[Reader-list] Fwd: "Socialism's Come Back"- (fwded)

[Venugopalan K M]

"..Marx's closest collaborator, Frederick Engels, argued back in the 1890s
that state ownership isn't equivalent to socialism. After the conservative
German leader Otto von Bismarck "went in for state ownership of industrial
establishments, a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen," Engels complained,
"degenerating, now and again, into something of flunkyism, that without more
ado declares all state ownership, even of the Bismarckian sort, to be
socialistic."

Marx, Engels and the revolutionary socialists who followed them also argued
that socialism can't be achieved by voting a socialist party into office.
The workers themselves must take the lead in transforming society by
exerting their power in the workplace and taking control of production.

That's why socialists can't be satisfied with a critique of capitalism. They
have to organize and fight for an alternative, by rooting socialist
organization in working-class struggles against the ravages of capitalism.

Eugene Debs, the great American socialist who got nearly a million votes for
president in 1912, made this point. "I would not lead you into the promised
land if I could," he said, "because if I led you in, some one else would
lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get
yourself out of your present condition."
http://socialistworker.org/2009/05/06/socialisms-comeback




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