Hell no!

Hopefully this will be the last time I will address this ridiculous accusation.

The financial crisis which has swept the globe over the past month, centered in the US banking system, has dealt an enormous blow to the official ideology of the American ruling class, which more than any other has elevated worship of the “free market” to the status of a state religion.

The federal bailout of Wall Street—despite the hysteria of the House Republicans—has nothing to do with socialism. The measures could be more correctly characterized, not as nationalization of the banks, but as privatization of the US Treasury, turning over its vast resources to billionaires and speculators.

The charges of “socialism” demonstrate the degree to which the eruption of financial crisis has confused and frightened the political representatives of the ruling elite. They recognize that the near-breakdown of the credit markets has discredited the capitalist system in the eyes of the working people, the vast majority of the population, and they react nervously to anything that might provide an opening for the expression of anti-capitalist sentiment.

Socialism means the reorganization of economic life under the democratic control of the actual producers, the working people whose labor creates all wealth. It can come about only through the independent political mobilization of the working class, led by a revolutionary party, which establishes a new and far more democratic form of state, a workers’ state, which exercises ownership and control over the means of production. Socialism cannot be engineered through backroom deals between Wall Street bankers and Washington politicians, or through the policies of any Democratic or Republican politician.

Some 160 years ago, Karl Marx wrote, “A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism.” He was describing the mood of fear and trepidation in the European ruling classes on the eve of the great revolutionary wave of 1848, even though the number of conscious revolutionary socialists was still a relative handful. If the specter of socialism today haunts the American ruling class, despite decades in which socialism has been subjected to an unrelenting campaign of slander and vilification, it is likewise because the profit system faces a new period of revolutionary upheaval.

There is NOTHING….I repeat…NOTHING socialistic about Obama or the much maligned bailout.  It is time toi stop trying to compare these cases to something that NO one has any idea about.  To keep referring to socialism in these4 cases is doing nothing but showing one’s ignorance.