Socialism is strangely impervious to refutation by real-world experience. Over the past hundred years, there have been more than two dozen attempts to build a socialist society, from the Soviet Union to Maoist China to Venezuela. All of them have ended in varying degrees of failure. But, according to socialism’s adherents, that is only because none of these experiments were “real socialism”. This book documents the history of this, by now, standard response. It shows how the claim of fake socialism is only ever made after the event. As long as a socialist project is in its prime, almost nobody claims that it is not real socialism. On the contrary, virtually every socialist project in history has gone through a honeymoon period, during which it was enthusiastically praised by prominent Western intellectuals. It was only when their failures became too obvious to deny that they got retroactively reclassified as “not real socialism”. Listen today…  

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Set in 1890’s Imperial Germany, this remarkable novella follows the arc of a family as narrated by the head as he initially enthuses over the socialist sweep to power. Quickly, however, he progresses through various stages of disenfranchisement that inevitably follows: first tempering his expectations, then ratcheting them downward, followed by grappling with cognitive dissonance brought about by the internal contradictions of the new system. When those contradictions are inescapable, he finally spirals into angst and despair as he comes to fully comprehend the horrors of socialism. Realizing it is too late for himself, his family and livelihood largely destroyed, he commits one final act of repudiation against his socialist future. Originally written in German in 1893 by the journalist and politician Eugen Richter, it was translated into English in 1907 by Henry Wright with Thomas Mackay providing an introduction to the English text. Now that so-called “democratic socialism” is finding new found vogue in the current age, Mark E. Jeftovic provides a new forward with contemporary context. Get it now 

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SpokenTome.Media’s Mark E. Jeftovic catches up with Charles Hugh Smith. Topics ranged from PropOrNot’s anonymous, unsourced hit piece on …pretty well everybody, to populism, Yellow Vests, so-called “Democratic Socialism” and a new economic fairy  tale called Modern Monetary Theory (“MMT”). Since our last episode we’ve released three more CHS audiobooks: Money and Work Unchained Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege Pathfinding Our Destiny (his latest)

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America teeters on the precipice: our government is now captive to special interests and big money, twin cancers that threaten our democracy. This accelerating crisis is exacerbated by a toxic social media-fueled tribalism that has replaced “what do you think?” with “which side are you on?” Our crisis isn’t just political – it’s structural: as the pace of change explodes from gradual to non-linear, the organizations that dominate our economy – centralized corporations and government – become destined to fail. We see this failure in both the soaring inequality that has hollowed out the American Dream as well as in the rising tide of social and political disunity. To prevent the fall of our democratic republic, we must transform our economy and society from the ground up. As we enter a new era of rapid, unprecedented tumult, it is we citizens who will need to save our democracy. For our political and financial elites will cling to their centralized power, doing more of what’s failed, even as civil society unravels. All is not lost – yet. Our way forward starts with understanding the fatal flaws of our brittle, self-serving status quo and embracing this basic truth: better options are available if we’re willing to explore.To pathfind our way to a better destiny, we must create new localized structures optimized for resilience and adaptability – a flexible, decentralized, sustainable, democratic, opportunity-for-all nation. Get Audiobook

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Inequality is rising globally, and rising inequality is destabilizing. A status quo of increasing inequality self-destructs. To avoid this fate, we must answer this question: Why is the gulf between the wealthy and everyone else widening so dramatical...