> What Mark completely fails to understand is how profoundly
> discredited the word "socialism" has been by the self-proclaimed
> Socialists and Communists.
Mark begins his piece by citing a Gallup poll that proves that the word "socialism" is not as discredited in the U.S. (in the U.S.!) as you believe it is, but I'm not going to deny that you have a point. How strong it is I do not know.
> They mainly claimed that the tyrannical state-capitalist regimes of
> Stalin, Mao, and their epigonoi represented Socialism, Really
> Existing Socialism. They now mourn the "failures" of their beloved
> "socialist experiments" and so reinforce the fatal association of
> socialism with capitalist totalitarianism of the Stalinist variety.
I have a big problem with this.
Recently Michael Smith was mocking he who (citing by heart here) defends the "rights" of people to revolt, but retreats in horror when their actual revolutions fail to conform to his preconceptions of how those "rights" are to be exercised. I entirely agree with that. I don't care if your preconceptions are derived from Marx, Heraclitus, or the Roman Pope. These collective experiences were massive historical events, "actually existing" ones, to use Marx's formulation. They deserve to be studied on their own concretion, their own "immanent laws" discovered afresh, and not only by reference to some abstract catalogue.
There's a strong prima facie case to call them "Socialist," "Communist," etc., if not for other reason, because they were politically led by people who called themselves (and were called by many others) such, and that is in the historical record. The contents of these terms are, of course, subject to change as history (the history of class struggles) proceeds. Everything is. But to pretend that Marxists (or non-Marxist socialists) today can just detach themselves from these experiments (no scare quotes) as if they had been inspired, led, and executed by aliens is disingenuous. We cannot escape this "fatal association" except by criticizing it internally, which is to say, by appropriating it and overcoming it in practice. Eclecticism, as opposed to going through the trouble of coherently synthesizing a complex historical experience, is lame, but just to start people who struggle today against the social order cannot but be Socialists, Communists, Marxists, Soviet, Leninists, Maoists, Trotstkyists, Stalinists, Gramscians, and -- in Latin America at least -- Martíanos, Villistas, Zapatistas, Sandinistas, Bolivarianos, Fidelistas, and Chavistas. In the U.S., we should add Anarchists, OWS, and all that. So call me all that, thank you very much.
Re. your proposal to adopt the term "Populist" -- maybe I've watched too many episodes of Mad Men, but (even in the U.S.) the term "Populism" has no visible edge over the term "Socialism" or even the word "Communism." Forget all we know about the Russian Narodniki or Latin American Populismo, compared to the latter terms, "Populism" as it sounds to me in English is light weight, very superficial, utterly lacking in the historical heft that "Socialism" and -- even more so -- "Communism" have. But hey, what do I know about how people today and in the future may respond to x or y?