What socialism means to me

Socialism is a political term that the right wing in America has disparaged for decades as a legacy of the Cold War and out of a love of the anarchy for the rich and entrapment of the rest that libertarian economics represents. The word has been pulled into vogue, especially on social media, this century as we have leapt into two ill-conceived and ill-executed wars, while our leaders continue to feel free to devote our wealth to the benefit of the few. To the right, at least according to their public statements, socialism is both whatever they believe was the Marxist-Leninist system of the Soviet Union and whatever is going on in this country that they do not like, be that anything grabbed out of the bag of topics that include abortion, public education, discussions about pronouns, or guaranteeing healthcare to all. This is the result of an incoherent blend of Ayn Rand and Billy Graham, but I have yet to be shown that politics generates consistency all that often.

I must admit that the left has its own share of the process of gathering together a curio shop of policies, taking among other things the same list that I gave above and standing in opposition to the right as a matter of a team sport. We get mocked as wanting the blessings of a wealthy society to be given to us for free. College students are cited as a prime illustration of this, since canceling educational debt supposedly competes in popularity with legalizing marijuana among that group. This is, of course, a straw man. It looks at one article of the argument’s clothing and misses the core — a fault that I am sure the right will accuse me of doing to them.

But I will mostly leave the right to define themselves. My concern here is to explain what socialism means to me. As I said in a recent tweet, socialism recognizes that wealth is far more often the product of collective effort, and it asserts the justice of distributing wealth in a manner that is reflective of the contributions of all involved. The analysis of this and the proposed solutions to constructing a society’s economics take many forms in socialism. Marx and Engels offered a historical dialectic to explain how the world got to its state of affairs in their day and recommended a revolution of the proletariat as the final cycle, and to many on the right and the left, this is treated as the only formulation that socialism takes. Even…