On Becoming a Socialist

Back when Bernie and Biden were running neck and neck for the nomination of the Democratic Party, I found myself in Bernie's camp. I'm still there. I only switched to Biden because I believed he could get more American voters behind him. The primary goal was to get rid of Trump, and everything, I believed, had to be subordinated to that goal, the environment, equity, everything.  I believe time has proven me correct in assuming Trump was that destructive to the American pursuit of democracy. The fact that Biden has made room for Bernie in his cabinet pleases me no end.

To be a Bernie-backer is to have to listen to the right slam socialism. And that led my friend Sharmon and me to want to get a clearer idea of what we were backing when we backed Bernie. We both signed up with others advocating Social Democracy. The problem is I had much too vague an understanding of what exactly that was. I liked Bernie's goals; I didn't necessarily want to slap a label on his followers. Socialism is one of those portmanteau words that means many different things to people.

I have since come upon a wonderful site I want to recommend to you which tackles the kinds of distinctions I've been struggling over, and has enabled me to feel a bit less tentative in embracing the label "Social Democrat" for myself. God bless the nerdy academic types who do their homework in this area.

Here's the site: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlXZZhcWfyg

From now on, when asked to locate myself on the political spectrum, I will say I am a Social Democrat, and intend that to mean a capitalist who advocates the Marxist goal of a more equal distribution of wealth than the system we are currently working with by means of governmental intervention in the economy. I am not (yet) a Socialist, which is a person who believes in centralized government control of all means of production and distribution of wealth, but a capitalist who has been steadily moving in the direction of socialism, and hope to be a full-fledged socialist one day (although the time is getting short for that development to transpire).

The main problem with the way the U.S. goes about furthering its very noble project of achieving democracy one day, as I see it, is that it lacks a sufficiently enlightened populace. Because a raw form of capitalism is our most widely shared ideology, we are much better at producing wealth than we are at distributing it fairly and equitably.  Until the advent of Trump, who has now effectively turned the Republican Party into a Trumpism-over-democracy Party, we had the more unabashedly capitalist Republicans on the right and the less abashedly capitalist - but still capitalist - Democrats on the left. Bernie and his sympathizers - both Social Democrats and Democratic Socialists - were pretty much outliers.

But thanks to the two mainstream parties, we have now returned to the days of robber-baron inequity and many are beginning to look for alternatives. Some, deceived into thinking of Trump as their Savior, sought a solution in authoritarianism. Others, like myself, began looking more closely at socialism.

The only reason I am not yet a full-fledged socialist is that I think to line oneself up with socialists is to squander the little political influence any of us have. I think we calculated wisely in choosing Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders to run for president because he would get more Americans behind him than the Socialist Bernie Sanders, who has far more of my personal affection than Biden does. Biden is a decent enough man to make that decision palatable, so I have no regrets. But as long as Americans find socialism unpalatable, I feel I should continue to identify as a social democrat (i.e., capitalist) rather than pure socialist.

Socialism and Capitalism are opposing means for achieving democracy, the ultimate goal, democracy being understood as a social system in which distinctions of race, sex, ethnicity, and other accidents of birth are not impediments to a fair share of the pie. Capitalism's chief drawback is it operates on the assumption that human beings are inherently greedy; it uses the profit motive as a prime mover and is lousy at preventing the less powerful from falling through the cracks. Socialism's chief drawback has been that in all cases where it has been chosen over capitalism around the world, it has not been able to prevent a self-serving minority from seizing control and manipulating the uninformed to their own ends. And it has failed to achieve the economic goals achieved by capitalist nations. It is still, in my view, the better way to go; it's just that it has not had a good record thus far. The more successful democracies, those functioning in places like Scandinavia, the Netherlands, France, New Zealand and a few other places, are all making the same choice I have, to go the capitalist route for now. I believe (and this is speculation on my part - I don't have sufficient evidence for this) these countries have two factions, conservatives who are happy with the half-loaf of social democracy and want to maintain it, and progressives, who hope to make the jump away from capitalism to socialism some day.

Incidentally, I am inclined to listen carefully to voices on the far left who make the case that the main reason the socialist experiments (in the former Soviet Union, Vietnam, China, the countries of the Warsaw Pact, Cuba) have not worked is that the countries of the capitalist world have sabotaged their efforts. Whether this is largely true or simply somewhat true, or whether the problems lie inherent in the socialist systems themselves, I am sadly not sufficiently educated or informed to believe I can speak on this subject with any certainty. I continue to listen and hope to learn.

For a proper defense of socialism, I recommend this site: https://www.socialism101.com/basic

Photo credit