A Primer on Socialism
People are talking about socialism because current Democratic Socialists have won primary votes, some municipal elections, and are likely to win some congressional seats. But these are accusations rather than descriptions. The President says some ared Communists or like that. I want to provide some obvious distinctions so as to clarify the matter.
Socialism before the Industrial Revolution was a description of a community whereby all its members engaged in collective activities so as to fulfill a larger purpose. Christian Socialism, as was observed by Karl Marx, meant people had common barracks, commissaries, and services so that they could pursue their common vocation of pursuing God. :ater on, during the early generations of the resettlement of Jews into Palestine, there were ”kibuttim". Where farming was congregant and members given allowances, and congregate housing and eating and even children raised in separate collective facilities, occasionally visited by their parents.
Marx refocussed the concept to refer to nations rather than communities and to refer only to economic dynamics. Socialism is a way to organize a social system operates by having government control or own the means of production, which means all those industries that dominate the economy so as to create products and jobs and otherwise would control the government rather than serve it. So it means major manufacturing, but not the ma and pa grocery store. It means the government controls the utilities, the coal and steel industry, the automobile plants, It may not mean the government will control the press or the networks because that would interfere with the fair and freer elections that are needed so that the government is checked and guided by the population. Socialist governments have reigned throughout Europe, including Great Britain but never in the United States, the reason for that is because the United States is so prosperous that it doesn’t have to develop that expediently and also because ethnic clashes have divided the working class so that it can’t unify and elect a socialist government.
The Soviet version of Marxism emerged after the Russian Revolution in 1917. It dispensed with the need for free elections. It said, instead, that the government would be led by "a dictatorship of the proletariat”, which meant that a political party dedicated to and for the working class would control the government and make political, cultural and economic decisions for the nation. No free speech is required and disagreements can be punished by imprisonment or death. The government does not have to obey economic supply and demand but order quotas of production depending on its political objectives. Including the reshaping of the character of its citizens so as to make them loyal citizens dedicated to the leadership.
By the middle of the twentieth century, most advanced industrial societies had developed what was then called a "mixed economy. That meant that most economic activity was owned and controlled by privately owned corporations motivated by profit but more or less regulated by the government to insure competition and minimum standards for working conditions. Liberal and socialist administrations increased taxes and benefits and conservative administrations decreased taxes and benefits and regulations. Fully engaged Socialists such as those in Scandinavia could have high taxes and benefits thanks to prosperous industries such as Saab and Ikea. The command economies that followed the quota system were Communist. They were anti-democratic and unable to create consumer needs. Soviet refrigerators blew up and no Soviet made cars were exported while a revived Germany and Japan exported cars to great American success. The experiment in Nazi Germany of a strong dictatorial state with very active capitalism was economically successful but lasted r only 12 years.
By the end of the twentieth century it could be said that all nations except North Korea could be said to be considered capitalistic in that some were state capitalists in that government intruded and controlled large corporations that nevertheless were subject to the larger laws and incentives of private enterprise: regulation of interest rates, consumer demand, competition between enterprises beholden to favorites in the government, and profits to owners. North Korea remained a command economy.
A number of political figures such as Eugebe Debs emerged in American history and were socialists. Bernie Sanders emerged in the nineties and was remarkable not only because he combined eloquence with political sagacity but was fully aware that socialism meant government control of the means of production. This time, however, it did not mean steel and hydroelectric plants. It meant services vital for minimal needs that were not easily provided as a commodity that could be sold to individuals in single and repeatable purchases, such as bread and cars and better managed as collective purchases, such as education and health care. Moreover, these essentials made up a significant part of the economy. Health care is about a tenth of the American GDP. Education is the major expense of many community budgets. Sanders emphasized medical care and has consistently argued for Medicare for all, which means universal medical care even though the most extensive Obamacare covered ninety percent of the population because Sanders, the good Socialist thought that cutting out the insurance companies would lead to efficiencies and non duplication that the cost of medical care would go wat down when in fact medical vare goes up because it provides more services in testing and rehabilitation and new procedures. But Sanders had a clear analysis..
The Democratic Socialists of America, an organization that has become prominent in the past few years because electing mayors and nominating congresspeople as democrats this year, DSanders still its most prominent member, is not as clear in ideology as Sanders is. The organization engages in what would have been called fifty years ago as “vulgar Marxism”, which meant that the rich were just greedy, and knew it, not at all interested in the greater good, while sophisticated Marxists thought that the economic system of capitalism followed inevitable laws of economics and produced goods and services and even, some thought, prosperity yo the general population, however self deluded they might be because Marxists thought the population was either economically orf culturally immiserated. The current Democratic Socialists think that freeing America from capitalism will make everyone prosperous and free.
Journalists have regarded some of the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America as outrageous when they are reasonable if wrongheaded. One is the idea of abolishing the Senate, which would radically alter the United States government. But other democracies have unicameral legislatures. The House of Lords in Great Britain is just a debating society. Moreover, the function of the Senate as a deliberative body has waned and it follows a party line vote, just like the House of Representatives, with very few members engaged in taking independent considerations of the issues nor do the states have distinct cultures to represent because states are decided by urban and rural; and regionalism is the unit of cultural differences. The worst aspect of the Senate is how disproportionate it is, California has forty million people and gets two senators and Wyoming has less than a million people and has the same two senators. Five states, North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho gave ten senators, which is a tenth of the body, while representing 1/70th of the population. Hardly fair. Acreage shouldn’t vote, only people. So it is reasonable to suggest altering the Constitution even though it would be very difficult to accomplish in practice.
There is a more practical way to accomplish the end of more equal representation. Voluntarily acquire immigrants from other countries to increase the populations of the least inhabited states. Let's say we have five million people added to each of these five underpopulated states. That would considerably change the balance. In fact, the mountain West might have been expected to more fully fill up during the period of the Western Expansion, and that never happened. Moreover, immigrants to the United States in a few generations will have grandchildren in CalTech and Harvard, a great asset to the nation, making the United States more prosperous and even more powerful, which most people might endorse.
More picayune is the assertion that people with permanent green cards should be allowed to vote because they are part of the community and therefore have an interest in voting, they belong like Americans except for the title of “citizen”. But citizenship only means the sole additional rights to vote and carry a passport and why couldn’t people just do the additional little work of getting naturalized? Overcoming that generally low hurdle is a recognition that the world is still a set of nations and that allegiance to one or another provides protections that people without citizenship, such as displaced persons after World War II, did not have. The United States was radical enough in regarding citizenship as not an allegiance to a king or an ethnicity but to the Constitution itself. Why alter that unless citizenship is onerous?
The important point about these parts of the DSA platform is that they are not socialistic. They do not follow from the alteration of the organization of the means of production. Rather, they can be considered what Marx would consider the culture or superstructure of social life and so not a central matter. They might be considered, rather, part of the agenda of a radically small “d” democracy. What that suggests is that socialism is not at the heart of the socialist movement.