In Praise of Socialism

 

In Praise of Socialism

“Socialism” is dirty word in my country. Neoconservative and American fascist politicians use it to condemn public policies that benefit the American people rather than the American economic elite. They use it as a scare tactic. Very few Americans actually know what socialism is. They equate it with communism, about which they know as little as they know about socialism. From about 1947 to 1991 the US engaged in a “cold war” against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which most Americans equated with Russia. The USSR was, of course, a communist country. It was ruled in totalitarian fashion by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). There is no doubt that Soviet communism was a very bad thing. From 1917 to 1953, most of that time under Josef Stalin, the CPSU had led one of history’s most destructive terrorist regimes.[1] The US adopted a strategy of containment to keep Soviet-style communism from spreading around the globe. That’s why we fought wars in Korea and Vietnam.

There has never been a strong communist movement in the United States.[2] There were more communists in this country in the 1930s than there were thereafter. The Nazi treaty with the Soviets of 1939 drove many American communists out of the party. In the 1950s unscrupulous politicians conducted a “red scare”. Demagogues like Joseph McCarthy made wild claims about the number of communists in the agencies of the United States government. There was no evidence to support McCarthy’s claims whatsoever, but a great many Americans were so afraid of the USSR and Soviet communism in those years that the facts didn’t matter.

There had been a bit of a socialist movement in this country at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Eugene Debs was a leader of that socialist movement. He ran for president several times, but he never got more than around six percent of the vote. In her book Democracy Awakening, Heather Cox Richardson suggests that he really wasn’t a socialist in the sense of wanting to nationalize the means of production. He just wanted the government to work for the people rather than for the capitalists.[3]

American politicians and capitalists who opposed the New Deal began calling governmental programs designed to benefit the people at large socialist in the 1930s. People we usually characterize as conservatives (who may or may not actually be conservative) have made that charge against every social welfare or public infrastructure program in which the federal government has engaged ever since. They did it, and do it, not because they understand anything about true socialism. They do it because they know that the American people don’t know anything about true socialism but are scared to death of it.

What is true socialism? Its roots go back to Karl Marx, the economic theoretician who was active in the mid-nineteenth century. Perhaps Americans wouldn’t find socialism so scary if it weren’t associated at all with Marx, but it is, historically at least. Marxist theory was a reaction against the way European capitalists, especially British ones, were exploiting and abusing their work force in the many industries active at the time. He stood squarely in line with a European philosophical school that went back to Auguste Comte. Comte was a philosophical materialist. That is, he believed that only the material was real. Marx was also a disciple of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German philosopher who posited that history progresses through a dialectic process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Marx combined these two schools of thought into what he called dialectical materialism.

Marx believed that economics controls every aspect of human life. More specifically, he believed that everything in life was determined by who owned the means of production. In his world that meant the capitalists. Private entrepreneurs owned the factories, the land, and the mineral resources of every industrialist country. Therefore, they called all the shots. Everything else in a country was determined by its relationship to the means of production. In Marx’s time, everything in Great Britain and other industrialized nations worked for the benefit of the capitalists.

Marxism was revolutionary. That is, Marx said that history progresses through a series of revolutions. Those revolutions were always violent. Capitalism as a means of ownership of a country’s means of production came from revolutions against earlier, feudal systems in Europe. Marx called those revolutions bourgeois revolutions, meaning that they were conducted by and for the benefit of what was at the time the middle class. The French Revolution was primary example for Marx of a bourgeois revolution. That revolution was indeed violent.

Marx posited that the next revolution would be a revolution of the working class, which he called the proletariat. Workers of the world would rise up against their capitalist oppressors. They would expropriate the means of production so that the people not the capitalists owned them. After the proletarian revolution there would a period Marx called socialism in which all vestiges of capitalism, indeed all vestiges of social classes, would be eliminated. Once that was done, the world would enter into a final stage that Marx called communism. In that phase, all of the means of production would be owned communally by all the people. The economy and everything else about a country would then work for the benefit of the workers, who in the communist system would be the only class there was. This scheme is where the terms socialism and communism come from.

Marx hardly advocated nonviolence. He thought violence would be necessary to root out the capitalist class and turn the means of production over to the proletariat. Followers of Marx participated in violent revolutions across Europe in 1848. The existing powers crushed all of those revolutions. Marxists continued to believe, however, that a successful proletarian revolution was inevitable in industrially advanced countries. They expected the first successful proletarian revolutions to take place in Germany and/or Great Britain. Those anticipated revolutions, however, never took place.

Marxism appealed to many people across the globe because it gave an understanding of how capitalist exploitation of workers would be overcome and promised a culmination of human history in a world of peace and economic justice. It appealed to many nineteenth century Russians for exactly those reasons. A Marxist political party arose in Russia called the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Early in the twentieth century it split into two factions called the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.[4] Vladimir Lenin led the Bolsheviks. He introduced a couple of new concepts into Marxism. One was his contention that imperialism represented the highest stage of capitalism. The other was that the workers’ political party, which he thought his party to be, had to consist of the most class conscious members of the proletariat. This notion developed into the Leninists seeing the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party as the infallible representative of the proletariat. Here were the ideological underpinnings of the Stalinist terror.

The proletarian revolutions that Marx thought were inevitable never took place. There was a revolution in Russia that claimed to be Marxist, but it didn’t fit the Marxist ideology. Russia was still mostly an agrarian nation in 1917, and Marxists have never really figured out what to make of peasants. Initially under the leadership of Lenin and then under Stalin, what came to be called the Communist Party of the Soviet Union became an instrument of totalitarian oppression of the entire nation in the name of advancing the interests of the working class.

In western Europe most Marxists began calling themselves Social Democrats, a phrase that also appeared in the original name of the CPSU. In Germany the Social Democrats came to be led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. They led the Social Democratic Party of Germany, known as the SPD. They attempted a revolution after World War I but failed. The SPD then evolved into something quite different from a party committed to a Marxist revolution. Over time, the SPD became one of the two major political parties in Germany, something it still is today.

Today the SPD and the similar parties in most European countries are not revolutionary. They are, rather, democratic parties. They participate peacefully in democratic elections in their countries. They advocate and, when they can, enact public policies that benefit the people of the country rather than only the country’s wealthy industrialists. In Germany, the Scandinavian countries, and elsewhere they have created systems of universal health care and free or low cost higher education. They advocate the improvement of the working conditions for industrial and other workers, but they do not nationalize industries. They create tax systems that do not favor the wealthy the way the American tax system does.

Today, European socialism functions essentially as the more progressive of the major political parties in a country. The SPD, for example, is more progressive than its major political rival the CDU, the Christian Democratic Union of Germany. There is nothing scary about European socialism today. Though they both trace their origins back to Karl Marx, European democratic socialism has nothing in common with Soviet communism. It is thoroughly committed to democratic systems of government and free, democratic elections.

In the United States today we can divide our political landscape into two opposing camps. The people of one camp advocate governmental policies that benefit the people as a whole. The people of the other camp advocate governmental policies that benefit the wealthy, both wealthy individuals and large, wealthy corporations. The Democratic Party is the major political party of the first camp. The Republican Party is the major political party of the second camp. The policies of the Democrats are more favorable to more people than are the policies of the Republicans. The Republicans sometimes cover their policy of cutting taxes for the wealthy by saying that doing so will increase production thereby creating more jobs and improving everyone’s standard of living. All of the evidence shows that this is not true, but saying it allows the Republicans to work for the wealthy while saying they are working for everyone.

The Democrats are substantially better for the people than are the Republicans, but, with the exception of Bernie Sanders and maybe a few others, the Democrats are not socialists. They do not advocate truly socialist policies. For instance, they have not even advocated a universal health care system supported by taxes. They have done nothing to make higher education affordable for everyone.[5] They have taken only half measures to protect the environment. They have not raised the federal minimum wage in decades. They have not made our tax system equitable. They have done nothing to stop corporations from paying top executives obscenely large compensation packages while underpaying their employees and overcharging consumers. They spend as much money on the military as the Republicans do. Because we finance elections only through private donations, the Democrats are as dependent on big money donors as the Republicans are, and few Democrats advocate changing that system. They are better on civil rights than the Republicans are, but that isn’t necessarily saying much. Systemic racism still sullies our country, and the Democrats don’t seem to be doing anything to root it out. They have attempted only half measures at best to stop America’s pathologic mania for guns.

This country desperately needs a nonviolent socialist revolution. It needs to elect politicians at all levels who will pursue socialist policies. American socialists must be as committed to democracy and nonviolence as the European social democratic parties are. I will never advocate violence. But so much about this country is simply an outrage. We are the only so-called developed country in the world without a universal health care system. We have an enormous wealth gap between a very few obscenely rich people and all the rest of us. We spend an indefensible amount of human and fiscal resources on the military. We engage in unconscionable military activity all over the world. We have hundreds of thousands of unhoused people. Day care for children is so expensive, and the minimum wage is so low, that many people cannot afford to work. We continue to destroy the environment of the only planet we have to live on.

And all of this is true primarily because the policies of our federal administrations, whether Republican or Democrat, have not been sufficiently socialist. Neither party will make the wealthy pay a fair share of taxes. Politicians of both parties have to grovel for money for their electoral campaigns.[6] Both our culture and our laws tell business owners that their primary, indeed at times it seems their only, duty is to make as much money as possible. Big corporations justify their unjust practices by saying they have to maximize the return for the shareholders. Big corporations fight worker unionization tooth and nail because, heaven forbid, if there were a union, they might have pay their workers a fairer wage.

A government with a socialist orientation, whether it called itself socialist or not, would address all of these and other problems far more effectively than either of our major parties does today. Socialism really is nothing more than a political orientation toward the good of all of the people and not just of the wealthy people. But reactionary forces will continue to scream “Socialist!” at any policies that work for the good of all of the people, and most Americans will continue to be horrified by that word. Most of them couldn’t define it accurately if their life depended on it, but never mind. They will continue to make it a scare world that entrenched powers can use to stop any real social or economic progress in this country. Oh that such were not the case! We will never be a truly healthy nation until we become far more socialist than we are today.

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[1] Americans equated the USSR with Russia, and Russia was by far the dominant nationality in that country. Josef Stalin, however, was not Russian. He was Georgian, from a region located in the Caucus Mountains south of Russia that had been part of the Russian Empire and became one of the Soviet Socialist Republics. It is today an independent nation, His last name was actually Dzhugashvili, definitely a Georgian name not a Russian one. Of course he learned to speak Russian, but people say he always spoke it with a Georgian accent. Still, the terrorist regime he led was indeed dominated by native Russians. Under Stalin, the Soviet government killed at least as many people as Hitler did in Nazi Germany and the lands it conquered. After 1956 the CPSU conducted a sort of de-Stalinization campaign that removed all trace of Stalin from public view everywhere in the country except, that is, in Georgia. I was in Georgia in the summer of 1968. Stalin was everywhere. Cab drivers had pictures of him in their cabs. Our Soviet tour guide took us to a Stalin museum in Stalin’s hometown of Gori. I could explain the Georgians’ love of Stalin only by thinking that they must be saying, “Yes, he was a son-of-a-bitch, but he was our son-of-a-bitch, and boy did he kick some Russian butt.

[2] My father was a brilliant man who was a history professor at the University of Oregon for his entire career. He was from a tiny town in North Dakota called Sheldon. Also from that town was a recognized poet named Tom McGrath, who had been a friend of my father’s as they grew up. He was a communist, as far as I know a member of the American communist party. He’s the only American communist I have ever met.

[3] Richardson, Heather Cox, Democracy Awakening, Notes on the State of America (Viking, New York, 2023) p. 26.

[4] The terms come from the Russian words for “more (bol’she)” and “less (men’she).” They refer to a particular vote in the Party that the faction led by Vladimir Lenin won though only a minority of party members supported him and his radical view of Marxism. Lenin used his victory in this one vote to start calling his faction of the party the Bolsheviks. The people who lost that vote made the colossal mistake of letting themselves be called Mensheviks.

[5] President Biden has, somehow, managed to forgive a certain amount of student debt, but higher still costs an enormous amount of money. That’s why there is student debt in the first place.

[6] I write in the 2024 political season. If I contributed to every Democratic candidate who has hit me up for money on Facebook, I’d have to file bankruptcy.