What is socialism?

A gamesome guide for the politically perplexed

Socialism is all the gab these days, and since waxing political is kind of my day job, I thought I’d craft an everything-you-need-to-know-about-socialism article, followed by a few ripostes to several of the claims and critiques that news pundits have been throwing around about socialism. Spoiler alert: sometimes news pundits get things wrong.

At this point, Socialism is certainly in the running for most vexing word of the year, if that’s a thing. It is a word that seems to be currently everywhere in the dyspeptic world of political punditry, and a word that seems to be as egregiously overused as it is flagrantly misunderstood, both by those on the left and by those on the right. Is it, as conservative commentators claim, a political and economic system that has failed over and over again, each time taking millions of lives with it? Or is it, as progressive advocates claim, a political and economic system that prioritizes people over profit, where equality of opportunity and quality of life are secured for all rather than just for some, or at least for the many rather than for the few?

As is almost always the case in these types of debates, the alacrity with which participants enjoin rhetorical battle with their opponents pairs directly with the paucity of knowledge said participants have about the topic they are so vociferously debating. Lots of noise without any discernible meaning — basically the political equivalent of a monster truck rally. With that in mind, I thought I’d put together a political primer for the perennially perplexed: what exactly is socialism and what place does it have if any in American political discourse?

Details will follow, but the short answer is this — there’s more than one kind of socialism in the world, and knowing the difference between them will make for a far more productive dialog as we stumble and bumble toward the next day of electoral reckoning in November 2020.

To understand the classical roots of socialism proper, you must first understand that Karl Marx’s Lonely Planet Guide to Communist Utopia (actual title, The Communist Manifesto, 1848) is really just one part of a much larger project that Marx worked on throughout his…

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