Word: socialists
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What gives socialist rhetoric much of its current appeal is the economic battering the world's economy has taken in the 1970s. Against the backdrop of seemingly incurable inflation, unemployment, industrial stagnation and volatile currencies, a clarion for an economic restructuring sounds attractive. Socialist states have not solved?only hidden or ameliorated?these problems. Ironically, at the very moment of its spectacular advances, socialism faces profound new crises of its own. At the same time socialism has become a word appropriated by so many different champions and causes that it threatens to become meaningless, and a new effort is needed...
Some ruling socialists take this rhetoric seriously. In radically socialist South Yemen, civil servants' salaries have been cut and luxury goods banned. Under Julius Nyerere's firm socialist hand, Tanzania has been turned into one of the world's most egalitarian societies. The steeply progressive personal taxes of most social democracies, meanwhile, are a way of redistributing wealth...
...Marxist-Leninist states, egalitarianism is an empty slogan and socialist rule has become more a dictatorship of praetorians than of the proletariat. In a famous 1957 diatribe, Yugoslav Dissident Milovan Djilas railed against the privileges accorded a "new class" of Communists?party hierarchs, ranking bureaucrats, managers of state enterprises, and superstars in the arts and sports...
Pragmatically recognizing the key role that capitalist initiative plays in dynamic economies, some ruling socialists have taken steps toward encouraging freer enterprise. Britain's Labor government, for instance, is planning to announce efforts to stimulate individual initiative and investment. West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt has angered the radical wing of his Social Democratic Party by braking the rate of pension increases and halting the planning of new ambitious welfare schemes, like a costly increase in health benefits. To stop a headlong plunge into bankruptcy, Portugal's Socialist Premier Mario Scares has been uncomfortably forced to restore to private ownership farms...
What ultimately sustains all forms of socialism is the inherent appeal of an ideology promising to remake society in a manner that will foster a "new man" ?assured of his material needs, emotionally and psychologically unfettered and bursting with creativity. To this the socialists like to contrast "heartless capitalism," with its alleged willingness to tolerate permanent working-class poverty. The reality that the socialist promise is largely unfulfilled is not viewed as conclusive by its ideologues. In answer they would probably paraphrase G.K. Chesterton to the effect that socialism, like Christianity, has not failed, because it has never been...