Tag: socialism

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

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So yesterday three communists won the Democrat primaries for three seats in the US House of Representatives that represent districts in New York City.  And they weren’t even close.  Two of those seats had sitting Democratic law makers that were defeated and the other one saw the current Brooklyn Borough President defeated.  None of these communists were seasoned politicians.  One of them was a graduate student.  What they have in common is that Mayor Mamdani assured New York City voters that they were card carrying communists who would soak the rich and bring about the workers’ paradise on Earth that is Karl Marx’s vision of communism.  Workers of the world unite!  You have nothing to lose but your 401K!

Now, the punditocracy is fighting over whether this is a sign of the apocalypse or not.  And who knows?  After all there are plenty of young people who have seen all prospects for normal life with careers, families, homes and prosperity disappear for them.  So why shouldn’t they throw their support behind charlatans like Bernie Sanders, AOC and Mamdani who claim they’ll take money from the rich and give it away for free to the poor?  Of course, as we know, that will end up crashing the economy right down to the ground as the Russians, the Chinese and the Cambodians discovered to their sorrow.  But why shouldn’t we get our turn in the barrel?

Well, there’s no use in worrying about something that can’t be helped.  Those three house seats will be occupied by commies in January.  How that will differ from the Democrats that occupied them before seems minimally important.  They won’t vote any way differently from their predecessors.  All that will change will be the use of Marxist rhetoric in their press releases and the disappointment of their constituents when nothing tangible will occur after they’ve taken up their residence in the Capitol.

But what is important is whether Trump and the Republicans manage to get gas prices down sufficiently before November to sooth the voters’ nerves before the midterms.  If he allows the Democrats to take back the House and the Senate this will hamstring his efforts to get his agenda enacted over the last two years of his term.  But of course, once you’re in a shooting war with the Iranians it’s probably a cinch that they’ll pull a stunt right before the election just to put the kibosh on Trump’s plans.

Well, nothing new here.  Republicans have been screwing up elections since I was a kid.  What I feel is more important is that the administration does everything it can to encourage companies to employ Americans in good paying jobs.  How he manages to do this is not my field of expertise.  He’s tried tariffs.  Maybe now he should try legislation that rewards companies with lower taxes if they employ more Americans.  Whether that is considered communism, national socialism or noblesse oblige is completely irrelevant as long as it makes this a more prosperous and happier place for my descendants to live in.

Fear and Loathing in Dunwich

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Every week I spend several hours with someone whose politics are almost diametrically opposed to mine.  And I mean that literally.  Left, right.  Up, down.  You name it.  And interestingly we get along fine.  Now, we never talk politics, never.  Because we know that all we could possibly do is disagree.  So, we stick to business and to things that are universally human.  We love our families and we want our town to win the soccer games against the neighboring towns.  Nothing more controversial than that.

But even when all we are talking about is work, other things creep in.  And even when we are avoiding “current events” it’s hard not to let anxiety about the state of things surface.  Neither of us want to say much because we’re both avoiding putting a spin on what is fueling this anxiety.  But I think there was an “unspoken agreement” that we both feel that things are very, very not good.  And then she said something kind of odd, “Do you think that we’re reaching the end of one or both of the major parties?”  I tried to finish off this almost non-conversation by saying, “Well, maybe it’s not as bad as it seems.  Maybe every generation is like this and it’s not as bad as we think and things will just muddle along as they are now.”  And that was the end of the talk.  We moved onto Dunwich trivia.

But this got me thinking.  I think I see signs that things are very not good in the Blue States.  When the true believers start to wonder if things can go on the way they’re going without a change of party there is something very, very wrong.  I don’t want to blow this out of proportion or start putting money on some collapse theory.  But I get the definite feeling that all is far from well within the Democrat Party.  If I were to guess I think the socialists and the populists on the Left are eroding the “center” of the Democrat party to such an extent that a lot of the old guard don’t recognize what their party has become and are very worried by this change.

Maybe a good example is what is happening in the Democrat Senate race in Maine.  Governor Janet Mills was the establishment favorite to be the Democrat candidate to run against the Republican incumbent Susan Collins.  Graham Platner who is an oyster farmer, a Marine veteran and Harbor Master of the town of Sullivan is the Bernie Sanders candidate.  Mills attacked him based on his comments on Reddit about rape and violence and because he has a tattoo on his chest that resembles a nazi symbol (a Totenkopf).  But just last week she dropped out of the race and Platner is now the leading Democrat candidate.  Platner is a socialist and a populist and typifies the new Democrat direction.  Now someone like Platner would frighten a lot of old Democrats, especially the women.  The violent rhetoric, the adoption of a pro-Gaza, anti-Semitic stance, the pro-gun talk are frightening and confusing to a lot of these Democrats.  So, I think the question I heard was an honest one and means there is a lot of fear about what is going on in their party.

Of course, that’s not that different from what is going on with the Republicans.  Populist candidates are primarying establishment hacks like John Cornyn in Texas.  So maybe this is all just part of the increasing polarization of the country.  But maybe saying “just” the polarization is minimizing just how dire the situation really is.

Let me end this by saying there is fear and confusion throughout our country and we’re going to have to let it all play out before we know just how bad the crack-up will be.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 17JUL2025 – The People’s Food

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Chemist said

“Finally, as with anything related to NYC, there will also be a ton of graft and outright theft.”

Indeed in a little city near where I live there was an excellent grocery store part of one of the larger New England Chains. It was brand new, had good prices, all sorts of products, including very high quality produce and types of produce (Jicama, Star Fruit, Mangoes, Plantain etc) rarely if ever seen in New England Grocery stores. After about 3-4 years of operation, the chain closed it. I happened to know a person who was a relative of one of the managers. Shrinkage (i.e. Theft) was the main issue. But it wasn’t shoplifting or at the front of the store as they say. It was the back of the store, cases of stuff (canned, produce, meat) would come in the back and go right back out often to be broken up and sold to small stores and restaurants. Now, picture NYC and that Mamdani will try to use these grocery stores as a way to employ the indigent and his pals (but I repeat myself) and picture the scenario I just spelled out. Ultimately the stores would just be another sink hole for NYC taxes; they’d be losing money hand over fist from the day they opened.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 17JUL2025 – Grocery Wars

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So Mandani wants to have city run grocery stores.
Let’s say he gets his wish.
Grocery stores run about a 3% profit margin. This is for the big boys: Kroger, Safeway, HEB, etc.
The smaller chains have less buying power and can’t get the gross margins the big guys can so they run 1 to 2% profits. I don’t think NYC is going to get the same gross margin as Kroger.
Chain grocery stores employ a lot of younger, minimum wage people.
NYC stores will have to employ NYC city civil servants with all the benefits attached to being a city employee: Higher wages, gold plated health care, pensions, etc.
Pretty sure the 1% profit margin just left the building right there.
Then there is spoilage – because those folks living in the “Food deserts” aren’t going to be buying fresh stuff no matter how much the mayor says it is good for them.
Finally, as with anything related to NYC, there will also be a ton of graft and outright theft.
I predict the stores will run 20-30% in the red
This will be a HUGE debacle. But it might be fun to watch.

Guest Contributor – Ed Brault – 17JUL2025 – The Workers’ Paradise

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Burlington, Vermont, experienced a mini-version of this when the increasingly socialist city government raised property taxes on businesses to the point that all the grocery stores moved out. In response to the “food-desert” crisis, the city tried to lure food stores back, but the restrictions and requirements for what products had to be stocked, how much had to be “organic”, etc, resulted in only one taker, a “Whole-Foods” type grocery, with prices way too expensive for the low-income neighborhoods it was supposed to service.
Reductions in the Police Dept have resulted in some areas of the city becoming no-go zones, and the once-prosperous Church Street shopping district has lost its major anchor stores, and is overrun with panhandlers and homeless.
(Thanks, Bernie!)

Guest Contributor – The Portly Politico – 25JUN2024 – Coffee Shop Socialism

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I’m all for a business owner saying, “Okay, look, we’re going to pay you a living wage to serve coffee, but that means we’re going to have to sell this product at a much higher price than is competitive.” Advertise that to your customers—“we know you’re paying a bit more for this coffee and bagel than you would at our competitors, but you’re putting braces on our employees’ kids’ teeth.”

I frequent coffee shops, and that kind of model really resonates with the middle-class progressive clientele. It taps into the crusader/moralist mentality of the woke Left in what I think could be a productive way: the soyboy buying his coffee gets to feel good about “helping the workers”; the workers get more money and benefits.

It’s not sustainable in most businesses, but it could work in this environment. The problem is that progressives, like everyone, ultimately have to think about their personal spending, and raising prices will obviously mean fewer customers overall. Marketing with the right social justice message could mitigate some of that—and some people are very loyal to their preferred coffee shop—but it’s not easy. It sounds like the owner of OCF was trying some of these things and they weren’t working.

Observations from the Gulag Archipelago Relevant to Today – Part 1 – Show Trials

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Solzhenitsyn’s epic history of the Soviet Union’s war against its own people is a crippling experience for the reader.  The first ninety pages are a seemingly endless list of purges that went on from 1917 to well into the 1950’s.  The scope, the strategies and the tactics that were used to terrorize, imprison, torture and mostly murder these poor human beings is almost beyond comprehension.  In Solzhenitsyn’s own words “If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.’”

To try and understand how a government of men would choose to decimate and more than decimate its own people is very difficult.  But it is telling that in every society where radical socialism has taken hold it follows the same pattern and causes monstrous suffering.  Because this same ideology is now loose in our own society, I thought it would be useful to select specific details from the Gulag Archipelago and elaborate on how they relate to our time and place.

I’ll start off the series with the concept of show trials.  Among the many purges there was a period when a decision was made to go after engineers.  They were selected because previously they had been given a certain immunity due to their usefulness.  Because of the backwardness of pre-revolutionary Russia and because of the agricultural disruptions that occurred due to the collectivization of the farmlands, having men who could manufacture and repair and improve modern equipment like tractors and automobiles was quite important.  Sending them to the gulag was quite counterproductive.  But at a certain point logic ceased to be strong enough to prevent the next victim group from being fed into the maw of the meat grinder.

And it was quite easy to incriminate engineers.  By definition they were intellectuals, a classic category of counter-revolutionaries.  Also, most of them had studied at the universities during the czarist period so there were all kinds of associations and attachments to people and organizations that had already been condemned and consumed in the earlier purges.

But the technique that the authorities wanted to most use was to find someone innocent of any real crimes and tell him that if he would denounce himself and all his fellows of some absurdly improbable crime in a public exhibition then he would get a lighter sentence.  And so, we got the show trial.

At the trial the accused had to go through the full histrionics of denouncing himself and confess to all his crimes and accuse all of his co-conspirators.  In the best case all of the other equally innocent men would also confess to their inhuman crimes against the collective.  And finally, they would finish off by demanding their own deaths as the only fitting punishment for their atrocious crimes.  And ironically, despite the assurances that they had received of a lighter sentence, often death was awarded to them.  But either way this theater of the perverse was conducted and make-believe crimes were punished and more fodder was fed into the killing machine.

Amusingly, these trials came to an end when during the show trial against the ceramic industry the defendants as a body decided at the last minute to deny all charges.  And since the prosecution had no actual evidence to produce against them at this very public trial, they were exonerated.  It just goes to show sometimes courage is rewarded.

Currently, examples of show trials in our country are only the thinnest of ghosts of what the Stalinist regime could perpetrate.  A recent example is New York Times science writer Donald McNeil Jr.  He was denounced for the use of the black ethnic slur that shall not be repeated unless you are black.  He was on a trip with students in Peru, for some reason, and one of his students finked out another of the students for having used the black ethnic slur that shall not be repeated unless you are black (tbestsnbruyab).  When McNeil said tbestsnbruyab in the context of condemning the use of tbestsnbruyab he was reported by those present of using tbestsnbruyab.  He was condemned by his colleagues and the incident was forgotten.  But two years later the retroactive punishment for this offense became capitol and his colleagues demanded his firing.  And being the good progressive that he is, he made a statement applauding his professional lynching.  Now admittedly this is poor stuff compared to shipping him off to a labor camp or putting a bullet in his brain.  But it’s a rousing start when it occurs in the so-called land of free speech.

I expect there will be other examples of looney lefties denouncing themselves.  And I think we’ll also see that after the fact they’ll be heard caterwauling at the gates of the Emerald City claiming that they weren’t given a chance afterward to be re-educated and rehabilitated.  But it’s a funny thing.  Once you’ve been cast out into that void it’s really hard to get the “good” people to take your calls.  Contamination from bad thinking is much scarier than COVID.  They’re going to have to get back to you sometime in the future.  And that future sure isn’t tomorrow and chances are it’s never.

So, as you can see, we are only at the very beginning of the great revolution that the Russians perfected.  But I will continue this series and I’m sure we’ll use our Yankee ingenuity to innovate and who knows even show the masters a thing or two.  So, stay tuned comrades.