{"id":388347,"date":"2018-12-08T19:59:20","date_gmt":"2018-12-08T18:59:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/thoughts-on-strategy-for-a-left-opposition\/"},"modified":"2018-12-08T19:59:20","modified_gmt":"2018-12-08T18:59:20","slug":"thoughts-on-strategy-for-a-left-opposition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/thoughts-on-strategy-for-a-left-opposition\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on Strategy for a Left Opposition"},"content":{"rendered":"<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<div id=\"attachment_107744\" style=\"width: 520px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-107744\" src=\"https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/12\/5045484571_18da49a87d_z.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"340\" srcset=\"https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/12\/5045484571_18da49a87d_z.jpg 510w, https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/12\/5045484571_18da49a87d_z-300x200.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 510px) 100vw, 510px\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo Source ep_jhu | <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/\">CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>The time to resume using words like \u201cresistance\u201d and \u201crevolution\u201d in philosophically sound and historically accurate ways was long ago.<\/p>\n<p>And while the Sanders campaign deserves praise for bringing the word \u201csocialism\u201d back into mainstream political discourse, for reasons other than to disparage it, some precision would be welcome in that domain as well.<\/p>\n<p>For most of the past two centuries, that term has been used to denote any of an array of social and economic institutional arrangements that bear at most only a family resemblance to one another.<\/p>\n<p>Also, for the most part, they share a common ancestor, the labor movement, but that connection has been on the wane for a very long time.<\/p>\n<p>Competing views about what socialism involves need not be disabling, especially in times like the present when the historical Left has gone missing. Even so, care should be taken not to conflate socialism with Social Democracy or, worse, with its close cousin, New Deal \u2013 Great Society liberalism.<\/p>\n<p>For socialists, including Marxists of all types and of course for Marx himself, socialism involves one or another form of social, as distinct from private, ownership of major means of production. Private ownership is a defining feature of capitalism.<\/p>\n<p>Social democrats promote left alternatives to existing social and economic arrangements within capitalist societies \u2013 sometimes from pro-capitalist conviction, and sometimes because they believe that socialist&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/12\/07\/thoughts-on-strategy-for-a-left-opposition\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Photo Source ep_jhu | CC BY 2.0 The time to resume using words like \u201cresistance\u201d and \u201crevolution\u201d in philosophically sound and historically accurate ways was long ago. And while the Sanders campaign deserves praise for bringing the word \u201csocialism\u201d back into mainstream political discourse, for reasons other than to disparage it, some precision would be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-388347","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388347\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}