Socialists without Socialism

It’s an old “meme” on social media, but one that continues to annoy me viscerally: “If you love driving on roads, having fire departments, and police protections, you love socialism.” It was randomly part of a Facebook debate tonight, and so I want to express my equally random response.

Socialism is common ownership of the means of production. Not mere regulation, but ownership, which is different. The police are not a product. Fire departments produce nothing. Roads are a common, shared resource, used for many purposes beyond production of goods.

Even socialists reject the simplistic idea that any government service is socialism. Jacobin and the Socialist Party USA reject the notion that the existence of any commons correlates to socialism. If the committed socialists reject the meme, why do so many progressives and welfare state liberals now want to be considered socialists? Socialism is somehow “cool” now, but it isn’t actual socialism.

Isn’t America Already Kind of Socialist?
BY
CHRIS MAISANO, Jacobin, 2016

For all of Bernie Sanders’s virtues, his campaign for president has only thickened the fog of ideological confusion. At one campaign stop last year, he endorsed the thinking behind the most simplistic of these memes: “When you go to your public library, when you call your fire department or the police department, what do you think you’re calling? These are socialist institutions.” By that logic any sort of collective project funded by tax dollars and accomplished through government action is socialism.

It’s not difficult to see the problem with this line of thinking. In a country as deeply and reflexively anti-statist as the United States, the identification of socialism with government is perhaps the worst possible rhetorical strategy the Left could adopt. “Like the DMV? Then You’ll Love Socialism!” isn’t a slogan that will win many converts. More importantly, conflating all government action with socialism forces us to defend many of the most objectionable forms of state activity, including those that we would want to abolish in a free and just society.

It’s one thing to identify public libraries with socialism. They operate according to democratic principles of access and distribution, providing services to all regardless of one’s ability to pay. They would be one of the most important institutions in any socialist society worthy of the name.

A reminder that many libraries were in fact funded privately and many still are. Still, libraries and schools certainly provide a common good without “making” anything but delivering a service that people do want. Libraries and schools also compete against private alternatives — as where in pure socialism access would need to be equalized. We know that access to information is not equal, not even in socialist nations. Likewise, schools have competition and even in socialist nations, access to the best schools is often unequal.

It is the police that cause pure socialists the most conflict with the memes about socialism and the public commons. The police aren’t liked by many on the left (or many classical liberals, I admit). Police aren’t exactly promoting freedom, as any libertarian will attest. The police take property through forfeiture. They use military force. They have too much power. That’s not socialism… though most self-described socialist nations also have overbearing police.

But it’s quite another to include the police. If the forces responsible for killing Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and Rekia Boyd exemplify socialism in action, then no person who wants freedom and justice should be a socialist.

The idea that any government activity is synonymous with socialism has major political and strategic implications. After all, if our country was already at least partly socialist, then all we would have to do is keep gradually expanding government. We wouldn’t have to change the purpose of any existing programs, nor would we have to reform the administrative structures of government agencies.

The actual, official Socialist Party writes:

The Socialist Party strives to establish a radical democracy that places people’s lives under their own control — a non-racist, classless, feminist, socialist society in which people cooperate at work, at home, and in the community. Socialism is not mere government ownership, a welfare state, or a repressive bureaucracy. Socialism is a new social and economic order in which workers and consumers control production and community residents control their neighborhoods, homes, and schools. The production of society is used for the benefit of all humanity, not for the private profit of a few. Socialism produces a constantly renewed future by not plundering the resources of the earth.

The above definition reflects the traditional definition of socialism within economics. Every text I’ve used in a university course defines socialism as government ownership, on behalf of all citizens, of the factories, facilities, and resources for the production of goods and intellectual capital. In other words, government even owns new ideas that might benefit all people because the societal benefit of common ownership outweighs individual entitlement to creative products.

Democratic socialists are using self-definition in a way that bends socialism beyond its academic or historical context. They are trying to relabel all government activity as socialist, and that’s somewhat absurd since all governments provide some services or we wouldn’t have grouped ourselves into communities beyond familial tribes.

Humans grouped so we could specialize. We distribute our work, based on interests and abilities. Then, we create commons to enable us to trade our products, including intellectual creations with no “value” (necessity to life) in pure socialism but a lot of value to people in all economic and political systems. Thankfully, even Soviet Communism quickly reversed itself on the arts, though the system stifled much creativity and daring to preserve what was decided to be acceptable.

That’s really the problem with socialism: individuals don’t get to create and market ideas. Someone has to approve the idea and the product. Other people always have a say. True, you can fail in a free market, but you can try anything. Socialism doesn’t embrace that freedom to fail.

But, a free market does require rule of law and basic security. Fire departments, police, and courts of law are required for the markets to function with stability. We agree to a commons to preserve the free market, which the self-described socialists don’t always appreciate.

Police make nothing. They don’t produce new products but they consume a lot of resources. Yet, every classical liberal thinker has support policing. Why? Because without stability and safety, most of us wouldn’t want to go out and trade with other people.

Calling the common, public good, socialism devalues the concept of socialism and its valid intellectual history. The constant redefining of Marxism presents a similar problem. At some point, the “new” Marxism has no relation to Marx.