2015 Coulson Memorial Lecture: Islamic Reform: Democracy or Reinterpretation? SOAS
http://www.soas.ac.uk/cimel/ The Coulson Memorial Lecture 2015 titled "Islamic Reform: Democracy or Reinterpretation?" was given by Professor Mohammed Fadel of the University of Toronto at...
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Occupy Boston - This is what democracy looks like
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Gerald Caplan is an Africa scholar, former NDP national director and a regular panelist on CBCs Power and Politics.
When I was 18 going on 19 I became a passionate democratic socialist. In the next two years I also became a fierce anti-Communist. I still embrace both these positions.
What influenced my abhorrence for communism me is clear: two events and three books. First were the shocking revelations about Stalins long tyrannical rule by his own successor. Second was the brutal crushing of the 1956 Hungarian revolution by the Soviets. Third were the books I still vividly recalll: The God That Failed, Darkness at Noon, and Homage to Catalonia.
The God That Failed was Communism itself, as exposed by distinguished left-wingers in Europe and the U.S. who had fled the Communist Party in shattered disillusion. Darkness at Noon was Arthur Koestlers terrifying novel about Stalins show trials, where loyal henchmen were executed after confessing they were actually counter-revolutionaries. Homage to Catalonia was George Orwells report from the Spanish Civil War showing that Communist fighters, under direct orders from the Kremlin, were targeting non-Stalinist left-wing militias instead of Francos fascists.
Everything Ive learned in subsequent decades has added to the evidence of the crimes committed in the name of socialism or communism. Communists often used the term interchangeably; so do red-baiters. Socialists never do. It is a terrible truth of the past 100 years that except for Hitler, the greatest mass murderers in modern history have been self-proclaimed communists Stalin and Mao above all, but also the likes of Pol Pot in Cambodia, Mengistu in Ethiopia and the rulers of North Korea. To achieve their ideal communist utopia, where all were equal, they murdered tens of millions of their own people.
Despite florid communist rhetoric about the glorious masses, not a single communist government anywhere (with the ambiguous exception of Titos Yugoslavia) has ever allowed anything remotely like democracy or human rights, nor delivered anything like material comfort for those revered masses. In no country has opposition ever been allowed, and in every one imprisonment, torture and even execution of non-violent dissenters was commonplace. Every aspect of life, from thinking to shopping, was dictated from above. This was true totalitarianism.
Socialism without democracy is a contradiction in terms. Todays Cuba remains the prime example of this truth, and there has been no greater betrayer of socialism than Fidel Castro. China represents a different kind of travesty a self-styled Communist dictatorship directing a free market economy. North Korea communism is the inmates running the prison asylum.
Communism collapsed of its own failings in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe a quarter of a century ago. Some Canadians who once had the misfortune to live under communism in eastern Europe, and some of their descendants, now want to erect a monument in Ottawa to memorialize the victims of communism. The Harper government agrees; there are votes to be had here. But there are also issues.
This memorial has little to do with Canada beyond these voters. As squalid as the record of communism has been, Canadians have fled all kinds of ugly regimes over the decades. Do we memorialize every one of them? And do Canadians with no links whatever to eastern Europe even care about an increasingly distant past? After all, 1.2 million of us contentedly holidayed in Cuba last year. For most Canadians, communism is history, not a living issue.
Theres a second issue that has received much attention. The proposed memorial would be in the heart of downtown political Ottawa. Except for those who chose this site and the Harper government, just about everyone else believes it to be inappropriate. But its axiomatic: whenever the vast majority of authoritative opinion challenges this government, the government wins.
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Communism is awful, but there are more pressing causes to be memorialized
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The proper role of government in a capitalist economic system has been hotly debated for centuries. Unlike socialism, communism or fascism, capitalism does not assume a role for a coercive, centralized public authority. While nearly all economic thinkers and policymakers argue in favor of some level of government influence in the economy, those interventions take place outside of the strictly defined confines of capitalism.
The term "capitalism" was actually made famous by the system's most notorious critic, Karl Marx. In his book "Das Kapital," Marx referred to capitalists as those who owned the means of production and employed other laborers in pursuit of profits. Today, capitalism refers to the organization of society under two central tenets: private ownership rights and voluntary trade.
Most modern concepts of private property stem from John Locke's theory of homesteading, in which human beings claim ownership through mixing their labor with unclaimed resources. Once owned, the only legitimate means of transferring property are through trade, gifts, inheritance or wagers. In laissez-faire capitalism, private individuals or firms own economic resources and control their use.
Voluntary trade is the mechanism that drives activity in a capitalist system. The owners of resources compete with one another over consumers, who in turn compete with other consumers over goods and services. All of this activity is built into the price system, which balances supply and demand to coordinate the distribution of resources.
These dual concepts private ownership and voluntary trade are antagonistic with the nature of government. Governments are public, not private, institutions. They do not engage voluntarily but rather use taxes, regulations, police and military to pursue objectives that are free of the considerations of capitalism.
Nearly every proponent of capitalism supports some level of government influence in the economy. The only exceptions are anarcho-capitalists, who believe that all of the functions of the state can and should be privatized and exposed to market forces. Classical liberals, libertarians and minarchists argue that capitalism is the best system of distributing resources, but that the government must exist in order to protect private property rights through the military, police and courts.
In the United States, most economists are identified as Keynesian, Chicago-school or classical liberal. Keynesian economists believe that capitalism largely works, but that macroeconomic forces within the business cycle require government intervention to help smooth out. They support fiscal and monetary policy as well as other regulations on certain business activity. Chicago-school economists tend to support a mild use of monetary policy and a lower level of regulation.
In terms of political economy, capitalism is often pitted against socialism. Under socialism, the state owns the means of production and attempts to direct economic activity towards politically identified goals. Many modern European economies are a blend between socialism and capitalism, although their structure is generally closer to the fascist concepts of public/private partnership with a planned economy.
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What role does the government play in capitalism?
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