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From December 26, 1907, to January 9, 1908, ten thousand tenants, predominantly Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe living in New York Citys Lower East Side, took part in a historic rent strike. During an economic depression causing mass unemployment and grinding poverty, landlords tried to hike rents by 33 percent. With their cry to fight the landlord as they had the Czar, the tenants won a partial victory, with rents significantly reduced for two thousand households.

The movement established a tradition of militant working-class housing campaigns that eventually contributed to winning vital rent controls that still protect millions of the citys tenants today. As the COVID crisis continues, New York City renters are again organizing against rapacious landlordism.

The 19078 rent strike was led by a remarkable woman, Pauline Newman, who had arrived in the United States from Lithuania in 1901, aged about nine (her birth certificate was lost along the way). She was one of 2 million Jews who arrived in the country between 1881 and 1924, escaping antisemitic pogroms. Still a child, she started work, first making hairbrushes and then in the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

Newman had been exposed to radical ideas in her homeland, where one trade unionist commented that behind every volume of the Talmud was a volume of Marx. Still young, she argued against gender segregation in the synagogue and demanded the schooling that was often denied girls. Her political education continued in America through the pages of the mass circulation Yiddish-language socialist newspaper theJewish Daily Forward, and in discussion groups that included some of the left luminaries of the time.

Pauline Newman was the epitome of intersectionality long before the term was coined. She became known as the East Side Joan of Arc, combining housing activism with trade unionism, socialism, the fight for womens suffrage, and gender and sexual equality. As a gay woman who raised a child with her partner and assumed a nontraditional style of dress, she lived in a way that challenged patriarchal orthodoxy, and died in 1986 after a lifetime devoted to the struggle that saw her go from the garment shop floor to positions of influence in the American labor movement, according to Annelise Orlecks 1991 bookCommon Sense and a Little Fire.

The legacy and contemporary relevance of Pauline Newman abounds. Inspired by the 1907 rent strike, in November 1909, she helped build the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and its Uprising of 20,000 against the exploitation of the textile industry. After two hours of indecision at a mass meeting at the Cooper Union, one of the workers, Clara Lemlich Shavelson, famously said, I am tired of listening to speakers. . . . I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared now! Once again, the strikers demands were only partially met but their women-led grassroots campaigning challenged both the employers and the male-dominated union hierarchy, leading to a wave of industrial action by textile workers across the United States.

The tradition of working-class New Yorkers fighting for a better life extended beyond housing. ILGWU members were also heavily involved in a succession of protests and boycotts against excessive food prices, beginning with a boycott of Kosher butchers in 1902. As theNew York Timesput it, when East Siders dont like something, they strike. In 1914, the ILGWU founded the Union Health Center to provide medical care to its members; they also promoted education projects in the same period, including the successful Workers University.

By March 1911, Pauline Newman was working with the US Socialist Party alongside Eugene Debs, when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory firekilled 146 workers. The negligence of the factorys bosses was yet another example of the corporate manslaughter that still puts working-class lives at risk, from the sweatshops of Dhaka to Grenfell Tower. But the ILGWU kept up the struggle for better conditions, at work and at home. The union was part of a highly significant movement to build cooperative housing developments for New York City workers, several of which survive today: the Penn South development in central Manhattan, for example, was sponsored by the ILGWU, and continues to provide 2,820 truly affordable homes in the heart of one of the worlds most unaffordable cities.

Rent strikes have been a recurring theme in New York Citys working-class history and a vital weapon in the ongoing fight for better housing conditions. As Ronald Lawsonwritesin the introduction to his history of the citys tenant movement, elites do not always have their way . . . ordinary people working class and poor, women, immigrants, minorities do help shape political agendas when they are organized and mobilized.

This year has brought new evidence of this. With millions losing income and unable to pay rent during the pandemic, a huge increase in evictions and homelessness was threatened. But a vibrant, well-organized coalition of housing campaigners fought to ensure that the state of New York has been virtually eviction-free for eighteen months. This reversal of a cornerstone of capitalism is a remarkable achievement one that has not yet been replicated in other places. It results from the same kind of assertive and often women-led mobilizations that Pauline Newman personified, including rent strikes. The early role of trade unions in building these movements was vital, too, and needs urgently to be revived.

Another recurring theme of housing and social justice movements in New Yorks history is the role of radical Jewish socialists. Much of the citys truly affordable housing was inspired and built by them. Sadly, the ILGWU fell foul to the red scares and infighting that have so often afflicted the US labor movement, and its a horrible irony that, as we remember the 19078 rent strike, the leadership of the UK Labour Party is busy purging itself of people following in the tradition of Pauline Newman.

In New York City today, the call for unity to defend workers at work and at home continues. Community Action for Safe Apartments (CASA) in the Bronx is just one of numerous tenant organizations fighting against the renewed threat of mass evictions as COVID enters its third year in the United States. Some CASA members are on rent strike, demanding their landlord carry out repairs, and the organization is spearheading a campaign demanding that the anti-eviction protections are extended for as long as the pandemic is with us.

Private landlords have filed 240,000 cases against New York tenants with rent arrears, threatening a huge spike in homelessness next year, particularly among the citys poor people of color and immigrants. Its a situation Pauline Newman would instantly recognize. But CASA and other organizations like it are determined to fight in a way shed recognize, too.

See the rest here:
New York's Winter Rent Strike Inspired Generations - Jacobin magazine

Manolo De Los Santos is co-executive director of the Peoples Forum and researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He coedited, most recently, Viviremos: Venezuela vs. Hybrid War (LeftWord, 2020). Vijay Prashad is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is the author of Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, Assassinations (Monthly Review Press, 2020).

They are guest editors of this special issue, The Cuban Revolution Today: Experiments in the Grip of Challenges.

On November 1, 2018, John Bolton, the national security advisor of U.S. president Donald Trump, unveiled a phrase with a sinister implication: troika of tyranny. The U.S. government, Bolton said, would focus attention on overthrowing the governments in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Bolton announced that the government had tightened its blockade on Cuba with more sanctionsincluding the implementation of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, allowing U.S. citizens to sue any person or company who benefited from property confiscated since the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Travel and money transfers to Cuba were restricted and several Cuban businessesincluding its national airlinefaced new sanctions. At the end of this cycle, Trumps administration placed 243 new sanctions on Cuba.

Anticipation that Joe Biden would roll back the Trump sanctions was quickly dispelled when his press secretary Jen Psaki said on March 9, 2021, that a Cuba policy shift is not currently among President Bidens top priorities. The previous month, senator Marco Rubio and Luis Almagro (the secretary general of the Organization of American States) began a social media campaign called Crisis in Cuba: Repression, Hunger, and Coronavirus. It should be noted that, at the time, there was not a single case of COVID-19 on the island. The U.S. campaign to overthrow the Cuban Revolution accelerated.

Twice in 2021, first on July 11 and then on November 15, the U.S. government and politicians joined with right-wing Cuban exiles (mainly in Florida) to egg on protests inside Cuba. U.S.-funded organizations began a social media campaign, a Bay of Tweets, that was designed to provoke uprisings among people who suffered from the social impact of the U.S.-imposed blockade and the COVID-19 pandemic. On July 11, in the Cuban town of San Antonio de los Baos, protests took place. Cubas president, Miguel Daz-Canel, heard the news and drove forty miles from Havana to talk to the disgruntled and see what could be done. Across Cuba, tens of thousands of patriots walked onto the streets with their national flag and with flags of the July 26 Movement that formed the core of the revolutionaries in 1959. In those crowds was Johana Tablada who works in the Cuban Foreign Ministry. We are human beings who live, work, suffer, and struggle for a better Cuba, she told us. We are not bots or troll farms or anything like that.

The social media campaign that came to be called J11 was driven by Florida-based companies and websites, many of them funded by the U.S. government through its National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Foundations (including Cubanos por el Mundo, Cubita NOW, CubaNet, El Estornudo, Periodismo de Barrio, Tremenda Nota, El Toque, and YucaByte). At the heart of this campaign is the Assembly of the Cuban Resistance, a coalition of anticommunist groups that calls for a U.S. invasion of Cuba. Its head, Mauricio Claver-Carone, is former head of Cuba Democracy Advocates, Trumps main advisor on Cuba, and now president of the Inter-American Development Bank (based in Washington DC). The hashtag #SOSCuba was mobilized and amplified across various platforms by troll farms, trying to generate a consensus about a large-scale uprising against the Cuban Revolution.

Having failed on July 11, 2021, these same forces tried again in November. First, a group called Archipilago announced that it would hold protests on November 20, a statement amplified by the U.S. government and its agencies. When it was learned that Cuba planned to open its borders on November 15, the protest was then announced for that date. Biden administration officials threatened Cuba with more debilitating sanctions if the government prevented the uprising. Archipilagos social media demonstrated that it was in favor of both regime change and the use of violence to achieve its ends. (Previous violent actions took place on April 30, 2020, when an assault rifle was fired at the Cuban embassy in Washington, and on July 27, 2021, when two individuals threw a Molotov cocktail at the Cuban embassy in Paris.) U.S. politicians such as Senator Rubio, senator Rick Scott, congresswoman Mara Elvira Salazar, and congressman Carlos Gimnez ramped up the pressure against Cuba, calling for more sanctions.

Despite the call for a Civic March for Change, nobody took to the streets on November 15, 2021. A few days before, young defenders of the Cuban Revolution wore red scarves, assembled at Havanas Central Park, and held concerts, poetry readings, documentary screenings, book presentations, and speeches. When the youththe Pauelos Rojos (Red Scarves)invited him, President Daz-Canel joined them. They defeated the hybrid attack for now.

But the U.S.-imposed blockade and hybrid war continue. This special issue of Monthly Review is motivated by the maximum pressure campaign that has intensified in Washington DC.

Very early into the 1959 Cuban Revolution, it became apparent that the U.S. government would take a hostile position against it. Despite recognizing the new government of president Manuel Urrutia a week after the revolutionaries overthrew the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship, the U.S. government proceeded to undermine the Cuban Revolution, particularly after Fidel Castro was appointed prime minister in February 1959. When Castro visited the United States in April, president Dwight Eisenhower refused to see him. Matters would only deteriorate further until the United States broke ties with Cuba in 1961 and put in place a range of destabilization mechanisms run by the CIA (assassination attempts against Castro, terrorist actions on the island under Operation Mongoose, the Bay of Pigs invasion by right-wing Cuban exiles). This was the general tenor of official U.S. policy toward Cuba.

Two other political and social forces within the United States, however, immediately embraced the Cuban Revolution: the Black liberation movement and the socialist projects.

When Castro arrived in New York to attend the UN General Assembly meeting in 1960, before the U.S. government officially broke ties with Cuba, the Cuban delegation found it impossible to get hotel rooms in the city. Malcolm X arranged for Castro and the Cubans to stay at Hotel Theresa in Harlem, showing the deep ties between the Black liberation movement and the Cuban revolutionaries (when Castro was denied entry into Eisenhowers lunch with Latin American leaders, he held his own gathering at a coffee shop in Harlem for employees of the Hotel Theresa, the poor and humble people of Harlem, as he put it). At a meeting between Castro and Malcolm X, the latter told the Cuban of the revolutionary process, there are twenty million of us and we always understand.

In March 1960, Paul Sweezy and Leo Hubermanthe editors of Monthly Reviewtraveled to Cuba to have a look at the revolution with their own eyes. They met the main leaders of the revolution (Castro and Che Guevara), officials of the new state and new civic bodies, and people from all walks of life. When they returned to New York, Sweezy and Huberman wrote down their reflections and published them in a special issue of their socialist magazine (JulyAugust 1960), called Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution (published as a Monthly Review Press title later that year). It was one of the first books to make the case that the Cuban Revolutiondriven by the ferocious determination to protect its sovereigntywould evolve necessarily in a socialist direction. Huberman and Sweezy returned to assess the revolution at several points. Hubermans Socialism in Cuba (1960) was well-received on the island for its sympathetic critique of the Cuban process. The relationship between Monthly Review (both the magazine and the press) and the Cuban Revolution continued from then to now, this current special issue being another indicator of that linkage.

Monthly Review Press was the original English-language publisher of Che Guevaras Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War (1968), and the magazine carried several articles by Che. After Che was assassinated in 1967, Eduardo Galeanos fine reflection on him, Magic Death for a Magic Life, was published in Monthly Review in January 1968. Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran dedicated their classic book Monopoly Capital (1966) to Che. Paul Baran had traveled to Cuba in September and October 1960, along with Sweezy and Huberman, who were there for the second time. His Reflections on the Cuban Revolution was published in the magazine in January 1961. Due to his strong support for the Cuban process, Baran was targeted at Stanford University (he had his first heart attack after returning from Cuba and felt the immensity of the pressure of supporting the revolution during the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Missile Crisis, succumbing to a heart attack in 1964).

We are grateful for the opportunity to present this special issue within the pages of Monthly Review, carrying forward a tradition established six decades ago. The stance of the magazine reflects Castros June 1961 comments at the Biblioteca Nacional, where he asserted that criticism should be from within the revolution, mirroring the view of one of the most important radical sociologists in the United States, C. Wright Mills. In his Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (1960), Mills wrote that we dont worry about the Cuban Revolution, but we worry with it. This volume is put together in that spirit.

Read more:
Preface and Introduction - Monthly Review

The conclusions to be drawn from the Glasgow-hosted twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties UN climate summit (COP26) that closed on November 13 should be clear for climate campaigners. They are certainly not new.

Once again representatives of the worlds most powerful capitalist nation states and the formally non-market economies in World Trade Organisation (WTO) terms also present were unable to overcome their competing economic and political interests to avert the prospect of future catastrophic climate change.

Nicholas Stern, author of the authoritative 2006 UK government commissioned report, at the time famously called climate change the result of the greatest market failure the world has seen a failure, in other words, of capitalism. Nothing that transpired in Glasgow contradicts that now well-established assessment.

Labour, the anti-Semitism crisis, and the destroying of an MP

By Lee Garratt

Published by Thinkwell Books, 2021, 11-99

The removal of Chris Williamson and Jeremy Corbyn from the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), and Rebecca Long-Bailey from the front bench, was in each case based on accusations of anti-Semitism, or on comments on accusations of anti-Semitism. There was no actual evidence of anti-Semitism in their cases and they all made clear that it should have no place in the labour movement. However, that issue had become a battering ram of the Labour Party right wing against the Corbyn-led left and its prime method for removing certain individuals from positions of influence.

Lee Garratts book documents well the deliberate smearing of those prominent Labour lefts and many others such as former MP and London mayor Ken Livingstone who were targeted on similar grounds.

Ten years ago the revolt of the indignados (the outraged) erupted in Spain as a protest against brutal austerity. The government of Jos Luis Rodrguez Zapatero and the misnamed Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), loyal to the interests of the capitalists who backed him, demanded that ordinary working class people pay the bill for the economic crisis which convulsed the Spanish state and the rest of the world in 2007-08.

While Spanish banks received huge no-strings-attached bailouts, Zapatero held wages down and savagely cut back public services, pensions and welfare. Jobs were slaughtered and new attacks were launched on trade union rights in order to obstruct the efforts of workers to fight back.

On 25 December1991 asombreMikhail Gorbachev appeared on television screens across eleven time zones announcing that the vast federation known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was dissolved. Long before this date, it had been unravelling and the fate of Gorbachev, its president and the secretary of the ruling Communist Party, had been sealed.

This Christmas speech marked the end of the Soviet Union; it was by no means the end of history, as one infamous political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued, maintaining there was now no alternative to capitalism. And yet today the idea of socialism is becoming more and more popular amongst young people and ever more urgent in the fight against the destruction of the worlds people and resources.

Those on the left who have pinned their hopes on founding a new socialist party, wrote the veteran Labour left-winger Tony Benn on the eve of Labours Bournemouth conference, should note that the Socialist Alliance candidate only received 366 votes in Brent East and Arthur Scargills Socialist Labour Party (SLP) was only able to get 111 votes, which does not promise well for that strategy. (Morning Star, 26 September 2003)

When the leaders speak of peace, wrote the German socialist artist Bertolt Brecht while living in exile in 1937, the people know that war is coming. Brechts pithy epigram, from his German War Primer poem, should be kept firmly in mind as the representatives of the countries that agreed the 1992 Rio Earth Summit United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change gather this November in Glasgow for the twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties to the convention (COP26).

Almost half of the atmospheres extra, human-made carbon dioxide has been put there under the watch of these representatives in the period since, almost thirty years ago now, they solemnly signed the Rio convention to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate.

Emerging from the Covid pandemic and following a decade of austerity, the capitalist class is once again determined to force the working class to pay the price for economic instability and crisis. But their success is not a foregone conclusion that depends on whether there is a struggle.

In an attempt to stave that off, and particularly to prevent struggle finding a political expression, when Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015 the Blairite right-wing embarked on a ferocious campaign. These representatives of capitalist interests in the Labour Party had spent years transforming it into a party safe for big business, and were not about to allow the door to open to the possibility of it becoming a vehicle through which workers could challenge the profit system.

Now with Corbynism defeated within the Labour Party framework the new battleground is in the biggest public sector trade union, with 1.3 million members, UNISON.

The consultation on the 2004 Gender Recognition Act (GRA) launched by the Tory government in 2016 was not the starting gun for the culture wars but it did create a battlefield. The Tories faced a Labour opposition led by Jeremy Corbyn. They hoped making it easier for trans and non-binary people to self-identify would be a cheap way to cut across some of the hatred felt, especially among young people, for their nasty austerity party. Five years on, as we warned, the Tories admit they have no intention of improving the GRA. The battlefield, however, is still active.

Those pushing themselves to the front of the so-called debate arising from the GRA reform consultation falsely present womens rights and the rights of trans and non-binary people as conflicting rights. They are not. All women and trans and non-binary people suffer in different and related ways because of the way capitalist society is organised and structured.

The United Nations climate change conference in Paris is the latest in a series of talks that has gone on for 23 years. They have thoroughly demonstrated how bankrupt capitalism is, in the face of the coming climate catastrophe it has created. The rate at which pollutants are spilled out has continued to grow, virtually unabated by the discussions held by diplomats around the world.

See the rest here:
Socialism Today Socialist Party magazine

Story Highlights

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Not only is socialism's image unchanged in the U.S. over the past decade, as reported in Gallup's recent in-depth review of attitudes toward socialism and government power, but positive views of socialism are flat across the age spectrum. Since 2010, young adults' positive ratings of socialism have hovered near 50%, while the rate has been consistently near 34% for Gen Xers and near 30% for baby boomers/traditionalists.

At the same time, since 2010, young adults' overall opinion of capitalism has deteriorated to the point that capitalism and socialism are tied in popularity among this age group. This pattern was first observed in 2018 and remains the case today.

The 2019 results are based on an Oct. 1-13 Gallup poll in which respondents were asked about their overall views of six different economic terms, including capitalism, socialism, free enterprise, big business, small business and entrepreneurs.

Despite the relatively high proportion of young adults who view socialism positively, a much higher 83% have a positive view of "free enterprise." This nearly matches the 88% of Gen Xers and 91% of baby boomers/traditionalists who view free enterprise positively. Still, opinions of free enterprise have weakened slightly among millennials/Gen Zers in the past few years.

All three age groups have a more subdued reaction to "big business" than free enterprise -- but the percentage viewing it positively among young adults has now fallen below 50% (to 46%). The image of big business also fell among Gen Xers between 2012 and 2018, but has since rebounded to 55%.

Among all Americans, "small business" is universally well-regarded, with a 97% positive rating. Nine in 10 view entrepreneurs positively, and a similar proportion (87%) say the same of free enterprise, while smaller majorities of Americans are positive toward capitalism (60%) and big business (52%).

There are no meaningful differences in the various generations' views of small business or entrepreneurs, with high percentages of all age groups viewing both positively.

Socialism is the only economic system rated positively by less than half of the public, now at 39%.

Americans' Views of Six Economic Terms

Just off the top of your head, would you say you have a positive or negative image of each of the following?

Young adults mirror the country as a whole in having a range of reactions to the terms commonly used to describe aspects of the U.S. economic system. Small business, entrepreneurs and free enterprise earn positive reactions from large majorities of all age groups, while fewer view big business and capitalism favorably. Where young adults differ from older generations is their particularly low ratings of capitalism and big business combined with their relatively high rating of socialism. Taken together, their different reactions to the terms suggest that young adults favor Americans' basic economic freedoms but have heightened concerns about the power that accrues as companies grow, and that younger generations are more comfortable with using government to check that power.

Read more about Gallup trends on socialism, capitalism and the level of government involvement that Americans want in solving the country's problems.

Learn more about how the Gallup Poll Social Series works.

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Socialism as Popular as Capitalism Among Young Adults in U.S.

Illustration by Alex Nabaum

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About the author: Vitaliy Katsenelson is CEO of IMA, a value investment firm in Denver, and the author of the upcoming Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life.

On Dec. 4, 1991, my family got off the boat from Russiawe landed at JFK, our stop on the way to Denver. I was 18 years old. My father moved my entire family to America for the shot at a better life for his kids; he had little inkling that the Soviet Union would collapse a few weeks later. I had learned about the U.S. mostly from American movies, which, with the exception of Westerns, were heavily biased toward coasts and skyscrapers. Denver was flat, sunny, and unusually warm. People wore T-shirts in the middle of winter.

That was not the only surprise for us.

We were picked up at the airport by a half-dozen strangers from my aunts synagogue. They drove us to our fully furnished apartment. That was shocking to me. I had been brainwashed into believing that Americanscapitalist pigswould sell their brothers to supersize their Happy Meals. These cold-hearted capitalists had taken their time and money to care for people they had never met.

In Soviet Russia, everyone (for the most part) was equally poor. My family, despite my fathers high salary (he had a doctorate, which boosted his pay), lived from paycheck to paycheck. Our understanding of money, especially mine, was very limitedwe never had any.

Money and power often unmask a person. Sometimes you like what is revealed; many times you dont. Im an investment manager. As an occupational hazard, Ive spent time around some very wealthy people, and I havent observed any extra dose of happiness in them.

Money solves money problems. It doesnt make people love you; your actions do. Money, just like education, is supposed to buy you choices. It should provide security. The first few years in the U.S., my parents worried how we were going to pay for groceries and rent. We dont have that worry todayand that is liberating.

After we arrived, I spent a few months knocking on the doors of every business within walking distance of our apartment. I didnt realize it at the time, but the country was in a recession. Getting a job was very difficult. Every member of my family needed to work.

When I eventually found work at a restaurant on the night shift, everything I earned, down to the last penny, I gave to my parents. This money went for food and rent. My stepmother, who was a doctor in Russia, was now cleaning rooms in a hotel.

Those were difficult years, but I would not trade them for anything. They taught me to work harder than anyone else. I dont know if I was driven by hunger for success, fear of failure, or by seeing the contrast of what this country had to offer versus my life in the Soviet Union. Probably all of the above.

Yes, this country has kept its promise. But as I reflect on spending the bulk of my adult life here, I realize I understand this country less today than I did 30 years ago.

Over the past decade, the country has turned tribal. We outsource our thinking to the mother ship of the tribe. Other tribes become our nemesis, and we lose nuance. Tribalism has started to impact our freedom of speech. No, the government isnt going to send you to the gulag for your political thoughts. We do it to ourselves by canceling one another.

The more we self-censor, the less free we become. As nuance is lost, we lose pragmatism and resilience, and we follow the paths of all empires. They get too rich, overextended, think they are better than others, and then fail.

I see the same thing happening on the corporate level. As great companies triumph, they lose a healthy sense of paranoia and perspective. Their culture stiffens, and they start thinking that success is a God-given right. Hubris creates an opening for the competition. IBM , GE, Xerox , Kodak , Polaroid, the onetime hallmarks of this country, are now sorry shadows of themselves.

It pains me to see the younger generation romanticizing socialism, as a person who lived under Soviet socialism and as an investor. When you tell them that every country that tried it failed, they answer that theyll do it better. Socialism fails not because of the quality of people involvednobody thinks that Russia or Venezuela would have succeeded if only they had better bureaucrats. Socialism simply runs counter to our genetic programming.

The alignment of incentives is paramount to the success of any enterprise. The incentives of government bureaucrats are aligned not with the success of the country but with keeping their jobs. Compare SpaceX to the space program run by the U.S. government. Capitalism is far from perfect, but it is the best system weve got.

I am still optimistic about the U.S. But we should not take our success for granted. Just like immigrants fresh off the boat, we should be hungry.

Guest commentaries like this one are written by authors outside the Barrons and MarketWatch newsroom. They reflect the perspective and opinions of the authors. Submit commentary proposals and other feedback to ideas@barrons.com.

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30th Anniversary of the Soviet Collapse: An Investor Looks Back - Barron's