Looking To the Radical Past For Hope

GOOGLE JOHN DEWEY. He's worth it. A philosopher and writer, his primary concerns were democracy and education. In his day, nobody called Dewey an "anarchist", but easily could have. His idea of democracy was to eliminate all forms of coercion, institutional and systemic, including much law, including domination by "business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press and the means of propaganda and publicity." Dewey understood that "power today resides in control of the menas of production, exchange, publicity, transportation, and communication. Whoever owns them rules the life of the community, even if formally democratic systems remain in place." Until the above institutions are publicly owned and controlled, said Dewey, politics will always be a "shadow cast on society by big business." Although Dewey wrote this decades ago, he could have written it today, and it would be true. More recently, writers like gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky have mad the same argument. Dewey went much further, asserting that workers should control their own fate, rather than being, as he said, "tools rented by employers". This is a reference to the hourly wage system, which we have today. He was talking about worker ownership of business, and worker control of business. Our current system is feudalistic, he said, referring to the system in place then but still extant now, and should be replaced with a democratic one. Dewey's ideals sound radical in 2017, in conservative culture in which communism and socialism are considered radical by our prevailing capitalistic values, reinforced by corporate propaganda, and the political leaders who, controlled by corporate money, consider worker democracy a radical concept. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, John Dewey was mainstream. In that era, labor unions were large and vigorous, the idea of workplace democracy and ownership were mainstream. In 1920 and again in 1932, socialist and communist candidates for the U.S> presidency got more than one million votes. Eugene V. Debs received a million votes, although he was in jail on election day. Progressive ideals and labor unions have long since been immolated by corporate power, a process which began in earnest after World War Two. since the Reagan administration, both major political parties and the country in general have moved steadily to the right, assisted by a huge wll funded propaganda campaign, financed by billionaires. And so, minimum wage is seven twenty five an hour, Americans are working longer hours for less money, corporations enjoy higher profits than ever, the top one tenth of one percent of the population possesses nearly a quarter of the nation's wealth, and the gap between the rich and the poor is greater than at any time in America history. We the American people have willingly become sheep, placing ourselves at the disposal of the wealthy powerful elite. But there is hope. Phenomena like the occupy Wall Street movement and Bernie Sanders give us hope. But unless the extreme, pro wealth agenda of the republican party, which is truly radical, can be defeated, hope is a mere point of light, rather than the needed roaring blaze.