a ''gotcha'' line, the judge relied on ''if-it-ain't-broke, don't-fix-it'' logic - ''Before the adoption of the 2011 statute, the state was operating under provisions that, at least insofar as shown by this record, were working well.''

Another electoral provision that has been found to be more popular among Democrats than Republicans is voting in the days or weeks before the formal poll date - so, needless to say, the provision has become a target for the Republican suppress-the-vote brigade.

This has been an important provision because unlike traditional Saturday voting in Australia, Americans vote mid-week when the majority of voters have jobs and other distractions to tend to.

And the reason for attacking early voting is because it is so popular, especially among Barack Obama's African American supporters in the south. In the past 15 years, it has risen steadily as a share of the vote - accounting for about a third of all votes cast in 2008.

It is not an issue of fraud. Voting figures for 2008 reveal the reason Republicans are so determined to shrink the period in which early voting is allowed for this year's election - it seems to have given Obama a leg-up.

In North Carolina, where more early votes were lodged than were cast on polling day, Obama won the state by less than 15,000 votes. More than half of the black votes were cast early, compared with just 40 per cent of white votes - so there is a good chance a shrunken window for early voting could damage Obama.

In Florida, the Republicans' critical point of attack on early voting was to ban pre-poll voting on the Sunday before election day. This is sickening and arguably racist, because it is a deliberate attack on the practice of African American churches bussing their congregations to vote after they attend services.

In an editorial, The New York Times rails against the assault on early voting - ''it is the latest element of a well co-ordinated effort by Republican state legislatures across the country to disenfranchise voters who tend to support Democrats, particularly minorities and young people.''

The legendry African American congressman John Lewis was equally blunt - ''There is a deliberate, systematic attempt to win or steal the election before it takes place … it's a sin; it's obscene.''

But in Florida, they're not done yet.

State officials used a bizarre cross-referencing of voter rolls and driver's licence records to produce a list of 180,000 names of electors they claim might not be American citizens.

In a recent first strike, they wrote to almost 2700 of them - giving them 30 days in which to prove their citizenship or to be struck from the roll. Just the implicit insult in such a letter or general forgetfulness would be enough to have a portion of its recipients not respond.

More than 350 in the Miami area came in to prove their citizenship. As the The New York Times explains, the state's data is demonstrably dodgy and it is highly likely many legitimate voters who can't read English, or have relocated or didn't check their mail among the 1300-odd other recipients of the letter, will be barred from voting in November.

Other swing states are mounting similar purges. New Mexico's investigators came up with 64,000 suspicious names, but found only 19 individuals who might have been non-citizens.

Colorado is doing the same. All these states have big Hispanic populations, who are deeply offended by the Republican stand on immigration. The chances are that if they vote, they will vote Democrat; so the best option for the Republicans is to prevent them from voting at all.

Some detailed research by The Miami Herald on the near 2700 first recipients of the Florida letter challenging their right to vote revealed 58 per cent of them to be Hispanics and 14 per cent to be black.

It's hardly surprising that the African American congressman G.K. Butterfield, a Democrat from North Carolina, would tell a recent gathering: ''There's a right-wing conspiracy that is alive and well in this country that is trying to take us back to 1900 and even before.''

© 2012 Sydney Morning Herald

Paul McGeough is an Irish Australian journalist and senior foreign correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald, specializing in Middle Eastern affairs.

When the world-economy stagnates and real unemployment expands considerably, it means that the overall pie is shrinking. The question then becomes who shall bear the burden of the shrinkage – within countries and between countries. The class struggle becomes acute and sooner or later leads to open conflict in the streets. (Callin' out around the world there'lll be dancin' in the streets!)

June 2, 2012 by Immanuel Wallerstein

The World Class Struggle: 

The Geography of Protest

by Immanuel Wallerstein

When times are good, and the world-economy is expanding in terms of new surplus-value produced, the class struggle is muted. It never goes away, but as long as there is a low level of unemployment and the real incomes of the lower strata are going up, even if only in small amounts, social compromise is the order of the day.Students march during a protest against tuition fee increases in Quebec (Photo: Roberio Barbosa/Getty Images)

But when the world-economy stagnates and real unemployment expands considerably, it means that the overall pie is shrinking. The question then becomes who shall bear the burden of the shrinkage – within countries and between countries. The class struggle becomes acute and sooner or later leads to open conflict in the streets. This is what has been happening in the world-system since the 1970s, and most dramatically since 2007. Thus far, the very upper strata (the 1%) have been holding on to their share, indeed increasing it. This means necessarily that the share of the 99% has been going down.

The struggle over allocations revolves primarily around two items in the global budget: taxes (how much, and who) and the safety net of the bulk of the population (expenditures on education, health, and lifetime income guarantees). There is no country in which this struggle has not been taking place. But it breaks out more violently in some countries than in others – because of their location in the world-economy, because of their internal demographics, because of their political history.

An acute class struggle raises the question for everyone of how to handle it politically. The groups in power can repress popular unrest harshly, and many do. Or, if the unrest is too strong for their repressive mechanisms, they can try to co-opt the protestors by seeming to join them and limiting real change. Or they do both, trying repression first and co-option if that fails.

The protestors also face a dilemma. The protestors always start as a relatively small courageous group. They need to persuade a much larger (and politically far more timid group) to join them, if they are to impress the groups in power. This is not easy but it can happen. It happened in Egypt at Tahrir Square in 2011. It happened in the Occupy movement in the United States and Canada. It happened in Greece in the last elections. It happened in Chile and the now long-lasting student strikes. And at the moment, it seems to be happening spectacularly in Quebec.

But when it happens, then what? There are some protestors who wish to expand initial narrow demands into more far-reaching and fundamental demands to reconstruct the social order. And there are others, there are always others, who are ready to sit down with the groups in power and negotiate some compromise.

When the groups in power repress, they quite often fan the flames of protest. But repression often works. When it doesn’t and groups in power compromise and co-opt, they often are able to pull the plug on the protestors. This is what seems to have happened in Egypt. The recent elections are leading to a second-round runoff between two candidates, neither of whom supported the revolution in Tahrir Square – one the last prime minister of the ousted president Hosni Mubarak, the other a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood whose primary objective is instituting the sharia in Egyptian law and not implementing the demands of the those who were in Tahrir Square. The result is a cruel choice for the about 50% who did not vote in the first round for either of the two with the largest plurality of votes. This unhappy situation resulted from the fact that the pro-Tahrir Square voters split their votes between two candidates of somewhat different backgrounds.

How are we to think of all of this? There seems to be a rapidly and constantly shifting geography of protest. It pops up here and then is either repressed, co-opted, or exhausted. And as soon as that happens, it pops up somewhere else, where it may in turn be either repressed, co-opted, or exhausted. And then it pops up in a third place, as though worldwide it was irrepressible.

It is indeed irrepressible for one simple reason. The world income squeeze is real, and not about to disappear. The structural crisis of the capitalist world-economy is making the standard solutions to economic downturns unworkable, no matter how much our pundits and politicians assure us that a new period of prosperity is on the horizon.

We are living in a chaotic world situation. The fluctuations in everything are large and rapid. This applies as well to social protest. This is what we are seeing as the geography of protest constantly shifts. Tahrir Square in Cairo yesterday, unauthorized massive marches with pots and pans in Montreal today, somewhere else (probably somewhere surprising) tomorrow.

© 2012 Immanuel Wallerstein

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The US in a Chaotic World (New Press).

There's a conventional wisdom in Washington that there's nothing we can do politically to stop the U.S. government from killing innocent civilians with drone strikes. But it ain't necessarily so.

June 2, 2012 by Common Dreams

Yes, Virginia, We Can Do Something 

About the Drone Strikes

by Robert Naiman

There's a conventional wisdom in Washington that there's nothing we can do politically to stop the U.S. government from killing innocent civilians with drone strikes.

But it ain't necessarily so.

Speaking only for myself, I'm willing to stipulate that killing "high value terrorists" who are known to be actively preparing to kill Americans is wildly popular, regardless of whether it is constitutional and legal.

Here's what's not wildly popular: killing innocent civilians.

This is not a liberal vs. conservative issue. This is an American issue. Go to the reddest of Red America. Stand outside a megachurch or military base in the Deep South. Find me twelve Christian Republicans who are willing to sign their names that they want the U.S. government to kill innocent civilians. I bet you can't do it. Killing innocent civilians is un-American.

Consider: after what widely reported news event did even Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum say maybe we ought to get our troops out of Afghanistan? After it was reported that a U.S. soldier massacred Afghan civilians.

The historian Howard Zinn suggested that it's a backhanded compliment to the American people that our government lies to us about what it's doing in other people's countries. Because it suggests that if the American people knew, they would never stand for it.

Thanks to a New York Times report this week, we now know. In an echo of the Colombian military's "false positives" scandal, our government is killing people with drone strikes and then decreeing that "military age men" killed by U.S. drone strikes are automatically "combatants." Born a chicken, raised a chicken, now you're a fish.

Some senior U.S. officials are quite unhappy about this, the Times reports.

The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it "guilt by association" that has led to "deceptive" estimates of civilian casualties.

"It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants," the official said. "They count the corpses and they're not really sure who they are."

So what is producing this conventional wisdom that there's nothing we can do?

A key determinant is what Members of Congress are willing to say and do. If you can't get twelve Members of Congress to say "boo" about something, then the conventional wisdom says it's not an issue.

Well, that just changed. Thirteen Members of Congress are willing to say "boo". Here they are: Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers, Rush Holt, Jesse Jackson, Jr., Maurice Hinchey, Charlie Rangel, Pete Stark, Mike Honda, Raul Grijalva, Bob Filner, Barbara Lee, Jim McGovern, and Lynn Woolsey.

These thirteen Members of Congress - who, one hopes, will soon be joined by others - have signed a letter to the Administration demanding that the Administration come clean with Congress and the American people about its drone strike policy, particularly concerning civilian casualties and so-called "signature strikes" that target unknown people.

This Congressional letter is being supported by the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, Amnesty International, and other groups who don't want the U.S. government to kill innocent civilians.

If ten thousand Americans would write to their Members of Congress, urging them to sign the Kucinich-Conyers letter, we could get forty Members of Congress to sign it. If we could get forty Members of Congress to sign it, the beltway media would report that Members of Congress are complaining about civilian deaths from drone strikes. If we could get the beltway media to report that Members of Congress are complaining about civilian deaths from drone strikes, the conventional wisdom that there's nothing we can do politically about civilian deaths from drone strikes would be dead.

Sometimes mate in five starts with a pawn move.

As Stephen Colbert put it,

"The administration has developed a brilliant system of ensuring that those building engulfing explosions don't kill non-combatants: they just count all military age males in a strike zone as combatants...This isn't just the president executing innocent people around the world by fiat, there is an appeals process. The men are considered terrorists unless 'there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent,' in which case, I assume, there is a legal process that un-kills them."

Colbert Nation, to your laptops.

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Robert Naiman is Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy. Naiman has worked as a policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Illinois and has studied and worked in the Middle East. You can contact him here.

Nationwide state and local subsidies for corporations totaled more than $70 billion in 2010, as calculated by Professor Kenneth Thomas of the University of Missouri-St. Louis: How Corporate Socialism Destroys

June 2, 2012 by Common Dreams

How Corporate Socialism Destroys

by David Cay Johnston

A proposal to spend $250 million of taxpayer money on a retail project here illustrates the damage state and local subsidies do by taking from the many to benefit the already rich few.

Nationwide state and local subsidies for corporations totaled more than $70 billion in 2010, as calculated by Professor Kenneth Thomas of the University of Missouri-St. Louis

In a country of 311 million, that’s $900 taken on average from each family of four in 2010. There are no official figures, but this one is likely conservative because — as documented by Thomas, this column and Good Jobs First, a nonprofit taxpayer watchdog organization funded by Ford, Surdna and other major foundations — these upward redistributions of wealth keep increasing.

In Irondequoit, just outside Rochester, N.Y., and a few miles from where I live, developer Scott Congel wants $250 million in sales taxes to finance rebuilding the Medley Centre mall while adding condominiums and a hotel. Typically local governments issue bonds, which are paid off using sales tax receipts that are diverted from public purposes to the developer’s benefit.

Subsidies for retail businesses are the worst kind of corporate welfare because, as the end of the economic chain, retailing grows only when population and incomes increase. If population or income falls, then subsidies for new projects like Congel’s damage existing businesses, where people would otherwise be spending their money.

The mall, which struggled from the start, was built in 1990 for $140 million in today’s dollars. A Congel associate, Adam Bersin, bought it in 2005 for less than $6 million in today’s dollars. He then persuaded the Monroe County industrial development agency to issue $5.4 million in bonds and then flipped the real estate to Congel in 2007.

Today the mall is empty, its doors sealed, except for a Sears at one end and a Macy’s at the other, each with a handful of customers during my visits.

Congel promised a $260 million project, but five years on nothing is built and Congel is seeking delays in fulfilling promises for which the mall was granted property tax breaks.

That’s how corporate socialism works – taxpayers contribute when the market rejects.

Taxpayers' Expense

Congel has never spoken publicly about his plans for the mall and neither Congel nor any of his representatives, including a lawyer, returned my calls. But la st month hi s office gave a local TV station a statement promising to invest not $260 million but $750 million

My review of construction costs for hotels and condominiums suggests the $750 million figure is wildly inflated, but it may make the subsidies more politically palatable.

If the larger figure is real, and taxpayers put up $250 million, they would pay for a third of the project, while for a $260 million project the taxpayer share would be 96 percent.

Having taxpayers pay nearly all of a new investment is becoming common. General Electric, for example, is getting Ohio taxpayers to cover 92 percent of a $126 million project

That’s how corporate socialism works — taxpayers donate capital, while the owners keep the profits.

Congel, along with GE and others, should rely on the market to finance projects. If a project is sound, the market will finance it and, if not, why should taxpayers donate?

When the Monroe County industrial development agency gave Congel’s plan initial approval I asked for its due diligence. The county provided a thin report stating that if taxpayers finance the restoration Medley Centre’s sales would grow from $30 million annually to $420 million.

The report cover states that Congel commissioned it. Judy Seil, director of the agency which gives money to companies, confirmed that Congel paid for the report. Still, she insisted, the report is the county’s due diligence.

That’s how corporate socialism works. The poor may have to pass a drug test to get benefits but rich applicants write their own ticket.

My due diligence shows that total inflation-adjusted income in Monroe County fell by $2.5 billion, or 13 percent, from 2000 to 2008, the latest data. With such a steep drop in incomes it seems unlikely that Medley Centre sales could grow 14-fold.

That’s how corporate socialism works — ignore inconvenient facts.

Winners and Losers

As for that proposed hotel, my analysis of county hotel tax data shows demand for lodging unchanged for two decades. If taxpayers finance Congel’s hotel it would either fail or almost certainly force an existing hotel or two out of business.

That’s how corporate socialism works — government, not the market, picks winners and losers.

Last November I warned that New York State taxpayers would have their pockets picked ever more thoroughly because of a decision by the state’s highest court

The majority acknowledged that the New York State constitution bans gifts to corporations. To get around this, the court ruled, tax dollars can be funneled through a government economic development agency like the one Seil runs.

That’s how corporate socialism works — ignore inconvenient laws.

Because New York had one of the strongest prohibitions among the 50 state constitutions, this ruling shows how easily corporations can plunder state treasuries.

New taxes to pay for stadiums for team owners, billion-dollar-plus gifts for building factories and the pocketing by 2,700 companies of state income taxes paid by their workers have become common

That’s how corporate socialism works — divert money from schools and other public services to company coffers.

The 50 New Yorkers from libertarians to liberal Democrats who brought the case asked for a rehearing, citing serious factual errors in the high court’s decision

The court not only denied the request, it also imposed $100 for court costs. Attorney James Ostrowski of Buffalo, who represented the plaintiffs, called that a gratuitous “slap in the face of people who litigated a matter of vital public interest on a shoestring budget.”

That’s how corporate socialism works — penalize anyone with the temerity to fight being taxed to give to the already rich.

Congel may never get $250 million of taxes, but if he does it will cost taxpayers whether they visit his mall or not, while weakening or destroying existing local businesses.

That’s how corporate socialism works — privatize gains, socialize losses and destroy competitors who do not get subsidies.

David Cay Johnston is the author of Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill).

Utopian socialism: from the Encyclopedia Brittanica - the baliwick of conservatives! (O M G - me thinks "conservative" maybe used to mean something else)

Utopian socialism

Conservatives who saw the settled life of agricultural society disrupted by the insistent demands of industrialism were as likely as their radical counterparts to be outraged by the self-interested competition of capitalists and the squalor of industrial cities. The radicals distinguished themselves, however, by their commitment to equality and their willingness to envision a future in which industrial power and capitalism were divorced. To their moral outrage at the conditions that were reducing many workers to pauperism, the radical critics of industrial capitalism added a faith in the power of people to put science and an understanding of history to work in the creation of a new and glorious society. The termsocialist came into use about 1830 to describe these radicals, some of the most important of whom subsequently acquired the title of “utopian” socialists.

One of the first utopian socialists was the French aristocrat Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon did not call for public ownership of productive property, but he did advocate public control of property through central planning, in which scientists, industrialists, and engineers would anticipate social needs and direct the energies of society to meet them. Such a system would be more efficient than capitalism, according to Saint-Simon, and it even has the endorsement of history itself. Saint-Simon believed that history moves through a series of stages, each of which is marked by a particular arrangement of social classes and a set of dominant beliefs. Thus, feudalism, with its landed nobility and monotheistic religion, was giving way to industrialism, a complex form of society characterized by its reliance on science, reason, and thedivision of labour. In such circumstances, Saint-Simon argued, it makes sense to put the economic arrangements of society in the hands of its most knowledgeable and productive members, so that they may direct economic production for the benefit of all.

Another early socialist, Robert Owen, was himself an industrialist. Owen first attracted attention by operating textile mills in New Lanark, Scot., that were both highly profitable and, by the standards of the day, remarkably humane: no children under age 10 were employed. Owen’s fundamental belief was that human nature is not fixed but formed. If people are selfish, depraved, or vicious, it is because social conditions have made them so. Change the conditions, he argued, and people will change; teach them to live and work together in harmony, and they will do so. Thus, Owen set out in 1825 to establish a model of social organization, New Harmony, on land he had purchased in the U.S. state of Indiana. This was to be a self-sufficient, cooperative community in which property was commonly owned. New Harmony failed within a few years, taking most of Owen’s fortune with it, but he soon turned his attention to other efforts to promote social cooperation—trade unions and cooperativebusinesses, in particular.

Similar themes mark the writings of François-Marie-Charles Fourier, a French clerk whose imagination, if not his fortune, was as extravagant as Owen’s. Modern society breeds selfishness, deception, and other evils, Fourier charged, because institutions such as marriage, the male-dominated family, and the competitive market confine people to repetitive labour or a limited role in life and thus frustrate the need for variety. By setting people at odds with each other in the competition for profits, moreover, the market in particular frustrates the desire for harmony. Accordingly, Fourier envisioned a form of society that would be more in keeping with human needs and desires. Such a “phalanstery,” as he called it, would be a largely self-sufficient community of about 1,600 people organized according to the principle of “attractive labour,” which holds that people will work voluntarily and happily if their work engages their talents and interests. All tasks become tiresome at some point, however, so each member of the phalanstery would have several occupations, moving from one to another as his interest waned and waxed. Fourier left room for private investment in his utopian community, but every member was to share in ownership, and inequality of wealth, though permitted, was to be limited.

The ideas of common ownership, equality, and a simple life were taken up in the visionary novel Voyage en Icarie (1840; Travels in Icaria), by the French socialist Étienne Cabet. Icaria was to be a self-sufficient community, combining industry with farming, of about one million people. In practice, however, the Icaria that Cabet founded in Illinois in the 1850s was about the size of a Fourierist phalanstery, and dissension among the Icarians prompted Cabet to depart in 1856.

Socialism: from the Encyclopedia Brittanica

socialism, social and economic doctrine that calls for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources. According to the socialist view, individuals do not live or work in isolation but live in cooperation with one another. Furthermore, everything that people produce is in some sense a social product, and everyone who contributes to the production of a good is entitled to a share in it. Society as a whole, therefore, should own or at least control property for the benefit of all its members.

This conviction puts socialism in opposition to capitalism, which is based on private ownership of the means of production and allows individual choices in a free market to determine how goods and services are distributed. Socialists complain that capitalism necessarily leads to unfair and exploitative concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of the relative few who emerge victorious from free-market competition—people who then use their wealth and power to reinforce their dominance in society. Because such people are rich, they may choose where and how to live, and their choices in turn limit the options of the poor. As a result, terms such as individual freedom and equality of opportunity may be meaningful for capitalists but can only ring hollow for working people, who must do the capitalists’ bidding if they are to survive. As socialists see it, true freedom and true equality require social control of the resources that provide the basis for prosperity in any society. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made this point in Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) when they proclaimed that in a socialist society “the condition for the free development of each is the free development of all.”

This fundamental conviction nevertheless leaves room for socialists to disagree among themselves with regard to two key points. The first concerns the extent and the kind of property that society should own or control. Some socialists have thought that almost everything except personal items such as clothing should be public property; this is true, for example, of the society envisioned by the English humanist Sir Thomas More in his Utopia (1516). Other socialists, however, have been willing to accept or even welcome private ownership of farms, shops, and other small or medium-sized businesses.

The second disagreement concerns the way in which society is to exercise its control of property and other resources. In this case the main camps consist of loosely defined groups of centralists and decentralists. On the centralist side are socialists who want to invest public control of property in some central authority, such as the state—or the state under the guidance of a political party, as was the case in the Soviet Union. Those in the decentralist camp believe that decisions about the use of public property and resources should be made at the local, or lowest-possible, level by the people who will be most directly affected by those decisions. This conflict has persisted throughout the history of socialism as a political movement.

Origins

The origins of socialism as a political movement lie in the Industrial Revolution. Its intellectual roots, however, reach back almost as far as recorded thought—even as far as Moses, according to one history of the subject. Socialist or communist ideas certainly play an important part in the ideas of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, whose Republic depicts an austere society in which men and women of the “guardian” class share with each other not only their few material goods but also their spouses and children. Early Christian communities also practiced the sharing of goods and labour, a simple form of socialism subsequently followed in certain forms of monasticism. Several monastic orders continue these practices today.

Christianity and Platonism were combined in More’s Utopia, which apparently recommends communal ownership as a way of controlling the sins of pride, envy, and greed. Land and houses are common property on More’s imaginary island of Utopia, where everyone works for at least two years on the communal farms and people change houses every 10 years so that no one develops pride of possession. Money has been abolished, and people are free to take what they need from common storehouses. All the Utopians live simply, moreover, so that they are able to meet their needs with only a few hours of work a day, leaving the rest for leisure.

More’s Utopia is not so much a blueprint for a socialist society as it is a commentary on the failings he perceived in the supposedly Christian societies of his day. Religious and political turmoil, however, soon inspired others to try to put utopian ideas into practice. Common ownership was one of the aims of the brief Anabaptist regime in the Westphalian city of Münster during the Protestant Reformation, and several communist or socialist sects sprang up in England in the wake of the Civil Wars (1642–51). Chief among them was the Diggers, whose members claimed that God had created the world for people to share, not to divide and exploit for private profit. When they acted on this belief by digging and planting on land that was not legally theirs, they ran afoul of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, which forcibly disbanded them.

Whether utopian or practical, these early visions of socialism were largely agrarian. This remained true as late as the French Revolution, when the journalist François-Noël Babeuf and other radicals complained that the Revolution had failed to fulfill the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Adherence to “the precious principle of equality,” Babeuf argued, requires the abolition of private property and common enjoyment of the land and its fruits. Such beliefs led to his execution for conspiring to overthrow the government. The publicity that followed his trial and death, however, made him a hero to many in the 19th century who reacted against the emergence of industrial capitalism.