Word: socialistic
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...Biology Ph.D. from Harvard in 1941, and he currently directs the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University in St. Louis, an environmental research facility. A deceptively energetic 62 year-old. Commoner has been calling for radical changes (including reorganization of the energy industry along socialist lines) for many years now. In founding the Citizens' Party, Commoner hopes to create a vehicle for implementing some of those changes...
Ideas were just as diverse--delegates held political and economic views ranging from socialist to the American ethic of agriculture and small business. Although it has not yet had a serious effect on the party, an underlying ideological split exists between party members who favor a return to the days of small-scale capitalism and those who favor a socialist industrial state...
This split manifested itself in the most spirited debate of the convention, over the economic plank of the party platform. A delegate from Ohio rose to denounce the plank, formulated by Sidney Lens, a well-known socialist author calling it simply a "wish list" and describing it as "old fashioned socialism." Lens vigorously rebutted these charges, thrusting the meeting into a flurry of accusations and counter-accusations of intellectual dogmatism and shortsightedness...
...Citizens' Party will not engage in politics-by-label--damning a proposal just because someone has called it 'socialist,'" Lens said. In the end, the convention voted overwhelmingly to adopt his plank, which included calls for the nationalization of certain key industries...
Commoner, of course, has a vested interest in making an analogy with a successful political departure, but perhaps Studs Terkel's comparison to the Populist era is more appropriate to the contemporary political scene. Eugene V. Debs, founder of the American Socialist Party, once said during that period, "I would rather vote for what I want and not get it, than vote for what I don't want...