Reading “The Stone Canal” by Ken MacLeod – a science fiction writer quickly becoming one of my favorite authors – I came upon this bit of dialogue:

“…the Western democracies are socialist! Big public sectors, big companies that plan production while officially everything’s on the market … sort of black planning, like the East had a black market. Marx said universal suffrage was the rule of the working class, and he was right. The West is Red!”

Perhaps it’s because I’ve been trading comments with Chris Potter over at Slag Heap on City Council’s attempts at central planning or maybe it’s the giant hammer and sickle sitting on the front page of this blog, but this subject has been on my mind for a while and MacLeod captured it brilliantly in the above passage.

The West is Red and it isn’t that way because of a single revolution, election or dictatorship of the proletariat. Instead, socialism has and is making steady progress in the United States thanks to the efforts of self-described “progressives” who desire equality in means rather than equality in opportunity.

I’m probably going to tackle the question of political labels in my first Pitt News column after the break. Until then, this is just a quote that I think many of you might find instructive or particularly poignant in its directness.

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