Some weeks there are a lot of
things going on in the Global Justice Movement.
Other weeks there are still a lot of things happening, except nobody
tells us what they are. . . . Be that as it may, here are this week’s items:
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| Herbert George Wells |
• Democratic Socialism on the Rise.
Most “democratic socialists” seem to have a rather vague idea of what it’s
all about, but acceptance of the concept has been spreading rapidly, and not
just among actual socialists who took a page out of the handbook of the Fabian
Society, which broke with H.G. Wells over the best way to implement
socialism. For the record, Wells thought
the best way was to be straightforward, convince enough people that socialism
is right, and socialism will be established.
In contrast, the Fabian Society’s way (which Wells seemed to think
underhanded or dishonest, un-British, in fact) is to be as vague as possible,
infiltrate established organizations in Church and State, and burrow from
within, never saying anything definite, converting institutions to socialism
without anyone realizing what was going on until it was too late. As George Bernard Shaw noted over a century
ago, the greatest strength of the Fabian Society is that people outside the
Society have no idea what they are promoting, other than a loose adherence to
the principles devised by the agrarian socialist Henry George . . . which is
also the Society’s greatest weakness. (“The
Fading Fabians,” The Boston Evening Transcript, November 27, 1908, 10.) Evidently, many people now believe that it is
“too late” to turn back the clock and avoid socialism. Consequently “democratic socialism” is the
wave of the future and is the new form of Church and State. The irony, of course, is that early
nineteenth century socialism was first propounded as “the democratic religion”
directed toward establishing and maintaining a new form of Church and
State. The rise of democratic socialism
is therefore not really looking toward the future but turning back the clock
two hundred years for another go at a system that could never be made to work
in the first place.
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| Walter Reuther |
• Tariffs and Farm Aid. As a
result of the “Trump Tariffs,” U.S. farmers have been put in a precarious
position, so the government is proposing that they be helped financially . . .
out of a fund established during the (third) Great Depression. Of course, the easiest way to help farmers
would be not to have tariffs in the first place, and to implement an aggressive
program of expanded capital ownership and monetary reform to institute an “elastic”
and asset-backed reserve currency for the U.S., with the assets private sector
hard assets that are broadly owned. A
shift in the structuring of compensation from wages alone to wages and
ownership income would, as the late Walter Reuther pointed out so many years
ago, lower prices and allow workers and consumers to share equitably in
productivity gains. The balance of trade
would equalize as U.S. goods became less expensive in other countries without
harming the American consumers or their counterparts in other countries.
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| Orestes A. Brownson |
• What Happened to Social Justice.
Work proceeds on the book, hopefully to be released before the end of
this summer, that traces how the idea of social justice developed, how it grew
— and what happened to turn it into a euphemism for socialism. Should this particular volume be successful,
a number of others are planned to examine what happened to the financial
system, and a series of more “localized” stories in more detail about key
figures in the development of social justice.
For example, it was discovered during the research for the current blog
postings on John Henry Cardinal Newman that there is a tie-in with a number of
other key figures, such as Robert Hugh Benson, Ronald Knox, and Fulton Sheen,
even Orestes A. Brownson.
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| Support the Global Justice Movement |
• Shop online and support CESJ’s work! Did you know that by making
your purchases through the Amazon Smile
program, Amazon will make a contribution to CESJ? Here’s how: First, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your Amazon account. (If you don’t have an account with Amazon,
you can create one by clicking on the tiny little link below the “Sign in using
our secure server” button.) Once you
have signed into your account, you need to select CESJ as your charity — and
you have to be careful to do it exactly this way: in the
space provided for “Or select your own charitable organization” type “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington.” If you type anything
else, you will either get no results or more than you want to sift through. Once you’ve typed (or copied and pasted) “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington” into the space provided, hit “Select” — and you will be taken to
the Amazon shopping site, all ready to go.
• Blog Readership. We have had visitors from 25 different
countries and 41 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Canada, India,
Peru, and the United Kingdom. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were, “An
Introduction to American Liberalism,” “A
Grammar of Assent,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 29,” “How
About English Liberalism?” and “Philosophies
at War.”
Those are the happenings for this
week, at least those that we know about.
If you have an accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a
note about it at mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into
the next “issue.” If you have a short
(250-400 word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the
blog — do not send them to us to post for you.
All comments are moderated, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#