Define "Socialism"
By Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher, Jr., The Nation Posted on March 6, 2009, http://www.alternet.org/story/130365/ and it dawned on me that much resistance to socialism is definitional, flung about by a socialist populace that thinks they are capitalists. If you don't own the place where you work, trust me, you are not a capitalist, you just work for one. My favorite is the red state farmer or rancher who despises "socialism" but wants and needs his/her subsidies and is counting on social security to supplement retirement. What most of these mixed up souls are really saying is that they are against totalitarianism; their beef has nothing to do with socialism.
Pure capitalism doesn't work, ever, because (1) the markets all tend towards monopoly (2) there is no central planning and (3) the markets don't take into account the true costs of economic activity (e.g., long-term depletion of resources, pollution, labor abuse, etc). These are all well-proven phenomena in economics. But we haven't really been living in a true capitalistic state. If we did, the poor would quickly eat the rich and that would be that. Instead, we have been living in a form of perversely corrupted socialism where select individuals who have economic power subvert the social system to their desires through social schemes that continually redistribute wealth to those individuals. Thus, we get tax relief for the rich and large corporations, deregulation to allow damaging economic practices to proceed unfettered, union busting and the like. In reality, this is an ass-backward, corrupted socialism where, under the name of capitalism, the people use their own social system not for the greater good but to enrich an elite segment of the society. One of the first things that needs to be accomplished in the process of unraveling this quagmire is to come up with definitions for the terms being used. "Socialism" in modern parlance is associated with sovietism or maoism. Both are types of socialism to be sure but so is the current American model.
People need to recognize that socialism isn't inherently bad or inefficient, but is necessary to any governmental system that needs to distribute finite resources fairly and account for the costs of economic activity. The term "socialism" currently being misused to unfairly compare American standards of living with countries that have fewer resources and corruption of totalitarian regimes (China and Russia) or, worse, countries that have fewer resources, corruption and are under a devastating trade embargo (Cuba). Even with these deficits, China is outperforming us economically, Russia's economy has recovered with the development of its oil industry and Cuba has good social services available to all of its people (aka equality). Our current economic turmoil is quickly teaching the American public, who now find themselves in the wake of the fallout from this dysfunctional, nonsensical brand of American socialism, that our system of government that serves the few at the expense of the many is corrupted.
It would be nice to pull the public out from under the spell of faux capitalism because they wouldn't like real capitalism if it existed. It would be right to have people recognize that we already are socialists in our own right, so that we can begin the work of determining what is the best strain of socialism. The word may be so damaged and connotative that it needs to be supplanted with a new term just like when the term "liberal" was jettisoned for "progressive," or "trial lawyer" kicked to the curb for "consumer advocate." But as long as the wealthy elements of our society manipulate the Press and public opinion into despising certain labels by misdefining what they stand for, we will all remain socialists who like to call ourselves capitalists.
