I posted this answer:
Though socialism is inherently authoritarian—it is, by ideological definition, collectivist**—it needn’t be politically authoritarian or statist. The Communistic Societies of the United States; Harmony, Oneida, the Shakers, and Others by Charles Nordhoff and History of American Socialisms by John Humphrey Noyes’ document the many socialisms that have existed in the United States ***. Published in the 1870s, Nordhoff and Noyes give first-person accounts of the ideologies and functions of life in these 19th Century colonies. The socialisms they cover were not statist because all were established privately and voluntarily, and were respectful of the universal guarantee of inalienable individual rights. 20th Century examples of non-statist socialisms include American Kibbutzim, modeled on the Israeli Kibbutz, and the 1960s hippie communes. (Nordhoff and Noyes did not cover the feudal slave plantation communisms of the antebellum U.S. South, which were sanctioned and protected by law and thus were statist.)
Karl Marx weaponized socialism by uniting it with political power. Political socialism, whatever its variation, including “Democratic Socialism”, seeks to impose socialism on entire societies, nations, or the world through the legal machinery of government force. Marxism unites socialism with statism, and that brand of socialism has become the common understanding of socialism, to the unfortunate exclusion of non-statist socialisms.
Clearly, socialism and individualism are morally incompatible. The right to pursue your own happiness clashes with socialism’s collective moral vision. Just as clearly, voluntary socialism needn’t be statist as long as it is practiced privately and voluntarily, which makes it legally compatible with a government that constitutionally protects individual rights, such as in America in its Founding principles. Of course, even voluntary socialism is authoritarian, even though participants voluntarily submit to collective—that is, centralized—control of their lives.
Political socialism’s horrors in practice, including national socialism, communism, fascism, Southern plantation slavery, and the whole host of hybrid offsprings, stem directly from Marx’s influence or channel the same communistic and anti-Capitalist ideas championed by Marx. In order to end socialism’s brutality while simultaneously protecting the right of individuals to live a socialist lifestyle, socialism must be separated from politics. When socialists turn to the government to impose their authoritarian creed on others by force, socialism becomes statist. Under Capitalism, with its complete separation of economics and state, statist socialism would be constitutionally forbidden.
There is an important parallel between socialism and religion. Religion has a long history of brutality and murder when united with political power. The Founding Fathers of America found a simple, ingenious, but powerful solution—the separation of religion and state; “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
The history of statist socialism in practice is even more brutal, and equally as unjust, as that of religion. The solution should be to adopt the same principles that the Founders applied to religion. Religion and socialism have a common underpinning: They are both inherently authoritarian, with religion claiming the individual must submit to God’s dictates, and socialism claiming the individual must submit to the collective’s dictates. Consequently, just as religion cannot be trusted with political power, so neither can socialism be trusted with political power. The Founders’ solution on religion should be applied to socialism. For the same reasons and in the same way as the separation of church and state, we should have the separation of economics and state to bar socialists from ever again uniting with political power.
So long as socialism was voluntary, it was not statist. Socialism as it is understood and advocated today is statist because socialists have abandoned the peaceful, persuasive, rights-respecting means of socialism documented by Nordhoff and Noyes, instead turning to the guns of political power--in today’s case the power of democratic legislative force--to advance their goals. Socialism will cease being statist, as well as immoral, unjust, and contrary to the principles of a free society, when socialists decide to re-join civility by renouncing the use of government force, getting out of politics, and returning to respecting the rights of others through voluntary consent and mutual agreement, and leaving those not interested in the socialist lifestyle free to go about their own lives unmolested by government coercion. That’s when non-Marxist socialism will stop being ignored.
** [Collectivism is the doctrine of group supremacy. That is, the collective, however it is defined—the proletariat, the race, “the people,” society—is the fundamental unit of moral, political, and economic concern. The individual’s primary function and justification for existence is to serve the interests and good of the collective. In collectivism’s political practice, socialism, the good of the group is determined by some central planning authority—i.e., the state.]
***[See my full review of these books here.]
RELATED READING:
Sociology for the South: Or, The Failure of Free Society by George Fitzhugh
Criminal Socialism vs. a Free Society
What is Socialism? by Robert Heilbroner
What is Capitalism? by Ayn Rand
QUORA: ‘Is capitalism voluntary?’
A Socialist Confirms that the Basics of ‘True’ Socialism is Totalitarianism
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