Archive for the ‘Socialism’ Category

Xi Jinping Thought Explained: A New Ideology for a New Era

China has a new official political doctrine.

Its called Xi Jinping Thought, and it is everywhere. Schools, newspapers, television, the internet, billboards and banners all trumpet the ideas of Mr. Xi, the countrys president and Communist Party leader.

Officially known as Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, the ideology will soon be given an even more prominent platform: the preamble of Chinas Constitution.

Boiled down, the doctrine is a blueprint for consolidating and strengthening power at three levels: the nation, the party and Mr. Xi himself.

The doctine, like Mr. Xi, is not going anywhere soon. The Party on Sunday abolished the presidential term limit, meaning Mr. Xi could remain in power indefinitely. Heres your guide to understanding the ideas likely to guide China through the next decade, or possibly longer.

The Nation: Make China Great Again

Since Mr. Xi became chairman of the Communist Party in 2012, he has vowed a great rejuvenation to restore China to its ancient prominence and glory.

In recent decades, China has become the worlds second largest economy and a powerhouse of global trade and investment. Xi Jinping Thought promotes taking the next step, making China not only prosperous but also politically powerful.

Never before have the Chinese people been so close to realizing their dreams, Mr. Xi is often quoted as saying. Implicit in the dream of being counted among the worlds powers is the idea of China nearing the United States in strength and influence.

To sustain Chinas global rise, Mr. Xi is modernizing Chinas military and investing heavily in a $1 trillion international trade initiative known as Belt and Road. Under Mr. Xi, China has expanded the size and scope of its military, purged corrupt officers and built military installations in contested waters of the South China Sea.

The Party: Chinas Best (and Only) Option

Mr. Xis nationalist message of China as a strong, highly respected world power resonates with many Chinese.

But the promise of national glory comes with a catch: single-party rule.

Xi Jinping Thought promotes the supremacy of the Communist Party to growing numbers of avid consumers, internet users and world travelers a group fundamentally different from the workers and peasants who were supposed to be the soul of the Communist Revolution.

Mr. Xis philosophy teaches that the goal of a powerful, unified China can be achieved only if the Communist Party stays firmly in control of China. The party, he says, is the solution to Chinas problems, not their source.

Harping on the importance of one-party rule is not new in China. But Mr. Xi has taken aggressive steps to revitalize the Communist Partys grip on business, the news media, the internet, culture and education. The influence of party permeates every corner of society even rap music.

Official news media routinely point to the corruption and failings they see in Western democracies. Why question the Communist Party when the alternative is chaos and corruption? goes the message.

The Man: The National Patriarch

The third piece of Xi Jinping Thought is Mr. Xi himself.

Central to the doctrine is the idea that for China to continue its global rise, and for the party to maintain its rule, a decisive leader is needed at the helm. And the man for the job is Mr. Xi.

A new security deal. The Solomon Islands signed a sweeping security agreement with Chinathat could threaten the stability of the entire Asia-Pacific region. The deal gives Beijing a foothold in an island chain that played a decisive role in World War II and could be used to block vital shipping lanes.

A pause on wealth redistribution. For much of last year, Chinas top leader, Xi Jinping, waged a fierce campaign to narrow social inequalitiesand usher in a new era of common prosperity. Now, as the economic outlook is increasingly clouded, the Communist Party is putting its campaign on the back burner.

Xi Jinping Thought was seen in action this week when the Communist Party announced it would abolish presidential term limits, allowing Mr. Xi to remain in power, perhaps indefinitely.

In propaganda, Mr. Xi is referred to as lingxiu, a reverent Chinese word for a leader that was also used for Mao Zedong. In official imagery he is portrayed as a visionary leader on a historic mission brave, wise and decisive.

Xi Jinping Thought still reveres the teachings of Mao and Karl Marx, but it also links Mr. Xi to even older Chinese traditions, especially Confucianism.

Mao said he wanted to smash the grip of Confucius on China and ignite revolution. But Mr. Xi regularly quotes Confucius and other ancient sages, stressing their teachings on obedience and order, and promoting the idea that the party is the custodian of a 5,000-year-old civilization.

Party propaganda now even equates Mr. Xi to a Confucian patriarch who runs the country as if it were his own family.

And all good Confucian children must observe filial piety.

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Xi Jinping Thought Explained: A New Ideology for a New Era

I hope youngsters are learning about socialism and will carry on the fight – The National

A BIG thanks to Caileen Gallagher for her article on Joe Hill (A man sacred and secular, canonical and communist, May 7). Joe Hill was of course executed by the state for the trumped-up charge of murder but in fact he was shot for being a socialist or indeed communist. How good to see the words in print in our newspaper.

Socialists and communists have had many martyrs in the fight against poverty and hunger which capitalism inflicts on the majority of the workers all over the world, but countries never build memorials to them as they do for generals in battles which use workers as expendable fodder. I hope young people are learning the history of socialism and can see the injustice perpetrated by the capitalist class against ordinary workers and therefore carry on the fight for a more equal society.

READ MORE:SNP councillors eye takeover of 'Better Together' council after topping poll

To paraphrase Germaine Greer from BBC Question Time some years ago: The reason that politicians get away with so much is because of the demise of the Communist Party, who kept an eye on them. At a time when we are losing the right to demonstrate, we need the youth to step up to the plate and fight for our rights.

Rosemary SmithEast Kilbride

Originally posted here:
I hope youngsters are learning about socialism and will carry on the fight - The National

How Oklahoma’s Socialist party shaped the state – Oklahoman.com

Use the word socialism in the last decade, and youll likely conjure images of political ads claiming takeover of the United States by the countrys coastal elites.

But from the turn of the 20th century through the end of the World War I, socialism was commonplace throughout much of the country, including finding a substantial support system among Oklahomans.

Proportionally it (Oklahoma) was the largest Socialist Party given the small population of the state. It had more dues-paying members thanNew York State at its height, said Stephen Norwood, history professor at the University of Oklahoma. At its peak strength, the Oklahoma Socialist Party could pull close to a third of the vote.

East Coast and Midwestern cities led much of the early socialist movements where the focus fell on those workers in industrialized areas. However leaders of the movement like Oscar Ameringer soon saw an opportunity among those living in rural areas of the country, as well.

When Ameringer came to Oklahoma in 1907, he realized looking around that you could not build a socialist movement on the traditional socialist base, Norwood said. There wasn't much industry in Oklahoma."

More: All but one of Oklahoma City's 2022 mayoral candidates file final contribution reports

Ameringer, originally from Germany, first found his way into organizing with labor movements in Ohioand Louisiana before moving to Oklahoma to work in the Socialist Party.Instead of focusing on the traditional views driven by Marxs writings and the belief that industrial workers would lead the movement, what Ameringer found in Oklahoma was an impoverished state made up of largely agricultural workers. Many of those workers were tenant farmers who did not own the land on which they worked.

Norwood said after the Land Run, much of the land in the state ended up in the hands of coal companies, oil companies, railroad companiesand other wealthy landowners, leaving small farmers no choice but to rent from them.

That meant that if you're in that situation, you don't have any real hope for a future. You'll be living in poverty generation after generation like sharecroppers in the South, he said. The socialists provided some hope for these people."

An earlyAmeringer meeting took place in Harrah, Norwood said, as he began traveling across the statesharing the socialist platform and message. Norwood said Ameringer describes this meeting in his autobiography.

"He notices that the man whogreeted him and was going to introduce him to the audience was really soaked to the skin, and he asked him why that was, Norwood said. There had been a torrential downpour, the sort that we often have in Oklahoma, and the bridges had been washed out but he wasn't going to miss the opportunity to introduce Oscar Ameringer so he swam across the river.

More: Social issues at forefront of Oklahoma state superintendent race

Ameringer was impressed by the dedication of the farmers who were living at little more than a subsistence level. However, in addition to changing their message and leaning away from some of the stronger Marxist ideals, the socialists also had to lean into religion for the poor rural populations of Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas, rather than denouncing it as other socialists throughout the country did.

They used religious imagery, Norwood said. People come from all around in their wagons, or on horseback or on foot and they're used to listening to ministers preaching, so the socialist orders would adopt the same kind of almost a fire and brimstone, apocalyptic style in presenting the socialist message.

Norwood said unlike the National Socialist Party, Oklahomas socialists did not advocate for the traditional ideal of publicly owned resources, often seen as being on the left-wing of the party or the part of socialism known as red due to its affiliation with Marxist ideals.

Now in Oklahoma, that's not going to work. If you make that your message, you're not going to get anywhere; you have to be more flexible, he said. What they proposed was taking the big landholdings and dividing them into small farms that would be individually owned private farms.

Candidates representing Oklahomas Socialist Party often polled close to a third of the statewide vote in elections. Ameringer himself would capture about23% of the vote in the 1911 race for mayor of Oklahoma City.

In the 1914 gubernatorial elections,Fred W. Holt received 41% and 35% of the vote inMarshall and Roger Mills counties, respectively,where socialism was strongest, according to the Oklahoma Historical Society.

In 1917 at the height of World War I, a group of tenant farmers in Oklahoma staged a revolt along the banks of the South Canadian River. This uprising, known as the Green Corn Rebellion, was in protest of the countrys forced draft or conscription policy.

According to the Oklahoma Historical Society, men planned to march to Washington and end the war, surviving on the way by eating barbecued beef and roasted green corn, the latter giving the rebellion its name.

It didn't get very far, and it was suppressed posses were quickly recruited and went after these armed men and suppressed the uprising, Norwood said. But the green corn rebels did seize some banks and county offices.

More: Oklahoma GOP Congressional candidate John Bennett calls for execution of Dr. Anthony Fauci

Norwood said the uprising, while unsuccessful, did denote larger pacifist anti-war sentiments that the rebels were playing off. While the Socialist Party and Ameringer discouraged the uprising andit was not an official socialist sponsored act, it led to the first wave of the partys decline.

"It's after 1920 or so it declines very fast, Norwood said. "The peak is really in the 1910s. Historically, the party itself is just really a shell after 1932."

There was a brief resurgence with the election of Franklin DelanoRoosevelt, a Democrat whounited many of the people who had supported socialism, includingsmall farmers, labor unionsand African Americans.

Like the rest of the country, Oklahoma saw the development of unions with the growth of the socialist movement. Most of Oklahoma's unions found their start with socialist leaders like Ameringer.

The Oklahoma Renters Union and Twin-Territorial Federation of Labor, later the Oklahoma Federation of Labor, were among the earliest established in the state. These unions like their national counterparts led pushes to improve working conditions for workers across a number of industries.

Ameringer and many leaders in the socialist movement across the nation were also advocates for African American rights. However, in Oklahoma this is one area where the party largely ignored progress, Norwood said. While Ameringer pushed to overturn Oklahomas grandfather clause, an amendment to the states constitution that took the right to vote away from most Black residents, many other socialists were not concerned with these matters.

That's always a problem in that period andfor labor organizing generally is that there is a significant amount of racism among poor whites, Norwood said.

More: Democratic US Senate candidate Madison Horn gets to stay on ballot in Oklahoma

The development of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union during the Great Depression, an interracial union that originated in Arkansasbut quickly spread to include many Oklahoma farmers, would begin a shift in attitudes.

Norwood said racism still existed in the Socialist Party, but the party did go beyond the two major parties in their proposals on civil rights. As the civil rights movement advanced, more socialist leaders in the African American community emerged, including Bayerd Rustin, the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington.

I think the one thing that the socialists probablyput out there is allpeople are human beings deserving to be treated with dignity, to have a fair shake in life, to have some protection against sudden impoverishment.

Norwood says socialism todayis a "watered down" form of the earlier movement, adopted by others parties, including those who would now classify themselves as liberal Democrats or leftists.

Socialism as it's defined now is also not quite what it used to be, Norwood said. The classic definition of socialism is the public ownership of the means of production and distribution. Anyone calling themselves socialists now isnt going that far;it's more building a safety net.

See more here:
How Oklahoma's Socialist party shaped the state - Oklahoman.com

Walter Crane Was a Socialist Visionary Who Illustrated the Triumph of Labor – Jacobin magazine

Walter Crane woke up on a spring morning in 1884. He never slept again. As an artist and illustrator, Crane had drawn inspiration from pre-Raphaelite visions of universal brotherhood; as a political activist, he idolized John Stuart Mill and supported the radical, democratic left of the British Liberal Party. But by 1884, thirty-nine years since his birth to a family of Torquay decorators, the artist of enchantment had been thoroughly disillusioned.

The worst thing in the world had happened to Crane: he got what he wanted. Raising illustration to a fine art in the eyes of his peers, Crane saw his groundbreaking book designs warped in crude, commercial reproductions. Successive reform bills enfranchised ever wider circles of the population but in industrial London, he only saw rising poverty and squalor.

As a decade of economic and political crisis began, Cranes sunny Victorian optimism was rapidly clouding over. Looking back years later, he described the dread that crept over him as he realized the real nature of British society:

Under the forms and semblance of political freedom, real economic slavery . . . a grinding commercial system of inhuman competition, threatening to be a worse tyranny that any the world has ever seen, reducing all things to money value, vulgarising life, and ruthlessly destroying natural beauty.

Romantic art had promised to reunite the worlds of artifice and nature; democratic reform to make peace between capital and labor. Both had failed. Or so it seemed to Crane, his vision of the future darkening by the day. But then, in the writings of his friend William Morris, he found a light.

The visionary artist Morris, the founder of modern design, crossed the river of fire to the socialist movement late in life. He brought with him his own heterodox interpretation of communist ideals; a marriage, E.P. Thompson called it between romanticism and Marxism. The promise of the romantic movement could only be realized, Morris argued, through the revolutionary transformation of society. In Art and Socialism, the lecture, that, in the spring of 1884, made Crane a socialist, Morris made his case clear:

One day we shall win back Art, that is to say the pleasure of life; win back Art again to our daily labour . . . now the cause of Art has something else to appeal to: no less than the hope of the people for the happy life which has not yet been granted to them. There is our hope: the cause of Art is the cause of the people.

Morris stood, as Raymond Williams noted, at a crossroads in British intellectual life; proposing a moral and aesthetic transvaluation that would sweep away the dark satanic mills of industrial Britain. And an unlikely cultural revolutionary found an unlikely acolyte in Britains foremost childrens book illustrator. More than any other artist, Walter Crane inherited Morriss vision and fought for his ideals, tangling alike with old reaction and commerant renegades in the Arts and Crafts movement.

Not that Crane was a political neophyte. His commitment to radical, democratic values dated from his apprenticeship amongst old Chartists in the workshops of Hammersmith, veterans of the fight for the vote in Britain. His understanding of art as imbricated with social and moral questions was one borrowed from his mentor John Ruskin. And the words of the radical romantics John Keats, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley were woven through his work and life. Like Morris, Cranes romantic belief in the power of human self-expression, the beauty of the natural world, and the centrality of friendship shaped his whole life: aesthetic judgment implying even demanding political commitments to match.

His private life was no exception, taking hospitality for a way of life. Crane and his wife Marys love of fancy dress and delight in friendship made their parties major events on Londons artistic social calendar.For their son Lionels twenty-first birthday, they invited seven hundred people into their home. Crane dressed up as a crane in beaked hat and triple-toed shoe and Mary as an enormous sunflower. George Bernard Shaw once noted with admiration and surprise just how sociable Crane was. Given how personally unpleasant socialists and artists tended to be as separate phenomena, Shaw reasoned, a socialist artist ought to be entirely unbearable. In and out of season, Walters residence in Kensington teemed with life and noise, not least given their vast menagerie of household pets: cats, dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, an owl, a jerboa, a golden pheasant, mongooses, marmosets, one shoulder-perching squirrel and an alligator.

Cranes mind, the artist William Rothenstein recalled, like his house, was too full to be kept dusted and tidy; but he had unusually broad sympathies, and while he followed in the footsteps of Morris and [Edward] Burne-Jones, he was free from prejudice his spirit kept open house. The pre-Raphaelite ideal of hospitality found political form in Crane and Morriss commitment to a socialist society; it found practical expression in the ordering of their lives. Fellowship is life, Morris wrote, lack of fellowship is death. Crane, who inscribed that slogan on banners and motifs almost beyond counting, had better claim than most to be the older mans direct successor in politics as well as art.

These two post-pre-Raphaelites embraced a Marxism with romantic characteristics, seeing the society of the future as latent in both ideals of the past and the struggles of the present. The past is not dead, Morris declared, but is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make. Such sentiments led commentators to dismiss Crane and his mentor as medievalist: a label neither unjustified nor entirely accurate. Crane drew on classical and international motifs especially Japanese art far more than the Middle Ages, helping define the transnational style later known as art nouveau. His aesthetic influences revealed a philosophical underpinning spiritual but secular, romanticist but internationalist that Cranes contemporary admirers often overlook.

The universalist humanism to which Crane and many of his cothinkers subscribed was encapsulated by one of his great influences, the critic Walter Pater. The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, Pater said in his essays on Renaissance art, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Later art movements most notoriously Oscar Wilde and the aestheticists took Paters vision as a manifesto.

Crane inherited Paters penchant for classicism and the Renaissance, but he was never a wholehearted Epicurean, even before he took up the socialist banner. Tempered by his love for Blake and Shelleys poetry, Crane retained a political edge lacking in many aesthetes. Beauty and use could be reunited; artwork and craftwork made one; the imagination could do more than just dream of a better world. It could create one.

Looking to the past, Crane and Morris sought proof, not solace. Things could be otherwise not because time was empty, but because it wasnt. What was good and valuable in life could die without being destroyed; enduring the ages and redeeming the time in song and story, painting and prose; burning always, as Pater put it, with a hard, gem-like flame.

But although arts flame burned without the permission of gods or kings, in Cranes eyes it didnt burn aimlessly or alone. Art which can lift our souls with large thoughts, or enchant them with a sense of mystery and romance, Crane wrote, can also be a familiar friend at our firesides, and touch each common thing of every day use with beauty, weaving its golden threads into the joys and sorrows of common life, and making happy both young and old.

Well-made and beautiful art could make us happier, more refined, softening and humanising us. Art educated the eye and so the person: in one of Cranes last lectures, he expressed sorrow over the novel use of posters for commercial ends, rather than for the enlivening of human experience. The contemporary commonplace that all art is political hed likely consider unambitious: to Cranes eyes, art was politics: different lenses refracting the same light. Artists were, in a sense, naturally socialistic, he explained in one of his essays: Art itself is essentially a social product, intimately associated with common life, and depending for its vitality upon a co-operation of all workers, upon living traditions and quick and universal sympathies. These are its sunlight and air.

And real art, being nothing more than the the expression by man of his pleasure in labour, as Morris put it, was a kind of prefiguration of socialism itself, as a particular expression of a universal impulse towards freedom. Art spoke, Crane later wrote, this universal language, bringing order out of confusion, sweetness out of strength. Just as the Arts and Crafts movement challenged the preeminence of utility over beauty in design, the socialist movement fought for an economy of joy, where price and virtue is not to be counted in, or commanded by, dollars, but lies simply in human and hopeful conditions of the life of a people.

Culture was communism. And vice versa; a comprehensive artistic unity could only be developed among people politically and socially free. A common life and common labor would provide the foundations for a new art as well as a new society. Looking at a world convulsed by economic chaos, staggering on to revolution or disaster, Crane thought he saw the new world arriving on the horizon or at least, at the end of his pen.

In the aftermath of Bloody Sunday a notorious attack by police on unemployed workers in Londons Trafalgar Square he created artwork protesting the police murder of his friend Arthur Linnell. When the veteran of the Paris Commune Louise Michel held an international school for insurrectionists, the soft-spoken West Londoner produced a lavishly illustrated prospectus. Luminaries of the movement from Edward Carpenter to George Bernard Shaw wrote to Crane to ask his help. They almost always got it. Journals, posters, cycling clubs: working long hours, and often for free, Crane defined the look of the socialist movement more than any other artist, according to the Social Democratic Federations founder, Henry Hyndman.

Settling into his new role as agitator-artist, Crane was politically promiscuous, working for most of the socialist movements of his day. Nevertheless, he continued to shadow his mentor closely: following Morris out of the Social Democratic Federation and into the new Socialist League. Like Morris, Crane situated himself on the anarchist-adjacent left of British socialism, celebrating the then recent and deeply controversial Paris Commune. Speaking to refugees from the commune, like Michel or the great realist painter Gustave Courbet, Crane was inspired by their foreshortened experiments in the democratization of art.

Although the fluid, rustic imagery of Cranes designs emanated from a worldview that was anything but conservative, he held no candles for the Victorian cult of science. Crane shared his mentors skepticism of the mechanical utopias then popular on the Left. Reconciliation to the natural world was a hallmark of Cranes politics as well as his art, and while not quite a Luddite he agreed with Morris that as a condition of life, production by machines is altogether evil. Underlying his politics was a belief that revolution meant restoration; the recovery of human capacities and talents warped by an artificial social order.

Artists must become craftsmen, Morris declared, again and again, and craftsmen artists. Socialized humanity would be a commonwealth, a collective: but a collective of individuals. Its an insight immediately obvious in Cranes designs, where groups are common but crowds are rare. Nearly always the features of his characters, however idealized, are picked out in careful detail, neither obscured by distance nor disguised by proximity. Crane allows us to see socialism with a human face. This meld of romantic individualism and humanist technophobia has dated in the century since Cranes death. But his warnings of a world where the human-built world displaces the human and machines master men have a grim resonance today.

Reconciling art and labor was a high ambition, and one Crane bore largely alone after Morriss death in 1894. He didnt confine it to the realm of politics. In art, design, and architecture, Morris and Cranes fulminations against commercialism had struck a chord. A growing number of artists, disenchanted with government-sponsored schools of design and excluded from the emerging professions, sympathized with their radical critiques. Parity between ornamental work and other art; truth to materials, handwork over machinework; the revival of handicraft: even where artists rejected their political activism, Morris and Cranes worldview held a powerful attraction.

Arts and Crafts artists like T.J. Cobden-Sanderson set up guilds and workshops where designers and craftsmen worked as peers rather than servants and masters. One Arts and Crafts thinker, Cranes friend C.R. Ashbee, took this a step further, attempting his own utopian community on the banks of the Thames. The Clarion, a socialist newspaper, set up a national Guild of Handicraft; Crane himself established the Art Workers Guild, aimed at uniting the decorative and fine arts. Unlike the reclusive Morris, Crane threw himself into organizing artists: devising Arts and Crafts contributions to international exhibitions, writing pamphlets, and giving lectures on the meaning of the movement.

Predictably, that meaning was socialism. But Cranes romantic ideals struggled to sink roots in the arid soil of late-Victorian Britain. Arts and Crafts ideals, always vague, were swiftly diluted as the movement won critical acclaim and commercial success. Far from building a new art for a commonwealth of fellowship and service, Morriss epigones helped found modern consumer culture. The revolt of artists against the nascent professional world finally won their entry to it. And a negotiated surrender to mammon was on the cards for all but a few embattled utopians. One firm split the difference and finished machine-made metalware with manually applied hammer marks for a suitably artisanal look.

Dismayed but not defeated, Crane renewed his commitments to the socialist movement as the new century approached. A tour of America saw Crane condemn the United States in self-penned verse as soon as he disembarked and concluded in Cranes ostracism by most of the East Coasts art world after a vehement defense of the Haymarket Eight anarchists convicted of a murder they didnt commit. With Irish home rule on the horizon, Crane threw his weight behind the struggle for independence. And traveling throughout India in 1906, he joined the small number of Western socialists calling attention to the injustice of colonialism.

At a time when many British socialists professed an attachment to the empire or looked for progressive justifications of imperial expansion, Crane was unremitting in his disgust for the Wests domination of Asia both political and economic:

But all over the East, wherever European influence is in the ascendant, the result is disastrous to the arts, and thus the very sources of ornamental design, beauty of colour, and invention are being sullied and despoiled by the sharp practices and villainous dyes of Western commerce.

Art, the universal language, was being forgotten. Religion was defunct, and the romantic ideals that had inspired Crane at the beginning of his career seemed to evaporate by its end. By age or inclination unable to appreciate the impressionist movements sweeping European art, Crane saw the Moloch of capital holding the field. In 1911, he still maintained the socialistic influence of the Arts and Crafts movement but even Crane had to grant it was an influence exercised only indirectly. As the new century wore on, he was a man artistically and politically out of time.

Whether he realized it or not, the political world Crane lived in was created by a confident workers movement united around revolutionary convictions. It was destroyed in 1914 when war revealed that these convictions were nominal. Another casualty of that same cataclysm was Cranes romantic philosophy of art. Postwar artists, jaded by the use of art nouveau in propaganda and deeply alienated from the culture that fed their generation into the meat grinder of the Somme, saw the war in Wyndham Lewiss phrase as a cyclopean dividing wall in time. For Crane, the creative process may have involved struggle but only in the journey toward final aesthetic harmony. For his modernist heirs, an inverse dynamic took hold: the artwork itself became a site of struggle.

The Arthurian idylls of Morriss poetry had been smashed to pieces; the heap of broken images of T.S. Eliots Wasteland remained. Some Arts and Crafts figures struggled on into the interwar years: in a grim irony, they supported themselves by supplying a grieving nations endless demands for war memorials. Crane didnt live to see it; he died in 1915, broken by his wifes unexpected death. Lancelot, his youngest son, followed him to the grave a few years later: one of millions of young men in uniform who never returned home.

Artists continued to rally to socialism in subsequent decades, but never with the same innocent idealism as Crane or Morris. Cranes mixing of the gentleman-artist and the revolutionary was a relic of the past, not a token of the future. Arcadian fantasies of garden utopias and communard-knights had a cooler reception in the century of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

Yet something about Cranes art still resonates. Every May Day and Christmas, his designs proliferate in postcards and posters and tea towels and the movement to which he dedicated his life renews itself across the world. Insistence on the public, communal character of art continues to be bitterly necessary. Asserting the creative potential of every human being and the creative skill of every worker is something contemporary socialists would do well to emulate. And Cranes appetite for transcendence, seeing in politics and art a disclosure of truths beyond either, is surprisingly well-suited to a world where everything from food to free time is subservient to utility.

In his art and activism, in his writing and speeches, Crane reminds us that, while the injustice of capitalism necessitates the building of a new society, this society must be built on an affirmation of what makes us human.

In one of the last essays published before Cranes death, he wrote, once again, on the congruity of art with socialism; their shared past, their linked future. From ideals in art we are led to ideals in life and to the greatest art of all The art of Life. It is an art we are yet to master. It is a world we have yet to win. Look at a Crane drawing, though, and see what he saw: its closer than we know.

Read the rest here:
Walter Crane Was a Socialist Visionary Who Illustrated the Triumph of Labor - Jacobin magazine

Florida becoming a "s—hole" state, end division and learn to love – Sarasota Herald-Tribune

opinion

DeSantis policies will drive away tourists

I used to laugh when friends pointed out articles where crazy things happened in Florida, saying they would never want to live here.

I figured they were just jealous of the warm weatherand the number of tourist attractions at our doorstep.

Not anymore.

More: How to send a letter to the editor

Gov. Ron DeSantis, in his obsession with pandering to the far right-wing MAGA base, has turned Florida into a racist, homophobic, anti-science state that people are not going to want to vacation in, much less live in.

You remember when former President Donald Trump coined the phrase (expletive)countries, referring to other nations?Well,Florida is becoming that kind of state.

Were it not for the warm weather, Florida would be Alabama, Mississippior worse.You get the picture.

Felton Marans, Lakewood Ranch

Students learn best with support, empathy

Frankly, I am tired of reading about the horrors of Social Emotional Learning, as argued by people who dont know much about it, during School Board meetings. Parents who vociferously argue against SEL need to do credible research and look for SEL examples in practice.

SEL is mostly about teacher practice. For example, think of an algebra teacher responsible for teaching a gateway course. Gateway means if students fail algebra, many doors close to them in the future.

Do parents want a curmudgeon teaching algebra or someone empathetic and supportive in developing relationships with students and parents?

Do parents wish to have algebra teachers who encouragetheir students to seek positive views of themselves as mathematicians, and mathas a way to understand the world?

Contrarily, do they want negative and punitive algebra teachers who identify students as failures before teaching them, resulting in high school students who think they cant do mathematics and view themselves as failures?

In other words, do they want the gate open or shut?

Students tend to succeed with positive, empathetic teachers who identify solutions to problems. Conversely, students dont achieve their fullest potential in negative and punitive classrooms.

Yet, some parents say no SEL.

Michelle A. Johnston, Sarasota

Blend capitalism, socialism, like Sweden

In his May 2 column,My concern for todays youth, DeVoe Moore seems to believe that America is faced with a stark choice between capitalism and socialism.

He should learn more about the blend of capitalism and socialism developed by Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries.Regulation and taxation make the environment cleaner and provide a social safety net, without stifling capitalism and creativity.(Have you shopped at IKEA?)

Scandinavian workers are among the most productive in the world.Talented young people arent lost to the workforce for lack of education, because college education is supported by the government.

An accident or sudden illness doesnt mean bankruptcy. And Sweden has 45 billionaires.

Jim Eachus, Sarasota

Division, hate threaten our democracy

America is a divided country. In fact, there are only two times in the last 100 years that we were united after Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11.

Our enemies were not trying to kill hyphenated Americans; they just wanted to kill Americans.

We have a threat to our democracy today. It is us. We have hyphenated and divided ourselves so much that hate has entered our inner beings. It is time to evaluate ourselves by looking at the root cause and healing ourselves.

Hate is the lack of love and love cant occur until we know one another. We cant know each other until we understand why others think the way they do.

Why do some believe that abortion is taking a life and others believe that its not a life at all?

Why do some believe that climate change is caused by humans and others dont?

Why do some think that being gay is a sin and others think that God made some of us that way?

No question that we are a divided, hyphenated country. As Abraham Lincoln famously said, A house divided against itself cannot stand.

Lets become one America and learn to love one another once again.

Walt Wenk, Sarasota

One-sidedview on Middle East

The April 30 letter, Headline, story show bias against Israel, could not be further from the truth by refusing to recognize that the cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians is a direct result of Israels 50-year oppression of millions of Palestinians.

The mainstream media in the U.S., which includes the Herald-Tribune, is overwhelmingly one-sided and pro-Israel.

RayGordon, Venice

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Florida becoming a "s---hole" state, end division and learn to love - Sarasota Herald-Tribune