The 2020 strategy for Republicans is the mirror image of using happy words to hide ugly reality. They are misusing a word with actual meaning—socialism (more accurately, the term democratic socialism)—to stand in for everything that they cannot attack on the merits and for which they offer no alternative that they are willing to defend.Paul Krugman takes time to look at the emptiness of the Republican accusation, also agreeing that it will be a standard Republican practice (The S Word, the F Word and the Election New York Times 06/27/2019):
Nobody in these [Democratic Presidential] debates wants government ownership of the means of production, which is what socialism used to mean. Most of the candidates are, instead, what Europeans would call "social democrats": advocates of a privatesector - driven economy, but with a stronger social safety net, enhanced bargaining power for workers and tighter regulation of corporate malfeasance. They want America to be more like Denmark, not more like Venezuela.Krugman takes the chance to situate the extent of Republican far-rright extremism by comparing it with the EU's most notorious case of an authoritarian "iiliberal democracy" in Hungary under President Viktor Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party. "One might even argue that the G.O.P. stands out among the West's white nationalist parties for its exceptional willingness to crash right through the guardrails of democracy."
Leading Republicans, however, routinely describe Democrats, even those on the right of their party, as socialists. Indeed, all indications are that denunciations of Democrats' "socialist" agenda will be front and center in the general election campaign. And everyone in the news media accepts this as the normal state of affairs.
I want to agree and disagree with Krugman on what socialism is. The agreement is his diagnosis of the Republians' rhetorical strategy. They are trying to make perfectly sensible policies like national health insurance sound equivalent to governments and policies that the public understands to be dictatorial, undemocratic, and otherwise disastrous. And it is dishonest and demagogic. It's also silly for Democrats like John Hickenlooper to try the same tack, because the Republicans are going to call any Democratic Presidential nominee socialist.
If you're determined not to vote for any candidate the Republicans will call "socialist," well, you're probably a Trump supporter. I would add to Buchanan's description that Republicans use "socialism" for "everything that they cannot attack on the merits and for which they offer no alternative that they are willing to defend", that they also use it for things they just don't like.
My disagreement with Krugman is actually more a different perspective when he says, "government ownership of the means of production, which is what socialism used to mean." The "means of prodution" in that classical forumlation being all major industries, banks, and natural resources. That's mostly accurate. But I think it's also important to see socialism as the classical critical left perspective on capitalism.
The term socialist came into usage in broadly its current sense in Europe around 1830 and by the 1840s was beginning to come into general usage as a reference to the reformist doctrines that later came to be known as utopian socialist, particularly those associated with Robert Owen (1771-1858), Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Claude Henri Graf von Saint-Simon (1760-1825).
I wrote about the development of the term ten years ago in Who you callin' a socialist? 11/22/2009 in the previous iteration of this blog.
In the wake of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, socialist parties formed advocating for unions, the rights of the industrial workers, and for democratic governance. The history of the socialist movement is also a history of ideological arguments over what socialism should really mean as well as over strategy, tactics, peronalities, positions, fame, money and all the other things political parties fight over.
The same can be said for the intellectual trends associated with socialism, of which Marxism is the best known. And, of course, there have been multiple competing versions of Marxism to this day.
The European Social Democratic parties were the main political vehicles for socialist ideas in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early 20th. The most famous and influential of them was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) whose prominent leaders included August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and Clara Zetkin. Karl Marx and Frederich Engels identified with that party and with others in the international party associations known as the First International (International Workingmen's Association 1864–1876) and the Second International (from 1889 to today's Socialist International).
The SPD and the other social-democratic parties emphasized establishing parliamentary democracies, a goal which they shared with bourgeois pro-capitalist liberal parties. They did advocate government ownership of the means of production and they did regard themselves as revolutionary parties, the French Revolution of 1789 and the Revolutions of 1848 being their general model of the process. The American Revolution and the freeing of the slaves in the US Civil War were important but more indirect influences. The First International was enthusiastic for the Union cause in the Civil War.
But they were not focused on taking power by organizing citizens' militias and staging armed uprisings on the model of say, the Peasant Wars of the 16th century. They weren't pacifists. And the aftermaths of the French Revolution and the suppression of the 1848 revolutions, as well as the constant presence of Czarist Russia as a conservative force ready to intervene against democratic movements that would take power, made them very mindful of the danger of counter-revolutionary violence. But the SPD, even during the period of the German Sozialistengesetz of 1878-1890 when the SPD was officially outlawed, continued to organize and succesfully focused on peaceful (if not always legal) political activity. Successful enough that the SPD became the largest German political party - and the largest party advocating for parliamentary democracy - and regarded the period of illegality as their "heroic period."
An example of the diversity of opinion within the official socialist movement can be seen in Karl Marx' Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), his comments on the official program of the German party adopted in 1875. A quick scan of the text will show that he didn't endorse 100% of the formulations in the program. But he did approve of the assumption in the Gotha Program that the social-democratic goal was a "co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production." That is the idea to which Krugman refers when he writes that "government ownership of the means of production ... is what socialism used to mean."
In the 1890s, a major new trend gained popularity in the SPD that was known as Revisionism. Associated with Eduard Bernstein, it advocated a reformist goal for the party and rejected the Gotha Program idea of social revolution in which the working class would overthrow the capitalist class and abolish it by doing away with the capitalist system. Karl Kautsky was the leading politician and theoretician of the more traditional "Marxist" approach that was still the official position of the SPD. This revolutionary/reformist dispute was reflected in other European social democratic parties, as well.
So, by the 1890s, there was already a major trend within the socialist movement that did not focus on establishing government ownership of the means of production but instead regarded their socialist perspective as a radical, pro-democracy criticism of the capitalist order. That's what I mean in the historical sense that socialism was the classical critical left perspective of capitalism, without being exclusively defined as state ownership of the means of production.
The Social Democrats had a huge and formal split over the outbreak of the First World War between those who supported their own country's side in the war and those who regarded it as an imperialist war in the interest of capital which the workers' movement should oppose by rejecting their own governments' participation in the war. But this split was not the same as the Revisionist-Marxist split. The "arch-Revisionist" Bernstein supported the antiwar position, while Kautsky initially supported the war but came over to the antiwar position by 1915. This difference resulted in a major, formal organizational split within the SPD.
The various brands of socialism emerging from the war was a far greater proliferation of positions. The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 produced new formal splits between supporters of the Bolshevik government and its political strategy (Communists) and those who criticized it for being dictatorial and rejecting the necessity of violent revolution on the Russian model (Social Democrats). There was a Leninist Communist International umbrella group (Third International) with the Second International defining itself in contrast. There was also an alliance of ten smaller national parties who rejected the terms of the Social Democratic/Communist split, including the "Austromarxist" Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ), which didn't suffer a significant split over Bolshevism, known as the International Working Union of Socialist Parties (IWUSP) which formally existed from 1921-23. Lenin mocked it as the "2 1/2 International".
Since 1917, there have been many varieties of groups identifying themselves and their goals as "socialist." Communism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, Maoism, and Guevarism are some of the better known. Many of these disagreements were involved with international disputes among socialist states. The single most important was the Sino-Soviet dispute, whose start is conventionally dated to around 1956. It produced years of extensive polemics between the Chinese and Soviet Communist Parties over Marxist doctrine, argued in terms of socialist history.
During the Cold War, "socialism" in general became a smear word in American politics, especially because of the post World War II Red Scare often identified with Joe McCarthy, who represented its more paranoid and authoritarian form, but was actually a bipartisan project. See, e.g.: Michael Steven Smith, About the Smith Act Trials Encyclopedia of the American Left (1998).
Conservative parties in Europe made the same effort, but with less effect. France and Italy had substantial Communist Parties, and Social Democratic Parties defended their version of the socialist vision in contrast to Communist models. The German SPD kept the ownership of the means of production as an official party concept until their Godesberg Program of 1958, though in practice they had abandoned it after the First World War. While the Europen Social Democrats were officially reformist, they still supported public ownership in various areas. And because there were large, distinct parties arguing their varying perspectives, voters and commentators generally were able to distinguish clearly between the "socialism" of the Social Democrats and the "socialism" represented by the East Bloc and Chinese models of ownership and governance.
This theme of socialism as The Enemy evolved in a significant way after the conservative turn in Chinese politics in the mid-1970s marked by the ascendency of Deng Xiaoping in the leadership and later by the increasing de facto alliance of the US and China balancing off against the USSR. John Kenneth Galbraith quipped that China had been informally designated as an honorary capitalist country in Amreican politics. And after the fall of the Eastern bloc Communist governments in 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, much of the American foreign policy establishment assumed the End of History had arrived, and Western-style capitalism and political liberalism had permanently triumphed. It was an overly hasty declaration of victory, to put it mildly.
With the end of history, the increasing prevelance of "neoliberal" thinking and policy in Western politics, the Republicans' continued dismissing of everthing they disliked as socialism, and the 2008 financial crisis, the idea of "socialism" didn't sound so threatening any more. If even public schools and fire departments are "socialist", that sounds pretty good to a lot of people. These are all reasons why such large numbers of younger American voters in particular express their approval for socialism in opinion polls.
Bernie Sanders, of course, had never been afraid of the label, even during the Cold War. And he was able to make his "socialist" critique of the failures of capitalism effective in building a political movement during his 2015-6 Presidential campaign and afterwards.
As the nearly two-century history of socialism suggests, disputes over the meaning of socialism and the best priorities and methods of achieving it are unlikely to end in any foreseeable future.
But I think it's reasonable to say that in the real existing political climate of the US in 2019, "socialism" as a framework of criticism of capitalism and its problems and failures now has a resonance and legitimacy that it hasn't had in a long time, maybe ever.
A final comment on "means of production." There is now a substantial historical record on state-owned enterprises, from the Soviet model to the present-day Chinese model to publicly-owned companies in social-democratic systems like France's and even publicly-run enterprises of various kinds in the US, including the Social Security system. Having a company that is publicly owned doesn't in itself mean it will act in the public interest or operate free from many of the same problems as a private business or corporations. And establishing democratic control over a company or segment of the economy doesn't have to mean government ownership.
And even though it's heresy to the neoliberal gospel, even very establishment economists recognize the existence of "natural monopolies", of which the OECD Glossary of Statistical Terms describes as:
... exist[ing] because of economies of scale and economies of scope which are significant relative to market demand. Natural monopolies are thought to exist in some portions of industries such as electricity, railroads, natural gas, and telecommunications. Because productive efficiency requires that only one firm exist, natural monopolies are typically subject to government regulation. Regulations may include price, quality, and/or entry conditions. [my emphasis]Goverment ownership is also an option in those cases. A country may also nationalize oil or other natural resources as a matter of national security or because it is considered fundamental to national economic development. Those are not distinctly socialist ideas. But presumably socialists would agree that those are valid options. (See, now I'm splitting hairs about what a True Socialist is!)
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