Thanks for mentioning Real Talk World on Thom Hartmann’s site. I’ll write on his site when I’m set up for business on my site. Great response to the Experiement in Socialism? article.

About the story from Texas Tech. This professor doesn’t even seem to know what socialism is. Perhaps this professor was affected by the conservatism of Texas culture and bought into the misconception perpetuated by conservatives. Directly from my dictionary, socialism is “a theory or system of social organization in which the means of production and distribution of goods are owned and controlled collectively or by the government.” People who self-identify as socialists tend to agree only with the collective ownership aspect, although I think government ownership is also socialism.

Socialism never says that everyone has the same outcome. The closest any system comes to that is communism, which is not the same as socialism. However, conservatives have long equated socialism with communism, making the general public make this connection, for the most part, and thus making socialism a dirty word to most Americans.

Actually, in my view, we are all socialists to some degree. Any public institution, at the local, state of federal level, is socialist. So are employee owned businesses, such as Winco Foods. Furthermore, companies such as Microsoft whch give stocks to their employees, might also be considered socialist. The state of Alaska, which distributes oil money to all Alaska residents, ironically, is socialist, despite being one of the most right-wing states. Public employees and employees of companies such as Winco and Microsoft certainly recieve different salaries, hopefully according to objective assessments of the contribution of each employee. Thus, neither should students receive the same outcome. I know of no nation in which students all receive the same grade. In fact, school is very competitive in mainland China. Moreover, students are not employees, so the analogy of a class to a socialist society is inaccurate. I would say the closest link I can think of relating a classroom setting to socialism would be one in which all members of the class take responsibility for the overall performance of the class. The better students still receive better grades, but would be expected to help the struggling students to understand more. This is a form of cooperative education. I remember a similar program going on at UC Riverside, when I was taking undergraduate classes there. but in this case, we had cooperative group projects which small groups of students worked on together. It was an interesting experience. I remember each group was graded by other class members. I think members within the group also graded each other, but I don’t remember that clearly. But these steps are examples of group ownership of the class, which are a fform of socialism.