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Tim Beck’s letter to the editor (“Creating a Socialist Country”) asks, “Why would we ever want to?” The latest scientific research in archaeology and anthropology answers his question emphatically. We are as successful a species as we are by virtue of our extremely social nature. The largest part of the last 200,000 years has seen us, in communities both large and small, experimenting with ways of organizing and governing ourselves using mutual aid, cooperation and the caring and sharing of limited resources as the organizing principles for our experiments. Such experiments are, by their very nature, social, progressive and more often successful than not. Nonetheless, they are routinely denounced as “socialists” by our conservative friends.
Through the years, this human experimentation in mutualistic self-governance has resulted in cooperative hunting, community farming and sharing of produce, shared public services like clean water, waste disposal, public policing, military service, public education, community health services, and most recently, Social Security, disaster relief and climate change mitigation, to name only a few.
Virtually all of these progressive measures were meant to address the needs of a growing population dependent on limited resources. This continues to be the central challenge of any government. Denying the need for progressive governance and insisting everything will be better if we just return to the way things were is like sticking one’s head in the sand. Things will never be as they once were. We must make progress with every single election cycle. Vote Democratic. Vote progressive.
Donovan C. Wilkin