What is Socialism?
By Jack McClatchy
There is quite possibly no more distorted word in the modern American political discourse than socialism. Ask two people what it is, and you will get two totally different answers. To some, it’s when the government owns industries, to others it means the welfare state, and to others still it means the complete liberation of the working class.
So, what is socialism?
The reason why, to me at least, this is such a difficult question to answer is because there is no one true answer to what socialism is. Theorists and activists wrote wildly different political and economic systems and called it socialism, and organizations, unions, and political parties all advocated for their own idea of what socialism is.
For me to explain what socialism means for me, unfortunately there must be a history lesson. Modern socialism began to be theorized after the French Revolution, which began the era of history in which liberal democracy established its dominance in the West. Various French and English theorists wrote of utopian socialism, or socialism without a class view of society (meaning that both rich and poor could unite to build socialism, which was vaguely defined).
Then in 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto which established “scientific socialism”, which according to Marx and Engels was socialism that used the scientific method to chart how society worked — Marx is one of the first theorists of modern sociology — and how to improve it.
This is where we get the most common view of socialism from modern socialists: an intractable class struggle between those who own the “means of production” and those who don’t. Marx defined the means of production as being the things that make things like cars, washing machines, and computers, and called those who owned the means of production as the bourgeoisie. Those who didn’t Marx called the proletariat or the working class. According to Marxist socialism if you own a business or factory you are bourgeois, and if you need to work for a wage you are a worker.
For Marx, the mode of production was socialized (a lot of people work together to make a car or a house) but the means of production were privatized: the factory and the profit it makes is owned by one person or a small group of people. This struggle then can only end when the means of production are socialized, or held in community ownership.
Profit is the monetary value of the surplus labor extracted from workers and put into the owner’s pockets: workers make a lot more stuff than they are paid to do and the remainder is taken by the owner. Think of it this way: you are paid $20 a day to make chairs, but in an average day you make $35 worth of chairs. Where does the remaining $15 go? Into the owner’s pockets. This is an oversimplification of Marx’s labor theory of value and his theory on social exploitation, but you get the idea here.
Of course, socialism doesn’t begin and end with Marx. There are socialists who accept Marx’s diagnosis of capitalist society but don’t agree with the prognosis: an armed uprising of the working class to supplant the ruling classes, an establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the establishment of a classless, moneyless, and stateless society known as communism (different from Communism, the 20th Century programs of countries like the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China before the death of Mao, which would need its own article to unpack).
Then there are the anarchists, who also fight against capitalism but frequently disagree with Marx as to what happens after capitalism. Some don’t agree with him on anything at all.
So, what is socialism? Long story short, ask someone who identifies as a socialist. You’ll see that for the most part socialism went through a massive disinformation campaign since the Russian Revolution in the United States. None of us want to construct a totalitarian society à la 1984 (George Orwell was a socialist who fought for it during the Spanish Civil War), in fact, we want to create a freer society where people won’t have to live without a certainty of having a home, job, or food.
To finish this short essay, I want to quote Albert Einstein’s essay Why Socialism?, originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review, where he makes the same claim I’m making here:
“Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.”
