‘Socialism’ Isn’t Socialism

My fellow Americans, we need to nip “socialism” in the bud.

By Alaric Dearment

In case you didn’t notice the scare quotes, it’s because I’m referring not to socialism itself, but the misinformed national conversation about it among proponents and opponents alike.

It’s important we have this discussion now, what with a self-described “socialist,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, several so-called “Democratic Socialists” now in Congress and President Trump and the Republicans all too eager to warn that embracing their ideas will turn us into Venezuela.

The problem is that the “socialism” a growing number of Democrats promote and the “socialism” that Republicans decry are caricatures, shorthand for policies they like or dislike. For the left, “socialism” means things like universal health care, tuition-free college and efficient public transit that doesn’t smell like a derelict public toilet. For the right, it’s a handy smear for anyone who supports government sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong.

Here’s what socialism really means in the real world: an economic model involving state control of the means of production, such as Soviet-style central planning or Yugoslav-style collective management. It’s distinguished from communism, a utopian political ideology that prescribes socialism for building an egalitarian society.

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In other words, socialism doesn’t entail well-funded public goods or regulation of private enterprise, but private enterprise is severely limited or banned. For example, private business in Yugoslavia was limited to tiny mom-and-pop shops. In Maoist China, it was a crime.

Today, such heavy-handed economic governance is mostly limited to North Korea and Cuba, though the latter has slowly begun transitioning to mixed capitalism as well. Although China and Venezuela call themselves socialist, the economic model of the former is more accurately called state capitalism, while the latter is an authoritarian kleptocracy that uses left-wing populism to maintain support for the government.

Meanwhile, Sanders touts the Nordic countries as models of socialism, but their generous welfare states thrive thanks to revenue from market capitalist economies. For comparison, even in that paragon of laissez-faire capitalism, Hong Kong, the government owns the land and offers universal health care, while much of the population lives in subsidized public housing.

Of course, nobody would call Hong Kong socialist. So it’s a tad ironic that universal health care for the U.S. is decried as “socialism,” but welfare for the wealthy in the form of trillion-dollar tax breaks that do little for the economy is not.

With the popular American conception of “socialism” bearing so little resemblance to the real thing, it’s no wonder the conversation around it has become so unhinged. After all, polls have shown only a small minority of Americans support socialists for public office, but a majority support the federal government ensuring all Americans have health-care coverage.

Why the disconnect? It’s simple: Universal health care, tuition-free college, and high-speed trains aren’t true socialism, any more than public education and public parks and Social Security are socialism. They’re the kinds of amenities found in every developed country except, for the most part, this one. But decades of disinformation, emanating from industries with vested interests in keeping such amenities off our shores, have conditioned us to fear them as “socialism” and view their absence as intrinsic to American capitalism. Perhaps that’s why many on the left now claim to oppose “capitalism” as well.

But it all comes with a price. Medical bankruptcy is an alien concept in other developed countries, but commonplace here. College tuition grows out of control, forcing students to take on enormous student loans they may never pay off. New York’s subways are a virtual poster child for infrastructural decay.

These are critical problems we face as a nation that requires a grown-up conversation on how to solve them. Such a conversation won’t take place until we accept that capitalism’s benevolence or malevolence depends on how it’s used, and that admitting it can’t solve all problems doesn’t make one a “socialist.” -NDN