Yes, It Was “Real Socialism.” No, We Shouldn’t Try Again

[ATraveller]

What I don’t understand is why so many on the American left are so comfortable with identifying “democratic socialism” when a good number of them are proposing modern social democracy. They shoot themselves in the foot.
I posted this last month:
Here are the thoughts of actual Scandinavians:

Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders is too far left for Sweden's ruling Social Democrats, official says | The Week

Why would a Swedish Social Democrat favor Buttigieg over Sanders? Well, democratic socialism is different than Sweden’s social democracy — the “Nordic model” Sanders touts — “and, unfortunately, Sanders has contributed to this confusion,” writes MIT political economist Daron Acemoglu. Democratic socialism seeks to fix the iniquities of the market economy by handing control of the means of production to a company’s workers or “an administrative structure operated by the state,” he explains. “European social democracy is a system for regulating the market economy, not for supplanting it.”

Lars Løkke Rasmussen, then the prime minister of Denmark, made a similar point in a speech at Harvard in 2015, when Sanders was gaining national attention. “I know that some people in the U.S. associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism,” he said. “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy,” albeit with “an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security to its citizens.”

Looking at the parties with seats in parliament:
:sweden: Sweden (List of political parties in Sweden - Wikipedia)

Party	Ideology
Social Democrats	Social democracy
Moderate	Liberal conservatism
Sweden Democrats	Social conservatism, nationalism
Centre Party	Liberalism
Left Party	Socialism
Christian Democrats	Christian democracy
Liberals	Liberalism, social liberalism
Green Party	Green politics

:denmark: Denmark (List of political parties in Denmark - Wikipedia)

Party	Ideology
Social Democrats	Social democracy
Venstre	Conservative liberalism, economic liberalism
Danish People’s Party	Danish nationalism, national conservatism, social conservatism
Social Liberal Party	Social liberalism, centrism
Socialist People’s Party	Democratic socialism, socialism
Red-Green Alliance	Socialism
Conservative People’s Party	Conservatism, liberal conservatism, green conservatism
New Right	Conservatism, national conservatism, economic liberalism
Liberal Alliance	Libertarianism, classical liberalism
Alternative	Progressivism

 

[StudentMI]

What I don’t understand is why so many on the American left are so comfortable with identifying “democratic socialism” when a good number of them are proposing modern social democracy. They shoot themselves in the foot.

My guess is they’ve been inculcated by the university system and feel hungry for a radicalism they don’t realize has been tried and failed numerous times. It’s similar to what the baby boomers did: they felt the need to rebel and subsequently sold out or bought in once they actually grew up. Sadly some seem locked in perpetual adolescence when it comes to political philosophy.

I doubt the rhetoric and atmosphere would be as heated if they had been taught Kojeve or Fukuyama. Realizing that the end of history they long for is basically social democracy is a bit disheartening and quite boring. Old fashioned Marxist idealism is far more incendiary.

 

[FiveLinden]

No it is not a straw man argument because it is not an argument. It is a serious question.

 

[StudentMI]

No it is not a straw man argument because it is not an argument. It is a serious question.

It’s a straw man and a false dichotomy as I said. I bash socialism so the immediate response is “so you’re advocating libertarianism?”

 

[FiveLinden]

No, it is not a straw man argument. It is not an argument. It is a question. Questions are not arguments. You are free to say ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘I don’t know’, or ‘I don’t want to tell you’.

 

[StudentMI]

Very well. As for what I advocate…

I advocate Catholic social teaching which recognizes the right though not absoluteness of private property, supports a market economy within limits, and whose two pillars are subsidiarity and solidarity.

I am mainly influenced by the treatment of papal teaching in the books An Economics of Justice and Charity and Papal Economics, though I think the approaches of both (one distributist and the other more market oriented) have truth in them and a sort of middle approach is needed.

Catholic social teaching is not hostile to the market, and sadly in recent years we’ve seen a dampening of the Catholic emphasis that markets have their place in the human society. As well, the state is only to intervene when necessary and even then only to the extent that such intervention is needed; it is to withdraw as soon as possible.

 

[graciew]

Ok. I am posting what Pope Benedict wrote about Christian Humanism, which Pope Francis has also expanded upon.
It may be helpful and provide some guide.
For all people of good will, Catholics and non catholic,please feel invited to read and included in the heart of the message. As brothers and sisters as we all are.

Pope proposes a 'Christian humanism' for the global economy | National Catholic Reporter.

 

[StudentMI]

Thank you for posting.

I admit some hesitancy about Benedict’s encyclical. In principal I find nothing objectionable in the idea of a world authority, of aid to developing nations, etc. It is in the actual implementation that I am weary. That is one of the most mystifying parts of Catholic social teaching to me. The difference between the ideal and the implementation, the principle and the circumstances.

Nonetheless, as I stated, I am an advocate of Catholic social teaching. I am also influenced by a host of political writers of varying approaches who I believe arrived at some part of the truth that we need to grapple with in order to find concrete solutions to today’s problems.

 

[graciew]

Thank you for interesting topics to explore. We learn.

 

[FiveLinden]

the state is only to intervene when necessary and even then only to the extent that such intervention is needed; it is to withdraw as soon as possible.

Thank you. Does this actually form part of Catholic teaching?

 

[Regular_Atheist]

The whole phrasing of the “real socialism” topic misunderstands the actual basis on which any system of social relations emerges. Political and economic systems aren’t born out of purely abstract principles and applied consciously by idealists from some kind of blueprint, but emerge from actually existing social relations and the movements that these relations condition. The Soviet enterprise system and other “socialist” economies emerged from semi-feudal states that were left undeveloped by the uneven global development that is a product of capitalism and imperialism. Far from bringing about the centralised, planned and decommodified system that communism would be, they were first to finish off land reform in Russia, bringing about a petty bourgeois economy in agriculture that they were never able to shake off. The enterprise system emerged as a way to industrialise the economy and proletarianise the population off of the back of little proper existing industry and a backwards agricultural economy. It served a purely capitalist function historically, creating a permanent class of wage labourers and allowing the rampant expansion of industrial capital.

There was a revolution in 1917 but it was a bourgeois one, and it could only be so given the social conditions that the Bolsheviks inherited and the isolation of their revolution. The “socialist revolutions” that followed basically all followed this model, and adopted a red ideology in so far as the Bolsheviks had shown how a late capitalist revolution could be carried out on the back of a historically undeveloped economy (though often just for the sake of securing a global ally, as in the case of Cuba). The “planned economies” of the 20th century were rooted in social conditions that no longer exist, and are never coming back. The “Democratic Socialism” of Sanders and others is obviously not related.

 

[AlNg]

Did they have automatic theorem proving

They were the first to have a man in space.

 

[Annie]

So do you advocate the sort of laissez-faire capitalism condemned by the Church? If not, what?

Perhaps off topic but I do believe a pure economics is possible independent of world views. Certainly such ‘infected’ classical political economy no less than modern economics, but I believe a ‘science’ of human action is possible. Mises’ idea of praxeology was a step in the right direction I think, though I don’t believe he got everything right.

I am not exactly sure if I am understanding you correctly, but it seems that you, StudentMI, are saying that one could find a perfect or ideal system of economics which could be applied at all times and everywhere.

This seems to have the same problem that FiveLinden’s question implies, which is a dichotomy: either this or that.

It seems that societies tend to move along in a way that is like driving. In teaching people to drive on a two-lane road, one has to tell them to move a little to the left as they approach the edge of the road, or a little to the right as they drive too close to the center line.

Sometimes there is an emergency and they have to go onto the shoulder or into the opposite lane.

Looking at history, one sees the development of a system that works for the circumstances. Then circumstances change, and we need to respond.

We may overcorrect and need to pull back, or we may encounter an emergency which requires a temporary change.

But I do not think that we can successfully impose One System as the solution to all problems.

 

[StudentMI]

Thank you. Does this actually form part of Catholic teaching?

186. The necessity of defending and promoting the original expressions of social life is emphasized by the Church in the Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno , in which the principle of subsidiarity is indicated as a most important principle of “social philosophy” . “Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them”[399].
…
188. Various circumstances may make it advisable that the State step in to supply certain functions [401]. One may think, for example, of situations in which it is necessary for the State itself to stimulate the economy because it is impossible for civil society to support initiatives on its own. One may also envision the reality of serious social imbalance or injustice where only the intervention of the public authority can create conditions of greater equality, justice and peace. In light of the principle of subsidiarity, however, this institutional substitution must not continue any longer than is absolutely necessary, since justification for such intervention is found only in the exceptional nature of the situation. In any case, the common good correctly understood, the demands of which will never in any way be contrary to the defence and promotion of the primacy of the person and the way this is expressed in society, must remain the criteria for making decisions concerning the application of the principle of subsidiarity.

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/p...peace_doc_20060526_compendio-dott-soc_en.html

 

[StudentMI]

I’m sorry to say you committed the very thing the article was talking about. I’ve seen this excuse used more times than I remember, and at one time I believed it myself.

I would also say that, as far as the Soviet Union employing a ‘bourgeois economy,’ just look into the short period known as War Communism, the rationale behind it and what those in power thought of it as. That is the reality of socialism.

 

[GEddie]

Communism is just socialism with a gun in your back.

ICXC NIKA

 

[Regular_Atheist]

I’m sorry to say you committed the very thing the article was talking about. I’ve seen this excuse used more times than I remember, and at one time I believed it myself.

No I haven’t. All I can say is that if you think that then you don’t understand my point, and you never believed what I am saying. I am not “making excuses” or juxtaposing some kind of political or economic ideal to that of the USSR. History is driven by changes in the material social relations that man engages in to reproduce himself, and to understand history and political action is not to come up with the most perfect society in abstract as proven by reason or practice and then apply it in reality. Rather to understand these things you need to understand the development of these material social relations and the movements that they engender. The USSR was obviously a capitalist society given the social relations that were present there (the existence of a large class of wage labourers, the existence of money and profit and the need to constantly expand production, the country’s general integration in the world economy, etc.) but this wasn’t a product of “wrong ideas” or personal failings on the part of the Bolsheviks (who were by all accounts “good Marxists”), but rather the social conditions that the revolution arose from, which I outlined in my previous post.

I would also say that, as far as the Soviet Union employing a ‘bourgeois economy,’ just look into the short period known as War Communism, the rationale behind it and what those in power thought of it as. That is the reality of socialism.

This is really a point you should elaborate on. I’m familiar with War Communism, but unsure what about it invalidates my point. It was, as the historian Alec Nove called it, “a siege economy with a communist ideology.” In conditions of war where most of the country is not occupied by your own forces, food production is low, and inflation is high, it is simply efficient to appropriate the grain from those producing it and give it to your soldiers and workers directly. While many of the Bolsheviks saw the measures of War Communism as signs of a communist society emerging from the old society (given the lack of the use of money, the use of communal dining, women in the workforce, and other measures) the fact is that this was largely illusory and as soon as the war ended and things were stabilized the period of the NEP began and all of those measures deemed “communist” which were employed for the sake of convenience were done away with.

I don’t want to talk your ear off, but if anything I think comparing the positions of the Bolsheviks at the time of War Communism to the positions of the Stalinist period is enough to show that the proletarian revolution in Russia failed and that a bourgeois state emerged. The early Bolsheviks were staunch internationalists, believed in the abolition of law, the emergence of a “universal family” based somewhat on the abolition of strict gender roles, and still seemed to believe in socialism as a decommodified society. Under Stalinism pretty much all of this was abandoned.

 

[Tex_Alberta]

Socialists want everything you have except your job.
It’s slavery, with the always added bonus of pits of dead people.

 

[otjm]

America has freedom of speech in theory. However, like any theory, it must be inculcated in the populace. And for anyone who is actually paying attention (meaning, by that, not having a dog in the fight emotionally), it only takes a bit or research to find that in academia, and in the multitude of students and graduates, we have an ever increasing attitude that speech is only free if it ides not trigger me. Safe spaces, the chaos going on within colleges and universities to silence, and all too many graduates who are now demanding that speech be censored if it even indicates a possibility of goring the favorite oxen, and the actions of several internet means of communication show that we are in a serious battle over what is and is not acceptable speech.

And as the lawsuits grow concerning speech (and the attorney fees continue to grow) we are seeing the activity not just of the internet giants, but also of “woke” local jurisdictions determining what will or will not be accepted in the public forum.

A little know fact by a very significant part of the population is that the ACLU represented, not once but at least twice, the right of the Ku Klux Klan to march in parade (and sheets, presumably). That I can agree is hate speech - but it is allowed speech, contrary to the opinions of a whole lot of folks. I am dead set against racism, but trying to outlaw hate speech is not going to advance better understanding and respect between races.

And now that we are off topic, we can return to the subject.

 

[Rau]

I find it interesting that some Catholics will be quick to point out the socialism condemned by the Church was of the Marxist variety, while other forms are up for debate. But when it comes to capitalism the same argument could be made that what was condemned was Manchester liberalism, and not liberalism entire, to which Catholic social teaching bears more than a slight resemblance.

This debate seems to rest on the false belief that the economic system of real-world countries can in each case be defined by a word (usually ending in -ism). To take the position that capitalism is good, socialism is bad, or the reverse, lacks any practical value.