"Socialist" has become the political equivalent of Toxic Duct Tape: a remarkably versatile warning label that can be slapped onto almost anything you want people to be frightened of. Radioactive! Poison! Choking hazard! Socialist!
For decades, politicians on the right have applied this particular adhesive to anyone and anything they disliked, including, at various times, public education, Social Security and Medicare ‒ three institutions that, last I checked, weren’t plotting to seize the means of production, just trying to make sure children could read and old people didn't die in the street.
These days, the pasting has reached a fever pitch. And yet, embarrassingly, few Americans could tell you which of the many varieties of socialism they're
supposed to be afraid of. We've been handed a very stern warning label with no ingredients list.
From communes to class struggle
The word socialism first turned up around 1830, coined by the Welsh industrialist Robert Owen and the French reformer Pierre Leroux, both of whom looked at the brutal inequalities of early industrial capitalism and thought, reasonably enough, this seems bad. (See: Dickens, "Oliver Twist," a book essentially about what happens when nobody reads Robert Owen.) They imagined a different kind of society, built on community welfare, cooperation and mutual aid rather than cutthroat competition ‒ one with fewer tycoons (or tech bros) buying their third mansion or yacht and fewer everyone-elses turning their pockets inside out for lint.
On the strength of this idea, a wave of idealistic "utopian” socialist communities, some religious in nature, soon sprang up in Europe and the U.S. that experimented with communal ownership, shared housing and equality between the sexes. Most collapsed quickly, like a bad soufflé, but a few succeeded for decades. New York's Oneida Community ‒ which, among its other unorthodox arrangements, practiced a system of communal marriage ‒ eventually produced the popular Oneida brand of flatware. Iowa's Amana Colonies gave rise to the Amana appliance company. So before you get too confident insisting you'd never have anything to do with socialism, you might want to check your kitchen. Awkward.
Then came Karl Marx, who didn’t invent socialism so much as hand it a much heavier briefcase. Borrowing the swagger and jargon of the natural sciences, he insisted socialism wasn't merely a nice thing decent people should work toward ‒ it was inevitable, ordained by the iron laws of history, coming whether we want it or not. Capitalism, he argued, would keep generating exploitation, inequality and class conflict until the whole contraption collapsed under its own contradictions, like a cheap flimsy bookshelf. Out of the wreckage would rise a classless, cooperative society.
This became "scientific” socialism, or Marxism. After Marx died in 1883, socialist parties spread across Europe and beyond and ‒ this being politics ‒ almost immediately started arguing with each other, which is, historically speaking, one of the most reliable signs a movement has put on its long pants and gotten down to business.
The fight was over one deceptively simple question: to reform capitalism, or overthrow it?
One movement, two very different roads
One faction ‒ the Social Democrats ‒ bet on reforms: universal suffrage, trade unions, pensions, progressive taxation, a mixed economy where private enterprise stuck around, but had its rougher edges filed off. It worked out rather well for them. American Socialists got themselves elected mayor of Toledo, Milwaukee, Butte and Flint, of all places, where they distinguished themselves mainly by establishing public-owned utilities, public parks, and running honest, competent local government ‒ a plot twist nobody saw coming.
In Europe, Social Democrats built the modern welfare state: strong unions, progressive taxation, unemployment insurance and enough cooperation between labor and business to make the whole thing hum. Britain's Labour Party dropped the socialist label but walked the same road. Clement Attlee, Willy Brandt, Olaf Palme ‒ Social Democrats all.
The other branch bet on overthrow. Vladimir Lenin and the revolutionaries insisted capitalism was un-reformable and had to be smashed. His Bolsheviks proceeded to do just that in 1917, founding the Soviet Union, imposing their system on postwar Eastern Europe, and later inspiring home-grown versions in China, Cuba, North Korea and North Vietnam. Whatever their stated ideals, these communist regimes (which usually still referred to themselves as "socialist") settled, with grim reliability, into one-party dictatorships that crushed anyone who disagreed with them ‒ which is a rather significant footnote to leave off the label.
Here's the irony: These two branches, born in the very same 19th-century cradle, spent the most of the decades since denouncing, undermining and occasionally killing each other.
The label tells you almost nothing
So when someone slaps the word "socialist" onto a person or a policy today, it's worth asking, gently, which socialism they mean. Lumping them together is a bit like assuming the great American actor Edwin Booth and his brother John Wilkes were basically the same fellow because they shared a surname and a flair for drama ‒ one gave the world extraordinary Shakespeare, the other gave it the worst night in the history of Ford's Theatre. Or, for the modern-minded, it's like assuming Charles Manson and Marilyn Manson (or Karl Marx and Groucho Marx) held roughly identical worldviews because of their common last names.
"Socialism" covers a pretty vast terrain: idealistic religious communes, Marxist revolutionaries, honest small-town mayors, North Korea’s hellhole and the modern Scandinavian welfare state. And these variants have spent a hundred years disagreeing, often violently, about property ownership, democracy and the proper size of government. Which is to say: The label tells you almost nothing about what's actually in the box.
And that is rather the point. A label is supposed to tell you what's inside the package. Calling something "socialist" today, more often than not, simply means that someone would rather frighten you into not opening it and looking for yourself.
Gary Stark is a former chair of the Kent County Democratic Party and a history professor emeritus. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters, and we may publish it in print or online.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Socialism is a political scare tactic in Michigan's midterms | Opinion
