What is Socialism Really?

And why elites desperately want you to hate it

We’re in trouble.

Wars and the threat of war are raging—from Ukraine and Palestine, to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan, Iran, Lebanon, China and more. Each conflict was largely provoked by US policy. None benefit working people. Some threaten to go nuclear. All squander precious resources and sacrifice countless lives.

Europe Prepares For Hot War With Russia, US Readies For Hot War With China

The environment is under assault from pesticides, industrial pollution, deforestation, declining soil fertility and species extinction.

Our health is under assault from Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Industry and agencies they’ve captured. Our food, air and water are poisoned. Life expectancy is declining. Chronic disease is on the rise.

Our economy is on the rocks, with housing, food and other prices spinning out of control. Unemployment is high and heading higher. The standard of living is declining for the majority. Meanwhile, the top one percent, who hold all the levers of power, see their fortunes steadily increase.

Freedom of speech is under attack. Government-promoted censorship of social media is pervasive and pernicious. Prominent individuals—Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Richard Medhurst, Tulsi Gabbard, Scott Ritter, Telegram's Pavel Durov, C J Hopkins and others—have been harassed, threatened and even imprisoned for their ideas, all in an attempt to discourage dissent and critical thinking. The Covid-19 pandemic was used to suppress speech and debate in the name of fighting “disinformation”. Mandates and closures, none of which were supported by scientific evidence, have been used to undermine individual rights and health under the guise of promoting public welfare.

Many conservatives, while acknowledging these problems, misidentify the source, claiming our politicians and their policies have become more “socialist”. The truth is, the US and its allies around the world remain steadfastly capitalist and the ills we observe are the inevitable consequence of that economic system. Many are confused due to a lack of understanding of what the terms “capitalism” and “socialism” mean. This confusion is understandable as it’s fostered by capitalist titans and narrative spinners to shift blame away from the system that empowers them. Attributing the evils of capitalism to “socialism” is a diabolical ploy on the part of cheerleaders for the current system.

Some have taken to falsely labeling extreme, reactionary government policies as "Marxist" or "socialist", especially when such policies are promulgated by the very-capitalist Democratic Party. Misleading memes like the one above are proliferating.

The villain in the film The Usual Suspects says that “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” A more apt framing would be: The greatest trick capitalist oligarchs ever pulled was convincing the world that capitalism is your friend and socialism is your enemy.

Nancy Pelosi: “We’re capitalist. That’s just the way it is.”

What is Capitalism?

Capitalism hasn’t always existed and it’s unlikely to be the last economic system humans will adopt. Homo sapiens and our hominin ancestors have been around for millions of years. For most of that time we survived as nomadic hunter-gatherers. With the invention of agriculture and the domestication of animals some twelve thousand years ago, everything changed. Suddenly, the labor of an average person could produce more in a day, week, or year than he/she could consume in that time. Added together, this productive capacity enabled the creation of a large social surplus. The history of humanity from that point forward can be understood as a battle for control of the surplus wealth we collectively produce.

The first type of society to address this problem was slavery (3,500 BC – 1,000 AD). Before agriculture gave rise to a social surplus, mass slavery was impossible. Only when productivity increased to the point where an average individual could produce more than needed for survival could an idle, oppressor class impose itself on society and be sustained by it. The multitudes were forced to labor as slaves, retaining for themselves just enough to keep them alive, working and reproducing. A major part of the fruits of slave labor was forcefully appropriated by the slave masters.

In time, slave societies were overthrown by a more efficient model: feudalism (900 – 1600). Under feudalism, serfs representing the great majority were forced to work the land of the feudal lord but were allowed just enough leeway to work their own smaller plot, ensuring the serfs’ survival. This is how feudalism allocated the ever-growing social surplus produced. In this way, royalty and the aristocracy under feudalism took advantage of humanity’s ever-increasing productivity.

As trade between various feudal fiefdoms increased in volume and importance, the merchant and artisan classes grew in strength and numbers. These classes, together with the serfs, combined to overthrow the kings, queens and feudal lords in the democratic revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Notable among these were the American and French revolutions. The economic system ushered in by these revolutions was capitalism.

Capitalism freed the serfs who, no longer tied to the land, were able to seek work wherever they pleased. But what happened to the collective social surplus? A new class, the capitalists, arose that owned all the major factories, mines, mills, workshops and other critical places of production. Laborers were hired to work for the capitalists. But there was a catch. While workers are said to be paid “a full day’s wage” for “a full day’s work”, the value of that wage—what it can be used to purchase in the market—is less than the value created by the workers’ labor. The difference is kept by the capitalist as “profit”. As the writer, poet and revolutionary Victor Serge explains,

It took until about 1850 to complete the [capitalist] revolution in Europe. Napoleon’s armies carried it from Madrid and Lisbon as far as Vienna and Berlin. The revolutions of 1830 and 1848 are its final political convulsions. In the meantime, the industrial revolution had begun, a revolution perhaps even more radical…^*

So, under capitalism, just as under slavery and feudalism, the productive capacity is such that an average worker produces more than they themselves “need” for survival. Under slavery, the social surplus went to the slave master. Under feudalism, the social surplus went to royals and aristocrats. Under capitalism, the social surplus is likewise appropriated by a tiny minority at the top: the capitalists. The wage system hides the fact that workers are paid only a portion (about half) of the value their labor produces.

Some countries replaced feudalism with capitalism later than others. As Serge recounts,

The abolition of serfdom in Russia coincides with the War of Secession and the abolition of slavery in the United States of America (1861-3). Both in the Old World and the New, the growth of capitalism demands the replacement of the slave or serf by the free worker – free, that is, to sell his toil.

Concentrated Wealth Means Concentrated Power

Because wealth under capitalism is highly concentrated in the hands of a minority, political power is also concentrated at the top. As a 2014 Princeton study demonstrates, the concerns of the majority are rarely reflected in political policy, while the concerns of the top one percent nearly always become law.

The top graph shows how the number of average citizens favoring a policy has no effect on whether it gets implemented. The bottom graph shows how policy priorities closely match the desires of the wealthiest.

What is Socialism?

Today, twelve thousand years after the invention of agriculture, productivity has increased immensely, so much so that it is now possible for everyone on earth to live in modest comfort. But we still have a division between a majority class (workers) whose labor produces much more wealth than their wages and salaries reflect, and a minority class (capitalists) who are deemed the rightful owners of the surplus wealth produced by the majority.

Socialism simply proposes that the immense surplus wealth produced collectively by society should be managed and controlled democratically, by society as a whole, rather than remain in the hands of a few unelected oligarchs. The idea is to introduce economic democracy, and in so doing, make genuine political democracy possible.

That’s it.

The exact form this should take and precisely how we might get from here to there are up for discussion and debate.

Lessons From History

In debating how to economically and politically democratize society, we don’t have to start from scratch. There are lessons we can draw from history.

• A society ruled by a minority at the expense of the majority can only be maintained by propaganda, narrative manipulation, censorship and force. If full, open democracy existed, the majority would never consent to minority rule and the concomitant unequal distribution of wealth and power.

• No privileged minority has ever given up power willingly. At some point, the majority must fight for the right to impose majority rule.

• Our current Bill of Rights should be retained and expanded to include the right to a job, healthcare, housing and other basic human necessities.

• The commanding heights of the economy—energy, transportation, logistics, infrastructure, critical manufacturing, banking, healthcare, etc.—cannot be left in private hands. A way must be found to manage these sectors democratically, replacing unelected financial titans with new, democratic management structures. This transformation will necessarily reorient these sectors to prioritize human needs instead of profits.

• Smaller establishments—restaurants, small producers, corner shops and the like—can and should remain in private hands.

• Government per se is neither good nor bad. Any government is made in the image of society’s ruling class. Currently, our government is fully beholden to Wall Street, capitalists and the one percent. Under socialism, the government will be restructured to defend the interests of the 99 percent. In particular, it must manage society’s collective surplus wealth for the benefit of the majority and manage the commanding heights of the economy to prioritize human needs over profits. Undoubtedly, representative government will need to change and expand. This could include adding industry representatives to regional and national governmental bodies. So, in addition to representation by geographical region, steel workers, teachers, farmers, healthcare workers, construction workers, scientists, etc. could elect their own representatives to governmental legislatures to advocate for their interests.

• Democracy should be introduced into the workplace. Workers should elect their own foremen and managers, oversee workplace safety, and have input into the goals and objectives of their enterprise.

If you find fault with any of these points, that’s fine. But be prepared to show how your plan would more effectively end the eons-old separation between those whose labor produces society’s tremendous wealth and the minority who has been allowed to appropriate and control that wealth.

They Can Abide no Alternative

When a small minority controls virtually all of society’s wealth and power, its top priority will always be to prevent the rise of a healthy, successful counter example. It’s essential that those at the top be able to claim that there is no alternative; that any attempt to implement genuine economic and political democracy must result in tyranny. Once a thriving, equitable, humane alternative to capitalism can be pointed to, the dictatorship of the one percent is finished.

So, it stands to reason that, without exception, every attempt to move beyond rule by the one percent is brutally attacked by the powers that be. A full-spectrum assault—propagandistic, economic and military—is brought to bear against any country that attempts to stray from the capitalist model. The objective is to crush any such rebellion outright. But where full erasure is not possible, the oligarchs will settle for the second-best option: to so impoverish, warp and hamstring the upstart country that the appeal of their example withers.

So, we have witnessed the brutal assaults on the revolutions in Paris (1871), Russia (1917), China (1949-53), Korea (1950-53), Algeria (1954-62), Cuba (1959-?), Vietnam (1945-73), Indonesia (1965-66), Chile (1973), Iran (1979), Grenada (1979), Nicaragua (1979), El Salvador (1979-92) and Venezuela (1999-?), among others.

The Case of Russia

The Russian revolution is a special case. This was the first time that conscious Marxists succeeded in overthrowing a capitalist government and attempted to build a society beholden to, and for the benefit of, workers and farmers.

A soviet is a workers’ and peasants’ assembly or council. The Russian soviets arose spontaneously during the years leading up to the revolution. These mass, representative, democratic bodies had both legislative and executive authority. Soviets were formed in the countryside and the cities, in all workplaces, and in all units of the army. City-wide, regional and national groups of soviets would occasionally meet as well. Everyone within the jurisdiction of a particular soviet meeting could attend, be heard and vote.

The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets met in Petrograd on October 25, 1917 (by the old Russian calendar.) On that, the very eve of the revolution, several key proclamations were passed. The first proclaimed an end to Russian participation in World War I, a conflict that benefited only the capitalists, even though the army’s soldiers were drawn almost exclusively from workers and peasants. The second granted land to the many landless peasants. Another granted the right of self-determination to all nationalities that had been part of “Greater Russia”. Regional languages and cultural differences were respected and protected.

Another proclamation declared that— through the popular councils in workplaces and the countryside—production would now come under workers’ control. Thus, the surplus wealth produced collectively by workers and farmers was, for the first time in history, to be managed democratically by the majority.

In the first year of the revolution, women were granted full equality, including the right to vote. The right to childcare for working parents, the right to medical care, and the right to education were legally guaranteed. This was three years before the 19^th amendment granted women the right to vote in the US.

The Capitalists React

Terrified that economically backward, upstart Russia was attempting to move beyond capitalism, the imperial centers did what they always do: they invaded, hoping to crush the incipient rebellion. US, Canadian, French, British, Greek, Italian, Australian and Japanese troops all invaded the new Soviet Union, desperate to turn back the clock. But in their primary goal of smothering the infant republic, the US and its imperialist allies failed. Victor Serge recounts,

In October 1919, at the end of the Year Two [of the revolution], the Republic seems to be at death’s door, besieged by three White armies. Kolchak is marching on the Volga; Denikin has invaded the Ukraine and marches upon Moscow; Yudenich, with support from a British naval squadron, marches on Petrograd. By a miracle of energy, the Republic gains the victory.

However, the US and its allies did succeed in severely weakening Russia. The cost to the Russian people of defending their revolution was enormous: mass poverty, famine, injury and death. After eons of conflict between ruling elites and the masses of laborers—that is, between those who control all the wealth and those who produce it—birthing a new society based upon genuine economic and political democracy would be challenging under the best of circumstances. But the economic hand Russia was dealt was far from ideal.

Socialism only became historically possible with the abundance that capitalism was able to produce, just as capitalism was made possible by the increase in wealth, craftsmanship and trade that feudalism bequeathed to it. Russia in 1917 found itself in a world awash in wealth while the country itself, economically backward to begin with, was devastated by years of war. The country began its race for prosperity, as it were, a good distance behind the starting line. Russian production did not return even to meager pre-WWI levels until late 1925, eight years after the revolution. Leon Trotsky, one of the central leaders of the Russian revolution explains,

It is sufficiently well known that every revolution up to this time has been followed by a reaction, or even a counterrevolution. This, to be sure, has never thrown the nation all the way back to its starting point, but it has always taken from the people the lion’s share of their conquests.

But the Soviet Union was a new phenomenon, built upon a new economic system.

At the same time, by concentrating the means of production in the hands of the state, the revolution made it possible to apply new and incomparably more effective industrial methods. Only thanks to a planned directive was it possible in so brief a span to restore what had been destroyed by the imperialist and civil wars, to create gigantic new enterprises, to introduce new kinds of production and establish new branches of industry.

Stalinism: A Gift to the Defenders of Capitalism

So, Russian workers and peasants were the first in the world to break with capitalism and attempt to build a more equitable society. But the US and its capitalist allies ensured that even if history could not be stopped outright, even if the revolution could not be killed, it would be seriously wounded. Trotsky explains how this unfolded.

Intervention followed intervention. The revolution got no direct help from the west. Instead of the expected prosperity of the country an ominous destitution reigned for long. Moreover, the outstanding representatives of the working class either died in the civil war, or rose a few steps higher and broke away from the masses. And thus after an unexampled tension of forces, hopes and illusions, there came a long period of weariness, decline and sheer disappointment in the results of the revolution. The ebb of the “plebian pride” made room for a flood of pusillanimity and careerism. The new commanding caste rose to its place upon this wave.

Moreover, hoped-for outside aid did not materialize.

The crushing of the Bulgarian insurrection in 1924, the treacherous liquidation of the General Strike in England and the unworthy conduct of the Polish workers’ party at the installation of Pilsudski in 1926, the terrible massacre of the Chinese revolution in 1927, and, finally, the still more ominous recent defeats in Germany and Austria – these are the historic catastrophes which killed the faith of the Soviet masses in world revolution, and permitted the [Stalinist] bureaucracy to rise higher and higher as the sole light of salvation.

All of this was detrimental to democracy.

Democracy had been narrowed in proportion as difficulties increased. In the beginning, the party had wished and hoped to preserve freedom of political struggle within the framework of the Soviets. The civil war introduced stern amendments into this calculation. The opposition parties were forbidden one after the other. This measure, obviously in conflict with the spirit of Soviet democracy, the leaders of Bolshevism regarded not as a principle, but as an episodic act of self-defense.

By the mid to late 1920s,

Of party democracy there remained only recollections in the memory of the older generation. And together with it had disappeared the democracy of the soviets, the trade unions, the co-operatives, the cultural and athletic organizations. Above each and every one of them there reigns an unlimited hierarchy of party secretaries. The regime had become “totalitarian” in character several years before this word arrived from Germany.

As we know from US history, war and economic hardship pose serious threats to democracy. See, for example, the Espionage Act (1917), The Sedition Act (1918) under which labor and antiwar activist Eugene Debs was convicted, the FDR ordered Japanese internment camps (1942-45), the McCarthy witch hunt (1950-54), the Patriot Act (2001), and mass government spying on Americans justified by the September 11, 2001 attack. In each case, the eroding of democracy was said to be justified by a foreign threat.

Add to this the long-standing use by the US of blockades and sanctions to explicitly bring about regime change in “unfriendly” countries.

All these threats were directed against the incipient Soviet republic by the US and its allies. And the results were predictable: poverty and reduced democracy in the face of a foreign threat. And so, we arrive at the essential explanation for democratic degeneration of the Russian revolution. Again from Trotsky,

The basis of bureaucratic [Stalinist-type] rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet [Stalinist] bureaucracy. It “knows” who is to get something and who has to wait.

…

In its first period, the Soviet regime was undoubtedly far more equalitarian and less bureaucratic than now. But that was an equality of general poverty. The resources of the country were so scant that there was no opportunity to separate out from the masses of the population any broad privileged strata. At the same time the “equalizing” character of wages, destroying personal interestedness, became a brake upon the development of the productive forces. Soviet economy had to lift itself from its poverty to a somewhat higher level before fat deposits of privilege became possible. The present state of production is still far from guaranteeing all necessities to everybody. But it is already adequate to give significant privileges to a minority, and convert inequality into a whip for the spurring on of the majority. That is the first reason why the growth of production has so far strengthened not the socialist, but the bourgeois features of the state.

But that is not the sole reason. Alongside the economic factor dictating capitalist methods of payment at the present stage, there operates a parallel political factor in the person of the bureaucracy itself. In its very essence it is the planter and protector of inequality. It arose in the beginning as the bourgeois organ of a workers’ state. In establishing and defending the advantages of a minority, it of course draws off the cream for its own use. Nobody who has wealth to distribute ever omits himself. Thus out of a social necessity there has developed an organ which has far outgrown its socially necessary function, and become an independent factor and therewith the source of great danger for the whole social organism.

[Emphasis added.]

This is what gave rise to Stalinism, as explained by Trotsky, the Russian revolutionist who led the fight against Stalin’s crimes. This is how the US and its imperial allies undercut the Soviet experiment while passing off the result of their handiwork as the inevitable outcome of any attempt to supplant capitalism. Similar stories can be told for other attempts to adopt socialism. The fact that it has been mass-based, popular, democratic movements that have challenged capitalism around the world is erased from historical memory. Instead, those who have made it their business to crush such movements control the narrative. With their thumb firmly on the scale, having done their utmost to ensure the material conditions for a thriving democracy are denied to any who rebel against the status quo, capitalist spinmeisters declare socialism itself to be inherently undemocratic.

But propaganda has its limits. Given the far greater development of the US economy today as compared to Russia in 1917, our superior standard of living, and the fact the main weapon wielded against anti-capitalist movements of the past has always been US power (or that of the imperial hegemon of the day), the outlook for the US is quite different. Any notion that the rise of a genuine, domestic, majority movement in the US to move beyond capitalism would inevitably morph into Stalinist-type authoritarianism lacks material foundation. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe such a historic reversal could and would be avoided.

A Word About Cuba

Though by no means perfect, Cuba stands out as the post-capitalist country that’s done the most to promote forms of grass-roots democracy and resist antidemocratic pressure from without. A 1960 memorandum from US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lester Mallory reported that “The majority of Cubans support Castro,” and “The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” This explains the cruel sixty-four year economic blockade the US has imposed on Cuba: a brazen attempt to prevent Cuba from being seen as a positive example. Yet despite it all, according to a 2014 Gallup Poll, Americans are more dissatisfied with their government than Cubans.

Two Parts to Every State

People often don’t realize—and pundits who know better conveniently forget—that every nation state has both an economic and a political component, and the two are not rigidly connected. Various capitalist economies—the US, England, France, Canada and much of Europe—have parliamentary, pseudo-democratic political systems. But other capitalist economies—like Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, fascist Spain, and the Park Chung Hee regime in South Korea in the past; and Egypt, Myanmar, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia in the present—have evinced very different, dictatorial political systems.

If an extremely cloistered person were aware of no country but Hitler’s Germany, that person could be forgiven for thinking that capitalism and fascist dictatorship always go hand in hand. But that person would be wrong.

For the same reason, the proposition that a socialist economic system must inevitably be paired with a repressive, Stalinist political system is erroneous. The world has yet to see a relatively wealthy country adopt a socialist economy without having to endure crippling assault—military, political and economic—by the US and its imperial allies. When that occurs, when one or more countries with sufficient productive power to truly put human needs above profits adopt socialist economies; when such a country or group of countries is strong enough to fend off imperial assault without destroying or severely undermining their own economic foundation, then there is every likelihood that such economies would be teamed with democratic political systems far exceeding the putative democracy of our own.

Indeed, if the population of the US itself decided to ditch capitalism and prioritize human needs over profits—that is, to embrace socialism—no outside force would be able to stop it. Given our democratic traditions, powerful economy and the lack of viable outside opponents, one could practically guarantee that a future Socialist United States of America would be a model of economic and political democracy.

Are Scandinavian Countries Socialist?

No. Despite often being mislabeled as socialist, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland are all capitalist. In each of these countries, the commanding heights of the economy are in private hands. The collectively produced social surplus wealth is controlled by individual capitalists and private corporations, not by society as a whole. All the Scandinavian countries are members of the capitalist NATO military alliance. Sweden, Denmark and Norway are also major arms exporters.

Having some laudable benefits, like universal healthcare and free college, does not make a country socialist any more than having the government owned Postal Service, Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Highway Administration, National Parks, and free universal elementary and high school education make the US socialist.

What About Communism?

Communism is a theoretical stage in the evolution of socialism where prioritizing human needs over profits has become so accepted, so normalized that the need for governmental administration, management and enforcement is greatly diminished. If this seems far-fetched, consider an example we all take for granted: water fountains.

Water is one of the most crucial of resources. An average person can survive only a few days without it. Fortunately, in the US and many countries, free water fountains can be found in virtually every building, park, and venue open to the public. Yet, as crucial as we know water to be, you never see stealing, hoarding or fighting over water fountains. There’s no need for water fountain police to ensure that people take turns or leave enough for others. Why? Because there are enough fountains to ensure that the lines are never too long. And through years of experience, everyone takes for granted that there’s enough water to go around. No matter how thirsty the person in front of you may be, you know there will be plenty left when it’s your turn.

Communism envisions that after generations of building and improving socialism, food, fuel and other necessities will be as abundant and universally accessible as water from water fountains is today. When that happens, the need for government’s role in regulation, management, distribution, enforcement, etc. for those resources will be greatly diminished.

So, what is Socialism?

There are basically two choices:

1. You can believe what those who benefit most from our current capitalist system say. You can accept how those who have the most to lose from genuine economic and political democracy define socialism. We’re referring, of course, to Wall Street, the corporate media, big business, oligarchs, and Democratic and Republican politicians. To the ones who lie us into every war. To the ones who lied about the safety and efficacy of mRNA shots. To the ones who support censorship “for the public good”. To them, socialism is tyranny.

2. Or, you can believe that we currently have no genuine democracy. That we can do better. That the tremendous wealth working people collectively produce should be managed democratically. That human needs should be prioritized over profits. That socialism means instituting economic democracy, and in so doing, making true political democracy possible.

Pick one.

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^* Of course, the American Revolution and transition to capitalism wasn’t complete until a second revolution—the Civil War, 1861-1865—ended slavery.