> I think it's racism (under capitalism). A social safety net would hold up blacks and whites alike. And for some, that's intolerable.
>
> Arthur Maisel:
> If the recent depression in advanced economies -- especially in Europe --
> weren't evidence enough of the quasi-irrelevance of left wing thought
> (given the material circumstances, in a 'rational world', revolutionary
> situations would be afoot) the fact that the following screed on a
> libertarian blog will almost certainly impact more people than on a leftist
> one, although the content could be almost verbatim, is sufficient to give
> serious thought as to why no one pays attention to the left
>
> Foodstamps Are Corporate Welfare
>
> http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-07-17/foodstamps-are-corporate-welfare
>
> Is Chomsky right -- did Stalin do such irreparable harm to the prestige of
> socialist thought, that we are still suffering from its consequences ?
Neither "Stalinism" nor "racism" has much to do with the inability of the contemporary left to find a mass audience.
Today's workers have a weak or non-existent historical memory of the USSR, particularly under Stalin. The old bogey of "Stalinism" doesn't really influence their political behaviour one way or another.
The working class has always been divided by religious, racial, regional, occupational, and gender differences, perhaps more so in early industrial capitalism than today. Yet it was in that earlier period that the working class spawned powerful movements for reform and revolution which were periodically able to overcome these differences and win democratic rights and improved living standards.
In fact, therein lies the primary reason for today's relative lack of worker militancy. The social safety net - food stamps but, more generally, unemployment insurance, pensions, health care, and other universal benefits - HAS held up the system, despite resentment from reactionaries and ongoing efforts to trim and constrain the welfare state.
The extension of the vote had contradictory consequences. On the one hand, it led to the formation of mass workers' parties which were able to press for better living and working conditions, or, as governments, legislate the implementation of these reforms. On the other hand, the universal franchise - initially resisted by the capitalists, who feared it would fundamentally threaten their power and property - had the effect of legitimizing the system and stabilizing it by steering workers' discontent into peaceful electoral channels where their demands could be partially satisfied and their militant energies absorbed. There has never been a social revolution in a bourgeois democracy.
The author of the Zero Hedge article is a libertarian who does not like government programs and either has the fanciful notion or pretends that if food stamps were abolished "there would be massive employee organizing (which) doesn’t happen when the taxpayer makes up the difference…" This is nonsense; there is no connection between food stamps for the needy, many of whose recipients are unemployed or tenuously employed, and the impediments to union organizing and political action independent of the two governing parties by the mass of the working population in the US.