electronicalifornia

Upton Sinclair, letter to John Reed(22nd October, 1918)

American capitalism is predatory, and American politics are corrupt: The same thing is true in England and the same in France; but in all these three countries the dominating fact is that whatever the people get ready to change the government, they can change it. The same thing is not true of Germany, and until it was made true in Germany, there could be no free political democracy anywhere else in the world - to say nothing of any free social democracy. My revolutionary friends who will not recognize this fact seem to me like a bunch of musicians sitting down to play a symphony concert in a forest where there is a man-eating tiger lose. For my part, much as I enjoy symphony concerts, I want to put my fiddle away in its case and get a rifle and go out and settle with the tiger.

This was coming from the mouth of a extreme socialist who’s spent his life writing books attacking american buisness and institutions. Right now there is this huge wave of “I hate Bush/Corporations/Democracy/Babies/Goodness/Kindess” which is really stemming from I hate capitalism.

I definitely don’t love capitalism. I hate that money is the stick we measure success by. I wish we could live in a country where you could have a nice clean place to live, food to eat, family and friends, and that would be enough. Where no one had power over someone else. All this consumerism would go away. (Oh yeah its called the christian heaven, funny how the early church were extreme socialists). But every society where the government has been used to create a perfect society has failed horribly. The good thing about capitalism is that there is no way to achieve absolute power because everybody can get money and in that case every can achieve power. In socialism or communism or…scientology, the power and knowledge must be kept in a ruling elite that decides where to “spread the wealth”. And as in capitalism, this power corrupts people. The difference is that in socialism you can’t do anything about it. In socialism you can only take power back by force because besides power itself, there is no motivating factor. But in a democratic capitalist system, you simply take away money and power is lost.

We don’t vote for our government when we go to the polls, we vote when we pay our taxes.