What
Is Socialism?
July
11, 2021
It has become
fashionable in rightwing American politics to say that Democrats are
socialists. The misguided worthies who say such things contend that any public
policy or policy proposal that benefits the people rather than just the
economic elite are socialists. To them the major accomplishments of the federal
government in the last ninety years, Social Security and Medicare, are
socialist. They are after all programs that keep millions of senior citizens like
me in health care and out of poverty. To the ever farther right rightwing of
American politics they are therefore entirely unwarranted and represent the
worst public policies we have ever had. They are, these people say, socialist
and therefore really, really bad.
There’s one thing
I don’t hear from these folks when they denounce the Democrats and their
policies as socialist. I don’t hear any discussion of what the word socialism
actually means. I get the sense that the people who throw that word around
don’t care and probably don’t know what it means. All they care about is that a
great many Americans, not understanding the word themselves, think it is
necessarily a bad thing and are afraid of it. The offer no constructive
critique of the term. Instead they use it as a verbal Molotov cocktail looking
to provoke not reasoned understanding but only the emotions of hatred and fear.
Well, the term socialism actually has a history that goes back at least to the
mid-nineteenth century. Over the decades since then the meaning of the term has
evolved so that today it doesn’t mean what it meant when Karl Marx developed
the conception in the 1840s. If we want to understand the term we need to look
briefly at that history, then look at how it is used today in societies that
embrace it rather than reject it. Perhaps unfortunately, we must start with
Karl Marx.
Marx used the
term socialism, though perhaps not in the way you might have expected him to
have done. Marx developed a theory of what he called dialectical materialism.
In this theory only the material, that is, the physical, is real. The spiritual
plays no role in Marx’s theory. He expressly denied its reality. Yet material
reality for Marx was not static. It had its own dynamic. The material develops
through history according to a pattern Marx called dialectic. For Marx the
ownership of the means of production determined everything about human society
and culture. He lived in a time when the economies of most of the nations of
western Europe, including Marx’s homeland Germany and his adopted home the
United Kingdom, were radically capitalist. For Marx that meant that the means
of production, in his world primarily factories, were owned by a relatively
small class of capitalists. Nearly everyone else was a member of what Marx
called the proletariat, the working class, the people who earned meager wages
working in those factories often in very unsafe conditions for the economic
benefit of the capitalists. He was not, by the way, wrong about that, though he
was wrong about many other things including his denial of the reality of the
spiritual. The economic dynamic of mid-nineteenth century western Europe was
indeed one of essentially unfettered capitalism. The lives of the members of
the proletariat were indeed awfully grim.
The capitalists
had come to their position of dominance, Marx said, through the workings of
dialectical materialism. Capitalism overtook and displaced the prior economic
order of feudalism. The way a rising class displaced another was for Marx far
from necessarily peaceful. Marxism is a theory for revolution. Marx could point
to various violent aspects of English history and to the French Revolution of
the late eighteenth century as revolutions of the rising capitalist class
against what was left of medieval
feudalism. The process of one class violently displacing another was for Marx
perpetual, or at least perpetual until it reached its supposedly inevitable
conclusion, about which more anon.
Marx thought that
in his time the processes of dialectical materialism were moving inexorably
toward the proletariat replacing the capitalists as the owners of the means of
production and therefore as the ruling class ruling in its interests rather
than in the interests of the capitalists. Ownership of the means of production
would pass, probably violently, from the capitalists to the proletariat, to the
working people who had been essentially wage slaves of the capitalists.
Though his theory
is popularly known as Communism, Marx called the revolution by which the proletariat
would overthrow the capitalists not a communist revolution but a socialist one.
The victorious proletariat would create an economic and political order called
socialism. There would still be a state, a government, but it would be a
government by and for the proletariat not the capitalists. Ownership of the
means of production would in theory pass to the working class and as a
practical matter would belong to and be run by the government of the
proletariat.
The function of
the socialist state was to make itself superfluous so that it would, in a
famous phrase, wither away. For Marx the only reason there was a state
structure at all was because of the existence of different classes in a society
with each class representing a particular relationship to the means of
production. The function of a socialist state was for Marx the elimination of
classes. Everyone would in a sense be a proletarian, yet because there would be
no classes no one would be called that any more. For Marx, if there were only
one class in a society there would be no need for a state, for a government.
The role of governments before the creation of a classless society was to
maintain the dominance of the dominant class over the other classes, in
capitalism the dominance of the capitalists over the proletariat. If there were
only one class the concept class would lose its meaning and there would be a
classless society. The state would therefore disappear. It would wither away.
Once it had
withered away the process of dialectical materialism would have reached its
culmination and would itself cease to function. Marx called this classless
society without state structures communism. That term is widely misunderstood
among us. To most Americans it means the vicious totalitarian regime of the
Soviet Union or of Maoist China. The only legal political party in the Soviet
Union (there was only one in theory because there would be only one class or at
least that state was there to represent only one class) called itself the
Communist Party. Yet the Soviet communists never claimed to have created a
communist society. Rather, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union reigned over
what it called a socialist society. In Marxism socialism is the transitional
stage between capitalism and communism. It is the stage in which all classes
other than the proletariat would be engineered out of existence. That process
would not necessarily be peaceful. The formerly dominant class of capitalists
could be expected to fight back. Yet they had to be eliminated if the classless
society of communism were ever to come into being. The Communist Party of the
Soviet Union always maintained that it ruled a socialist country moving toward
communism, not that it had already created a communist, classless society.
The original idea
of socialism was therefore that it was that transitional stage between
capitalism and communism. The whole idea of Marxism however arose out of very
real worldly conditions rather than out of abstract theory. It arose because of
the extreme poverty and political powerlessness of working people, that is, of
most people in the capitalist countries of the mid-nineteenth century in
western Europe. It’s whole underlying purpose was to improve the lives of
working people by taking power from the capitalists and giving it to the
workers.
Unfortunately,
the whole idea of socialism became tainted by what the Russian Communists did
with it after they overthrew the Provisional Government that had replaced the
monarchy in 1917. The great, unavoidable flaw in dialectical materialism is
that individual people have no intrinsic moral value. Individuals don’t matter,
only class matters. The Bolsheviks, as the Russian Communists were then called,
established a reign of terror intended to secure their control over the Russian
Empire and eliminate all opposition. Lenin created an institution he called the
Cheka (from the Russian words for extraordinary committee, that would
eventually evolve into the KGB).They conveniently ignored the fact that Marxism
didn’t really apply to Russia even in theory because in 1917 most of the people
of Russia were peasants not proletarians. Peasants don’t fit well into Marxist
theory. So the Russian Communists essentially turned the country’s peasants
into proletarians by forcing them to give up their land, animals, and farm
machinery to and to enter into collective farms where they worked land that
belonged to them only theoretically in the sense that it supposedly belonged to
everyone. A great many Russian and Ukrainian peasants killed their animals and
destroyed their farm implements rather than turn them over to some collective
farm as the Communist state demanded that they do. In the early 1930s Stalin,
who had by then amassed essentially unlimited personal power in obvious
violation of Marxist theory, created a famine in which millions died especially
in Ukraine, which had the country’s best farmland and had once been called the
breadbasket of Europe. The Ukrainians call the famine the Holodomor, and it
remains a cause of hatred toward the Russians to this day. In Marxist theory
and in Soviet practice those people who starved to death didn’t matter. Only
the creation of a classless society mattered, the creation of a classless
society looking in those years like nothing more than Russian terror.[1]
Leninist/Stalinist
totalitarianism discredited the term socialism nearly completely. Few of the
socialists of western Europe wanted to recreate the horror of Leninism or
Stalinism. After World War I some of them, including the Social Democratic
Party of Germany, attempted to bring off a socialist revolution through a coup
based on the Soviet model, but none of them succeeded. Yet the name of that
German socialist party is a clue to where west European socialism was headed.
Those German socialists called themselves democrats. The Nazis brutally
suppressed them in the 1930s, but after World War II something rather
surprising happened. The SPD, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, became
one of the two major political parties of the new Federal Republic of Germany,
as west Germany was called. East Germany, called the German Democratic Republic
though it wasn’t democratic at all, had a Soviet style totalitarianism imposed
on it, and the west German Social Democrats wanted nothing of the sort. For
example, when President Kennedy gave his famous speech in west Berlin in which
he said “Ich bin ein Berliner (which isn’t quite proper German for what
he meant, but never mind) the mayor of West Berlin who stood there with him and
who fully embraced democratic values was a man named Willi Brandt. Brandt was a
German Social Democrat, a member of the SPD. He later became Chancellor of west
Germany, and neither he nor any other members of his party wanted to do or did
anything to weaken the democratic form of government that was developing in
west Germany in the aftermath of the Nazi catastrophe.
By the 1960s at
the latest west European socialism had become something very different from the
Marxist socialism of a century earlier. West European socialists had become
democrats. They may still have traced their roots back to Marx, but they
functioned in most western European countries as the more liberal of the two
major political parties. The Labour Party of Great Britain is one of those
parties. In West Germany the SPD was and is more liberal or progressive than
the other major German political party, the CDU, the Christian Democratic
Union. The SPD represents to interests of working people more than the CDU
does, but it does so with a true commitment to democratic principles. The same
can be said about the Labour Party in Britain and its relationship to the
Tories.
The SPD has had
some success in enacting progressive social programs in Germany, certainly more
success than any party has had in the United States. The social democratic
parties of Scandinavia have had more success with those programs than anyone. I
recently saw this quote online from an unnamed woman identified as Swedish:
I live in Sweden. We have social security,
affordable health care, strict gun laws, 5 weeks paid annual leave, 1 year + maternity/paternity
leave, etc. A stay at the hospital costs $10. Prescription drugs have an annual
cap of $250 U.S. dollars. Oh, and we are not communist. We live in a social
democracy, and our freedoms are not inhibited.
That’s what socialism is today. It
is a type of democratic politics that seeks to make life better for everyone in
society not just for the wealthy few. Today in the United States socialists
advocate policies like expanding Medicare to cover everyone. They want working
conditions for everyone to facilitate life not just profits for owners. They
want everyone to be safe in their own country even if that means reasonable gun
control laws, with it does, without confiscating people’s guns, which it does
not. Socialists care for and about the people not just for a tiny economic
elite.
In Marxist
socialism the means of production don’t belong to private owners be they individuals
or corporations. In theory they belong to the people. In practice they belong
to the state. A Marxist socialist regime would confiscate virtually every
business of whatever sort from private owners, typically without compensation. The
whole point of socialism in the Marxist system is to transfer ownership from
private owners to public ownership. You’ll still see this aspect of Marxism in
many contemporary definitions of socialism.
We must clearly
understand that today’s socialists at least in Europe and the United States do
not advocate public ownership of business. A social administration in the
United States would confiscate no one’s business. It would instead regulate
economic activity to ensure that such activity was pursued more responsibly
than it is today. A socialist government would govern in the interest of the
people. It would not be swayed by paid lobbyists for big business the way it so
frequently is today. It would establish and enforce meaningful standards for
worker safety and compensation. It would regulate for environmental goals as
well. It would do all it could to reduce or eliminate global warming rather
than deny its existence the way so many Republicans insist that we do today.
As these measures
were put in place the owners of businesses big and small would protest loudly. Socialist
regulation would probably reduce the profits of some and perhaps many businesses.
The socialists would say that’s just how it has to be in order for the economy
to function in the interest of the many rather than in the interest of an economically
elite few. There would be a significant reduction in the income gap between wealthy
owners and executives of businesses and those businesses’ workers. Many large
businesses could make up much of that
loss by paying upper management reasonable compensation rather than the wildly
disproportionate way that they so often do now. There would be no Jeff Bezos
under a socialist government. The super rich would no longer be able to avoid
paying taxes by using loopholes or gaps in a tax code that was written to
benefit them as they do now. Like everything else the tax law would be
restructured so that it was fair to everyone and not exclusively benefit the
rich the way it does now. Socialism today does not advocate the confiscation of
private property, not even from the likes of Jeff Bezos. It means instead a
reordering of governmental priorities so that the people come first. The
prospect of that occurring should alarm no one other perhaps than the super
rich. A socialist government would not put their interests first. It would put
the true interests of the people first.
Of course many of
the programs socialists advocate cost money. They cost tax dollars. In this
country we could get those dollars if we put tax rates for the rich not back to
what they were under Eisenhower, when they were astronomically high, but to
what they were before Reagan implemented the neo-conservative mania for
slashing tax rates for the wealthy, something experience abundantly shows benefits
only the wealthy whose taxes are cut. We could get more money if we would
reduce the amount we spend on the military to a reasonable level. Of course the
wealthy object. Of course Americans who have swallowed the neo-conservative
ideology of benefiting the rich and pretending that doing so benefits everyone
object. That’s their right. They’re wrong, but our freedoms mean nothing if we
don’t have the right to be wrong.
There is no
reason for anyone to fear socialism. Socialism, unlike Reagan-nomics, benefits
everyone not only a few. So the next time you hear someone attack some socially
beneficial program as socialist please
remember. Socialists today are democrats. We believe in democratic forms of
government not authoritarian and certainly not totalitarian ones. We don’t want
to take away anyone’s constitutional rights. If anything we want to expand
those rights. We do not advocate violence. Many of us, your humble author here
among them, are strongly committed to the principles of nonviolence. Hurling a
word at people and programs in an attempt not to facilitate dialogue but to
frighten us into unthinking reactions contributes nothing to national
wellbeing. The neo-cons probably won’t stop hurling it. The rest of us must
just speak the truth and not live in fear of a term that really isn’t
frightening today at all. May it be so.
[1]
Stalin wasn’t a Russian. He was a Georgian, but he functioned as a Russian and
was seen by the Russians as one of theirs. The people Georgia still considered
him one of theirs when I was there in 1968. Stalin had disappeared from all of
the Soviet Union except in Georgia, where his picture was everywhere and where
we were taken to the Stalin museum in the town of Gori where Stalin was from.
