It's weird how often this newsletter ends up addressing my specific intellectual bugbears. Like eventually I'm going to wake up to a three-part series on how people misuse the word "sublime."
2. JS's interview with Janet Yellen was so bad that it actually made me angry. If he wants to explain to his audience how policy exacerbates inequality, he might start by explaining the difference between monetary and fiscal policy to himself.
Marx changed the meaning of "socialism" to mean "state ownership" from what it meant before 1848 (which varied a lot from socialist to socialist, but was roughly "any government policy that helps poor people") and there were always non-Marxist socialists who rejected state ownership as the basic paradigm of socialism.
So the thing you are claiming as the "technical meaning" is just "the thing this one really famous guy tried to convince everyone else it meant in 1848", and the "functional meaning" is "what it meant before that, continued to mean for the tiny minority of non-Marxist socialists in the 1880s-1940s peak period of socialism and got revived as the meaning of socialism after that period".
There are lots of socialist parties - parties called things like "Parti Socialiste" or "Partido Socialista Obrero Español" or "Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" - that were supporters of state ownership of everything in 1950 and have not been for many years. Historically, the switch is usually characterised as being the "Bad Godesburg program" of 1959.
But, as you point out later on, that really doesn't matter. What matters is what most Americans believe it to mean.
Of course, the other point is that "Swedish-style capitalism-with-a-large-social-safety-net" is not what socialists mean by capitalism either. Capitalism is a political-economic system that is dominated by capitalists, ie large owners of capital. Capitalism is opposed to the free market and open competition because large owners of capital should not be able to lose out to small owners of capital.
And when people are complaining about capitalism, what they mostly mean by capitalism is "domination by rich people", not "a free market" or "private ownership of businesses".
I actually don't disagree with you at all in substance - American left-wing politicians should not talk about "socialism" because it's a loser in America, because so many Americans think that socialism means what Marx meant by socialism and not what non-Marxist socialists mean by socialism.
When you're swinging around the words 'socialism' and 'capitalism' around like big hammers, you're glossing over the complexities of the real world. America, Japan and Sweden all have economic systems with lots of things in common and lots differences. These systems have all changed over decades and will continue to evolve. We should talk about what's good and bad within them and changes we'd like to make. The answer to 'government health care is socialist!' doesn't have to be 'let be explain to you why that brand that you think is bad is actually good'. It can also be 'no, government health care is capitalist, it is the standard in capitalist countries across the world.'
To give an example of what I think is somewhat similar on the right, the word nationalism can mean different things to different people. To some people, nationalism can just be a synonym for having patriotic love of country, or belief that globalism has issues in the reality of governance that makes it inferior to a more nationalist worldview. These are both things I can understand to varying degrees.
But to call yourself a nationalist nowadays would be just asking for misunderstanding and argument by people who have different worldviews. When people think "nationalists", it mostly evokes images of tiki torch wielding white supremacists yelling nonsense like "Jew will not replace us", and they won't listen to you. And can I blame them? Those people call themselves nationalists, so instead of fighting over the nuances of different meanings, maybe it's better for people to just concede the label and move on? I think a similar thing is going to happen to the world "conservative" in the post-Trump right the same way "Liberal" changed meaning over the past century.
In Marxism, socialism is the midpoint of total communism like the USSR or the PRC until the ideas have captured the whole world and has achieved true capitalism. You can argue that that's not what the world meant before and the meaning has changed since then, and I can't really say you're 100% wrong. Do I think everyone in the DSA shares this view of the world? No, but I know for a fact that there are lots who I think could be described as "fellow travelers" and a few who would agree with that world view if you injected them with truth serum, I've had those drunken conversations with my friends in these circles.
I think a lot of people need to just acknowledge that the term is loaded and should move on to something else, lest you invite these misunderstandings. I have Latino friends who recoil at the word "Socialism" and it invokes a lot of pain that their families have suffered, and would be better off just binning in the trash, like using the world "Nationalism" would probably invoke similar pain to other groups who have suffered from it.
Socialism has a leftover meaning for many of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and I don't think that's going away. Your goal should be to be understood by those you want to convince. Marrying yourself to labels over the ideas behind them, especially when they can undermine the understanding of your ideas, is shifting focus away from what matters.
I been delving into Marxist theory this last year, in a haphazard but honest to god attempt to figure out socialism. I came to conclusions.
One, socialism and communism predate Marx. The idea of dismantling the status quo, dispossessing every factory owner, and letting society evolve into something pure and egalitarian and utopian was kicking around both prior to and parallel with Marx’ theories. You can still be hard left wing without fucking with Marx and his inane, bloody legacy.
Two, Marxists are really good at diagnosing problems. Class conflict- the idea that every interaction between a day laborer and his boss is a zero sum game with the rules heavily favoring the latter- does more to explain the world than obscure it. Exploitation- the idea that each laborer produces excess value to his wages and that that excess is swiped away by someone who earned it by owning a a pile of papers that say “1 Stock in ACME Corporation”. Etc etc.
3. Related to #2, Marxism is terrible at generating solutions to the problems they see. The metaphor that springs to mind is some old timey medieval doctor going “Ah, the patient is presenting with contusions around the abdomen and hips, with jaundice evident in the face, and shortness of breath. He is suffering from hyperteromyia, but fortunately his case is not advanced.” And before you can even begin to be astounded that he pattern-matched the disease to the symptoms right out of the textbook, the doctor continues “We must therefore bleed him hourly for a week, stick leeches up his cock hole, then leave him outside in the snowbank overnight to balance his humors.” The solution to this problem of class conflict and exploitation and so on is CLEARLY not to demolish all social and legal institutions, centralize control of the state, impose modernity at gunpoint, set up a command economy run by an executive council, and ruthlessly purge every demographic who might object. This was tried. Didn’t work. Find a workaround.
4. Marxist communism failed so hard that it functionally does not exist in America.
5. Related to #4, the danger is not in wandering too far left, the danger is that we’d need to make a concerted effort to even try to move right. We’re immensely pro-owning class in every way. We’re so reactionary that anyone trying to form a union first must overcome the masses’ total disbelief that collective bargaining is even a thing, let alone overcome the corporate sabotage and stooging, let alone challenge the laws that prohibit uncontrolled strikes. 1930’s Kentucky is more left wing than we are, because even as Union men were being shot, beat and arrested, they still EXISTED.
"The segment completely accepts the “spending = socialism” paradigm"
This is the right (and I think often the center's) problem with "socialism" as commonly advocated by progressive activists and politicians--and especially the politicians. Socialism means spending, but spending with no accountability, spending with minimal planning, spending without caring much about the outcomes or results--just expecting them to naturally be what the politician says they will be.
There are a lot of people who would be open to attempting to solve many of the concerns people want to solve with "socialism"--if they had any sense the people designing and implementing such policies would be competent at doing so.
Language evolves. I wish it didn't; in my black little heart, I'm a linguistic prescriptivist. Your definition of socialism is the one I learned in political philosophy class. But that's not what it means anymore, because that's not how it's used. It's probably best to try to promote one's preferred definition, like "capitalism with a big social safety net." That's what my friends mean, and I don't hassle them about it.
And there should be two spaces after a period. "Begging the question" does not mean "raising the question." You shouldn't start a sentence with "and" even though I just did. Prescriptivists are always going to lose the battle.
"universally-free college" is good or bad to the extent that you think that "universal college" is good or bad. If you think that it should be normal for everyone to go to college the way it is normal for everyone to go to high school (even though many people do still quit high school and start work before graduating), then college should be universally-free. If not, then not.
"We don’t have universally-free college or a jobs guarantee because those are thoroughly-bad ideas"
I like the idea of free community college or two-year degrees--especially if it was a program always tied to training/courses in fields where there were a large number of job openings in the recent past, or presently.
College is not magic and not any degree you get is actually going to give you, your community, or the country any advantage for you to spend 2 or 4 years studying French poetry or erotic sculpture or pick-your-worthless-degree cliche.
But "learn to code" is not a bad thing to say to people seeking a free education. If that's too much trouble, learn to fix air conditioners, learn to be an electrician, or just learn something beyond "do you want fries with that" in a field currently employing people. I would have no problem with tax money paying for trade schools/engineering schools/appliance repair schools . . . etc.
A jobs guarantee really can't work. Although it would be nice. But as many available internships as possible (preferably outside of government and academia) would be nice.
Perhaps some element at play here is the constant splintering of left wing groups into every smaller niches. The different flavors of socialism are so tedious and annoying I won't be bothered to learn the differences and I'm someone who chose to take a seminar in college called "Capitalism in Question."
I basically agree with this one. My definition of socialism may be broader (I'd count economies dominated by worker-controlled-and-owned enterprises as socialist) but the point stands: giving 100% subsidies to certain slices of the economy isn't socialism. There's a case that the Nordic economies might have enough state-owned enterprises to count as semi-socialist (https://mattbruenig.com/2017/07/28/nordic-socialism-is-realer-than-you-think/), but it's arguable, and certainly Jon Stewart's list of policies isn't itself socialist.
People calling non-socialism "socialism" does trigger a wince. I worry less about how the word polls (just as I'm glad liberals eventually quelled the reflex of running away from the word "liberal", whether or not "liberal" polls badly) and more about simple accuracy — as we know, I'm keen on accuracy in political nomenclature. Socialists can, usually, survive calling ourselves "socialist"; liberals could too. But they'd just be incorrect (except for liberal socialists, if your definition of "liberal" doesn't rule out "liberal socialists" an oxymoron).
Does anyone else remember when the Daily Show sent Wyatt Cenac to Sweden, and he made fun of Robyn's dumpy apartment? (And he met a bunch of happy people with comfortable lives.) In that case, they did call it socialism.... but at least they portrayed it positively.
It's weird how often this newsletter ends up addressing my specific intellectual bugbears. Like eventually I'm going to wake up to a three-part series on how people misuse the word "sublime."
Two immediate thoughts:
1. It's funny how the economic models most American socialists call socialism were actually conceived in post-WW2 Europe as a right-ish, neoclassical econ-based alternative to...yep, socialism: https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/german-social-market-economy-rules-based-policymaking-by-lars-p-feld-et-al-2021-03
2. JS's interview with Janet Yellen was so bad that it actually made me angry. If he wants to explain to his audience how policy exacerbates inequality, he might start by explaining the difference between monetary and fiscal policy to himself.
Marx changed the meaning of "socialism" to mean "state ownership" from what it meant before 1848 (which varied a lot from socialist to socialist, but was roughly "any government policy that helps poor people") and there were always non-Marxist socialists who rejected state ownership as the basic paradigm of socialism.
So the thing you are claiming as the "technical meaning" is just "the thing this one really famous guy tried to convince everyone else it meant in 1848", and the "functional meaning" is "what it meant before that, continued to mean for the tiny minority of non-Marxist socialists in the 1880s-1940s peak period of socialism and got revived as the meaning of socialism after that period".
There are lots of socialist parties - parties called things like "Parti Socialiste" or "Partido Socialista Obrero Español" or "Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" - that were supporters of state ownership of everything in 1950 and have not been for many years. Historically, the switch is usually characterised as being the "Bad Godesburg program" of 1959.
But, as you point out later on, that really doesn't matter. What matters is what most Americans believe it to mean.
Of course, the other point is that "Swedish-style capitalism-with-a-large-social-safety-net" is not what socialists mean by capitalism either. Capitalism is a political-economic system that is dominated by capitalists, ie large owners of capital. Capitalism is opposed to the free market and open competition because large owners of capital should not be able to lose out to small owners of capital.
And when people are complaining about capitalism, what they mostly mean by capitalism is "domination by rich people", not "a free market" or "private ownership of businesses".
I actually don't disagree with you at all in substance - American left-wing politicians should not talk about "socialism" because it's a loser in America, because so many Americans think that socialism means what Marx meant by socialism and not what non-Marxist socialists mean by socialism.
A good Noah Smith tweet on this subject from the other day: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1457435650249035781
When you're swinging around the words 'socialism' and 'capitalism' around like big hammers, you're glossing over the complexities of the real world. America, Japan and Sweden all have economic systems with lots of things in common and lots differences. These systems have all changed over decades and will continue to evolve. We should talk about what's good and bad within them and changes we'd like to make. The answer to 'government health care is socialist!' doesn't have to be 'let be explain to you why that brand that you think is bad is actually good'. It can also be 'no, government health care is capitalist, it is the standard in capitalist countries across the world.'
To give an example of what I think is somewhat similar on the right, the word nationalism can mean different things to different people. To some people, nationalism can just be a synonym for having patriotic love of country, or belief that globalism has issues in the reality of governance that makes it inferior to a more nationalist worldview. These are both things I can understand to varying degrees.
But to call yourself a nationalist nowadays would be just asking for misunderstanding and argument by people who have different worldviews. When people think "nationalists", it mostly evokes images of tiki torch wielding white supremacists yelling nonsense like "Jew will not replace us", and they won't listen to you. And can I blame them? Those people call themselves nationalists, so instead of fighting over the nuances of different meanings, maybe it's better for people to just concede the label and move on? I think a similar thing is going to happen to the world "conservative" in the post-Trump right the same way "Liberal" changed meaning over the past century.
In Marxism, socialism is the midpoint of total communism like the USSR or the PRC until the ideas have captured the whole world and has achieved true capitalism. You can argue that that's not what the world meant before and the meaning has changed since then, and I can't really say you're 100% wrong. Do I think everyone in the DSA shares this view of the world? No, but I know for a fact that there are lots who I think could be described as "fellow travelers" and a few who would agree with that world view if you injected them with truth serum, I've had those drunken conversations with my friends in these circles.
I think a lot of people need to just acknowledge that the term is loaded and should move on to something else, lest you invite these misunderstandings. I have Latino friends who recoil at the word "Socialism" and it invokes a lot of pain that their families have suffered, and would be better off just binning in the trash, like using the world "Nationalism" would probably invoke similar pain to other groups who have suffered from it.
Socialism has a leftover meaning for many of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and I don't think that's going away. Your goal should be to be understood by those you want to convince. Marrying yourself to labels over the ideas behind them, especially when they can undermine the understanding of your ideas, is shifting focus away from what matters.
I been delving into Marxist theory this last year, in a haphazard but honest to god attempt to figure out socialism. I came to conclusions.
One, socialism and communism predate Marx. The idea of dismantling the status quo, dispossessing every factory owner, and letting society evolve into something pure and egalitarian and utopian was kicking around both prior to and parallel with Marx’ theories. You can still be hard left wing without fucking with Marx and his inane, bloody legacy.
Two, Marxists are really good at diagnosing problems. Class conflict- the idea that every interaction between a day laborer and his boss is a zero sum game with the rules heavily favoring the latter- does more to explain the world than obscure it. Exploitation- the idea that each laborer produces excess value to his wages and that that excess is swiped away by someone who earned it by owning a a pile of papers that say “1 Stock in ACME Corporation”. Etc etc.
3. Related to #2, Marxism is terrible at generating solutions to the problems they see. The metaphor that springs to mind is some old timey medieval doctor going “Ah, the patient is presenting with contusions around the abdomen and hips, with jaundice evident in the face, and shortness of breath. He is suffering from hyperteromyia, but fortunately his case is not advanced.” And before you can even begin to be astounded that he pattern-matched the disease to the symptoms right out of the textbook, the doctor continues “We must therefore bleed him hourly for a week, stick leeches up his cock hole, then leave him outside in the snowbank overnight to balance his humors.” The solution to this problem of class conflict and exploitation and so on is CLEARLY not to demolish all social and legal institutions, centralize control of the state, impose modernity at gunpoint, set up a command economy run by an executive council, and ruthlessly purge every demographic who might object. This was tried. Didn’t work. Find a workaround.
4. Marxist communism failed so hard that it functionally does not exist in America.
5. Related to #4, the danger is not in wandering too far left, the danger is that we’d need to make a concerted effort to even try to move right. We’re immensely pro-owning class in every way. We’re so reactionary that anyone trying to form a union first must overcome the masses’ total disbelief that collective bargaining is even a thing, let alone overcome the corporate sabotage and stooging, let alone challenge the laws that prohibit uncontrolled strikes. 1930’s Kentucky is more left wing than we are, because even as Union men were being shot, beat and arrested, they still EXISTED.
Can we create a Substack writer named "Geoffrey Epstein"?
Jeff, do you think the word "socialist" helped or hurt Bernie Sanders in his runs for president? I can see arguments in both directions.
"The segment completely accepts the “spending = socialism” paradigm"
This is the right (and I think often the center's) problem with "socialism" as commonly advocated by progressive activists and politicians--and especially the politicians. Socialism means spending, but spending with no accountability, spending with minimal planning, spending without caring much about the outcomes or results--just expecting them to naturally be what the politician says they will be.
There are a lot of people who would be open to attempting to solve many of the concerns people want to solve with "socialism"--if they had any sense the people designing and implementing such policies would be competent at doing so.
Jon Stewart is still alive? I had no idea.
Language evolves. I wish it didn't; in my black little heart, I'm a linguistic prescriptivist. Your definition of socialism is the one I learned in political philosophy class. But that's not what it means anymore, because that's not how it's used. It's probably best to try to promote one's preferred definition, like "capitalism with a big social safety net." That's what my friends mean, and I don't hassle them about it.
And there should be two spaces after a period. "Begging the question" does not mean "raising the question." You shouldn't start a sentence with "and" even though I just did. Prescriptivists are always going to lose the battle.
"universally-free college" is good or bad to the extent that you think that "universal college" is good or bad. If you think that it should be normal for everyone to go to college the way it is normal for everyone to go to high school (even though many people do still quit high school and start work before graduating), then college should be universally-free. If not, then not.
"We don’t have universally-free college or a jobs guarantee because those are thoroughly-bad ideas"
I like the idea of free community college or two-year degrees--especially if it was a program always tied to training/courses in fields where there were a large number of job openings in the recent past, or presently.
College is not magic and not any degree you get is actually going to give you, your community, or the country any advantage for you to spend 2 or 4 years studying French poetry or erotic sculpture or pick-your-worthless-degree cliche.
But "learn to code" is not a bad thing to say to people seeking a free education. If that's too much trouble, learn to fix air conditioners, learn to be an electrician, or just learn something beyond "do you want fries with that" in a field currently employing people. I would have no problem with tax money paying for trade schools/engineering schools/appliance repair schools . . . etc.
A jobs guarantee really can't work. Although it would be nice. But as many available internships as possible (preferably outside of government and academia) would be nice.
Perhaps some element at play here is the constant splintering of left wing groups into every smaller niches. The different flavors of socialism are so tedious and annoying I won't be bothered to learn the differences and I'm someone who chose to take a seminar in college called "Capitalism in Question."
Agree with your point here and relevant tweet from Matt Yglesias: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1456283472771825664
I basically agree with this one. My definition of socialism may be broader (I'd count economies dominated by worker-controlled-and-owned enterprises as socialist) but the point stands: giving 100% subsidies to certain slices of the economy isn't socialism. There's a case that the Nordic economies might have enough state-owned enterprises to count as semi-socialist (https://mattbruenig.com/2017/07/28/nordic-socialism-is-realer-than-you-think/), but it's arguable, and certainly Jon Stewart's list of policies isn't itself socialist.
People calling non-socialism "socialism" does trigger a wince. I worry less about how the word polls (just as I'm glad liberals eventually quelled the reflex of running away from the word "liberal", whether or not "liberal" polls badly) and more about simple accuracy — as we know, I'm keen on accuracy in political nomenclature. Socialists can, usually, survive calling ourselves "socialist"; liberals could too. But they'd just be incorrect (except for liberal socialists, if your definition of "liberal" doesn't rule out "liberal socialists" an oxymoron).
Does anyone else remember when the Daily Show sent Wyatt Cenac to Sweden, and he made fun of Robyn's dumpy apartment? (And he met a bunch of happy people with comfortable lives.) In that case, they did call it socialism.... but at least they portrayed it positively.
https://www.cc.com/video/yk98ct/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-the-stockholm-syndrome-pt-1