Everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, as a world system sincerely applied, is a way out. It would at least ensure us getting enough to eat even if it deprived us of everything else. Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everyone; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions, seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.—George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
Dinesh D’Souza has had a remarkably tidal career. Starting in the late 1980s, he published a series of politely received books on Christian doctrine that attracted the attention of academic theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Michael Novak. But it wasn’t until his 1991 book, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, that D’Souza really caught the public eye. The book made a contribution to the minor genre of conservative critiques of campus activism and politics and received warm reviews from the bowtie and cigar part of the right-wing press. Even the New York Review of Books took note.
D’Souza seemed fated for a cushy career as a conservative intellectual, bouncing between right-wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and prestigious outlets like the Public Discourse and First Things. But things began to slip off the rails with 1995’s The End of Racism and especially The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. The latter contains an infamous passage in which the author claims that the “cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the non profit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world. The Muslims who carried out the 9/11 attacks were the product of this visceral rage.” This take, along with D’Souza’s admission that he had some sympathy with fundamentalist critiques of western culture, proved too much for many conservatives, leading D’Souza to complain that he was being attacked by his own side in this lengthy op ed. This was pretty much the end of D’Souza the serious intellectual and the birth of the popular far-right conspiracy theorist, who has released books and documentaries hypothesizing that Barak Obama had a radical postcolonial agenda, comparing Richard Spencer to a “progressive Democrat” and arguing that Hitler was OK with homosexuality. The publications slowed for a little while when D’Souza was briefly imprisoned at a halfway house—colourfully depicted in the film Hillary’s America as the time when Dinesh discovered that the Democratic party was basically a gang—but picked up again after his release and eventual pardon by Donald Trump.
His latest book, United States of Socialism, is rather odd, though, to his credit, it’s better than a lot of what passes for pop-conservative commentary these days (I’m looking at you, Dave Rubin). There are the requisite eye-rolling passages, describing sixties activists and rock stars as “parodies of humanity … horny slothful loafers completely divorced from real-world problems, neurotically focused on themselves, their drugs and sex lives and mind-numbing music” and depicting Bernie Sanders as a lazy leech who publishes in “hippie rags.” During these sometimes interminable sections, I found myself dozing off on more than one occasion. But there are enough stabs at argumentation to prevent United States of Socialism from having quite as strong anaesthetic effects as Don’t Burn This Book. But, unfortunately, D’Souza’s arguments won’t be even moderately compelling to anyone who isn’t already convinced that Joe Biden is Josef Stalin reincarnated.
What Isn’t Socialism?
In Reinhold Niebuhr’s words, “Political controversies are always conflicts between sinners, and not between righteous men and sinners.” Falwell is in the pulpit. The Bible speaks of good and evil, and in the Bible the two do not mix. But in politics, distinctions are often less vivid. Falwell’s rhetoric, however, frequently does not distinguish between liberals, socialists, and Communists. He sometimes regards his enemies as opposing not just his programs, but God Himself. So he demonizes his critics the way they do him.—Falwell Before the Millennium, Dinesh D’Souza
One of the curious things I discovered from reading United States of Socialism is that the Marxists actually won the Cold War. Apparently, it wasn’t even close—at least, that is the only logical conclusion you can draw from the fact that pretty much everyone to the left of D’Souza is depicted as some kind of socialist. Even Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are socialists lite. While they may have liquidated the Social Democrats and Communists who were their main enemies, and sat on the right side of the Reichstag with other conservative parties, it seems that the Nazis were socialists too. Franklin Roosevelt was at least socialist curious and billionaire Michael Bloomberg is “rhapsodic” in his praise of Chinese communism. The Nordic countries practice “Sven Socialism”—in fact, pretty much ever developed country other than the US is a socialist state, since they all have public health care systems. Feminists, advocates for racial and LBGT equality and Miley Cyrus (a “highly disturbed individual,” who is “headed for the asylum or the morgue”) are “identity socialists.” Just about the only two people in history who are not socialists, according to D’Souza, are George Orwell and J. S Mill—despite the fact that shortly before his death Orwell claimed that “every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly … for Democratic Socialism, as I understand it.” Mill also often called himself a socialist and certainly sympathised with many socialist ambitions. This makes shrill passages like the following more than a little ironic:
We are again in Orwell territory … It’s hard for me to believe that, thirty years after I came to America as an idealistic teenager, this is where we are headed. In college I read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which contains the thrilling declaration “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. We seem to have gone, in one generation, from the bracing atmosphere of Mill’s On Liberty to the dark, dank atmosphere of Orwell’s 1984. Hate Week! The Ministry of Truth! The Thought Police! All of this—once the hallmark of faraway socialist regimes—is now familiar. It has become our world.
But if everything and everyone is socialist, then nothing is. D’Souza casually throws around a huge number of terms as though they were synonyms—leftist, progressive, Democrat, socialist, socialist lite, Stalinism. Any meaningful distinctions between all those to the left of a hard right American Republican are lost. Anyone who has actually engaged with the American political left would know there are deep and perhaps unbridgeable chasms between its different factions. D’Souza sometimes circles around this reality without really acknowledging it, as we see in his occasional begrudging admissions that Marx would have probably found the rainbow coalition politics of the post-Reagan Democratic party noxious. There are intense doctrinal differences between revolutionary Marxist-Leninists who emphasize class concerns, New Leftists who view them are irrevocably patriarchal and exclusionary and social democrats and democratic socialists who accept many features of liberal politics but want a more egalitarian economic system. These are in turn quite distinct from classical liberals and libertarians like J. S. Mill and Jason Brennan, who may be more or less economically left-wing, but who reject all socially conservative constraints on individual liberty in favor of diverse “experiments in living” and consequently tend to vigorously support multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism over cultural and ethnic nationalism. In D’Souza’s book, all these people are in the same camp and therefore “evil,” dangerous and apparently too partisan to harmoniously coexist with genteel conservatives like Dinesh.
The Moral Basis of Capitalism
When he’s not implying that Barak Obama is paying for blowjobs and crack cocaine—I’m not joking: read Chapter Six—D’Souza occasionally manages to make some quasi-reasonable arguments. The most interesting part of the book is Chapter Five, where he makes the case for the morality of capitalism. D’Souza rightly points out that there have always been convincing ethical objections to capitalism—even free market apologists like F. A. Hayek have conceded that, in a capitalist society, many of the unworthy get ahead, while many of the worthy fall behind. Social inequalities are now so stark that even billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have lobbed softball criticisms at unbridled capitalism and called for the rich to be taxed more heavily. Everyone from Marx to Milton Friedman has praised capitalism for its capacity to produce goods and wealth, but there remain serious questions as to whether it distributes that wealth in a just manner. D’Souza tries to argue that it does, and to do so he references some of the best arguments to the contrary.
Unfortunately he does not engage with these arguments in any depth. He provides an impressive list of moral critiques of capitalism, from Marx to John Rawls and Amartya Sen, but he speeds through all these arguments in a few scant pages and never offers any substantial rebuttals. What emerges is more a kind of pastiche, propped up by a lot of emotionally heated language about “lifelong” leeches and “Rawlsian mumbo jumbo.” Take his criticism of a well known thought experiment by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. In The Idea of Justice, Sen asks us to consider which of three people most deserves to be given a flute. Carla says she should get it because she made it. Jen says she should because she is desperately poor and would enjoy playing it the most. And Jim claims that he should get the flute because he can play it best. The three potential recipients here map nicely onto different theories of distributive justice. Carla’s claim to the flute flows from the Lockean idea that one should be entitled to the products of one’s labor. Jen’s claim is based on the utilitarian argument that we should distribute goods in such a way as to maximize overall happiness and minimize suffering. And Jim’s claim coincides with virtue-oriented and perfectionist theories that stress the importance of pursuing human excellence.
One could make a compelling argument in favour of any of these three moral theories. Sen’s own capability-based approach tries to split the difference between them. But D’Souza doesn’t even try to provide a justification for his preferred take. He merely asserts, “The flute always belonged to Carla, who created it. It’s obviously Carla’s flute. Absent Carla, there wouldn’t be a flute.” This doesn’t even approximate an argument. There are cases in which almost anyone would accept that more compelling concerns outweigh the entitlement to the product of one’s labor or to one’s property. For example, in his paper “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer (whom D’Souza once debated) asks us to imagine that we’re driving by a shallow pool when we see a child drowning. We can rescue her—but only at the cost of ruining our fine clothes. Singer points out that if we accept that the child’s life outweighs our right to preserve our property, the reasoning behind this leads to radically egalitarian connotations of a type D’Souza would emphatically reject.
Indeed, as a conservative, D’Souza should find the Lockean theory of work-based entitlement problematic. The notion that using your own personal labor to make something creates an entitlement to it has roots in both the Protestant work ethic and in major works of philosophy like Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. But it is not very popular among conservative economists for a simple reason: nowadays, it is strongly associated with Marx’s arguments about exploitation. Consider McDonald’s, about which D’Souza waxes poetic in the book. Did Ray Kroc or his successors actually grill many of the burgers that built the company? Does this mean that since the employees “created” the hamburgers that they’re “obviously” their property? D’Souza would never want to accept that conclusion. He spends a lot of the book arguing that labourers and workers contribute a lot less to the success of the businesses they work for than entrepreneurs do. This results in some pretty funny fan-fiction in which D’Souza waxes poetic about Donald Trump’s business genius and fantasizes about talking to a parking lot attendant who works for Trump. D’Souza assures the guy that “his worth is not more” than whatever Trump decides to pay him: “Someone—in this case Trump—had the idea for that resort. He organized it. He marketed it and established the coveted brand. His brand attracted the clientele. He took all the risk. The parking guy did none of this. So Trump, not the parking guy, deserves the lion’s share of the profit.”
As Nathan Robinson has explained, the book contains no real economic argument proving that Trump somehow created so much more value than the parking lot attendant that it justifies his decision to pay him a dead end salary. Remarkably, D’Souza even acknowledges that Marx was wrong to suggest that capitalists at least put up the capital that funds businesses, since nowadays banks and investors often perform that function. Capitalists don’t generally produce anything concrete. Instead they have “ideas,” D’Souza explains, and engage in “marketing” and “branding.” D’Souza is primarily attracted to the image of the capitalist as a modern day lord ruling over an empire. Consider this passage, in which he invokes Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter:
“One defining feature of the entrepreneur,” he writes, is “the dream and the desire to found a private kingdom.’’ In fact the secret dream of the entrepreneur is to found a “dynasty,” to project the dream beyond his own life. It is, Schumpeter admits, “the nearest approach to medieval lordship possible to modern man.” The motivation of the entrepreneur, according to Schumpeter, is not primarily monetary success. Rather it is the “will to conquer, the impulse to fight, to prove oneself superior to others, to succeed for the sake not of the fruits of success, but of success itself.”
What D’Souza advocates here is a romantic capitalist aesthetics. This interest in aesthetics permeates the book: for example, remarkably for a self-described Christian, D’Souza positively invokes Nietzsche’s critique of the “last men” as “insufferable,” effeminate types who “ride bicycles to work.” As David Hollands has commented, here as elsewhere, D’Souza writes in a postmodern conservative vein that lionises machismo and appeals to the gut rather than the head.
Conclusion
Dinesh D’Souza’s United States of Socialism is filled with unconvincing generalizations, rhetorical bombast and arguments that are far too thin to carry the weight D’Souza places on them. There are far better conservatives critics of the left, such as Roger Scruton. But D’Souza’s book could serve as the basis for an entertaining drinking game. Every time he calls the Democrats evil or Nazis or alludes to Satan, take a shot. That’s pretty much the only way to get much enjoyment from reading United States of Socialism.
27 comments
Socialism is a morally bankrupt ideology.
Matt, nothing new from you 🙂
Dinesh is of course a purveyor of in-your-face psychotic mind rot. His debating and “philosophic” technique is a species of Gish Gallop which is described on Wiki.
He is also an in-your-face purveyor of right wing Cynical Theories and of Bullshit too (with reference to the book On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt)
He is an ardently moronic nitwit who is unable to distinguish facts from wishful (bullshit) thinking. He would not be capable of identifying a fallacy if his life depended on it.
How he has achieved the status and influence he has ought to be a mystery (but really isn’t). The fact that he was pardoned by the arch proponent of cynical theories namely the Golden Golem of Greatness perhaps helps to explain this mystery. The pardon effectively puts him in the same psychotic league as Russ Limbaugh.
The Black Adder famously summed up the significance of Dinesh’s rantings via his now immortal phrase – Utter Crap!
With apologies to the great truth-telling Bard – Dinesh is also “full of sound and fury which signifies and communicates nothing but his own full blown psychosis”
Oh, THIS guy again. No wonder the author begins his review by trashing the author’s personality. Personal attacks aren’t arguments. I learned that from following the Pyramid of Debate (look it up). Personal attacks are at the bottom. This is a poor review, shot through with contempt and failure to extend the Principle of Charity to one’s political opponents.
This kind of writing doesn’t belong on an Intellectual Dark Web platform. Nobody is trying to stop it from being published and it is in no danger of being censored. This author needs to go to a new website.
But ones personality determines or patterns every minute fraction of ones body-mind. It patterns and controls ones behavior or what they actually do, what they write and what comes out of their mouth.
Dinesh’s toxic personality is embedded in everything that he has ever said written and promoted.
I said socialism is defined differently by different people and there is no agreed upon definition by all. It is kind of senseless to challenge what I wrote. My observation does not obfuscate criticisms but rather argues criticisms must be of actual policies that are called socialist, and not a label where there is no consensus as to what it means.
You gave two definitions, one of which I rebutted in terms of your own criticism of it – that of worker controlled coops. When tried, they work very well, often better than capitalist firms in the same country- such as Spain. The interesting question is why do they work so very well in some places and not in others. It clearly is not due to some intrinsic quality of their own.
You offered another definition- the Marxist one. I did not disagree with you regarding that one, but pointed out that almost 100% of those calling themselves socialists today, and 100% of the policies their opponents argue are socialist, do not fit that second definition. So if we stick to the second definition, hardly anyone on earth is a socialist and you are wasting your and our time going on at length about its risks.
If you keep to those two definitions then none of what is usually called socialist by either advocates or critics is in fact socialist, and so these proposals must be evaluated on their own merits. That is fine with me.
Any fair reading of what I have written CANNOT POSSIBLY be interpreted as my saying there is no definition of socialism.
I do not know much about the worker co-ops of Spain, so it’s hard for me to make comments on them. I did say I am extraordinarily skeptical that these co-ops will ever be able to out compete the capitalist rivals because their labor costs are so much higher. That being said, if they do manage to outcompete them, then I don’t think many people would be against their existence.
You’ve not given a definition of socialism, I have and I’ve provided a specific criticism. What is your definition?
Reading for comprehension sometimes requires effort. You have pretty obviously not made the effort. I get the feeling I would be as far ahead describing word history to a cat.
There’s nothing to comprehend from your replies because you haven’t said anything. All you’ve said is socialism doesn’t have an agreed upon definition in an effort to dodge the definition and criticism I did give.
Indeed, D’Souza does have some strange ideas. However, as someone who actually read his book, this article is yet another McManus special: A crafted narrative that either intentionally mis-characterises the book or a narrative by someone who didn’t want to understand the book.
For example, McManus — a socialist himself who writes for Jacobin Mag — completely missed the main premise of the book: That socialism has changed, moved on, and that today’s socialism wouldn’t be recognised by traditional socialists. To claim that D’Souza argues — or even magically arrives by mistake at the conclusion that “everything is socialism” is blatantly misrepresenting the book.
A simple example — from me, maybe mentioned by D’Souza, I don’t remember — is BLM. One of the main organisers, Patrisse Cullors, is a “trained Marxist”, taught by a member (Eric Mann) of the far-left terrorist group, Weather Underground Organization. This is what D’Souza wrote about: The fact that socialism has taken up the New Left’s critical theory / postmodern view of the world and integrated it with traditional socialism. This is somehow lost on McMaus, which is hardly surprising given his socialist credentials.
Likewise, the dig at Dave Rubin is childish. Rubin isn’t a conservative, for a start. For someone who wrote “D’Souza casually throws around a huge number of terms as though they were synonyms”, mis-characterising someone as conservative is hilarious. McManus can’t even abide by his own rules.
Nathan Robinson is yet another socialist, and his opinions and writing should be cast to the dustbin of history. He was also recently “cancelled” by the Guardian for anti Semitic remarks, a growing trend in far left circles (see the UK Labour party).
Dinesh D’Souza went from conservative intellectual to crazy conspiracy theorist REAL FAST. It’s bizarre.
Hello, anybody out there? Why are everyone still discussing the merits of socialism as if it’s “going to be different this time”? Ever heard of Daniel Bell’s The End Of Ideology, in which he pointed out that “Few serious minds believe any longer that one can set down ‘blueprints’ and through ‘social engineering’ bring about a new era of social harmony”? That was in 1960, six decades ago.
Never heard of the Nouvelle Philosophes ditching socialism en masse already in the 1960s and ’70s, calling socialist states totalitarian bureaucracies and military powers? They also scoffed that Marxism wasn’t brutally misapplied but actually fascist by nature, and held it responsible for creating the concept of a “human science”. And ridiculed the New Left of the time for refusing to examine what really happened under socialism. Sounds familiar? Do we really have to relive all this again, like a recurring nightmare?
I’ll elaborate. “Socialism” has a wide variety of meanings, from the Marxist view that state planning can replace the market- an argument that led to tyranny and a economy far weaker than a market one, to government owned services operating WITHIN a market economy, such as publicly owned utilities that are common in the US, including even a very successful state bank in North Dakota, to government provided services that replace markets in narrow areas, such as national parks and Medicare and highways.Two of the most powerful critics of state planning and advocates for market economies, Nobel Laureate F. A, Hayek and Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, both favored a guaranteed income for those whom the market or luck teeated poorly. Bernie Sanders, for example, does not want to replace markets and would be called a moderate Social Democrat in much of Europe. Social democratic European nations are market economies with healthy private sectors. Sweden today is called capitalist and as I demonstrated earlier, was called socialist a few decades ago. Sweden did not much change but the politics of name calling did.
So D’Souze errs at two levels. First, he seems incapable of serious thinking. Second, unless he explicitly defines socialism, and then identifies those who fit that definition, and not others who are sometimes associated with the name, his argument is self-righteous twaddle.
On the contrary the Marxist view of socialism is that there is no longer a state. Marx himself used the term socialism as a synonym for communism – a non market stateless society based on free access to goods and services and volunteer labour, Don’t confuse Marx and Lenin https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1983/1980s/no-947-july-1983/marxs-conception-socialism-part-1/
AMEN, Gus, a thousand times Amen!
D’Souza deserves every criticism here and many more. What a despicable human being. But why give him our attention?
Coming from the outside as one who once considered himself a conservative, then a libertarian, and now simply a generic liberal, modern ‘movement conservatism’ is for the most part only slightly more intelligent than D’Souza’s crap. In fact, ‘movement conservatism’ is almost by definition, not conservative. Much of it equates ‘conservatism’ with some version of Christianity, love of hierarchy so long as they are the hierarchs, or nihilism. To my mind Trump was implicit in much conservatism starting at least with Ann Coulter and Newt Gingrich.
Are there any conservative thinkers out there worth engaging with on these kinds of issues?
“Everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, as a world system sincerely applied, is a way out. It would at least ensure us getting enough to eat even if it deprived us of everything else. Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already.”
I assume since Matt McManus quoted this from George Orwell, he also agree with this quote. The problem, which I’ve never seen a self described socialist address, is that there seems to be only two routes to socialism. Route one is that people consent to employing their labor for worker co-ops which eventually outcompete the capitalists and drive them out of business. I think even a Staunch free market advocate would be okay with this form of socialism. Route two is that the workers rise up and threaten to kill the capitalists, and follow through on that threat to those who resist the revolution. Given the massively increased labor costs of the worker co-ops, route one seems highly unlikely, leaving only route two. If the only way to actualize the world one would like to see is through genocide, then the proposed system is no longer “common sense”.
Even if every argument D’Souza makes is intellectually bankrupt, he still arrives at the right conclusion. Socialism is evil.
Not long ago, before capitalist states so obviously did not perform as well, Sweden was called socialist, even totalitarian. For example, there was a popular right wing book “The New Totalitarians” that argued the “Scandinavian Model” was a form of totalitarian rule. Last I heard there were no violent uprisings and in fact people want to immigrate there. Hardly anyone wants to leave. The term “socialism” means almost nothing today unless it is enriched with some explanatory data, virtually none of which resembles your two descriptions. https://www.amazon.com/New-Totalitarians-Roland-Huntford/dp/0713902604
Not long ago, before capitalist states so obviously did not perform as well, Sweden was called socialist, even totalitarian. For example, there was a popular right wing book “The New Totalitarians” by Roland Huntford, that argued the “Scandinavian Model” was a form of ‘totalitarian’ rule. Last I heard there were no violent uprisings and in fact far more people want to immigrate there than leave. The term “socialism” means almost nothing today unless it is enriched with some explanatory data, virtually none of which resembles your two descriptions.
Actually, worker managed firms have done very well in a modern economy as a study of Spain’s Mondragon businesses readily testifies. The other is a Marxist model that I suspect virtually no one living today and calling themselves socialists would endorse.
The Marxist model as you call it is a moneyless wageless classless and stateless society of common ownership and democratic control of the productive resources of society. Contrary to your assertion that virtually no one living today and calling themselves socialists would endorse.this, quite a few do and though the number is small it is growing
While there is considerable ignorance about economics n some quarters, very few have views such as you describe. But it is not Marxist. The Marxist model included a very strong state under “socialism” that was supposed to wither away as Communism was achieved. The USSR, for example, was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and was supposedly “building communism.” So the Marxist model is exactly as I described it according to Marx and Marxists.
Gua diZerega, Nowhere did Marx describe socialism as having a “strong state” which would then wither away under communism. This is a complete distortion of Marx. Like so many others, you are confusing Lenin and Marx. It was Lenin who presented this scenario, not Marx. Marx used the terms socialism and communism interchangeably as synonyms for a stateless non-market alternative to capitalism. The Communist Manifesto of 1848 talked of the centralisation of capital in the hands of the state – a position Marx later distanced himself from as the various prefaces to the Manifesto make abundantly clear. But this was NOT a description of socialism. It is very clear that Marx was describing what still a capitalist society where the workers had just seized power but were unable yet to implement socialism because the productive forces were not sufficiently developed yet to implement socialism. Marx felt that a more statist version of capitalism would accelerate economic development and bring socialism closer. There was probably some truth in this as far as early capitalism was concerned. For example, Germany was the first country in the world to embark on state capitalism in a significant way under Bismarck in the late 19th century. By the beginning of the 20th century it had already overtaken the UK as an industrial power house, prompting British politicians to consider copying aspects of the German model of state capitalism – something Lenin admired to and wish to copy in Russia
If you want to toss out the Manifesto, fine. Evangelicals have done the equivalent in tossing out Jesus actual teachings. However, exegesis of sacred Marxist texts is as interesting to me these days as Biblical exegesis.
As to Lenin, his innovations within Marxist thought were primarily the role of the Communist Party as the vanguard of the working class, and the idea that, for historical reasons, Russia could jump over the stage of mature capitalism if the Party’s victory would then spark revolutions in developed capitalist countries, like Germany. Didn’t happen, of course, and that set the stage for Stalin’s “Socialism in one country.”
As to more exegesis of texts that, however insightful in some ways, got the big picture horribly wrong- I’ll pass. Marx was brilliant, and wrong regarding key elements of his analysis.
To make myself clear, there are several aspects of Marx/s writings that I take issue with. But the point I wanted to drive home to you and others here is that NOWHERE did Marx’s conception of socialism include the state in it. This is Lenin’s definition of socialism, not Marx’s (Lenin actually defined socialism as a form of “state capitalist monopoly” operated -allegedly – in the interest of the whole people). For Marx, socialism was a term used interchangeably with communism to signify a stateless non market alternative to capitalism. The writer you really need to read understand Marx and why he would have regarded the economic basis of the Soviet Union as essentially capitalist, is Paresh Chattopadhyay , author of “The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience” . It is a brilliant piece of writing and you can download the entire book for free from Libcom. Google and check it out
I understand Sweden has been called socialist, but it is not a socialist economy. What exactly about my “descriptions” doesn’t fit socialism? Socialism is worker or state controlled means of production. The means of production already have an owner, meaning you have to out compete the existing owners, or steal their stuff by force. I don’t see a third option, but if there is one I’d love to hear it.
I’ve heard about some successful worker co-ops, but I am extraordinarily skeptical these will find broad success rivaling the success of major corporations here today. If the co-ops end up winning in a competitive environment, then you can consider me a socialist. If the revolutionaries decide to murder their way to their utopia, then they can count me as their enemy.
The problem, as I tried to explain, is that “socialism” has no clear definition. You have yours, others have theirs. To my mind the Mondragon cooperatives that turned the Basque region of Spain from the country’s poorest to its richest are not socialist because they are not publicly owned or controlled. By your definition they are. Whatever they are, they are successful.
The national parks are government owned service that are incredibly popular and do not fit your definition. So is the weather bureau. So are our highways. So is the state bank of North Dakota. Libertarians and classical liberals call all this socialist, and have for years. You choose not to call Sweden socialist but when that stupid book came out it was featured by the Libertarian Book Club as a critique of socialism.
Idiots call efforts to end global warming “socialist” although no proposal to my knowledge sought to replace private enterprise with state owned companies or their equivalent. In this country ‘socialism’s’ chief role is to be a scare word used by capitalists, ‘conservatives,’ and right wingers seeking to attack public programs without ever having to examine their strengths and weaknesses.
When you say socialism has no clear definition, this is an attempt to obfuscate so as to dodge any criticism levied at socialism. If we don’t have a definition of socialism, then any critique of socialism falls flat on its face as you can just say “that’s not socialism” and move on. We see the same thing with postmodernism. If you’re advocating something other than a violent takeover of private business, then it would behoove you to distance your movement as much as possible from the violent movement if you want it to gain traction.
I don’t deny socialism has been used as a scare word and many things that aren’t socialist have been, and still are, called socialist. But the intellectuals who consider themselves socialist, like McManus, do have central premise they rally behind, which is worker or state controlled means of production.
If there’s no definition of socialism, then we could call the United States socialist as it is today. If that’s the case, then the revolutionaries can pack their bags and go home because they’ve already won. Except they know they haven’t won and that the US is very far from their ideal, which means there is a central premise that can be defined and criticized.