On Fri, 5 Feb 2010, Miles Jackson wrote:
>>
>> Has socialism, as we mean it, ever existed, in any society?
>
> Well, you can turn that question around: has capitalism ever existed in
> any society?
Sure -- that's exactly the problem. Everyone knows capitalism has existed in lots of societies for the last 5 centuries. It exists in myriad forms. All these mixed forms are easily spoken of as forms of capitalism.
If we spoke in the same way, socialism should exist in many forms -- and social democracy would clearly be one of those forms. And single payer would be something we would embrace as a socialist program -- with many others we could easily point to. Social security and medicare would be embraced as socialist programs -- imperfect, but a huge advance on everything that went before, and better if we could get them closer to the ideal. We would take up the gauntlet of defending the "socialist" aspects of the US's chintzy welfare state and saying that's right, they are -- and what we need is more of it. And what's gone wrong has been the shaving away of what we had. It would be easy to name four things we're for as a socialist: free education, dependable pensions, free healthcare, no imperialism. The first three of which we have some of, and need more.
But instead, our default mode of speech among intellectuals in the US is that socialism is something which has never existed. We identify socialism with the ideal. Every mixed system doesn't count -- those are all capitalist. And no concrete program can ever be said to make a given mixed capitalist system "more socialist." It only makes it capitalist in a different way.
So capitalism and socialism are two different orders of words.
One is deeply real, and we are quick to point it out how it colors and shapes systems vastly different. There is virtually no system in the world nowadays that isn't in some way at least part capitalist. Capitalism we all agree has been around for centuries and it has a genius for reinventing itself in new forms.
And the other is inherently unreal. It's never existed anywhere and there is no sign of it anywhere. We refuse to call anything a sign of it.
Why do we talk like this? Our very categories of thought seem designed to be ineffective. Their goal is real; ours is imaginary. They want more of what exists in part. We want something unconnected to anything that exists.
Why would anyone embrace principles apply to nothing that exists?
Why do we embrace them?
Michael