The president himself frequently denounces socialism, and last
fall, the White House Council of Economic Advisers issued a scathing report,
report, “The
Opportunity Costs of Socialism.” None of this is worth
taking seriously at an intellectual level; the 70-page report is full of inane
attempts to link U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of
Massachusetts to such historical figures as Fidel Castro and Mao Zedong. It
insinuates that somehow “Medicare-for-all” will repeat the “tens of millions of
deaths by starvation” in Stalinist Russia. Even as scare tactics, this is a
joke.
In reality, cherry-picked examples from the worst of Soviet and
Maoist authoritarianism tell us nothing about socialist politics here in New
Jersey. “Socialism” is as broad a term as “capitalism,” but at its core, it is
about working people benefiting from their own labor, and economic and
political arrangements that ensure an equitable distribution of wealth and
resources, in stark contrast to our current system that is glaringly skewed
toward the wealthy.
Of course, under no socialist system do workers--all
workers--benefit from their labor. The proceeds of labor are controlled by the
state. Strub acknowledges as much. Wealth and resources are distributed not by
market forces--that is, by the cumulative voluntary choices of free people, as
under capitalism--but by the state--that is, by force. How do you get
“Medicare-for-all” without forcing everyone into the program whether they agree
or not? That forcing into “[fill-in-the-blank] for all” is exactly what drives
a Castro or a Mao or a Stalin, whether it’s collectivized farms or factories or
healthcare.
Strub goes on to muddy the intellectual waters.
She names several groups that fought for allegedly socialist causes, never
identifying their means: Did they employ private voluntary means, or coercive
legal means? She says only:
What unites all of these groups is the fight for the rights of
workers, women, African-Americans, immigrants and all marginalized and
oppressed groups.
Rights are guarantees to freedom of non-rights violating action. Group
organizations that are voluntary associations are right-respecting, and fight
for genuine individual rights. They are not socialist in the modern,
Marxian sense. But Strub is clearly referring to Marxism, as she mentions him
favorably in the article. There is no doubt that there have been oppressed
groups in America. But extending equal protection of individual rights to all,
not equal enslavement of all under a totalitarian state, is the proper answer.
Strub concludes:
The Democratic Socialists of America is a big-tent organization of
many beliefs and strategies, but its core principle is that
“working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet
human needs, not to make profits for a few.”
If Strub is referring to genuine individual
rights, she’s not talking about socialism. If she’s talking about genuine
socialism, she’s not talking about rights, which belong to capitalism and free
markets--that is, privately controlled economy and society to each meet her own
needs through work, trade, or other voluntary means..
I left these comments:
A “democratically run economy and society” is a
government that totally controls our economic and social lives.
Economics is the field of activity by which
people support their lives. A government that totally controls the economy has
total control over people’s means of survival. A government with total control
over people's means of survival is a government that has every individual by
the throat. What freedom, what opposition, what dissent, is possible under such
conditions? Does it matter if it is elected? A government, of whatever kind,
that has every individual by the throat is a totalitarian state.
Don’t be suckered by “democratic.” It only means
you give up your precious personal “vote”--the power to live by your own
choices--in exchange for a meaningless political vote, buried among millions.
You get to vote for the dictators that control your life. But an elected master
is still a master, and a voting slave is still a slave. Freedom is not the
right to vote. Freedom is the right to live your life regardless of anyone
else's vote or the outcome of any election.
There’s a reason democratic socialists turn to
politics. As a leading disciple of Marx understood, “Political power grows out of
the barrel of a gun.” So democratic socialists seek political power: All
socialism grows out of the barrel of a gun. Modern democratic socialists are
more clever than their communist predecessors. They play the “long game,”
achieving their goals in stages, and without the wholesale confiscation of
private business and property. But a system that subordinates the individual to
the political power of politicians to engineer “a radical redistribution of
power and wealth and a radical restructuring of our social system” from the
individual to the state is a redux of Mao and Stalin.
-----------------------------------
It’s true that few people who self-identify as
“democratic socialists” want the terror of the Castros, Maos, and Stalins. But
the totalitarian underpinnings of the democratic socialists does not differ
from those communists in any essential degree. The essence of socialism is the
denial of individual rights. In “What is
Democratic Socialism?” from the website of the Democratic Socialists of America, we read that “Democracy
and socialism go hand in hand.” This is oh-so-true; the fruits of the two
century-long effort by the Democratic Party
and its offspring, the so-called Progressive Movement, to convince
Americans that the country the
Founding Fathers created is an
unrestrained democracy, rather than a limited government republic.
Strub’s talk of rights is a smoke screen to
muddle the totalitarian goals of the Democratic Socialists of America. Rights
encompass life, liberty, and property. The rights violations of democratic
socialism begins with property, which requires violating liberty to dispose of
property. Next is life, in the form of political prisons and killing fields.
How do you resist, once you’ve submitted to a government that denies your
liberty and property rights, the essence of what it means to live? Once the
socialists come to power, do you think they will allow you to simply vote them
out of power?
The answer is no. As the socialist intellectual
Robert L. Heilbroner explained in 1982, socialism is incompatible with
individual freedom. In What
Is Socialism?, Heilbroner wrote
“If socialism seeks to avoid both the anarchy and alienation of
capitalism, it must seek to break the hold of the market, not merely over the
economy but over the mind.” Socialists can exploit capitalism’s
“tolerance of dissent” to gain power, Heilbroner explains, but then must not
allow dissent to undermine their power. Once in power, socialists must
understand that
Dissents, disagreements, and departures from norms then assume a
far more threatening aspect than under bourgeois society, for they hold out the
possibility of destroying the very commitment to a moral consensus by which
socialist society differs from capitalist.
Nor can we wriggle off this hook by asserting that, among its
moral commitments, socialism will choose to include the rights of individuals
to their Millian liberties. For that celebration of individualism is directly
opposed to the basic socialist commitment to a deliberately embraced collective
moral goal.
Strub’s attempt to distance democratic socialism
from “the worst of Soviet and Maoist authoritarianism” rings hollow. And remember
that Hitler, Mussolini, and Chavez, socialists all, came to power by
democratic/constitutional means--and all promptly consolidated power into a
dictatorship. Democracy, properly
understood, is
totalitarian. So is socialism. The Democratic Socialists of America understand
this. So should we.
Related Reading:
Our
Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People by Randy E. Barnett
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