Gaza War = A Safer World?

So let’s review. The supposed intent of the Israeli war on Gaza was to obliterate Hamas and protect the Israeli public from rocket attacks, similar to its intent during the recent Israeli-Lebanese war. Of course questions can be raised about these motivations, since Israel is currently in the midst of an electoral campaign that will conclude on February 10. Is the ruling Kadima party trying to fend off pressure from its chief rival, the ultra-Zionist and hawkish Likud party? Nobody in the media seems to be asking that question.

But let’s assume that the Israeli government’s motivation really is to make the Israeli public safer. How’s that going?

Socialism: The Time is Now

“Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.” – Karl Marx (1818-1883)

Socialism. This is maybe one of the most loaded political terms in use today, evoking memories from America’s past of the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the great Reagan era “triumph” over socialism in which global capitalism was said to have won the day. So isn’t socialism dead? It depends on how you define socialism. If you believe that socialism was embodied by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), then yes, socialism has been dead since the Soviet empire’s collapse in 1991 with only a few nations in the developing world hanging onto vestiges of the socialist philosophy.

But I don’t define socialism in terms of the Soviet Union; in fact, I think the Soviet Union was more about imperialism than socialism, and that it had much more in common with the capitalist west than it would have cared to admit. For me, socialism is the fundamental belief that democracy is not a strictly political phenomenon. Socialism is the extension of democracy to the economy, the belief that the means of production ought to be managed by those who are doing the producing — that is, by the workers, and not simply by the extremely wealthy few. It is, in other words, a political philosophy which argues that workers should not be slaves to production but active participants in it.