When I started school (1st grade), I could already read quite well. I was proud of this, probably obnoxiously so. When a group of boys presented me with a word to read, it was no challenge: “ship” with a “t” replacing the “p.” I was horrified, humiliated, and confused when they burst into laughter, telling me that I had said a “bad” word.
Beyond the initial embarrassment, I was perplexed: how could a word be bad? Could it hit, murder, steal, rob, kick, bite a person? I eventually learned to categorize words beyond their simple meaning and watched some words turn from good to bad or vice versa: queer, bitch, several men’s names bestowed to men’s body parts, gay, snowflake, and more. But because of that early scalding, I’m always interested in why words take on a particular tang.
Enter “socialism.” I thought I knew what it meant -- kind of. But reactions to the word are extreme: for some people, it represents bread lines, prohibited swimming pools, beat up cars, loss of property, Animal Farm, communism. For others, it’s Social Security, 8-hour work days, no child labor, workers’ rights, public schools, interstate highways.
Tracing the etymology doesn’t really help: the root, “socius,” means “companion, ally, associate, fellow, sharer.” All good things, so why the animus toward “socialism”? (The same question could be applied to “liberal” and “conservative,” both endowed with more meaning than their simple origins would bestow.) My online etymology site blames the French for dragging the word into the dirt of politics: socialisme, generally associated with a movement to improve conditions for less fortunate members of society. It did acquire a quite pungent funk due to its use in both German and Russian totalitarian and authoritarian regimes: National Socialism (Nazi) and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Probably both used it as a cloak to hide the authoritarianism, not really having any intent to improve citizens’ lives. But the use was an unfortunate hijacking of a word of good intentions: basically promoting improved welfare of a given society.
The negative implications of “socialism” are quite entrenched: from The Economist, 6 January, 2012 -- “Socialism is not "the government should provide healthcare" or "the rich should be taxed more" nor any of the other watery social-democratic positions that the American right likes to demonise by calling them "socialist"—and granted, it is chiefly the right that does so, but the fact that rightists are so rarely confronted and ridiculed for it means that they have successfully muddied the political discourse to the point where an awful lot of Americans have only the flimsiest grasp of what socialism is. And that, in a country that sent tens of thousands of men to die fighting socialism, is frankly an insult to those dead soldiers' memories.” Floating on the waves of the internet, much like that huge blob of plastic twice the size of Texas that is crushing life out of the Pacific Ocean, are images from World War II, showing war scenes and labelled as the fight against socialism. This is inaccurate, despite the coopting of “socialism” in the regime’s names. The evil behind the world wars was nationalistic aggression, authoritarianism, and fascism.
Scholars who like to categorize and parse political and economic terms often find they have to define socialism in terms of other -isms, mainly capitalism and communism. Here’s a long, but clarifying discussion of the modern use of socialism.
Philip Bump, The Independent, 25/10/15:
The day after the first Democratic presidential debate, Donald Trump called Bernie Sanders a maniac.
“This socialist-slash-communist,” Trump said to raucous cheers. “I call him a socialist-slash-communist, because that's what he is.”
Well, no. The terms “socialist” and “communist” are often confused, thanks in large part to the Cold War. Layer on top of that the nuance of the term “democratic socialist,” which is how Sanders describes himself, and it's easy to see why people might generally be confused. (Even if they aren't intentionally blurring that line, as it's safe to assume Mr. Trump might have been doing.) As our Dave Weigel and David Farenthold reported this week, voters are not clear on the difference, either.
To offer America a bit of a primer, I reached out to Dr. Lawrence Quill, chairman and professor of political science at San Jose State University, over e-mail. He explained the difference between communism, socialism, capitalism and democratic socialism — in very professorial terms.
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Capitalism — or really the concept of “liberalism” — arose in the 17th century, and centers on the right to private property. In Adam Smith's foundational “Wealth of Nations,” Quill notes, “is recognition that capitalism is going to make the lives of a good majority of the population miserable, and that there will be a need for government intervention in society and the economy to offset the worse effects.”
Socialism was in part a response to capitalism, largely through the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Socialism focuses on the inequalities that arise within capitalism through a number of possible responses. Quill outlined some possibilities: “[T]he state might 'wither away' or collapse altogether, in others it would regulate the production of goods and services, in yet others it would become thoroughly democratic” — all with the aim of reducing that inequality.
You can see that's where democratic socialism arises. That philosophy, Quill writes, seeks “democratic control of sectors of society and economy in order to avoid the pitfalls of an unregulated market and — this is most important — the kind of terrible authoritarian government that emerged in the Soviet Union.”
Communism “was the endpoint of Marx's ideas,” Quill writes, though Marx didn't delineate what it would look like, exactly. “We find hints in works like 'The German Ideology” (1846) where there is a description of working life that is unalienated, i.e. creative and various — we hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and become opera critics in the evening.“ During the Cold War, though, the idea came to be inextricably and pejoratively associated with the Soviet Union and with the elimination of private property. The term, in Quill's words, ”served as a shorthand for all things un-American“ — which was the way that Trump used it.
Quill's most important point is that “all of these terms are 'umbrella concepts'; in other words, they are host to a family of related ideas, not all of them compatible with one another.” We tend to use the terms concretely, which necessarily introduces inaccuracies. Or, as Quill put it, “they [can] serve as excuses not to think, as belief systems that discourage explorations of the mismatch between theory and practice and the inconsistencies of any grand theory.”
So that's the college-level curriculum. Next, I scaled it back a bit and talked to Tori Waite, who teaches high school history at Del Mar High School in San Jose. After all, since most of us were first introduced to these ideas in high school, perhaps we just need a refresher.
“When we teach about the different types of economies,” Waite said, “the first thing we do is we talk about economic questions. How is it made? Who makes it? Who gets to buy it? Based on the economy, different people answer those questions.”
Simplifying Quill's explanation: “In a communist country, the government answers those questions. There's no private business. There's no private property. The government decides.”
“In a capitalist society, the people make those decisions. The businesses, the market decides how much products will cost, how many there are, where it will be made.”
“In the socialist system, there's a mix of both. The government operates the system to help all, but there is opportunity for private property and private wealth. That's generally how we talk about it.” Back to Quill's point: A socialist government could control all of the means of production — or it could, for example, use taxes to redistribute resources among the population.
Both Quill and Waite note that the United States is not a purely capitalist society. There are and have long been socialist aspects to how the government makes decisions and applies its power, while still striving to keep the marketplace as free as possible. And, of course, while allowing democratic decisions to guide what it does.
The example of the United States serves as a reminder that these ideas exist on a three-dimensional scale, in which differentiation is often tricky.
Several of my friends whom I polled as to what “socialism” means brought up programs our country or state provides, paid for by us, that benefit us all: Social Security, Park System, interstate and other highways, police forces, fire departments, armed forces, VA services, health research and treatment. In other words, anything that could be privatized (and thereby exploited) but isn’t, at the moment. In this sense socialism is more opposite to libertarianism than to capitalism or mercantilism. They also mention working conditions, fairness in society, and welfare and treatment of children and elderly, most of which are controls on unfettered capitalism.
The danger in socialism, in my opinion, is in the use of the word. A person using it in the “helping society” sense may be stating it to someone who hears it with the knee-jerk reaction “that’s what we fought world wars against.” The shutters close and no honest exchange is possible, no clarification of what exactly was meant by its usage. Is the concern that young people in college are expressing new openness to socialist ideas springing from the reaction to the word: in other words, worry that the students are espousing authoritarian tendencies and need to “study history”? Certainly they need to study history, but history, well-taught and researched, would show that “socialism” has had many usages and meanings, often diametrically opposed, throughout history. Modern use of “socialism” always needs a modifier: tie it to democracy and capitalism, citizens’ needs and interests for every member of society. Otherwise it will be associated with those political regimes who used it as a mask for oligarchy, dictatorship, fascism, and other authoritarian regimes.
I like George Bernard Shaw’s words in “An Unsocial Socialist,” 1900:
I find that socialism is often misunderstood by its least intelligent supporters and opponents to mean simply unrestrained indulgence of our natural propensity to heave bricks at respectable persons.