The revolution is bold
Ever have a song stick with you for a year? You hear it once, and the song has something for you that maybe you can't put into words, something powerful that has you going out of your way to play the song again and again. You know that kind of song?
“Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein (edited for length)” by Hobo Johnson is that song for me this year.
The cut is really just Hobo Johnson reading excerpts from Einstein's essay in Monthly Review with some chill musical bits; but I dig that understated feel, and I love Einstein's essay. I keep coming back to it, and to the song, over and over again. When Einstein makes a powerful point and Hobo Johnson chimes in with a “fuck yeah,” I'm there at 💯
My favorite passage of the essay, also read aloud in the song, is this short paragraph near the beginning:
But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called “the predatory phase” of human development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, fuck yeah.
Don't tell me you can't imagine a better world because of the way this shitty one has always been made to work. Imagine the world made to work a different way, a better way. Imagine boldly.
That's the only way we get there from here.
Know more, believe less.