This book has one quality: it admits what the Left in America wants when it says that its goal is a socialist country

Imagine Living in a Socialist USA

by Ronald Radosh

(New York: Harper Perennial, 2014) 

This dreadful book has one redeeming quality: it admits candidly what the Left in America really wants when it says that its goal is a socialist country. Meant to be a recruiting tool as well as a morale booster for the Left, this book leads to a very different conclusion than its editors and authors intend.

Karl Marx, who, aside from that one famous sentence that when the communist golden age was finally reached, men would hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and relax at night, never wrote anything about how the communist future would actually work or what it would look like. The editors ofImagine, on the other hand, have tried for a book that paints an explicit portrait of the utopian future they are sure is just around the corner. They’ve recruited the usual suspects to help them out: including Bill Ayers, Michael Moore, Michael Ratner, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Frances Fox Piven, Mumia Abu-Jumal, Angela Davis, Juan Gonzalez and Leslie Cagan, among many others.

The first thing one notices when looking over the contributors is that there is no longer any differentiation between the Old Communist Left and the New Left. They are now one and the same, united in the hope of creating a revolution, or as Barack Obama once put it, a “fundamental transformation” of the United States. This did not happen, as some of them hoped and expected, in “one step” once Obama got elected. They now realize that whether or not it happens is up to them. Hence this half-witted blueprint.

I read through as many of the essays as I could stand, until the brain dwarfing unreality became too daunting. The editors did not take seriously the fundamental principle that boredom is the great enemy of human life.

The first section of Imagine is devoted to a critique of capitalism; the second is meant “to inspire hope”; the third, to imagining what life in a socialist America would be like.

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