I have for the past five years theorized that most self-described socialists just think of a regulated market with a welfare state as socialism and I have yet to be proven wrong
According to todays "conservatives" any attempt to regulate, tax or publicly fund anything is "socialist." Which takes in pretty much everyone from Reaganite Republicans through Chairman Xi.
The conservative tendency to label everything that the Clintons, Obama, and Biden supported "socialism" probably played a big role in the popular definitional drift here.
It's hard to attach an ideology to people who are too stupid to hold one. If Trump thought changing the American flag to the hammer and sickle would get him media attention and make him money, he'd do it in a heartbeat.
Yes, which is why “national conservatives” like Trump, Vance, and Hawley are economic morons and an embarrassment for a party that actually nominated Barry Goldwater for president back when TikTok was something out of Flash Gordon. Trying to build an ideologically coherent brand out of Trump’s statements that retains at least a veneer of fiscal sanity is like when Larry Flynt tried to turn Hustler into a Christian publication……
Trump isn't really a conservative. I'd probably call him a Trumpist, both because his beliefs are a random grab-bag of positions, many of them deeply stupid, and because ultimately all he cares about is his own enrichment and aggrandizement.
Which, of course, doesn't take away an iota of the blame from the Republicans for enabling him.
Guess what-the GOP needed some vote getting mojo and Trump provided that. Call him an asshole, a fiscal lunatic but DC needed shaking up, the border needed fixing, and the SC needed a reboot in a Constitutional direction. Mission accomplished on those fronts. Give Trump all the grief in approval rankings he deserves, but a retroactive guilt trip for not voting for Brandon’s work wife isn’t in the cards.
DC needs shaking up so we gut the civil service, ignore all laws and norms, rule by executive order, fire investigators investigating us, appoint unqualified friends and family to cabinet etc etc.
The border needs fixing so we randomly arrest and murder people we think might be foreign in the streets until people are afraid to come.
The SC needs to be more "constitutional" so we jam in three judges on straight partisan votes who proceed to turn Article 14 into a dead letter and invent out of thin air a rule that presidents can't convicted of crimes.
I guess the next time your car needs an oil change you're going to throw a can of gas in through the window and light a match.
After the Brandon regime it was more like a blown engine cylinder, not an oil change. I fully admit to not being being shocked by Trump 2.0, but it is/was a better bet than Brandon/Kamala 2.0.
"we randomly arrest and murder people we think might be foreign in the streets until people are afraid to come"
No kidding. People I know have written off the US as a holiday destination. When one of my friends told us he had to travel there for work, everybody winced, and he said "No, I reckon I'll be okay. I'm white."
Not my fault that the GOP buys into correct Constitutional interpretation more than the Ds. SC decisions should be ( and mostly have been, lately) about what is correct/Constitutional, not which political party will be big mad over the outcome.
Ain't much point in debating theoretical meanings when you nailed the praxis
Marxist communism is a corpse of an ideology, with scavengers plucking juicy slogans, symbols, and concepts in chunks off of its torso. Hence the ideological incoherency.
So, if you believe in progressive taxation but not authoritarianism that makes you a "scavenger" picking meat off a corpse? Ever think you might be being a tad melodramatic?
There's nothing wrong with adopting the good ideas of a failed movement while eschewing the bad ones.
People are always gong to complain about taxes-that’s pretty much the story of human history and even the BIble basically says to stfu, b/c things aren’t changing “Render unto Caesar….”. The current insanity is that the socialists/Cali Ds, etc. think they can somehow fund everything by gobbling up the literal wealth retention mechanism-the paper value of stocks/businesses and magically turning it into hard currency that will magically regenerate itself every year after the evil owners are forced to turn it over to Mamdani and Abdul the wannabe Senate socialist.
Yes, and you've hit a fundamental problem. Who are they going to sell their stock to if everyone *else* has to turn over the paper value of *their* stocks? Someone has to buy that shit for them to get money to give to the government.
Exactly. Warren Buffet’s dirty little secret is that he expanded his empire by snapping up dozens of privately owned companies at bargain rates when the heirs were smacked over the head with inheritance taxes on the death of the founder, and Warren rode to the rescue with a buyout offer.
If all you claim is to be is a liberal who believes in a regulated market with a calibrated tax policy, you aren’t who I’m talking about
I’m talking of the type of internet person who proudly claim to be both an anarchist and a communist, blissfully unaware that the two ideologies were mutually hostile. Just mining the Cold War and the labor fights of yesteryear for an aesthetic while buying into their OAN Dad’s complaints about the government programs being Marxist wholeheartedly.
That's fine, except your comment was in response to someone saying "socialist" generally seems to mean someone who wants a regulated market with a welfare state! So in context, it very much looks like you're trying to tar people who believe in progressive taxation as some kind of weird wannabe communists.
I read the original comment as critiquing revolutionary larpers who proudly claim the label of socialist or communist or both, but when pressed for details, describe regulated capitalism and welfare.
Although I guess that does make them distinct from revolutionary larpers who when pressed for details describe a wishlist of license and atrophied social mechanisms (abolish police and prisons etc).
Ironically, the most successful countries with robust social safety nets, like Denmark and Sweden, pay for those with a very robust capitalist economy!
I think in a lot of cases this seems about right, and it also helps explain why there can be such a vehement divide between self-described socialists and communists. This as a definition of socialism can reasonably be described as 'Capitalism that sucks less than it does right now,' which for most people is both attractive and seems like it ought to be attainable. If you're firmly in the communist camp, though, you don't WANT capitalism to suck less. That goes against your goals. You need capitalism to suck so bad that the people revolt (and ideally as a good-standing member of the party you get a comfy sinecure in the new regime).
I also think the definition of socialism just got warped a bit over time both by it being used pejoratively by opponents towards progressives and by European countries with large social safety nets getting rebranded as a form of socialism.
It's also useful as a way to differentiate itself from the mainstream Democratic party, which has steadily moved to the right on issues like labor. I think it would be a less widely used term for what is essentially old-school progressivism if the Democratic party still resembled... old-school progressives.
Your definition of socialism as being the waypoint between capitalism and communism is, objectively, the correct one. It's how all of the people who created socialist states in the 20th century would've defined the term. It's crazy-making how self-identified Millennial and Gen Z "socialists" react with outrage when you point out that whatever the hell they mean by that term (they often don't seem to know), they're using it incorrectly. Nordic-style welfare capitalism is... Nordic-style welfare capitalism. It's not socialism. Stop calling it socialism.
For a lot of Millennial socialists, "socialism" seems to be the political label they apply to their generational resentment of Boomers; Boomer lefties are Democrats, but Millennials hate Boomers, so Millennials are "Democratic Socialists." Gen Z socialists think the garbled definition of socialism meaning "public roads" that they saw on Tik Tok sounds cool. It's the Boomer and Gen X socialists you need to watch out for: they're old enough to remember the Soviet Union, so tend to understand what the term has historically meant, and use it to describe themselves because they yearn to liquidate certain classes of capitalist pigs.
Part of it is branding, I believe. Most DSA morons know being openly communism will still lose more voters than win.
However, what seems to be over their head (much like having a job) is that communist and socialist regimes often used the term interchangeably. The end point of communism is analogous to the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth in Christian Eschatology. It just gets rid of those pesky things like the Ten Commandments. It’s a utopian goal. the Soviet Union was run by a communist party, but it was the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” and the subject republics were “Soviet Federative Socialist Republics.” Saying “I’m not a communist, I’m a socialist” isn’t going to gain a lot of supporters among the millions of Americans originating from Cuba, Vietnam, the former USSR, etc… or anyone who has any knowledge.
It’s true there was non Marxist socialism in the 19th century. Marx himself was pretty marginal among socialist thinkers until the Bolshevik Revolution. Lenin and his coterie came across Marx and clearly liked it, becoming their core ideology.
I think it was Phil Magness who did an analysis of political literature. There are few references to Marx until the Bolsheviks took power. The USSR then spread Marxism, using money, their status as the sole socialist state, and subterfuge to take over socialism movements. Most other socialist movements and strains of thought were pretty much historical curiosities after that.
It’s worth noting this—Marx was a great writer, but his economic and historical knowledge was non existent. He was kind of a moron on his core subject. A big part of his entire ideology is hatred of the division of labor. That is, specialization, upon which all civilization depends. Hard to enjoy the finer things in life, like being a lay about writer depending on the financial support of a rich friend, when you have to grow your own food, dig your own well, make your own tools. It’s truly retarded.
Lenin’s contribution- vanguardism- is pretty much a recognition that Marx was wrong. There had been no revolution of the working classes! It wasn’t, of course, that Marx was just a guy making stuff up. Clearly, the working classes were dumb/not class conscious. We need some educated, committed revolution to seize the means of production and guide the revolution. Yes, millions may die, but that’s necessary
I'm going to do a "well actually." The system of social security was started by Otto von Bismark to kneecap the socialists who were gaining a lot of power at that time. FDR's plans were modelled off of the German system.
I think people are being obtuse when they consider a mixed economy -- mixture of capitalism with a redistributive welfare state -- which is what we have in the US and in the Nordic counties to be socialism.
But historically Socialism is a larger movement and group of ideologies that includes communism. Socialists just believe that there’s some kind of way to organize large scale industrial societies without private ownership of capital. And even then there’s for sure market socialists on the very edge of that definition. It includes all kinds of positions both on political authority and on how to organize production without private ownership. Although it’s much more debatable what communism is, in practice it’s the authoritarian Marxist subset of socialism descended from the Russian Bolshevik Party.
No. Sorry. Attempts to broaden the meaning of "socialist" to something other than Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy are more than 100 years too late. The people who built actual governments with "Socialist" in the name called dibs on the term, and there's no going back now. This is like trying to reclaim the term "National Socialism" because there are so many other things it could mean.
You can use words however you like, but that's not historically correct and it doesn't capture the existing spectrum of thought. Socialism coheres in the English speaking world in the 1820s. Marx doesn't start writing until 1848 and isn't a signficant influence until the first international in the 1860s. Even then, most of the members of the first international and even the second were not Marxists, they were from other socialist traditions. As late as the Russian Revolution in 1917, there are 4 socialist parties (if you count the anarchists), two of which are Marxist and only one of which is Leninist (the one let by Lenin). The largest party - who got completely rolled by Lenin and the Bolsheviks - where the Socialist Revolutionaries who came out of a completely different, specifically Russian tradition that predates the Communist Manifesto by decades. If you're going to insist on such an impoverished and constrained use of language I don't know how you'd account for this.
So you might say that you don't care about the history and only the current usage, but even there if you insist that socialists must be Marxist and Leninist that's not correct. The European social democratic parties (and the DSA) have Marxist groups in their makeup but what Leninists (and Trotskyites, Stalinists, Maoists etc) there were generally left (or were expelled) and formed their own. I think this is where the Communist/Socialist distinction comes from. Although Marx himself used the term, "Communist" doesn't really come into common usage until the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolshevik) renames itself the Russian Communist Party in 1918 and its from that organization - briefly led by Lenin himself - that the Communist International and all of the many Communist Parties of XXX descend. While Leninism can mean many things in different contexts and the man himself was brutally pragmatic and mercurially inconsistent they represent a distinctly authoritarian, centralist, vanguardist tradition within socialism. The Labour Party, the DSA, the German Social Democrats all outside of that, generally combining non-Leninist Marxism with non-Marxist socialism and increasingly plain old left liberalism.
As for their people in the DSA calling themselves communists? They're idiots.
I very much care about history, that's the point. In actually-existing history, there was a country: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. For more than 70 years, the Soviets advocated for, and at times successfully spread, their notion of "socialism" in which the dictatorship of the proletariat seized the means of production and started guiding society away from capitalism and towards communism. The Soviets did a lot of shit, some of which worked. They were kind of a big deal for most of the 20th century!
The Soviet understanding of "socialist" is now as definitive as the German Nazi understanding of "national socialism." They earned it by killing millions of people in socialism's name. The modern American leftist tendency to act as though "socialism" has nothing to do the Soviet understanding of the term is just as silly as pretending "national socialism" has nothing to do with the Nazis.
But also in actual history every NATO member had a political movement, in all but one case a major political party, that described itself as socialist but was prepared to go to war with the Soviet Union at a moments notice. It’s a consequential political movement, not some minor irrelevance. You don’t get to hand wave that history away with Nazi comparisons.
If Democrats are for something, socialists are for that, plus more. It’s why nothing is ever good enough: nothing can ever be good enough, by definition. So if Biden ends the drone war and the war in Afghanistan, socialists are for cutting off aid to Ukraine. If Democrats want to establish income based repayment plans for student loans, socialists are for total forgiveness. If Democrats support universal health care, socialists are for universal healthcare that covers all medical expenses without co-pays or deductibles. Any part of their agenda that becomes so broadly popular that it has a plausible chance of happening falls off the agenda. Twenty years ago socialists were for gay marriage and legalization of pot.
Socialists, then, are leftier-than-thou assholes who define themselves in opposition to Democrats so they can feel special. Communists are leftier-than-thou assholes who define themselves in opposition to other leftier-than-thou assholes so they can feel most specialest. Socialism is what normie Dems think is too radical and distance themselves from; communism is what socialists think is too radical and distance themselves from. Generally, communists support the same substantive agenda as socialists, but think it should be imposed by force after an armed uprising dismantles the state and builds a new one upon its ashes. Socialists think any policy that could be achieved with a Democratic trifecta is by definition not good enough. Communists think anything that could in principle be achieved on some theoretical time horizon through normal democratic means is by definition not good enough.
At the risk of engaging in an absurd People's Front of Judea vs Judean People's Front argument, I'll point out that most of the Americans who self-identify as "democratic socialists" are in fact social democrats. At least in Europe, this is a fairly well-defined and successful political movement with a long history: https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-democracy
Hassan Piker, who clearly is a moron, is treated as a serious person by these people. He goes on a Chinese propaganda that would have made Malcolm Caldwell blush, and talks about how great China is. Caldwell was the Scottish academic whose last night on earth was spent all but fellating Pol Pot, which did not prevent his murder by the same regime before the sun was up.
The difference is that Caldwell was an academic, who spent his life proving Orwell’s quip that “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
Piker has a room temperature IQ, which is exceeded by deep bile. Guys like that are the first to be shot post-revolution. Useful in gaining power, far too dumb to be useful in power.
This might just be me, but I get major predator vibes from him. If stories come out, I’d be less surprised than I was by Platner, which was not at all.
I was not surprised by Graham Platner in the slightest. I’m surprised it took as long! Can you imagine in a Republican candidate in a must win election for control of the Senate had even half the level of scandal or bad decisions? It would have been all over the Times, MSNOW, CNN. Every republican would have been asked to denounce him.
Yes, that does seem to be part of the problem. European social democratic parties are not socialists. But the folks around here that get hooked on labels insist they are not only socialists, but probably closet communists.
I used to think of communism as bad, but not really as bad as fascism. Then I lived in Prague for four years and had many Czech friends. They told me about not being allowed to work at the jobs they chose, not daring to say their true thoughts out loud, dealing with scarce food and housing, being imprisoned for their beliefs, and having to escape over the border into Austria and then not seeing their family again until 1989.
I am way on the left end of the political spectrum. I believe the political systems in Czechia since the Velvet Revolution, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland (where I now live) lead to happiness and prosperity. But these are capitalist economies with a social safety net. They’re not socialism, not by a long shot.
The DSA is full of naive young people like I was before moving to Prague. I think they need to spend some time with people who lived under communism. It might change their minds.
In elementary school, one of my friends had a mother who grew up in Soviet Latvia. The stories we heard from her, and they were almost certainly the least awful stories, were quite horrifying. If you've heard those kinds of stories, it's hard to square that with the idea that communism was bad but much less bad than fascism. I have a couple of old friends who became academics who get furious at the idea that communism and fascism deserve to be in the same bucket because clearly capitalism is the same type of evil as fascism. The bad stuff that communism and socialism did is always capitalism's fault -- somehow the capitalists managed to do the bad stuff or make them do the bad stuff, or maybe it didnt' happen. They no longer have the excuse of being young and naive. I think that they are motivated by the same factors that cause the more extreme MAGA types. I do sometimes wonder if the presence of peopel like my old friends (we don't talk much anymore because life is short and I'd rather not spend it being listening to a lecture on the supposed evils of capitalism) in places of institutional power makes it easier for naive young people to keep believing in the DSA.
About 20 years ago, the former Mexican foreign minister under Vicente Fox had an essay in Foreign Affairs where he noted that the Latin American leftist intellectuals who had spent time in exile in Cuba had seen how communism failed and returned home as committed to liberal democracy (Ricardo Lagos), while those who had never lived under communism and saw it as a way to get power were just small men in search of a balcony (Hugo Chavez).
Great post Mari. I went down very much the same path, except mine wove through Mexico and Poland for 20 years. Set my goggles on a little straighter to be sure.
Robert Conquest, who wrote the book “The Great Terror,” wrote in a retrospective on the 20th century, that he felt that the Holocaust was “worse” than Stalinist crimes, but it was hard to explain.
What really separated the Third Reich was the systematic, industrialized, and targeted mass murder of specific groups of people, with a goal to wipe them out. What we know called genocide was not new to human conduct. But the way in which the Germans, one of the most educated and seeming sophisticated nations on the planet, went about it was simply unfathomable.
But in sheer death toll, communist states killed far more. Pol Pot murdered between 25% to 33% of human beings in about 4 years. Mao’s body count is biblical.
The apocryphal Stalin quote that the “death of one man is a tragedy, millions is a statistic” is really true, and has saved the reputation of the most murderous ideology in human history. That, and a collective amnesia in the sense making institutions of the west. There was nothing like denazification, which allowed this ideas to survive in open place - academia.
I'm not even wading into this one, Jeff. I'm convinced words have no meaning anymore. Every time someone online describes themselves as a socialist, they come up with a different meaning and announce that "language is fluid you know".
Glad I got that public policy degree oh so many years ago. It's real handy in a world where you can make up your own definitions.
Eh, I’m an old-school (unwoke) New Deal / Social Democrat. I have very little to add to the above thoughtful comments except that one’s membership in the DSA is, for me at least, an immediate and disqualifying red flag. And at the risk of offending many on the Hard Left if Israel is currently occupying most if not all of your mental bandwidth as your own fucking country slides into a fascist abyss (it is), your priorities are horribly awry. This isn’t to absolve Israel of its misdeeds or to stave off a much needed discussion about aid but a simple recognition that the fight for Democracy is at our doorstep, not in the Levant.
True story. I attended my daughter’s graduation from Barnard the year of October 7th and not one student speaker addressed the looming onslaught against women in THIS country. It was all Palestine all the time. I was dumbfounded.
I’m not unfamiliar, historically speaking, with that period of America. Yes, FDR was “a traitor to his class” (great book, incidentally) which might be considered very much in his favor. Also, FDR didn’t appease socialists and communists; in fact the New Deal was conceived in part to blunt the appeal of both communism and facism created by the social and economic upheaval caused by the Great Depression.
FDR was smart to avoid calling the New Deal Socialist, but it is inaccurate to say the New Deal was trying to blunt the appeal of communism
or fascism. On a more conceptual level, the New Deal consisted of just trying stuff. At a basic level, there were quite a number of communists and fellow travelers in the New Deal coalition (and in government in the 30s and 40s).
There was also quite a bit of admiration among some New Dealers for the seeming economic success of Mussolini, Stalin, and then Hitler. Not the authoritarianism (for the most part), but many thought they had figured something out. The economic program of the New Deal was much closer to fascist Italy, Germany, and Peronist Argentina - corporatism, maintaining private ownership but with a heavy government hand in the name of class relations and efficiency (though it’s not efficient).
In hindsight, wasn't FDR's New Deal more Far Lefty than anything on the liberal table today? Led by a class traitor appeasing genuine card-carrying socialists and communists using The Great Depression for cover? And when anyone talks about a time when America was Great, are they embracing a post-Roosevelt America or wishing we could go back to a time before social safety nets, a surging middle class, and all those WPA public monuments that go into our patriotic montages?
FDR actually threw the brakes on the New Deal in the late 1930s b/c he actually was opposed to massive deficit spending. WW2 got big spenders off hook justification-wise.
Justification-wise, the Great Depression allowed for massive deficit spending, so that's a hard case to make. World War II made perfect bedfellows of massive government spending and our capitalist machinery. The post-War economic boom couldn't have happened without the GI Bill and The Marshall Plan, big government social engineering of the highest order, which also spurred American capitalism to new heights. I don't know why we need to pretend that both sides aren't happily providing reach arounds for each other.
I was responding to your introduction of the New Deal to the discussion, which is pretty relevant and interesting. Then I was responding to Matt's "throwing the brakes" comment, which was kinda hard to parse. If I was edging towards a point it's how FDR was considered quite the socialist in his day, but most of those New Deal policies are considered American mainstream today. But it you pulled them out and rephrased them, FDR would look like one woke son of a bitch. He did appease America's sizable socialist and communist labor force -- at least enough to win their votes. Maybe I should have made that first post an open comment rather than a response to yours.
My friends seem to be divided into several groups:
"Socialists" because they hate their jobs.
"Socialists" because they have medical problems that they can't afford to address (I'm very sympathetic to these folks, but that's still not socialism).
"Socialists" because capitalism has made us into consumers instead of citizens. I don't entirely get this one.
"Socialists" because they really want to be the idle rich.
"Socialists" because they hate Trump. Hey, I'm a neoliberal shill and I hate Trump too! Can we be friends?
Here in France, I'd say the difference goes back to their stance towards the Soviet Union.
The Socialist Party (with a rose logo) descends from social-democrats, left-leaning parties who nevertheless rejected the Soviet Union and revolution. Some would have liked to see capitalists expropriated, but they all eventually concluded that liberal democracy was preferable to Stalinism. On the other hand, the Communists (with the hammer and sickle) were those who considered the Soviet Union a model and admired Stalin.
It got increasingly murky over the decades, as local politics slowly eroded ideology, then the USSR collapsed and the point became moot. But that's how the words were understood in the middle of the XXth century.
Just by way of illustrating what “socialist” policies might look like in our current context. In addition to kicking off his program of City run groceries, NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani has appointed fellow DSA member Cea Weaver as Director of the “Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants”. And among her first policy pronouncements was that through a targeted program of fees, increased taxes, and increased citation for code violations, the city intends to coerce the owners of distressed properties into selling or otherwise handing them over to the city, at which point they would become part of the NYC Housing Authority. Unaddressed of course, is that the city council has for some years now been denying these landlords the rent increases they need to make repairs, or that the NYCHA has a $80,000,000,000 backlog of repairs to it already ailing housing stock
It’s “socialism = Denmark; communism = USSR.” That’s it. That’s all it is.
Denmark is, of course, capitalist, and the actual structure of Danish political economy bears very little resemblance to what these people think it is. (“Tax billionaires and everyone gets everything they want for free and also let’s not enforce any rules or social norms” is not a system that exists anywhere, but somehow American lefties are convinced it exists in Scandinavia.)
Also none of this has anything to do with Palestine, but that won’t stop people from trying!
For the record, I don’t have much truck with people using the word “socialism” in this way. Political labels are always slippery - see the many different valences of the word “liberal.” Whether their version of socialism makes any sense on the merits is a separate question, however.
Just as "gray" can mean any degree between black and white, "socialism" can mean any degree of taxation between libraries and forced labor, entirely subjectively. This allows the True Believers (I view communism as a religion) to have behind-closed-doors conversations that would never appeal to most people, while still being able to attract new converts with a lighter version of their fundamentalism. Whatever the would-be convert WANTS socialism to be, it is. Then once they've begun defining themselves as socialist, they'll be more likely to defend the team, even as it gets less and less rational. It's a cult-indoctrination technique.
As for what does socialism have to do with Palestine... Well don't get me started on that one. We'll be here all day.
I'd say this is right, except the glaring issue where you apparently think there's a conspiracy where the people who want public libraries and the people who think the USSR was a good idea are all in on it together. They're really, really not.
I'm a socialist, by your definition, because I like public libraries and approve of taxes paying for them. And there are few political movements I detest more than communism, because a) it's anti-democratic, b) capitalism works very well with the right checks and balances, and c) they're insisting we bring in a system that results in horror every time it's tried.
So stop with the conspiracy-mongering, please. It's frankly silly.
Then you misunderstood. I don't think that there is a conspiracy between people like me who support reasonably high taxes for libraries (and umpteen other social services) and those who drool over the next proletariat revolution.
What I think is that the True Communists dim the extremities of their end goals in public to become palatable, especially to people who don't really understand history and economics and who want to feel like the good guys fighting for the underdogs. They water down their definition (publicly) of socialism to such a degree that almost anyone can say "hey I guess I'm a socialist! This must be for me!" Then as the Communists start shifting further from pothole repair and closer to property confiscation, these same people become it's defenders. Nobody wants to be the exile or admit that they were wrong or maybe they change happens in such a way that they've begun changing too..
I don't believe it's a conspiracy, but I do believe that it's a plan by the far far left to gain acceptance and then move the goalposts.
This is something that SOUNDS like it could be happening, but I don't get the impression that it is, on any meaningful scale.
Like I said, I'm a "socialist" by your definition, and yet I don't find I have people trying to push me from welfare-state liberalism to communism. Not quickly, not slowly.
In my experience, honest-to-god communists tend to hit the ground running, typically because they're teenagers or young adults with little knowledge of history who think that communism is some clever new idea (or just decide it's the cool thing to like, because their friends say their communists too).
So I'm sorry, but this still sounds pretty conspiratorial.
"It’s been said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. But just because it isn’t easy to imagine now doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make it happen."
So when the DSA says this, which I promise you almost no voters in the primaries read, and the candidates say "we're not communist, we just want more affordable X", it ceases, to me, to seem like a conspiracy and seems extremely clear that they say one thing to woo kumbaya-types into the fold while simultaneously preparing to do something else.
Also, my definition of socialist is not what you think it is. I didn't define socialism. I said socialism is subjective. It's whatever you want it to be on the spectrum that allows you to label yourself socialist. If you never label yourself a socialist (and I wouldn't label you that, as you seem as capitalist as I do) then you aren't a socialist. But the guy next to you might think of himself as one, even if he lines right up with you on everything but the label.
I mean. Yeah. That does annoy everyone since it’s, wrong. “Capitalism” (whatever that is. I think you mean a system that springs from a liberal judiciary with focus on private property rights cus you can’t like major in capitalist studies the way you can communist studies but I digress) is a system by which everyone helps each other and we all on the average end up richer than when we went in. Communism is a fantasy land without money and pain and desire where no one commits crime because …they have food? The mechanism escapes me. And socialism is “if people have a little more than me they probably stole it and if they have less then me they were probably stolen from! (Also we’d really like to call ourselves communist but the label is toxic due to all the genocide).”
You're right about communism. Your definition of socialism sort of works, in a bad-faith, glass-half-empty sort of way, at least till the silly bit in brackets. But capitalism is not "a system by which everyone helps each other". That's as fantastical as utopian communism.
Capitalism is just people responding to incentives. There's a sense in which it's not even a system, but just what happens in the absence of another system being enforced.
That's what anti-capitalists don't understand. They think capitalism is an arbitrary set of rules that someone invented. It's not.
Great posts, but capitalism isn't always that laissez-faire. While it might unfold and evolve in the absence of controls, it's naturally going to form a system in which people with more money expect to be granted more political influence, and of course they fuel policies that side with management, remove regulations, encourage wealth consolidation, and avoid criminal punishments the less wealthy would still incur. Our Capitalists aren't politicians and don't want to be, and no one runs under a Capitalist Party banner, but it is a system with a pretty clear agenda. Where it gets interesting is that the growing influence of the ultra rich is the flashpoint for populism on both the Left and Right.
I don’t see the agenda. I see chaos that a pattern seeking human id distilling into cause and effect.
Also you assume help is always good and always works and will have a 100% success rate and always be perfect. No often people will help you… fail. No one has perfect information. But “capitalism” does allow for
More help than socialism because it doesn’t have the NARC class that tattles on their neighbor for paining homes without a government license.
People also misunderstand evolution in this way. Capitalism And evolution share a lot of traits. One of them is that survival is paramount. And in a pluralistic society or individual actors Making the highest number of Meaningful connections that prevent you from falling too far into economic hardship is a selected out trait. Evolution accounts for “being nice” as a desirable fuckable trait. Capitalism also Rewards not being a total ratbag. Especially when you let go of the hysterical stereotype of “every billionaire is an alien pod person with no personal
Worth who are all
Evil and sleep on big
Piles of money. And they’re the ones that make milke expensive!”
Interesting collection of words, TH3. Since I'm clearly advocating for context and perspective, I'm a long way from always assuming anything, and words like 100% and "perfect" are the enemies of intelligent discussion.
Of course - it gets dragged into politics, and politics gets dragged into it! I consider myself a pro-capitalist progressive (which people might or might not call "democratic socialist") in large part because I think capitalism works well at base, but needs all sorts of checks to make it actually work for people - anti-trust law, anti-bribery law, workers' rights, tax-funded welfare state.
I just think it's important not to lose sight of the fact that capitalism is kind of the base reality, that we do our best to adjust to our needs.
Sure. Make that claim. Lemme ask. Was Xbox a proper target for anti trust? We really spending time making sure the specific military shooter market isn’t semi cornered for three years?
There’s a difference between “hey let’s make food safe” and “let’s shackle everyone”.
AOL time warner never came to dominate because it was never going to. Big companies don’t tend to exist long without government protection. There are very few if any natural
Monopolies. Nearly all of them are granted by government not prevented by it.
Which claim? Honest question, because every sentence in my above post could be considered a claim.
If it's about anti-trust legislation, as that's what you appear focused on: I have no idea of the specifics. Don't know about the Xbox thing at all. I just mentioned it because monopolies are an example of capitalism sometimes working against human interest.
I don't think the problem is that people have fuzzy definitions of socialism and communism. The problem is they have a fuzzy definition of capitalism. The thinking goes: There are things about my life I don't like. These things are obviously not my fault, they are because of our society. Our society is 'capitalist,' and socialism is not that, so I am for socialism.
Well, my dad’s whole family is from Ukraine and left in the middle of WW2 so to me “communism” means
-agricultural collectivism
-widespread starvation when all the harvest is confiscated by the NKVD
-an “election” with ballots where the choice is A-Commie stooge and the write in option of “Death in Siberia”, all while wearing a pair of state provided shoes while you “vote” b/c Stalin saw a picture of hillbillies in Alabama voting barefoot and said that would never happen in a workers paradise
-my uncle having his mind blown by a small town Kroger in 1989 when he visited the rest of his family in the USA for the first time-and my uncle had it pretty good for the USSR-he was a party member-it was what you had to do to move up in society-my grandpa didn’t hold it against him, and actually bought my uncle a commie car, so that made my a uncle a really big deal in his neighborhood
To put it bluntly, socialism is how ostensible commies run countries/political units when they achieve real political control.
And then there’s the question of what the hell is the People’s Republic of China? It’s officially a socialist state in the Marxist on-the-way-to-pure communism sense, but their state doesn’t look like it’s withering away (unless by “withering away” you mean “setting up a surveillance state that would make Orwell think “I didn’t go nearly dark enough in 1984”), and they have a market economy that would make Milton Friedman say “whoa, comrades, dial it back a bit.” I’ve been reliably told that Friedrich List, the nineteenth-century German economist who argued for internal liberalization and external protectionism, is high on lots of Chinese reading Lists (ha).
Oh, and “Rectal Hiroshima” is the name of my new death metal band.
I don't know why, but any political party that calls itself communist attracts autocrats like soda pop cans attract wasps. That is not only so of the leadership, but of rank and file members. each is a wasp buzzing around looking r someone to control. But that's politics. For economics, the CCP lets some people be capitalists some of the time, but don't anyone forget that the CCP is in contorol in the end.
The rampant crony capitalism and foreign investment in China is the “Chinese characteristics” part of the CCP’s official label of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”.
I have for the past five years theorized that most self-described socialists just think of a regulated market with a welfare state as socialism and I have yet to be proven wrong
According to todays "conservatives" any attempt to regulate, tax or publicly fund anything is "socialist." Which takes in pretty much everyone from Reaganite Republicans through Chairman Xi.
The conservative tendency to label everything that the Clintons, Obama, and Biden supported "socialism" probably played a big role in the popular definitional drift here.
When your baseline is Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, just about everyone looks like a socialist.
Except when Donald Trump makes industrial corporations turn over stakes to the federal government. That's conservatism, apparently.
It's hard to attach an ideology to people who are too stupid to hold one. If Trump thought changing the American flag to the hammer and sickle would get him media attention and make him money, he'd do it in a heartbeat.
Yes, which is why “national conservatives” like Trump, Vance, and Hawley are economic morons and an embarrassment for a party that actually nominated Barry Goldwater for president back when TikTok was something out of Flash Gordon. Trying to build an ideologically coherent brand out of Trump’s statements that retains at least a veneer of fiscal sanity is like when Larry Flynt tried to turn Hustler into a Christian publication……
Trump isn't really a conservative. I'd probably call him a Trumpist, both because his beliefs are a random grab-bag of positions, many of them deeply stupid, and because ultimately all he cares about is his own enrichment and aggrandizement.
Which, of course, doesn't take away an iota of the blame from the Republicans for enabling him.
Sure, Trump himself has said that he isn't a conservative. Somehow that hasn't stopped Republicans from changing the word to mean whatever he does.
I don’t disagree-and shame on the GOP for that. That’s why I’m ride or die w/ Rand Paul and Thomas Massie.
I have seen three consistent beliefs from Trump:
1. Brown people are bad
2. Tariffs are a genius economic strategy
3. He is the greatest
Everything else is subject to the shifting needs of his ego and/or bank account.
And all three of those things beliefs are wrong.
Hah! Exactly!
Agreed. Bang on, in fact.
Guess what-the GOP needed some vote getting mojo and Trump provided that. Call him an asshole, a fiscal lunatic but DC needed shaking up, the border needed fixing, and the SC needed a reboot in a Constitutional direction. Mission accomplished on those fronts. Give Trump all the grief in approval rankings he deserves, but a retroactive guilt trip for not voting for Brandon’s work wife isn’t in the cards.
DC needs shaking up so we gut the civil service, ignore all laws and norms, rule by executive order, fire investigators investigating us, appoint unqualified friends and family to cabinet etc etc.
The border needs fixing so we randomly arrest and murder people we think might be foreign in the streets until people are afraid to come.
The SC needs to be more "constitutional" so we jam in three judges on straight partisan votes who proceed to turn Article 14 into a dead letter and invent out of thin air a rule that presidents can't convicted of crimes.
I guess the next time your car needs an oil change you're going to throw a can of gas in through the window and light a match.
After the Brandon regime it was more like a blown engine cylinder, not an oil change. I fully admit to not being being shocked by Trump 2.0, but it is/was a better bet than Brandon/Kamala 2.0.
"we randomly arrest and murder people we think might be foreign in the streets until people are afraid to come"
No kidding. People I know have written off the US as a holiday destination. When one of my friends told us he had to travel there for work, everybody winced, and he said "No, I reckon I'll be okay. I'm white."
Hold on. What's "constitutional" about making the SC even more Republican-dominated?
Not my fault that the GOP buys into correct Constitutional interpretation more than the Ds. SC decisions should be ( and mostly have been, lately) about what is correct/Constitutional, not which political party will be big mad over the outcome.
Ain't much point in debating theoretical meanings when you nailed the praxis
Marxist communism is a corpse of an ideology, with scavengers plucking juicy slogans, symbols, and concepts in chunks off of its torso. Hence the ideological incoherency.
So, if you believe in progressive taxation but not authoritarianism that makes you a "scavenger" picking meat off a corpse? Ever think you might be being a tad melodramatic?
There's nothing wrong with adopting the good ideas of a failed movement while eschewing the bad ones.
People are always gong to complain about taxes-that’s pretty much the story of human history and even the BIble basically says to stfu, b/c things aren’t changing “Render unto Caesar….”. The current insanity is that the socialists/Cali Ds, etc. think they can somehow fund everything by gobbling up the literal wealth retention mechanism-the paper value of stocks/businesses and magically turning it into hard currency that will magically regenerate itself every year after the evil owners are forced to turn it over to Mamdani and Abdul the wannabe Senate socialist.
Yes, and you've hit a fundamental problem. Who are they going to sell their stock to if everyone *else* has to turn over the paper value of *their* stocks? Someone has to buy that shit for them to get money to give to the government.
Exactly. Warren Buffet’s dirty little secret is that he expanded his empire by snapping up dozens of privately owned companies at bargain rates when the heirs were smacked over the head with inheritance taxes on the death of the founder, and Warren rode to the rescue with a buyout offer.
Oh, Mamdani and the like have no idea what they're doing and are trying to sell a fantasy to the politically ignorant. No argument there.
If all you claim is to be is a liberal who believes in a regulated market with a calibrated tax policy, you aren’t who I’m talking about
I’m talking of the type of internet person who proudly claim to be both an anarchist and a communist, blissfully unaware that the two ideologies were mutually hostile. Just mining the Cold War and the labor fights of yesteryear for an aesthetic while buying into their OAN Dad’s complaints about the government programs being Marxist wholeheartedly.
That's fine, except your comment was in response to someone saying "socialist" generally seems to mean someone who wants a regulated market with a welfare state! So in context, it very much looks like you're trying to tar people who believe in progressive taxation as some kind of weird wannabe communists.
I read the original comment as critiquing revolutionary larpers who proudly claim the label of socialist or communist or both, but when pressed for details, describe regulated capitalism and welfare.
Although I guess that does make them distinct from revolutionary larpers who when pressed for details describe a wishlist of license and atrophied social mechanisms (abolish police and prisons etc).
Really? What part of "regulated market with a welfare state" made you think of revolutionary LARPers?
This really sounds like "I'm not saying all progressives are evil scumbags (but I am saying that really)".
That’s the game. It can’t be proven wrong because it is whatever you need it to be at the time.
Ironically, the most successful countries with robust social safety nets, like Denmark and Sweden, pay for those with a very robust capitalist economy!
I think in a lot of cases this seems about right, and it also helps explain why there can be such a vehement divide between self-described socialists and communists. This as a definition of socialism can reasonably be described as 'Capitalism that sucks less than it does right now,' which for most people is both attractive and seems like it ought to be attainable. If you're firmly in the communist camp, though, you don't WANT capitalism to suck less. That goes against your goals. You need capitalism to suck so bad that the people revolt (and ideally as a good-standing member of the party you get a comfy sinecure in the new regime).
I also think the definition of socialism just got warped a bit over time both by it being used pejoratively by opponents towards progressives and by European countries with large social safety nets getting rebranded as a form of socialism.
It's also useful as a way to differentiate itself from the mainstream Democratic party, which has steadily moved to the right on issues like labor. I think it would be a less widely used term for what is essentially old-school progressivism if the Democratic party still resembled... old-school progressives.
So, what we have now.
That does not describe the DSA, at all, in any respect.
Which is why Mamdani and Co. somehow think the South Bronx is going to magically turn into something akin to Goteborg, Sweden under their rule 🙄
Your definition of socialism as being the waypoint between capitalism and communism is, objectively, the correct one. It's how all of the people who created socialist states in the 20th century would've defined the term. It's crazy-making how self-identified Millennial and Gen Z "socialists" react with outrage when you point out that whatever the hell they mean by that term (they often don't seem to know), they're using it incorrectly. Nordic-style welfare capitalism is... Nordic-style welfare capitalism. It's not socialism. Stop calling it socialism.
For a lot of Millennial socialists, "socialism" seems to be the political label they apply to their generational resentment of Boomers; Boomer lefties are Democrats, but Millennials hate Boomers, so Millennials are "Democratic Socialists." Gen Z socialists think the garbled definition of socialism meaning "public roads" that they saw on Tik Tok sounds cool. It's the Boomer and Gen X socialists you need to watch out for: they're old enough to remember the Soviet Union, so tend to understand what the term has historically meant, and use it to describe themselves because they yearn to liquidate certain classes of capitalist pigs.
Ha — maybe I should have included an interpretation that’s “Non-boomer Democrat”. Because your points are well taken.
Part of it is branding, I believe. Most DSA morons know being openly communism will still lose more voters than win.
However, what seems to be over their head (much like having a job) is that communist and socialist regimes often used the term interchangeably. The end point of communism is analogous to the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth in Christian Eschatology. It just gets rid of those pesky things like the Ten Commandments. It’s a utopian goal. the Soviet Union was run by a communist party, but it was the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” and the subject republics were “Soviet Federative Socialist Republics.” Saying “I’m not a communist, I’m a socialist” isn’t going to gain a lot of supporters among the millions of Americans originating from Cuba, Vietnam, the former USSR, etc… or anyone who has any knowledge.
It’s true there was non Marxist socialism in the 19th century. Marx himself was pretty marginal among socialist thinkers until the Bolshevik Revolution. Lenin and his coterie came across Marx and clearly liked it, becoming their core ideology.
I think it was Phil Magness who did an analysis of political literature. There are few references to Marx until the Bolsheviks took power. The USSR then spread Marxism, using money, their status as the sole socialist state, and subterfuge to take over socialism movements. Most other socialist movements and strains of thought were pretty much historical curiosities after that.
It’s worth noting this—Marx was a great writer, but his economic and historical knowledge was non existent. He was kind of a moron on his core subject. A big part of his entire ideology is hatred of the division of labor. That is, specialization, upon which all civilization depends. Hard to enjoy the finer things in life, like being a lay about writer depending on the financial support of a rich friend, when you have to grow your own food, dig your own well, make your own tools. It’s truly retarded.
Lenin’s contribution- vanguardism- is pretty much a recognition that Marx was wrong. There had been no revolution of the working classes! It wasn’t, of course, that Marx was just a guy making stuff up. Clearly, the working classes were dumb/not class conscious. We need some educated, committed revolution to seize the means of production and guide the revolution. Yes, millions may die, but that’s necessary
"For a lot of Millennial socialists, "socialism" seems to be the political label they apply to their generational resentment of Boomers"
That's a really good point, Vlad.
American-style welfare capitalism! They got it from us! They got it all from us! And then we decided to burn it to the ground.
I'm going to do a "well actually." The system of social security was started by Otto von Bismark to kneecap the socialists who were gaining a lot of power at that time. FDR's plans were modelled off of the German system.
I think people are being obtuse when they consider a mixed economy -- mixture of capitalism with a redistributive welfare state -- which is what we have in the US and in the Nordic counties to be socialism.
But historically Socialism is a larger movement and group of ideologies that includes communism. Socialists just believe that there’s some kind of way to organize large scale industrial societies without private ownership of capital. And even then there’s for sure market socialists on the very edge of that definition. It includes all kinds of positions both on political authority and on how to organize production without private ownership. Although it’s much more debatable what communism is, in practice it’s the authoritarian Marxist subset of socialism descended from the Russian Bolshevik Party.
No. Sorry. Attempts to broaden the meaning of "socialist" to something other than Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy are more than 100 years too late. The people who built actual governments with "Socialist" in the name called dibs on the term, and there's no going back now. This is like trying to reclaim the term "National Socialism" because there are so many other things it could mean.
You can use words however you like, but that's not historically correct and it doesn't capture the existing spectrum of thought. Socialism coheres in the English speaking world in the 1820s. Marx doesn't start writing until 1848 and isn't a signficant influence until the first international in the 1860s. Even then, most of the members of the first international and even the second were not Marxists, they were from other socialist traditions. As late as the Russian Revolution in 1917, there are 4 socialist parties (if you count the anarchists), two of which are Marxist and only one of which is Leninist (the one let by Lenin). The largest party - who got completely rolled by Lenin and the Bolsheviks - where the Socialist Revolutionaries who came out of a completely different, specifically Russian tradition that predates the Communist Manifesto by decades. If you're going to insist on such an impoverished and constrained use of language I don't know how you'd account for this.
So you might say that you don't care about the history and only the current usage, but even there if you insist that socialists must be Marxist and Leninist that's not correct. The European social democratic parties (and the DSA) have Marxist groups in their makeup but what Leninists (and Trotskyites, Stalinists, Maoists etc) there were generally left (or were expelled) and formed their own. I think this is where the Communist/Socialist distinction comes from. Although Marx himself used the term, "Communist" doesn't really come into common usage until the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolshevik) renames itself the Russian Communist Party in 1918 and its from that organization - briefly led by Lenin himself - that the Communist International and all of the many Communist Parties of XXX descend. While Leninism can mean many things in different contexts and the man himself was brutally pragmatic and mercurially inconsistent they represent a distinctly authoritarian, centralist, vanguardist tradition within socialism. The Labour Party, the DSA, the German Social Democrats all outside of that, generally combining non-Leninist Marxism with non-Marxist socialism and increasingly plain old left liberalism.
As for their people in the DSA calling themselves communists? They're idiots.
I very much care about history, that's the point. In actually-existing history, there was a country: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. For more than 70 years, the Soviets advocated for, and at times successfully spread, their notion of "socialism" in which the dictatorship of the proletariat seized the means of production and started guiding society away from capitalism and towards communism. The Soviets did a lot of shit, some of which worked. They were kind of a big deal for most of the 20th century!
The Soviet understanding of "socialist" is now as definitive as the German Nazi understanding of "national socialism." They earned it by killing millions of people in socialism's name. The modern American leftist tendency to act as though "socialism" has nothing to do the Soviet understanding of the term is just as silly as pretending "national socialism" has nothing to do with the Nazis.
But also in actual history every NATO member had a political movement, in all but one case a major political party, that described itself as socialist but was prepared to go to war with the Soviet Union at a moments notice. It’s a consequential political movement, not some minor irrelevance. You don’t get to hand wave that history away with Nazi comparisons.
Social democracy is not the same as socialism
☝️
If Democrats are for something, socialists are for that, plus more. It’s why nothing is ever good enough: nothing can ever be good enough, by definition. So if Biden ends the drone war and the war in Afghanistan, socialists are for cutting off aid to Ukraine. If Democrats want to establish income based repayment plans for student loans, socialists are for total forgiveness. If Democrats support universal health care, socialists are for universal healthcare that covers all medical expenses without co-pays or deductibles. Any part of their agenda that becomes so broadly popular that it has a plausible chance of happening falls off the agenda. Twenty years ago socialists were for gay marriage and legalization of pot.
Socialists, then, are leftier-than-thou assholes who define themselves in opposition to Democrats so they can feel special. Communists are leftier-than-thou assholes who define themselves in opposition to other leftier-than-thou assholes so they can feel most specialest. Socialism is what normie Dems think is too radical and distance themselves from; communism is what socialists think is too radical and distance themselves from. Generally, communists support the same substantive agenda as socialists, but think it should be imposed by force after an armed uprising dismantles the state and builds a new one upon its ashes. Socialists think any policy that could be achieved with a Democratic trifecta is by definition not good enough. Communists think anything that could in principle be achieved on some theoretical time horizon through normal democratic means is by definition not good enough.
It's kind of the flip side of when Democrats adopt an idea conservatives came up with and then conservatives label their old idea socialism.
At the risk of engaging in an absurd People's Front of Judea vs Judean People's Front argument, I'll point out that most of the Americans who self-identify as "democratic socialists" are in fact social democrats. At least in Europe, this is a fairly well-defined and successful political movement with a long history: https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-democracy
True. But then you see DSA morons reading Marx and Lenin.
Hassan Piker, who clearly is a moron, is treated as a serious person by these people. He goes on a Chinese propaganda that would have made Malcolm Caldwell blush, and talks about how great China is. Caldwell was the Scottish academic whose last night on earth was spent all but fellating Pol Pot, which did not prevent his murder by the same regime before the sun was up.
The difference is that Caldwell was an academic, who spent his life proving Orwell’s quip that “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
Piker has a room temperature IQ, which is exceeded by deep bile. Guys like that are the first to be shot post-revolution. Useful in gaining power, far too dumb to be useful in power.
This might just be me, but I get major predator vibes from him. If stories come out, I’d be less surprised than I was by Platner, which was not at all.
I was not surprised by Graham Platner in the slightest. I’m surprised it took as long! Can you imagine in a Republican candidate in a must win election for control of the Senate had even half the level of scandal or bad decisions? It would have been all over the Times, MSNOW, CNN. Every republican would have been asked to denounce him.
Yes, that does seem to be part of the problem. European social democratic parties are not socialists. But the folks around here that get hooked on labels insist they are not only socialists, but probably closet communists.
Yeah, it's to the point that it feels like those terms are functionally interchangeable now.
I used to think of communism as bad, but not really as bad as fascism. Then I lived in Prague for four years and had many Czech friends. They told me about not being allowed to work at the jobs they chose, not daring to say their true thoughts out loud, dealing with scarce food and housing, being imprisoned for their beliefs, and having to escape over the border into Austria and then not seeing their family again until 1989.
I am way on the left end of the political spectrum. I believe the political systems in Czechia since the Velvet Revolution, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland (where I now live) lead to happiness and prosperity. But these are capitalist economies with a social safety net. They’re not socialism, not by a long shot.
The DSA is full of naive young people like I was before moving to Prague. I think they need to spend some time with people who lived under communism. It might change their minds.
In elementary school, one of my friends had a mother who grew up in Soviet Latvia. The stories we heard from her, and they were almost certainly the least awful stories, were quite horrifying. If you've heard those kinds of stories, it's hard to square that with the idea that communism was bad but much less bad than fascism. I have a couple of old friends who became academics who get furious at the idea that communism and fascism deserve to be in the same bucket because clearly capitalism is the same type of evil as fascism. The bad stuff that communism and socialism did is always capitalism's fault -- somehow the capitalists managed to do the bad stuff or make them do the bad stuff, or maybe it didnt' happen. They no longer have the excuse of being young and naive. I think that they are motivated by the same factors that cause the more extreme MAGA types. I do sometimes wonder if the presence of peopel like my old friends (we don't talk much anymore because life is short and I'd rather not spend it being listening to a lecture on the supposed evils of capitalism) in places of institutional power makes it easier for naive young people to keep believing in the DSA.
About 20 years ago, the former Mexican foreign minister under Vicente Fox had an essay in Foreign Affairs where he noted that the Latin American leftist intellectuals who had spent time in exile in Cuba had seen how communism failed and returned home as committed to liberal democracy (Ricardo Lagos), while those who had never lived under communism and saw it as a way to get power were just small men in search of a balcony (Hugo Chavez).
Great post Mari. I went down very much the same path, except mine wove through Mexico and Poland for 20 years. Set my goggles on a little straighter to be sure.
Robert Conquest, who wrote the book “The Great Terror,” wrote in a retrospective on the 20th century, that he felt that the Holocaust was “worse” than Stalinist crimes, but it was hard to explain.
What really separated the Third Reich was the systematic, industrialized, and targeted mass murder of specific groups of people, with a goal to wipe them out. What we know called genocide was not new to human conduct. But the way in which the Germans, one of the most educated and seeming sophisticated nations on the planet, went about it was simply unfathomable.
But in sheer death toll, communist states killed far more. Pol Pot murdered between 25% to 33% of human beings in about 4 years. Mao’s body count is biblical.
The apocryphal Stalin quote that the “death of one man is a tragedy, millions is a statistic” is really true, and has saved the reputation of the most murderous ideology in human history. That, and a collective amnesia in the sense making institutions of the west. There was nothing like denazification, which allowed this ideas to survive in open place - academia.
I think what you are describing here is what they call "the warmth of the collective."
I'm not even wading into this one, Jeff. I'm convinced words have no meaning anymore. Every time someone online describes themselves as a socialist, they come up with a different meaning and announce that "language is fluid you know".
Glad I got that public policy degree oh so many years ago. It's real handy in a world where you can make up your own definitions.
Everything is "fluid" nowadays.
Eh, I’m an old-school (unwoke) New Deal / Social Democrat. I have very little to add to the above thoughtful comments except that one’s membership in the DSA is, for me at least, an immediate and disqualifying red flag. And at the risk of offending many on the Hard Left if Israel is currently occupying most if not all of your mental bandwidth as your own fucking country slides into a fascist abyss (it is), your priorities are horribly awry. This isn’t to absolve Israel of its misdeeds or to stave off a much needed discussion about aid but a simple recognition that the fight for Democracy is at our doorstep, not in the Levant.
Young women are more concerned about Palestine and wearing a Keffiyeh than acknowledging their rights are quickly eroding around them.
True story. I attended my daughter’s graduation from Barnard the year of October 7th and not one student speaker addressed the looming onslaught against women in THIS country. It was all Palestine all the time. I was dumbfounded.
I’m not unfamiliar, historically speaking, with that period of America. Yes, FDR was “a traitor to his class” (great book, incidentally) which might be considered very much in his favor. Also, FDR didn’t appease socialists and communists; in fact the New Deal was conceived in part to blunt the appeal of both communism and facism created by the social and economic upheaval caused by the Great Depression.
FDR was smart to avoid calling the New Deal Socialist, but it is inaccurate to say the New Deal was trying to blunt the appeal of communism
or fascism. On a more conceptual level, the New Deal consisted of just trying stuff. At a basic level, there were quite a number of communists and fellow travelers in the New Deal coalition (and in government in the 30s and 40s).
There was also quite a bit of admiration among some New Dealers for the seeming economic success of Mussolini, Stalin, and then Hitler. Not the authoritarianism (for the most part), but many thought they had figured something out. The economic program of the New Deal was much closer to fascist Italy, Germany, and Peronist Argentina - corporatism, maintaining private ownership but with a heavy government hand in the name of class relations and efficiency (though it’s not efficient).
Then why did Roosevelt say that saving capitalism from itself would prevent a turn toward socialism or communism in America.
In hindsight, wasn't FDR's New Deal more Far Lefty than anything on the liberal table today? Led by a class traitor appeasing genuine card-carrying socialists and communists using The Great Depression for cover? And when anyone talks about a time when America was Great, are they embracing a post-Roosevelt America or wishing we could go back to a time before social safety nets, a surging middle class, and all those WPA public monuments that go into our patriotic montages?
FDR actually threw the brakes on the New Deal in the late 1930s b/c he actually was opposed to massive deficit spending. WW2 got big spenders off hook justification-wise.
Justification-wise, the Great Depression allowed for massive deficit spending, so that's a hard case to make. World War II made perfect bedfellows of massive government spending and our capitalist machinery. The post-War economic boom couldn't have happened without the GI Bill and The Marshall Plan, big government social engineering of the highest order, which also spurred American capitalism to new heights. I don't know why we need to pretend that both sides aren't happily providing reach arounds for each other.
What exactly is your point?
I was responding to your introduction of the New Deal to the discussion, which is pretty relevant and interesting. Then I was responding to Matt's "throwing the brakes" comment, which was kinda hard to parse. If I was edging towards a point it's how FDR was considered quite the socialist in his day, but most of those New Deal policies are considered American mainstream today. But it you pulled them out and rephrased them, FDR would look like one woke son of a bitch. He did appease America's sizable socialist and communist labor force -- at least enough to win their votes. Maybe I should have made that first post an open comment rather than a response to yours.
I just despair.
My friends seem to be divided into several groups:
"Socialists" because they hate their jobs.
"Socialists" because they have medical problems that they can't afford to address (I'm very sympathetic to these folks, but that's still not socialism).
"Socialists" because capitalism has made us into consumers instead of citizens. I don't entirely get this one.
"Socialists" because they really want to be the idle rich.
"Socialists" because they hate Trump. Hey, I'm a neoliberal shill and I hate Trump too! Can we be friends?
Here in France, I'd say the difference goes back to their stance towards the Soviet Union.
The Socialist Party (with a rose logo) descends from social-democrats, left-leaning parties who nevertheless rejected the Soviet Union and revolution. Some would have liked to see capitalists expropriated, but they all eventually concluded that liberal democracy was preferable to Stalinism. On the other hand, the Communists (with the hammer and sickle) were those who considered the Soviet Union a model and admired Stalin.
It got increasingly murky over the decades, as local politics slowly eroded ideology, then the USSR collapsed and the point became moot. But that's how the words were understood in the middle of the XXth century.
Just by way of illustrating what “socialist” policies might look like in our current context. In addition to kicking off his program of City run groceries, NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani has appointed fellow DSA member Cea Weaver as Director of the “Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants”. And among her first policy pronouncements was that through a targeted program of fees, increased taxes, and increased citation for code violations, the city intends to coerce the owners of distressed properties into selling or otherwise handing them over to the city, at which point they would become part of the NYC Housing Authority. Unaddressed of course, is that the city council has for some years now been denying these landlords the rent increases they need to make repairs, or that the NYCHA has a $80,000,000,000 backlog of repairs to it already ailing housing stock
It’s “socialism = Denmark; communism = USSR.” That’s it. That’s all it is.
Denmark is, of course, capitalist, and the actual structure of Danish political economy bears very little resemblance to what these people think it is. (“Tax billionaires and everyone gets everything they want for free and also let’s not enforce any rules or social norms” is not a system that exists anywhere, but somehow American lefties are convinced it exists in Scandinavia.)
Also none of this has anything to do with Palestine, but that won’t stop people from trying!
For the record, I don’t have much truck with people using the word “socialism” in this way. Political labels are always slippery - see the many different valences of the word “liberal.” Whether their version of socialism makes any sense on the merits is a separate question, however.
Denmark is fairly socially conservative in some respects, and a constitutional monarchy to boot.
Just as "gray" can mean any degree between black and white, "socialism" can mean any degree of taxation between libraries and forced labor, entirely subjectively. This allows the True Believers (I view communism as a religion) to have behind-closed-doors conversations that would never appeal to most people, while still being able to attract new converts with a lighter version of their fundamentalism. Whatever the would-be convert WANTS socialism to be, it is. Then once they've begun defining themselves as socialist, they'll be more likely to defend the team, even as it gets less and less rational. It's a cult-indoctrination technique.
As for what does socialism have to do with Palestine... Well don't get me started on that one. We'll be here all day.
I'd say this is right, except the glaring issue where you apparently think there's a conspiracy where the people who want public libraries and the people who think the USSR was a good idea are all in on it together. They're really, really not.
I'm a socialist, by your definition, because I like public libraries and approve of taxes paying for them. And there are few political movements I detest more than communism, because a) it's anti-democratic, b) capitalism works very well with the right checks and balances, and c) they're insisting we bring in a system that results in horror every time it's tried.
So stop with the conspiracy-mongering, please. It's frankly silly.
Then you misunderstood. I don't think that there is a conspiracy between people like me who support reasonably high taxes for libraries (and umpteen other social services) and those who drool over the next proletariat revolution.
What I think is that the True Communists dim the extremities of their end goals in public to become palatable, especially to people who don't really understand history and economics and who want to feel like the good guys fighting for the underdogs. They water down their definition (publicly) of socialism to such a degree that almost anyone can say "hey I guess I'm a socialist! This must be for me!" Then as the Communists start shifting further from pothole repair and closer to property confiscation, these same people become it's defenders. Nobody wants to be the exile or admit that they were wrong or maybe they change happens in such a way that they've begun changing too..
I don't believe it's a conspiracy, but I do believe that it's a plan by the far far left to gain acceptance and then move the goalposts.
This is something that SOUNDS like it could be happening, but I don't get the impression that it is, on any meaningful scale.
Like I said, I'm a "socialist" by your definition, and yet I don't find I have people trying to push me from welfare-state liberalism to communism. Not quickly, not slowly.
In my experience, honest-to-god communists tend to hit the ground running, typically because they're teenagers or young adults with little knowledge of history who think that communism is some clever new idea (or just decide it's the cool thing to like, because their friends say their communists too).
So I'm sorry, but this still sounds pretty conspiratorial.
This is on the DSA website, page 1:
"It’s been said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. But just because it isn’t easy to imagine now doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make it happen."
So when the DSA says this, which I promise you almost no voters in the primaries read, and the candidates say "we're not communist, we just want more affordable X", it ceases, to me, to seem like a conspiracy and seems extremely clear that they say one thing to woo kumbaya-types into the fold while simultaneously preparing to do something else.
Also, my definition of socialist is not what you think it is. I didn't define socialism. I said socialism is subjective. It's whatever you want it to be on the spectrum that allows you to label yourself socialist. If you never label yourself a socialist (and I wouldn't label you that, as you seem as capitalist as I do) then you aren't a socialist. But the guy next to you might think of himself as one, even if he lines right up with you on everything but the label.
Sure, "gray" is a distinction between black and white, but then how do you define "grey?"
Grey isn't really a distinction between black and white, it is everything between black and white. All of the gray-dients.
It's fluid silly.
"It's Fluid, Silly!" should be a political slogan. Like "It's the economy, stupid!"
If I was a politician or campaign manager in the halcyon days of the trans movement, I would insist "It's Fluid, Silly" as my slogan.
May as well annoy everyone: Capitalism is humans exploiting humans. Communism is the other way around. And Socialism is the happy medium.
I mean. Yeah. That does annoy everyone since it’s, wrong. “Capitalism” (whatever that is. I think you mean a system that springs from a liberal judiciary with focus on private property rights cus you can’t like major in capitalist studies the way you can communist studies but I digress) is a system by which everyone helps each other and we all on the average end up richer than when we went in. Communism is a fantasy land without money and pain and desire where no one commits crime because …they have food? The mechanism escapes me. And socialism is “if people have a little more than me they probably stole it and if they have less then me they were probably stolen from! (Also we’d really like to call ourselves communist but the label is toxic due to all the genocide).”
You're right about communism. Your definition of socialism sort of works, in a bad-faith, glass-half-empty sort of way, at least till the silly bit in brackets. But capitalism is not "a system by which everyone helps each other". That's as fantastical as utopian communism.
Capitalism is just people responding to incentives. There's a sense in which it's not even a system, but just what happens in the absence of another system being enforced.
That's what anti-capitalists don't understand. They think capitalism is an arbitrary set of rules that someone invented. It's not.
Great posts, but capitalism isn't always that laissez-faire. While it might unfold and evolve in the absence of controls, it's naturally going to form a system in which people with more money expect to be granted more political influence, and of course they fuel policies that side with management, remove regulations, encourage wealth consolidation, and avoid criminal punishments the less wealthy would still incur. Our Capitalists aren't politicians and don't want to be, and no one runs under a Capitalist Party banner, but it is a system with a pretty clear agenda. Where it gets interesting is that the growing influence of the ultra rich is the flashpoint for populism on both the Left and Right.
I don’t see the agenda. I see chaos that a pattern seeking human id distilling into cause and effect.
Also you assume help is always good and always works and will have a 100% success rate and always be perfect. No often people will help you… fail. No one has perfect information. But “capitalism” does allow for
More help than socialism because it doesn’t have the NARC class that tattles on their neighbor for paining homes without a government license.
People also misunderstand evolution in this way. Capitalism And evolution share a lot of traits. One of them is that survival is paramount. And in a pluralistic society or individual actors Making the highest number of Meaningful connections that prevent you from falling too far into economic hardship is a selected out trait. Evolution accounts for “being nice” as a desirable fuckable trait. Capitalism also Rewards not being a total ratbag. Especially when you let go of the hysterical stereotype of “every billionaire is an alien pod person with no personal
Worth who are all
Evil and sleep on big
Piles of money. And they’re the ones that make milke expensive!”
Interesting collection of words, TH3. Since I'm clearly advocating for context and perspective, I'm a long way from always assuming anything, and words like 100% and "perfect" are the enemies of intelligent discussion.
Capitalism helps more people than socialism. It just does.
I agree. That’s why I’m surprised you think that. You don’t really read my collection of words.
Of course - it gets dragged into politics, and politics gets dragged into it! I consider myself a pro-capitalist progressive (which people might or might not call "democratic socialist") in large part because I think capitalism works well at base, but needs all sorts of checks to make it actually work for people - anti-trust law, anti-bribery law, workers' rights, tax-funded welfare state.
I just think it's important not to lose sight of the fact that capitalism is kind of the base reality, that we do our best to adjust to our needs.
Sure. Make that claim. Lemme ask. Was Xbox a proper target for anti trust? We really spending time making sure the specific military shooter market isn’t semi cornered for three years?
There’s a difference between “hey let’s make food safe” and “let’s shackle everyone”.
AOL time warner never came to dominate because it was never going to. Big companies don’t tend to exist long without government protection. There are very few if any natural
Monopolies. Nearly all of them are granted by government not prevented by it.
"Sure. Make that claim."
Which claim? Honest question, because every sentence in my above post could be considered a claim.
If it's about anti-trust legislation, as that's what you appear focused on: I have no idea of the specifics. Don't know about the Xbox thing at all. I just mentioned it because monopolies are an example of capitalism sometimes working against human interest.
That's pretty much where I land, too. Apparently finding a coherent label and peer group is the issue.
Capitalism is an emergent phenomenon that spontaneously organizing itself though supply and demand.
I don't think the problem is that people have fuzzy definitions of socialism and communism. The problem is they have a fuzzy definition of capitalism. The thinking goes: There are things about my life I don't like. These things are obviously not my fault, they are because of our society. Our society is 'capitalist,' and socialism is not that, so I am for socialism.
Well, my dad’s whole family is from Ukraine and left in the middle of WW2 so to me “communism” means
-agricultural collectivism
-widespread starvation when all the harvest is confiscated by the NKVD
-an “election” with ballots where the choice is A-Commie stooge and the write in option of “Death in Siberia”, all while wearing a pair of state provided shoes while you “vote” b/c Stalin saw a picture of hillbillies in Alabama voting barefoot and said that would never happen in a workers paradise
-my uncle having his mind blown by a small town Kroger in 1989 when he visited the rest of his family in the USA for the first time-and my uncle had it pretty good for the USSR-he was a party member-it was what you had to do to move up in society-my grandpa didn’t hold it against him, and actually bought my uncle a commie car, so that made my a uncle a really big deal in his neighborhood
To put it bluntly, socialism is how ostensible commies run countries/political units when they achieve real political control.
And then there’s the question of what the hell is the People’s Republic of China? It’s officially a socialist state in the Marxist on-the-way-to-pure communism sense, but their state doesn’t look like it’s withering away (unless by “withering away” you mean “setting up a surveillance state that would make Orwell think “I didn’t go nearly dark enough in 1984”), and they have a market economy that would make Milton Friedman say “whoa, comrades, dial it back a bit.” I’ve been reliably told that Friedrich List, the nineteenth-century German economist who argued for internal liberalization and external protectionism, is high on lots of Chinese reading Lists (ha).
Oh, and “Rectal Hiroshima” is the name of my new death metal band.
I think they meet the definition of fascism, but their historical roots and their branding cause people to reject that interpretation.
When's your first album come out?
I don't know why, but any political party that calls itself communist attracts autocrats like soda pop cans attract wasps. That is not only so of the leadership, but of rank and file members. each is a wasp buzzing around looking r someone to control. But that's politics. For economics, the CCP lets some people be capitalists some of the time, but don't anyone forget that the CCP is in contorol in the end.
Funny post!
It's my understanding that the State-owned Enterprises are not doing so great right now in China.
The rampant crony capitalism and foreign investment in China is the “Chinese characteristics” part of the CCP’s official label of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”.