We are now thirty years beyond the collapse of governments in Russia and eastern Europe that were, allegedly, based on communism, a philosophy advanced by Karl Marx in the nineteenth century in which the "means of production" were owned by the workers, and not an exclusively investor class. That collapse was touted by global media, especially global business media, and the politicians it supports, as settling once and for all the question of which economic system--capitalism or socialism--was history's "winner." Every major government in the developed world, including the United States, committed itself to expanding the power of market economies throughout the world. And expand they did--beyond the boundaries of anyone's expectations.
History, however, is never a march in one direction. It may be useful to think of it as a kind of spiral, one that moves upwards as we learn more about mastering both ourselves and the world around us, but one that touches many basic points over and over again as the spiral goes around and around. In the current circle, our experience has taken us a long way past the capitalist point on its circumference and back to a word that had been effectively declared a dead letter in 1989:
Socialism.
Socialism has been so often used in our politics as a kind of swear word without meaning or context (except, more often than not, that you should hate people who believe in it, whether in fact they do or not). So it's useful to take a few moments to discuss what socialism is and isn't.
It's been said jokingly that capitalism is a theory of production without a theory of distribution, and socialism is exactly the opposite--a theory of distribution without a theory of production. While there's some truth to the joke, it lies more on the capitalism side. For capitalism truly is a theory of production without a theory of distribution. At its most extreme, in the late nineteenth century and today, its proponents place their emphasis on the need for all property, or the maximum possible amount, to be owned by private actors and not governments or agencies thereof. They have absolutely nothing to say about the distribution of products and services. They simply assume that, so long as private owners are allowed to maximize the profitability, the distribution problem will take care of itself.
But what that latter point means in practice is that distribution "takes care of itself" in the form of excess, excess that has the effect of squandering human potential in both directions. At one end, many people aren't able to acquire enough resources to live minimally decent lives, regardless of how long or how hard they work. At the other end, a handful of individuals are able to acquire a share of those resources well beyond what they could rationally use in a dozen lifetimes--and often end up putting those resources into efforts to leverage their existing power to even greater levels. Sadly, this country currently has a "President" who is the embodiment of this type of individual, as are many of his supporters and many members of his Administration.
Socialism, in contrast to what you may have heard or read elsewhere, is far less interested in the issue of ownership than capitalism is. The truth is that socialism comes in many different forms of ownership--the key linking these forms, however, is the concept of collective benefits, rather than individual ones. A privately-owner cooperative, for example, is a form of socialist enterprise, one in which the economic benefits are not inextricably linked to investors, but are shared by the workers. More common, of course, are democratic socialist economies that use taxation and regulation to ensure the existence of a social safety net guaranteeing that the minimum needs of everyone are met. But, unlike Marx's concept of socialism, these societies don't ban private ownership of businesses; in fact, many of them are the homes of some of the world's most profitable companies.
On the other hand, in the economies of the former Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact governments, China and Vietnam, governments made attempts to virtually eliminate private ownership of businesses, attempting to put Marx's idea into practice by acting as a "trustee" of the people that owned the means of production to ensure maximum fairness in the distribution of goods and services. All of these societies did so, however, without any form of meaningful democratic input that would serve as a check on the self-serving impulses of the governments--and, as a consequence, much of the output of these economies was squandered in fruitless military adventurism, not unlike our own experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Ironically, in the end, China was forced to salvage its economy by embracing many practices of market economies, while still doing so under the name of "Communism." As a consequence, China has the worst of both worlds: a country controlled by a class of plutocrats pretending to be avatars of the masses, who have no way of influencing the political or economic direction of the country
What can be learned from all of this, and what I've believed for decades, long before the end of the Cold War, is that both extremes are the enemies of a vibrant economy and a world in which the will of the people is a reality. In both cases, corrupt ruling classes answerable only to themselves sabotage the distribution of goods and services so as to prevent them from reaching the maximum possible number of people. However, in the case of democratic socialist countries, where ownership of private property is not restricted by state ownership or political freedom by oligarchical investors, people enjoy the ability to freely participate in all aspects of society and receive a share of its total outcome that ensures the means to participate as well.
In other words, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of how to organize capital or labor in a nation, so long as the extremes ends of the organizational spectrum are avoided. Some societies will lean a little bit more toward private economic ownership, and some will lean a little more in the other direction. Neither is right, and neither is wrong, so long as society is stable and individuals can maintain there own autonomy with it.
What is important to keep in mind, ultimately, is that private ownership of property can never be absolute in any society, if that society is to function at all. Government needs the ability to contract for services and purchase property if it is to have any chance of performing the functions that everyone agrees it should perform: providing a criminal justice system, including police, and a national defense.
And then there's the dirty little secret about property itself: without the existence of government, property rights would not exist at all. In a state of nature, which seems to be what most libertarians are aiming for, there would be no true property, for there would be no government to create rights to ownership that could subsequently be enforced. And, if government is to exist at all, then property rights must give way to that existence, to the maximum extent necessary to maintain it. Think that this is some bizarre, Marxist concept? Nope. Benjamin Franklin, no stranger to property interests, said it himself. Don't believe me? Read all about it here, in an article that effectively argues for a balance of interests when it comes to property ownership.
As a society now in the grip of a shrinking number of plutocrats, it's high time we had a robust but thoughtful discussion amongst ourselves about the future of our economy, and focus on the question of whether "socialism" is truly a dirty word, especially in light of the fact that we already have a good deal more "socialism" than we commonly acknowledge---or, perhaps, care to admit. We are, indeed, an affluent society, to borrow from Galbraith, but that affluence is concentrated in such a way that America may not be the land of the free very much longer.
Our politics, for far too long, has been about labels and personalities, which is hardly the state of affairs the Framers hoped for. We need, in particular, to get past the idea of socialism as a label for some unmentionable evil. The truth is that some greater measure of socialism than what we already have may be the only way toward, to twist a phrase, making America America again.
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