“immediately conjures up visions of modern-day China, the ’80s-era Soviet Union, Castro’s Cuba, and anywhere else where socialism and/or communism have been wielded as means of systemic oppression. I was alive to see socialism at its least effective and most destructive, which is how I ended up assuming that socialism can be implemented only in that form, and in no other way.”
This conflation of socialism and communism is the root of all the problems we have today with socialism being a dirty, scary word. And it makes sense. The distinction between the two is subtle from a conceptual standpoint, but makes a world of difference when it comes to being put into practice. Hell, I feel like I have a reasonable grasp on the two concepts, but still find myself double-checking my work when I go to write about it.
Usually, people frame socialism, as a concept, through the lens of communism, because both eschew private business ownership. But only communism rejects the idea of private property. Because in communism, the outputs of the state-owned means of economic production are distributed to the populace based on need, whereas in socialism, they are distributed based on contribution.
That latter one sounds rather familiar, doesn’t it? And it’s exactly why it’s also important to frame socialism through the lens of capitalism: because in both socialism and capitalism, people are able to acquire and own private property — the “comforts” you reference in this article — as a function of what they contribute. In other words, what they earn. The core difference is the mechanism that determines what is “earned”. In capitalism, it is determined by the “invisible hand” of the free market. The same free market that, left unchecked, leads to robber barons and zero workers’ rights and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. In socialsim, it is determined by the government, which represents the people*
- *worth noting here that this is another important distinction between communism and socialism: the former refers to state ownership of the means of production while the latter refers to public ownership. So while in both systems, it’s ultimately the government making those decisions, socialism carries the implicit understanding that the government is democratic (the people), whereas communism does not, since “the state” could be authoritarian or some other non-democratic government.
Anyway, this is usually where the counterargument to socialism picks up the “well, the government doesn’t do anything right — why should be trust them to make those kinds of decisions about who deserves what?” And that’s not an unfair argument. But it’s also a different argument, because the government as no less potential for corruption and abuse in a capitalist economy, AND it’s not like the “invisible hand” is particularly immune from abuse either.
This is all to say that you can call yourself a capitalist or a socialist, but determining which one you are doesn’t have anything to do with your desire to keep personal comforts and property.
At the end of the day, a capitalist system with a much heavier socialist streak (medicine, banks, environmental protection and natural resources) is probably what’s going to work best in the United States, simply because we are indoctrinated to understand it much better. But the first step to even getting to that point is to kill this ill-informed notion that the distinction between communism and socialism is just a matter of semantics.
