"Socialism" in the American political vocabulary

My own summary version of the main meaning of the word "socialism" in the mainstream American political vocabulary would be: a one-word way to say, "any public policy that doesn't mainly benefit the wealthiest is evil, bad, really bad."

Here is a great historical account of the mainstream meaning of "socialism" from the historian Health Cox Richardson, who has a talent for explaining precedents of this kind, History and Politics Chat: May 19,2020:

The part about the Paris Commune and the trans-Atlantic cable is an interesting twist.

Here's a shorter and more lighthearted version of it from Francesca Fiorentini AJ+ , Socialism: Republicans Keep Being Forced To Love It AJ+ 10/17/2020:

She concludes with, " So remember, when a Republican calls something socialist, it's not just a tactic to scare you. It means that that something might actually just save your life."

Of course, there has been a strain of political thinking that considers itself socialist, and not in the Republican meaning. Bernie Sanders advocates what is probably the most famous version at the moment, one that he calls "democratic socialism". Here is a description of Sanders' version from Heather Gautney from the Jacobin site that shares the same general perspective, Defining Bernie’s Democratic Socialism 03/14/2020.

Someone who is mainly familiar only with the stock American political-polemical meaning of "socialism" who then decided to research its broader meaning in the world for the last couple of centuries would quickly stumble on the disorienting fact that there are easily ten thousand version of "socialism." And I'm only thinking about the United States!

I took a shot at a big-picture description of socialism as the classic critical alternative to capitalism in "Socialism" and US politics in 2019 (and also 190 years before that) 07/01/2019.

Biden the Bold?

Twitter is full of the sounds of deep sighs of relief from the Make American Boring Again faction now that Status Quo Joe is officially the frontrunner in delegate count (barely). That's understandable, and hard to begrudge.

And I give the Corporate Centrist faction credit for waiting at least a day or so before going into smug-like-Hillary-supporters-in-2020 mode. I hope for all our sakes that Biden and his campaign are very aware of and prepared to compensate for his weaknesses.

It would also be good if Biden could pick one or two good, popular policy themes by which he can define his campaign.

This Biden-booster article by Yascha Mounk, Biden’s Agenda Is Plenty Bold The Atlantic 04/04/2020, apparently seeks to convince us that a from items from the boilerplate list of issues from Democratic fundraising letters amounts to a gutsy policy agenda: "Biden has pledged a higher minimum wage, a big increase in Social Security benefits for the poorest Americans, more generous health subsidies, and strengthened union rights. While unabashedly in favor of markets, Biden is just as unabashedly in favor of completing the American welfare state."

Except he's definitely against "completing the American welfare state" with comprehensive national health-insurance, aka, Medicare for All. Definitely not that!

Mounk also uses the argument that Biden's program is "social democracy", which he assumes that will be perfectly acceptable to voters while Sanders' "democratic socialism", which voters will presumably find horrifying. I don't recall ever hearing of Biden use "social-democracy" to define his program. And while I heard someone the other day make some kind of distinction between social democracy and democratic socialism, it was surprised to hear it. Because I'd have to do research myself to to figure out how to make an argument like that. And I have at least a passing familiarity with the history of socialism.

Eric Levitz recently said in explaining the difference in Biden's approached and Sanders', that Sanders embraces "radical social-democratic reform". (Bernie’s Revolution Failed. But His Movement Can Still Win. New York 03/04/2020)

And at the risk of harshing the mellow of Biden fans envisioning floating on the clouds of contentment they thought Electable Hillary Clinton would deliver to them in 2016: Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee will be running against the Republicans. That means, they are going to call him a socialist and a communist and lots of other things as well. Don't kid yourselves.

A perestroika era look at capitalism, socialism, and democracy (2 of 2)

This is the second of two parts on a 1989 essay by Soviet dissident writer Juri Burtin. The first part is here.

Capitalism vs. Socialism, 1989

A key argument of Burtin's is that capitalism proved itself to be far more adaptable than Marx and Engels and their adherents perceived. And that the economic performance of the socialist economies was obviously inferior to that of capitalist countries. Jordan Peterson could take chunks of this part of the essay into something he writes and no one would think notice a difference in quality. Some of it is downright trite, in other words. Including talking about conservative economics as "the market," actually (albeit vaguely) arguing that markets didn't exist in the Soviet Union.

Burtin makes a long argument about how the actual intensity of work and the social importance of a particular type of work is absolutely unmeasurable. And then proceeds to argue that's why people higher up in a hierarchy should be materially the most rewarded because otherwise everybody gets lazy and has no ambition. Stock Jordan Peterson stuff.

He also indulges in a College Republican brand of argument, taking a broad theoretical argument from Engels in Anti-Dühring about how a socialist organization of society would recognize and do fuller justice to the function of social capital in individuals' work than capitalism does. And responds to it with a Petersonian argument of, oh yeah, how you gonna do that, huh? Doesn't that mean that you still have a market which is what you want to do away with huh, huh? In other words, answering a broad argument about society by asking what does that have to do with managing an individual machine shop. It's a polemic debating approach, not an actual analysis. And then winds up arguing that there's no actual way to measure work effort and intensity. (pp. 186-8)

The essay is structured as a criticism of Marxism, but actually it uses superficial framing with an assumption that Western "market" capitalism is economically and (apparently) socially in all ways superior to the Soviet model of socialism.

Juri Burtin adapts the post-First World War Communist critique of Social Democracy, that the Second International had adopted a strictly deterministic notion that capitalism would inevitably turn into socialism by a more-or-less automatic process and makes it a criticism of the entire Marxist/socialist/social-democratic outlook.

The most interesting theoretical moment of the whole essay is the part in which Burtin describes the Marxian notion of the transformation of capitalism into a classless socialist-communist society that highlights a certain analogy to Hegel's concept of the end of history, the end or art, etc. But he doesn't pursue it even so far as to mention Hegel at that point.

He argues at length that Marx and Engels failed in their understanding of the flexibility of capitalist rule. But he also cites them as foreseeing what he criticizes them for not having forseen:

In the given case, it is not so much the concrete side of Marx's presumption that is interesting for us, but rather the precedent-theoretical side of Marx's presumption: the possibility of suppressing a progressive movement by another, no less progressive, but a movement that belongs to a different level (or limitation) of the process." (p. 202; my translation)

The kinds of issues that Burtin raises as supposedly devastating critiques of elementary ideas of Marxist economics and historical philosophy actually read more like routine and shallow Chamber of Commerce type arguments against government restrictions on business and against labor unions. The kind of arguments he raises as blind spots in 19th-century Marxism are largely issues that non-Marxist economics, sociologists, and management theorists had already been discussing and studying long before 1989.

The very respectable management theorist Peter Drucker, for instance, pointed to the case of sports teams to challenge the notion that managers should get paid more than their employees/subordinates. A star football or basketball player or superstar entertainer may make considerably more in a given year that their coaches or executives of the corporations with which they work. In sales departments, it's also not unusual for an individual salesperson working on commission to earn more in a given time period than their managers or their managers' managers. There's a long-running discussion about whether it makes sense for a company to promote the most successful salespeople to be managers, because the skills required by organizational management are not identical to those required to be a successful salesperson. A counterargument is that if a company doesn't give top salespeople priority for promotion, it would undermine the motivation of the salespeople.

Even in basic capitalist "free-market" considerations, the difficulty of the job does play some role in the pay offered. I remember back in the 1990s hearing some Republican politician complain about how some bus drivers in Los Angeles earned $70,000 a year! (Which would be more like $120,000 or so today.) He assumed that his audience would be obviously outraged by that. But my immediate thought was to wonder if he was talking about drivers working overtime and/or the most unpopular shifts. But my main thought was, there are probably some areas of Los Angeles that I wouldn't want to be a bus driver for twice that amount.

Juri Burtin's essay could give the impression that no one had ever taken such notions seriously before.

John Kenneth Galbraith, a famous if often dissenting economist, used to heap Thorstein-Veblen-style scorn on the notions that CEOs earn enormous salaries because of the great difficulty of their jobs. In his last book published during his lifetime, The Economics of Innocent Fraud (2004), he wrote:

"Work" describes both what is compelled and what is the source of the prestige and pay that others seek ardently and enjoy. Already fraud is evident in having the same word for both circumstances.

But this is not all. Those who most enjoy work - and this should be emphasized - are all but universally the best paid. This is accepted. Low wage scales are for those in repetitive, tedious, painful toil. Those who least need compensation for their effort, could best survive without it, are paid the most. The wages, or more precisely the salaries, bonuses and stock options, are the most munificent at the top, where work is a pleasure. This evokes no seriously adverse response. Nor until recently did the inflated compensation and extensive perquisites of functional or nonfunctional executives lead to critical comment. That the most generous pay should be for those most enjoying their work has been fully accepted.

The notion that "the market" somehow mystically produces just and rational outcomes from a societal viewpoint is at least as much in question now as it was in 1848, when the Communist Manifesto was first published. Even if from the perspective of 1989 in the USSR, that may not have seemed quite so obvious to Juri Burtin.

A perestroika era look at capitalism, socialism, and democracy (1 of 2)

This year we're getting retrospectives of the Revolutions of 1989, when Soviet-model socialist governments in eastern Europe entered the political crises that finally ended them.

I'll make a tiny contribution here by discussing a long essay I finally got around to reading that had been in my mental queue for a while. It's a German translation of an essay by a dissident Soviet writer, Juri Burtin, Die Achillesferse der Marxschen Geschichtstheorie ["The Achilles Heel of the Marxist Theory of History"] that appeared in the annual journal Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 13 (1991), then published in East Germany for the Institute for Marxism-Leninism in Moscow. Burtin's essay was first published in the USSR in 1989.

I was interested in it as an example of someone examining the changes during a huge transitional moment in the socialist world.

I have to admit Burtin's essay was a somewhat disappointing experience. The most engaging thing about it was to disaggregate the various strands of the argument. It reads to me like the work of a committee, or like a discussion by three main participants that was summarized by someone else into an article using a single voice. One of the participants argues that Marxism was a dynamic democratic theory that has continuing significance and application. Another argues that, okay, the whole thing sounded good a century ago but it missed pretty much everything that was important. Another one is looking for a gig as an advocate for neoliberal, "free-market" radical reform in socialist countries. All combined into one by by feature writer that tosses in some dignified coffee-table-book reference to make it all sound sensibly important.

It is a transition piece in that it tries to argue for the complete failure across the board of Marxist thinking while trying to frame it in the traditional Soviet style of proceeding from Marxist premises in developing the argument.

Since Burtin is trying to argue on a Marxist theoretical basis, he praises Marx and Engels toward the end as incredible geniuses when it came to analyzing the developments of their own time and finds them thoroughly committed to democracy. But he also argues that they were massively deceived about the nature of capitalism and that the path their embraced inevitably leads to dictatorship, even one-person dictatorship.

We might say that it's not an entirely consistent picture. Not even in a "dialectical" sense. Although he does make some effort to present it that way, also not very convincingly.

I'm doing this in two separate posts. This one focuses on ...

Democracy

Burtin makes a version of the democratic determinist argument so popular among Western neoconservatives at the time, which is that capitalism inherently tends to produce liberal democracy:

... die für Diktatoren aller Zeiten und Volker „überflüssige" Demokratie eine Lebensbedingung der modernen Gesellschaft - nicht mehr und nicht weniger -; sie ist ebenso nötig wie Luft und Wasser. (S. 197)

... the democracy that for dictators of all times and peoples is "superfluous" is no more and no less the condition for life of modern society; it is just as necessary as air and water.

(All translations from the German in this post are mine.)

This was the era that spawned celebratory optimism about the definitive triumph of both Western-style liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism. Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay "The End of History?" gave this view its iconic name. It was appealing for for advocates of the neoliberal position on economics that came to be known as the "Washington Consensus" because it allowed them to argue that spreading conservative economics and corporate-deregulation trade treaties would promote conditions leading to liberal democratic governance and its maintenance.

In 2019, in the times of Putin and Orbán, Bolsonaro and Modi, Trump and Salvini, the notion that liberal democracy is inevitably advancing in the world seems downright quaint.

But people in 1989 didn't need 30 years of future vision to have reservations about that idea. The 19th century examples of Britain and the United States could support that understanding. But capitalism was also developing in France and Germany, the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian Empires, and they don't fit as well into the framework of liberal democracy being inevitably produced by capitalism. The Italian Fascist and German Nazi regimes were both brutal examples of capitalist countries with non-democratic regimes. Both also provide dramatic cases of big capitalist interests decided they thought democracy was not in their interest.

And the brand of neoliberal capitalism that became the standard for the "end of history" was pioneered and tested in the military dictatorships of Chile (1974-90) and Argentina (1976-83). No, the necessary link between democracy and capitalism is not self-evident.

But in 2019, this provides a nostalgic take as an argument for democracy:

Was nun die eigentliche Demokratie betrifft, so genügt es zu ihrer Charakterisierung vielleicht, sich an einen einzigen Fakt zu erinnern - Watergate, die Geschichte, wie der „Durchschnittsamerikaner", gekrankt durch die Unehrenhaftigkeit seines Prasidenten, diesen aus dem WeiBen Haus verjagte. (S. 198)

[As for democracy, perhaps it suffices here to characterize it by remembering a single fact - Watergate, the story of how the "average American," sickened by the dishonorable conduct of his President, chased him out of the White House.]

Yes, in 1989, America's willingness to use the impeachment process to force out a criminal President could be used as an obvious argument for the value of democracy. Nixon's resignation was only 15 years in the past then. Thirty years later, American democracy isn't looking quite so robust in the face of far more serious misconduct by the White House's current occupant.

The parts of the essay on democracy are basically a polemic against the idea that concentrated wealth, class realities, or oligarchical corruption can put any meaningful constraints on democracy. And therefore for the idea that it's illegitimate to talk about such problems restricting democracy.

Burtin actually makes a Burkean argument about democracy, nominally democratic but actually reactionary. Since he's framing the argument in terms of historical Marxism, he discusses Marxist and Leninist concepts of democracy and makes ritual invocations of "the classics of Marxism" (194)

He simultaneously argues that Marx and Engels had a radical democratic perspective and that their perspective was fundamentally anti-democratic:

Der Kern meines Gedankens besteht darin, daB wir Menschen am Ende des 20.Jahrhunderts in einer Welt Ieben, die schlecht oder gut sein mag, die aber von der, auf deren Boden die ldeen nicht nur von Marx, sondern auch von Lenin geboren wurden, wie der Himmel von der Erde entfernt ist. (S. 205)

[The core of my thought is that at the end of the 20th century we humans live in a world that may be bad or good, but on whose soil the ideas born not only from Marx but also by Lenin, are as far removed as the heavens from the earth.]

Burtin makes what amounts to a conventional Cold War commentary on the Marxist concept of "dictatorship of the proletarian". Here the broad theoretical argument about Marxism as an economic-social-political worldview is complicated by the particular forms the workers' state took in the Soviet bloc and China and related systems. In the 19th century, the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat was connected with the Marxist notion that government under capitalism functions as a de facto dictatorship of the capitalist class. The broad social-democrtic and Marxist goal then was to fight for parliamentary democracy with the goal of achieving control of the governmental organization and reorient it to policies in the interest of the working class and the establishment of socialism. In the classical Marxist conception, this would be a government representing the majority that would have to resort to "dictatorial" means in the case that the capitalist opposition would attempt to overthrow the democratic government by force.

The concept of the "withering away of the state" identified with Engels that also engendered much discussion, controversy, and a flood of polemics over the last couple of centuries is also related to the classical Marxist definition as the state as an instrument of class control. Once classes in the historical sense are abolished, a state in the sense of a mechanism of class domination would no longer exist. Public administration would still be needed, including very complex types. But that would not be a "state" in the previous sense.

(If anyone feels inspired to run down Frederick Engels’s version of this, it’s in Anti-Dühring, Part 3 (Socialism) Chapter 2 (Theoretical), where he writes that in the transition to socialism, The proletariat [working class] seizes political power and turns the means of production in the first instance into state property. But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as state.“)

It's safe to say that the general understanding of what governments ("states") are today would also view administration of a classless society as a "state". If those 19th-century concepts seem quircky in contemporary terms, I would argue that that is also related to how Marx and Engels translated the Hegelian notion of the end of history. It wasn't because they were engaging in fuzzy utopianism, as Burtin heavily insinuates.

It was also a matter of practical discussion in Engels' time what form the democratic state should take, i.e., the social democrats tended to favor a unitary parliamentary government and weren't especially fond of Madisonian-Montesquieuian notions of separation of power and checks-and-balances, which also provide a supply of quotes that can be used polemically in Burtin's style of polemics.

Burtin's gauzy theoretical arguments on those historical concepts say nothing particularly meaningful about the real existing democratic deficits in the socialist countries of 1989. And his treatment of the history of democratic concepts is interesting as an example of an 1989 attempt at theoretically understanding an important transitional historical moment. But as historical arguments, they are notably lacking.

"Socialism" and US politics in 2019 (and also 190 years before that)

Neil Buchanan back in February made a prediction that is holding up so far, Republicans Will Run an Entire Campaign Based on an Incorrectly Defined Word (Socialism) Because They Have Nothing Else Verdict/Justia 02/19/2019;

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.

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.

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."

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!)

Politicon discussion of left-right disputes in the Democratic Party and socialism

This is an interesting discussion from last weekend's Politicon convention.

Is Socialism Good for America? Politicon 2018 Panel ft. Ana Kasparian, Kyle Kulinski and Sam Seder 10/21/2018:

The title of this panel was "Is Socialism Good for America?", but its actual focus is on how left should the Democratic Party be.

Sam Seder opens by asking how each participant stands on the idea of socialism. And he asked them to identify themselves on a spectrum from not-socialist to public ownership of the means of production, the classical Social Democratic goal in the 19th century and which the Soviet Union and China implemented in their respective ways. It made me think about how I would respond if I were on that panel.

I think I would have made a distinction between between a longer term vision and immediate goals that the Democratic Party can use in campaigns right now. I would put the longer view in liberation-theology terms that God is on the side of the working class and that I envision Heaven being pretty much like the Wobblies' vision of the One Big Union.

But that is also a "pie in the sky" way of looking at it. On the issue of owning the means of production, I would mention that we do have a large number of state enterprises in the world over the last century that we can evaluate as practical experiences. Most of largest oil producing nations have or recently have had state ownership of their oil supplies which, among other things, can enhance the level of actual national independence a country has. Even in the neoliberal age, European countries still have some nationalized industries like trains. Included various formas of national health care or health insurance.

I would talk about current issues where making private industries public immediately is a sensible and practical position that even Democrats could take. Obviously, Medicare for All is now a mainstream position that is very popular, even among Republicans, even though the Very Serious People still consider it dangerously radical. Making prisons an exclusively public function is another, one that Ana Kasparian mentions in her response. Private for-profit prisons are a genuine obscenity. And I would stress the need to keep public education public and why scam for-profit colleges like the infamous Trump University should be banned.

I would also float an idea as a potential immediate issue the Democratic Party could take up but is not currently being discussed would be nationalizing the arms industry. That also opens up a discussion of the need for genuinely democratic control. Because a nationalized armaments company could be just as irresponsibly greedy and asocial as private ones. This is something that's very relevant to the current system in China, which will soon be the largest economy in the world, if it isn't already.

Bakari Sellers makes an excellent point on the panel that the Republicans ironically helped improve the image of "socialism" by calling the moderate Democratic President Barack Obama a socialist and derided ACA/Obamacare as socialism. Because if the image of socialism in the public eye is the federal government mandating access to affordable and good quality health insurance instead of a Cold War cartoon view of sinister commissars, it makes it no longer taboo for Democrats to talk about it in a realistic and serious way. And that is what has happened in the last several years.