It Will Take a Democratic Socialist Movement to Save Capitalism from Imploding

We need a concrete foundation of action for real life.

Photo credit: iStockPhoto

By Warren Blumenfeld

Ironically, it will take a Democratic Socialist movement to prevent the current Capitalist system, lacking in oversite regulations, rife with corruption and influence peddling resulting in massive financial inequities vastly favoring the superrich, from imploding onto itself.

It will take a Democratic Socialist movement to promote governmental sponsorship of previously private and semi-private sector institutions, such as insurance and retirement policy corporations and educational establishments.

It will take a Democratic Socialist movement to compel the United States to live up to its overriding promise that anyone can succeed depending on their motivation, merit, talent neither helped nor hindered by their socioeconomic birth ranking or their social identities.

It will take a Democratic Socialist movement to ensure a firm and strong safety net to catch everyone who, for any reason, has been unable to ascend.

No, Democratic Socialism is not a magic panacea or some unattainable utopian vision from a futuristic film. Instead, Democratic Socialism provides a concrete foundation of action for real-life to lift our nation from the ever-widening social and economic abyss in which we find ourselves, an abyss that poses an existential crisis far greater than any threat from foreign military or cyber invasion.

Young people, especially those steeped in history — or possibly protected from its murky shadows — can educate their elders who grew up in earlier generations when “Socialist” was thrown as an evil and corrosive epithet.

The type of Democratic Socialism proposed of, for example, Senator Bernie Sanders (and while not referring to herself as a “Democratic Socialist,” Elizabeth Warren has articulated similar plans), is completely dissimilar from the crime and fraud-laded freedom killing National Socialism ruthlessly imposed by the German Nazis; from the governmental system inflicted within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR); or the ruthless Socialism of Venezuela and the Communism of Mainland China…