So, what is socialism, anyway?
Political leaders around the world, particularly those on the Right who use demagogic populist appeals to their followers, have worked hard to undermine faith in honest news reporting, historical evidence, and even science. The self-styled leader of the “Free World,” Donald J. Trump, is a master of falsification, a prodigious prevaricator, and the purveyor of myths, distortions, and conspiracy theories. Recently, he found it difficult to condemn White Supremacists, those who believe that people of color (that is, the majority of the planet’s population) are inferior to the light-skinned northern Europeans who first settled on the shores of North America and dispossessed the native peoples of their land. He has refused to distance himself from the bizarre Q-Anon conspiracy that believes that Hillary Clinton runs a Satanist pedophile ring and that Trump is the savior who will expose and destroy it.
A dominant theme in Trump’s campaign for re-election, echoed by his agents, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr, among others, is that his opponent former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the Democrats more broadly are in fact radical socialists, even (he said about Senator Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate) communists. Pro-Trump Senator Joni Ernst, who proudly touted that she “grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm,” recently warned voters that a Democratic victory in the forthcoming election would be a takeover of the United States by “extreme liberal interests,” “extreme environmentalists,” and “extreme abortionists.” “All of these things lead us on an ugly path to socialism.” In American ears, from the Cold War years to the present, the words “socialist” and “communist” are frightening reminders of the nightmarish totalitarian system, Stalinism, that held the Soviet people captive for twenty-five years (roughly 1928 until Stalin’s death in 1953). The United States, after all, was not only the major counterrevolutionary power that stood in the way of Soviet expansion and socialist social programs in democratic countries but actively overthrew leftist governments in Latin America and the Middle East that threatened the global capitalist system and pro-American allies.
The most respected newspaper in the United States – at least for educated readers and liberals – is undoubtedly The New York Times. In general, it reports the news as objectively and neutrally as possible in an age when deep political cleavages have created doubt about facts, the news, and even truth. Recently, the Times published an article on Trump’s efforts to paint his rival as a socialist and discovered that “many voters aren’t buying it.” (1) “Biden has made a corrupt bargain in exchange for his party’s nomination,” Mr. Trump told a rally of his supporters. “He has handed control to the socialists and Marxists and left-wing extremists like his vice-presidential candidate.” Later in the Rose Garden of the White House, Trump called the election “a choice between a socialist nightmare and the American dream.” His son Eric Trump toured on a bus labelled “Fighters Against Socialism” through the contested state of Florida, hoping to secure the votes of Latinos who had fled from Cuba, Venezuela, and other ostensibly “socialist” states.
Biden: Netiher a socialist, nor a communist
Biden, of course, is neither a socialist nor a communist. He is a centrist liberal, who is supported by the Left in his party, the followers of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, but at the same time suspected by them of not being progressive enough in his policies. Trump’s accusations against the Democrats are not sticking.
While the majority of Americans are opposed to what they think is socialism – without having any clear idea of the variety of meanings attached to that word, a majority of the young have become disillusioned by the failure of that elite and of liberalism more generally and have been gravitating toward something that they believe is socialism. A recent poll showed that 56% of Democrats favor socialism over capitalism, while 74% of Republicans and 61% of independents favor capitalism over socialism. Most Americans, three out of five, support “a national health plan, sometimes called Medicare for All, in which all Americans would get their insurance from a single government plan.” Even more people favor the government providing free tuition to anyone attending a two- or four-year university. Two-thirds believe that taxes should be raised on the rich to curb the runaway polarization of wealth in the country.
So, we might ask, what is socialism?
Is it possible any longer to separate the burden of the Stalinist legacy and socialism’s humanist values that inspired so many in the past?
While the Right in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere gleefully and without much reflection deploys socialism to denounce everything from social welfare programs to environmental regulations, it is possible to examine the word historically and distinguish the cluster of core meanings that still possess a power to animate and mobilize millions from its frequent and deliberate misuse. Like the words “liberalism” and “conservativism,” socialism works, as literary critics would put it, as a “floating” or “empty signifier,” that is a word with multiple, indeterminate, and contested meanings. Yet at its most fundamental level socialism is the political philosophy that believes that public policy ought to promote primarily the common good rather than simply individual or particular interests. From the early nineteenth century socialism involved democratic politics – the empowerment of all the people, social justice for all, and equality (not only of opportunity as liberals believe, but of reward as much as is practically possible). Socialism, then, stood (and for many still stands) opposed to the proposition so central to classical liberal (now conservative) economic ideology that individual greed will magically produce the greatest good for the greatest number.
While it nurtured the possibility of a more socially connected economy, capitalism daily tore asunder the empathetic bonds of men and women, rendering them egoistic atoms in a state of Darwinian competition. Such a system, particularly in its neo-liberal variant that proudly proclaims that the market can do everything, perpetuates the class division between a wealthy minority and the vast majority without capital and assets. Capitalism operates for the benefit of the shareholders, and those who can pay, not for the general good. The material world and the moral world moved in opposite directions.
Socialists believe that social environments shape human ambitions and possibilities. Along with the society of competition and greed that capitalism fostered, that competitive, individualistic system also created a corresponding “human nature” that demanded ever increasing accumulation, exploitation of the natural world, and the separation of individuals from their common purpose. Utopian or realist, socialists have to be frank that the socialist values of equality and social justice run up against the desires of people already shaped by centuries of capitalism.
Goals of socialism
The goals of socialism are not private or corporate profits but the public good, greater democracy, well-informed participation in politics and economics by its citizenry, and programs, both governmental and in the private sector -- policies that aim toward greater equality and material security for all. Inequality and unearned advantages and privileges conferred by the ownership of property are the enemies of socialism, and therefore policies aimed at the common good are in tension with the power of the propertied who shortsightedly look to the profit of corporations and individual owners of capital.
Socialism might be seen as the democratic intervention into the economy as well as the political sphere to reorient production and consumption toward public ends. For instance, a health care system that eliminated fee for service medicine and provided guaranteed health care for all would be a kind of socialism, whether administered by government or, as in Switzerland, by regulated non-profit private insurers. Regulation of polluting industries to save the environment aims at the common good, and therefore can be considered a kind of socialism. Public services such as fire departments, public schools, free university education, national parks, and the post office – institutions that operate in favor of the common good rather than for personal or corporate profit, are socialist rather than capitalist.
It has been said that capitalism is intolerable and socialism impossible. That may be the inescapable dilemma of our age. But as historians continually remind us, nothing is fatally determined or inevitable. We should not mistake the present for the future. There is always a degree of choice. There is a radical middle road to a better future. As someone who has studied the USSR and international socialism for over half a century, I have come to think that concepts like socialism and capitalism, which at first seem to define opposing economic systems, are, in fact, intimately, even fatally, connected.
Realistically, in a world dominated by neo-liberal market fundamentalism, in which inequality between the top and bottom of society grows daily, socialism is what will make a more moderate, regulated form of capitalism work for most people. Looking at the past of failures and the present of confusion, socialism offers the possibility of a different logic to be applied to public policy, a democratic intervention into the economy, redirecting it toward a public good and the salvation of the planet. We have learned from the Soviet experiment that there is no real socialism without democracy, and we are daily coming to the realization that there can be no real democracy – the empowerment of all the people -- without socialism.
(1) Jim Tankersley, “President Paints His Rival as a ‘Socialist.’ Many Voters Aren’t Buying It,” The New York Times, October 14, 2020.
