Socialism Isn't Welfare - by E. McCarson

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The case needs to be made that the recent trend of government subsides for financial institutions in order to prop up Wall Street is not “one more step towards socialism” because it doesn’t distribute any ownership rights to anyone who didn’t previously have them.

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As we leave the election season behind and focus our energy on the current financial crisis, many columnists, reporters, and politicians who still voice opposition to “rescue packages” for major financial institutions and other corporations do so because, according to them, they are a step towards socialism.

“Socialism” in this context is used as a catch-all term meaning any form of government intervention in the market whatsoever, but especially cases of taxpayer funded hand-outs for huge financial institutions and their CEOs. In an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun, Ron Smith, a conservative radio host, likened the bailout of Wall Street to a recent trend of “government intervention in the economy on a scale only dreamed of by hard-line socialists.”

As a “hard-line socialist” (cf. Eugene V. Debs), I have no idea what he’s talking about. What I think Ron Smith (and everyone else, it seems) is missing is that socialists aren’t dreaming of simply tinkering around with capitalism and inflating the power of the government to regulate it. Yes, it is true that many of us advocate for a stronger and more collectively controlled government in order to reign in the ridiculously over-reaching power and control of huge corporations. We notice the glaring contradiction of individuals being left to suffer the chaotic whim of The Market (and being told to “pick themselves up by their bootstraps”) while the corporate elite enjoy welfare from the government via taxpayers. Given this less than desirable situation, where access to both capital and political power is equally denied, many thinkers on the left decide it is a lesser of two evils to strengthen government—while pushing it as hard as possible toward democracy—because we realize that, under a decadent late-capitalist oligarchy, this is perhaps the best strategy.

But what we socialists really dream of is …well, actual socialism. Socialism, it must be pointed out, is not simply capitalism under control of the state (like the late USSR), or government intervening in The Market (like modern America). On the contrary, it consists of a completely different system of ownership. If you want to imagine socialism, imagine every company, factory, office, and level of government functioning as cooperatives. Ownership of production, the environment, law-making ability, and so on would be delegated evenly among everyone, in the form of councils or cooperatives. That’s it. There’s no other blueprint. We’re not advocating equal pay for everyone, or everyone living in the same kinds of houses or driving the same kinds of cars, or everyone wearing the same drab clothes, or everyone giving up their possessions and sharing each other’s toothbrushes, etc. (These are all misconceptions of socialism that I’ve heard over the years.)

Such sophomoric views of socialism breed hostility and malice when one thinks, for example, that socialism “rewards laziness” or destroys people's incentive. I could go on with pages of examples of such ill-informed, absurd notions that people harbor (and embarrassingly for them, proudly express on a whim), but suffice it to say that my hope is that socialism will one day (soon) be defined by and associated with collective ownership and direct democracy, period. In fact, I often call myself an “advocate of direct democracy” among strangers to avoid their all-too-common and all-too-ignorant rejoinders.

But much to my chagrin, the inaccurate association of socialist collective ownership with forced equality of income, or simply with welfare, is being continually reinforced by virtually everyone in the “mainstream”—or corporate—media, including local and national outlets, and by almost all politicians (even ones on the left, including Ralph Nader) who keep making the comparison. The re-branding of the bailout bill as “nationalizing banks” or as “socialism for Wall Street” may be a quick and handy device to point out the hypocrisy of the free-market myth that is used to entrench the exploitation of corporate capitalism as the norm. But the comparison is also a dangerous and misleading one—and it might do more damage to the left than to its intended target.

One of the most personally annoying intellectual blunders of our time is the insistence that the resounding historical example of socialism is Stalinist Russia (and derivatively, Castro’s Cuba, or more recently, Chavez’s Venezuela). Indeed, the sole reason for the popularization of this idea was that it acted as mutual propaganda for both sides in the Cold War. The US was able to brand the USSR as Marxist and radical (i.e. threatening and un-American) and Stalin, in one of the most egregious displays of demagoguery to date, was able to brand himself as being a populist “leader of the people.” Both perceptions about Stalin’s adherence to Marxist thought were and are, of course, patently false. I believe that the divorce of Stalinism from Marxism (and convincing people of the difference) remains one of the great challenges of the left as we attempt to explain the derivation of our thought without quickly and unfairly being confused with megalomaniacal dictators from the annals of history.

Declaring that one is a Marxist, or even that one has read Marx, is still considered political suicide almost everywhere in America (with the possible exception of Vermont, with its Democratic Socialist Senator, Bernie Sanders). The recent equation of government intervention in The Market with socialism completely negates the effort to shed Marxism (as a critical intellectual approach) and its ideals of direct democracy and collective ownership of their historic, but misplaced, guilt by association. “Socialist” remains a dirty word; it’s used as an insult. The popular perspective about collective ownership and direct democracy is still clouded by pre-Cold War absurdities—by an ideology of corporate capitalist “freedom” that, judging from my experience, still affects the average person’s worldview.

Even Barack Obama, deemed by the Republican Right “the most liberal member of Congress” (did they forget about the aforementioned Senator from Vermont?), felt that he had to refute claims that he had socialist tendencies or that he really would redistribute wealth in order to win the election. Of course it shouldn't need to be pointed out that the tax code already accomplishes such redistribution, but the fact that he felt the need to deny being a socialist outright - or even knowing one - is indicative of the public’s misunderstanding of the term. This kind of defamation and utter manipulation of the ideals of socialism cannot bode well for thinkers on the left who are attempting to promote direct democracy through the media in this country. How do we even begin to discuss the possible injustice of wealth discrepancies through inheritance, for example, when merely bringing up the topic of redistribution causes one to be branded a Stalinist?

The case needs to be made that the recent trend of government subsides for financial institutions in order to prop up Wall Street is not “one more step towards socialism” because it doesn’t distribute any ownership rights to anyone who didn’t previously have them. We still have a capitalist oligarchy, by definition. Merely tinkering with The Market could be considered economic planning, or State Capitalism (by strict definition, fascism), or perhaps just an inefficient and corrupt capitalism (although the phrase “corrupt capitalism” is a bit redundant, no?). But it most certainly should not be considered categorically socialist. What we are seeing lately in the economy isn’t a trend towards socialism, but rather blatant and outright welfare for major corporations.

On the contrary, to really take “one more step towards socialism” we would be converting all workplaces, including corporate ones, into cooperatives. That, and only that, would bring us closer to a situation that I’ve “only dreamed of.”