By Whitney Strub

President Donald Trump and his supporters hate socialism, that much we know. Whether it’s his friend Jair Bolsonaro, the newly inaugurated and scarily fascistic Brazilian president, declaring his nation’s “liberation from socialism,” or just his son Don Jr. making puerile tweets about taking away half of his daughter’s Halloween candy and offensive Instagram posts warning that freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a rising democratic-socialist star, will usher in an age of dog-eating, Team Trump leaves no doubt about its hostility.

The president himself frequently denounces socialism, and last fall, the White House Council of Economic Advisers issued a scathing report, report, “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism.” None of this is worth taking seriously at an intellectual level; the 70-page report is full of inane attempts to link U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to such historical figures as Fidel Castro and Mao Zedong. It insinuates that somehow “Medicare-for-all” will repeat the “tens of millions of deaths by starvation” in Stalinist Russia. Even as scare tactics, this is a joke.

In reality, cherry-picked examples from the worst of Soviet and Maoist authoritarianism tell us nothing about socialist politics here in New Jersey. “Socialism” is as broad a term as “capitalism,” but at its core, it is about working people benefiting from their own labor, and economic and political arrangements that ensure an equitable distribution of wealth and resources, in stark contrast to our current system that is glaringly skewed toward the wealthy.

We can see variations on socialism from the famous 1913 Paterson silk strike to the 37 percent of New Jersey Democrats who supported democratic socialist Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary.

Newark has a rich socialist tradition, dating to German immigrants of the 19th century, such as Mathilde Franziska Anneke, who knew Karl Marx in Europe before settling here and publishing the radical newspaper Newarker Zeitung with her husband, Fritz, in the 1850s.

Later, Newark would become one of the central hubs of the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist group formed specifically in opposition to Stalin’s version of communism. Member James Kutcher worked at the Veterans Administration office on Washington Park, and played a key role in stopping the Red Scare of the 1950s when anti-communist fervor resulted in his firing over his Socialist Workers Party membership.

Another SWP member, Gladys Barker Grauer, was a civil rights activist who ran for the U.S. Senate in 1960 while living in Clinton Hill. She remains active as an artist in her 90s, including a recent show at Gallery Aferro.

During the Black Power era, iconic leader (and the father of Newark’s current mayor) Amiri Baraka endorsed Marxism-Leninism in 1974 as part of his internationalist anti-colonial politics. He helped inspire one of Newark’s longest-running community organizations, the People’s Organization for Progress, which longtime longtime leader Larry Hamm told me does not formally identify as socialist, but whose 1983 constitution supports “a radical redistribution of power and wealth and a radical restructuring of our social system.”

What unites all of these groups is the fight for the rights of workers, women, African-Americans, immigrants and all marginalized and oppressed groups.

I belong to the North New Jersey chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has ballooned in membership since 2016 to over 50,000, becoming the largest socialist group of the past half-century. The projects we work on have nothing to do with Stalin or gulags, and everything to do with empathy and respect for all people’s humanity: free brake-light clinics because broken tail-lights endanger people of color and undocumented people by putting them at risk in police traffic stops; housing-justice programs such as assisting people facing eviction in knowing their rights; protesting Essex and Hudson counties’ contracts with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to assist in Trump’s racist war on immigrants by detaining them for profit; and canvassing for “Medicare-for-all.”

The Democratic Socialists of America is a big-tent organization of many beliefs and strategies, but its core principle is that “working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few.”

This is an exciting moment for socialism, and Trump’s team is right to be scared. When his advisers call “Medicare-for-all” “similar in spirit to Lenin and Mao,” the proper response is laughter. The American people know better.

In the end, you can look at the work American socialists are doing in New Jersey — with a commitment to the rights of workers, immigrants, LGBTQ people, women and all — and judge socialism by its work rather than the grotesque memory of 20th-century communist authoritarianism. Or you could take the word of Trump’s economic advisers? After all, chief adviser Larry Kudlow told us last summer that the national deficit was falling — fact-check: it is doing precisely the opposite. So who would ever doubt them?

Which side are you on?

Whitney Strub is director of the Women’s & Gender Studies Program and is an associate history professor at Rutgers University-Newark.

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