Reply To: Status of World Socialist Party (US)

With the corporate bail outs and government subsidies and tax cuts to the wealthy, there is a common refrain in the US

“Capitalism for the poor, Socialism for the rich”

It conflates the State’s intervention to bolster capitalists with socialism although it does genuinely reflect that the role of the state is to be the tool of the ruling class.

The US working class has always been under the miscomprehension that its government, federal and state, never steered and fostered capitalism that it was always individualism entrepreneurship and the free market and free enterprise that built and maintains capitalism. A few policies now seem to be undermining that false belief.

I have little time for Wolff regardless how erudite he may be as a Marxist academic who promotes co-ops or as he likes to describe them, workers self directed enterprises, as stepping stones towards socialism. But among progressives he does have an influencial following, he says what they want to hear…I rather describe him as the 21 Century backswoodsman in the tradition of many American mutualists such as Walden etc with idealized images of what capitalism could be like if there still existed a vast western frontier to settle with little houses on the prairie.