Disagreeing with Liberal Socialism, Despising Marxist Socialism

I wrote last week about evil of totalitarian ideologies such as communism and fascism and pointed out that both antifa and Nazis should be treated with complete disdain and ostracism.

And that led me to find common ground with my left-of-center friends, even though I don’t like many of their policies.

I don’t like redistribution…programs are financed with taxes and that the internal revenue code is enforced by coercion…if you catch me in a cranky mood, I’ll be like the stereotypical libertarian at Thanksgiving dinner and wax poetic about what’s wrong with the system. That being said, I much prefer the coercion found in western democracies compared to the totalitarian versions of coercion found in many other parts of the world. At least we have the rule of law, which limits (however imperfectly) capricious abuse by government officials. …our Constitution still protects many personal liberties, things that can’t be taken for granted in some places. Moreover, there is only a trivially small risk of getting abused by the state in western nations because you have unpopular views. And there’s little danger of persecution by government (at least nowadays) based on factors such as race and religion. This is what makes liberal democracy a good form of government (with “liberal” in this case being a reference to classical liberalism rather than the modern version). Unfortunately, there are some people in America that don’t believe in these principles.

Now let’s look at an aspect of this issue from a left-of-center perspective.

Writing for the New Republic, John Judis analyzes the different types of socialism. He starts with some personal history of his time as a socialist activist.

In the early 1970s, I was a founding member of the New American Movement, a socialist group… Five years later, I was finished with…socialist organizing. …nobody seemed to know how socialism—which meant, to me, democratic ownership and control of the “means of production”—would actually work… Would it mean total nationalization of the economy? …wouldn’t that put too much political power in the state? The realization that a nationalized economy might also be profoundly inefficient, and disastrously slow to keep up with global markets, only surfaced later with the Soviet Union’s collapse. But even then, by the mid-1970s, I was wondering what being a socialist really meant in the United States.

He then notes that socialism has made a comeback, at least if some opinion polls (but not others) and the campaign of Bernie Sanders are any indication.

…much to my surprise, socialism is making a comeback. The key event has been the campaign of self-identified democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, who almost won the Democratic nomination and is now reputedly the most popular politician in America. Several opinion polls have also found that young people now think favorably of socialism and ill of capitalism… For the first time since the ‘60s, socialism looks like a politics with a future in the United States.

But Judis notes that it’s unclear what socialism means.

The old nostrums about ownership and control of the means of production simply don’t resonate in 2017. …In the 2016 campaign, however, Sanders began to define a socialism that could grow… I think there is an important place for the kind of democratic socialism that Sanders espoused.

He says there are many flavors of socialism, but ultimately puts them in two camps.

There is no scientific definition of socialism… It’s a political tradition with many different flavors—Marxist, Christian, social-democratic, Fabian, Owenite, Leninist, Maoist. In looking at the choices facing American socialists now, …a choice between a socialism rooted in Marx’s apocalyptical promise of revolution, or the abolition of capitalism and a socialism that works more gradually toward the incorporation of public power and economic equality within capitalism. One could be called “Marxist socialism” and the other “social democratic”—or, to borrow from John Maynard Keynes, “liberal socialism.”

And “liberal socialism” basically means capitalism combined with European-style redistributionism.

In Western Europe, …socialists were forced to define their objectives more clearly. And what has emerged is a liberal conception of socialism. …social democracy has probably reached its acme in the Nordic countries, where the left has ruled governments for most of last half-century. …That’s not Marx’s vision of socialism, or even Debs’s. In Europe, workers have significant say in what companies do. They don’t control or own them. Private property endures. …private capital is given leave to gain profits through higher productivity, even if that results in layoffs and bankruptcies. But the government is able to extract a large share of the economic surplus that these firms create in order to fund a full-blown welfare state.

Which means “liberal socialism” is, well, liberalism (the modern version, i.e., statism, though Thomas Sowell has a more unflattering term to describe it).

By the standards of Marxist socialism, this kind of social democracy appears to be nothing more than an attenuated form of capitalism. …But…As the Soviet experiment with blanket nationalization showed, it can’t adjust to the rapid changes in industry created by the introduction of automation and information technology. …the market is a better indicator of prices than government planning. …the older Marxist model of socialism may not even be compatible with popular democracy. …What’s the difference between this kind of socialist politics and garden-variety liberalism? Not much. …American socialists need to do what the Europeans did after World War II and bid goodbye to the Marxist vision of democratic control and ownership of the means of production. They need to recognize that what is necessary now—and also conceivable—is not to abolish capitalism, but to create socialism within it.

For what it’s worth, the leftists I know are believers in “liberal democracy,” which is good, and they also are believers in “liberal socialism,” which is good, at least when compared to “Marxist socialism.” Sort of like comparing Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to Nicolás Maduro and Kim Jong Un.

I disagree with Obama and Clinton, of course, and I would argue that what they want is bad compared to small-government capitalism.

But I utterly despise the totalitarian regimes in Venezuela and North Korea.

Let’s conclude by highlighting a key difference between “liberal socialists” and supporters of small government. My leftist friends are content to allow capitalism so long as they can impose high taxes on “economic surplus” to finance lots of redistribution.

They think that such policies don’t cause significant economic harm. I try to explain to them that punishing success and subsidizing dependency is not a good recipe for long-run prosperity. And I also tell them that demographic changes make their policies very unsustainable.

But at least these decent people on the left are not totalitarians. So when I look at this amusing image from Reddit‘s libertarian page, I agree that everyone who supports big government is a collectivist of sorts. But “Social Democracy” (assuming that’s akin to “liberal socialism”) is not really the same creature as the other forms of collectivism (assuming “social justice” is akin to antifa).

Which is why this image is more accurate.

The bottom line is that Nordic-style big government is misguided, but state-über-alles totalitarianism is irredeemably horrible.