Reflections on May Day: the Undying Role and Challenge of Global Socialism

As a global movement of unparalleled ideal, socialist internationalism was extensively damaged in reputation and image after it was ruthlessly hijacked by the likes of Stalin, Mao, and various short-lived governments in the developing world they supported in the Cold War.  As "socialism" became the justification for their respective political authoritarianism and economic stagnancy, the word itself and the ideals behind it became increasingly associated with lack of development and perpetual poverty suffered under suppression of any form of dissent.

While this is not say that socialism has completely walked out of its shadows, it is time for the movement to at least make an attempt in escaping its dark past of dictatorial intolerance.  More than two decades has past since the end of the Cold War and collapse of the communist ideological camp.  With its end, a new generation of youth in the staunchly capitalist West has not had to listen to endless anti-communist propaganda in their daily lives and compulsory education.  The word "socialism" is gradually losing its unwarranted sense of being taboo across the post-Cold War world.

Yet, the decreasing focus on the word "socialism" itself is not equivalent to the concept being pronounced dead.  In contrast, the ideals promoted by the original leaders of socialist internationalism are perhaps as relevant as it has ever been.  Yes, capitalism certainly deserves massive historical credit for promoting development across the globe.  Thanks to spread of capitalism, unimaginable materialistic wealth and higher standards of living has entered the lives of hundreds of millions across the previously poverty-stricken "economic periphery" such as China and India.

But capitalism is far from being that economic panacea.  While absolute poverty declined, relative poverty has perhaps increased in the past two decades.  While most people have seen their incomes rise under capitalist systems, they have also noticed that others have seen incomes rise thousands of times faster than they do, assisted by their greater access to opportunities, whether it be education, connections, or simply the luck of being in the right place at the right time.  The joy of increased incomes are quickly replaced by anger toward visible inequality in geographic proximity.

That anger is the reason why the socialist internationalist movement came into existence and why it continues to be relevant today.  The leaders of the movement realized that massive gaps of inequality, even if justified by greater abilities, intelligence, or efforts on the part of the wealthy, is dangerous simply because it breeds mass discontent that eventually boils over into violent assaults seeking to destroy the existing socioeconomic order.  Such cause-and-effort relationship is just as true in the French Revolution two-and-half centuries ago or the LA riots two-and-half decades ago.

Yet, the capitalists seem not understand the danger of their own inability to control massive and still growing inequality as a force that can ultimately cannibalize the market economic system they worked so hard to propagate around the world in order to undermine communism.  The evolution of capitalism into a finance-based one, giving a tiny proportion of the extremely wealthy people power to manipulate and potentially wipe out the wealth of the entire civilized world seemed to have given modern-day socialists a new mission: to save the capitalist system from destroying itself.

The task will be difficult.  After all, in any nation of the world, the wealthy, the beneficiaries of the existing status quo, are the ones who control the means to wealth and power.  And despite the increasing power of grassroots-level information dissemination, the wealthy and the powerful can still dominate ideology-swaying and opinion-shaping media outlets and sources of information.  But even those elites do realize that certain socialist ideas must be taken up and integrated within the existing socioeconomic system if it were to survive intact in the face of entrenched inequality.

Either way, the socialist internationalist movement will outlive any battles of ideology, whether it be the Cold War or the ongoing debates on the respective merits of "liberalism" and "conservatism."  That is because socialism, in its most ideal form, pursues a much more simple yet universal goal: the provision of happiness brought about by equality in opportunity and fairness in distribution of wealth.  It does NOT stand for authoritarianism, nor does it stand for radical methods in making everyone equally poor.  Today it exists to complement capitalism, saving it from its own unchecked excesses.  

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