Socialism On Trial

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

This really is a delightful video. It highlights the fight of the Liverpool Labor Councilors fighting to defend Labor socialism in Liverpool in the mid-1980's during Thatcherism. What I found so heartwarming about it was seeing the majority of the White working class in this city rallying in the streets with red flags and signs saying socialism.

Here in the US, that sight is almost incomprehensible. No way will any group of White working class Americans anywhere march in the streets with red flags defending any kind of socialism. The interviews were also very uplifting. These working class Whites defended the Labour Party and its socialist project.

Why? Because they lived in a totalitarian Communist state and had to say that? No, because the socialist Labourites on the council had actually been making their lives better in real and tangible ways for decades.

This didn't happen by accident. The Labourites finally started winning big after WW2, possibly because the Right in the UK was discredited by the defeat of fascism.

Over 60 years, a very strong socialist movement, in the Labour Party, built its own Gramscian cultural hegemony in the UK. This succeeded to the point where your average Brit is a social democrat. There are large papers such as the Guardian, run by corporations, that are pro social democrat. Publicly financed broadcasting in the BBC is also probably pro-social democrat.

It is hard for non-Americans to understand how incomprehensible this is. The notion of huge broadcasting stations and newspapers supporting social democracy in the US is comical. The notion of your average American supporting socialist anything is a product of science fiction. The White working class in particular is irredeemable hostile to anything with the word socialist in it.

But this video shows that it is possible in the West for a socialist political party to win the hearts of White working class people. That notion right there shows that there is hope after all.

This interesting website highlights something else about US culture. Since Reagan in 1980, we have had almost 30 years of hardcore Gramscian cultural hegemony working like madmen to inculcate the market virus in our brains and make us hate anything government with Pavlovian unthinkingness.

In particular, an effort has somehow emerged, apparently cultivated by the Republican Party, that Democrats are fags, wussies, sissies or metrosexuals, and only Republicans and conservatives are real men. The Democrats are for the niggers, the Mexicans and the faggots*.

In White working class communities in rural and suburban California, it seems most of the young men vote Republican. If you're White, working class and say you vote Democrat, people will say, "Well you're not Black or Mexican, so what is your problem? Are you a queer?"

If you're a real man, you're a conservative. You love capitalism, you hate environmentalism, you hate towelheads, Islam, Europeans (especially France) and foreigners in general. You love global warming and plans to stop it are a Democrat socialist faggot plot against capitalism.

If you're a Democrat, your masculinity is suspect. If you're not a queer, at least you're not much of a man. Maybe you're a metrosexual. Reagan was real man. Jimmy Carter was a wuss. Bill Clinton, despite all the bimbos, was some sort of faggy not real man type. George Bush is a man. His father was supposedly a man too, but Bush Sr. actually has a pretty wimpy voice and mannerisms.

Basically, any Republican is automatically a big man and any Democrat is automatically a wussy metrosexual possible faggot.

You love globalization because it's capitalism on steroids, but say buy American (don't ask for coherence). You hate Palestinians for being dirty fighters and love Israel for fighting like real men. You love imperialism and colonialism for their manliness and cynical, real-world hardened views of the globe. And it's very manly and studly to be a neoconservative. You hate health food and love meat, especially red meat.

Socialism of any type, either in health care or social security, is for pussies and fags.

The love of capitalism is because all real men can supposedly become "successful" and "make good money" in the US, or, I guess, anywhere. Assuming 100% of US men decided to become he-men and make it to the upper middle class, how all 100% of them could somehow manage to squeeze into the top 20% is not explained.

If you're a liberal or a Democrat, you're not only a queer, but you're also a loser. If you're a liberal or a Democrat and you have some money, you're considered to be an insane person, working against your own interests.

Money is very much tied in with masculinity in our culture. American women, despite all the feminism, continue to judge a man's masculinity on his earnings. Somehow feminism managed to push equal pay for women while still winking at "take the man for everything he's got" game, giving "oppressed" women the best of both worlds.

An American woman's contemptuous, snarky, "You don't make enough money" is another way for her to call you a faggot or a pussy. So in addition to being called a loser, a low-income man is also told he's not a man. No wonder so many guys go postal.

Since money is equated with masculinity, the new conservative White guy does the same. He may not make much, but some day he will. Or he envies the guys who do. Or something. Or whatever.

It's interesting that in other parts of the world, particularly Europe, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, the Arab World, the Muslim World, and Asia in general, an identity has been constructed in which a socialist man can be as real of a he-man that ever existed.

The ultra rightwing macho man is very much a US invention, but US politics cannot be understood these days without taking it into account.

*used sardonically

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