Part ten in a series: excuses for "why we can't have socialism." Previous entries:
Capitalism will last indefinitely.
This is a conservative country.
Socialism is like total equality y'know.
Socialism has never happened before
Socialism is like Sweden y'know.
Socialism is a utopian fantasy.
Socialism is dead/ Socialism is against human nature.
To those who freak out about "socialism"
Here's a fun addendum:
Yes Magazine: What to Say When They Say It's Impossible.
Usually the excuse here is framed with the notion that we can "never get pure socialism, nor can we get pure capitalism," intimating that some "combination of socialism and capitalism" is possible. But "pure capitalism" is usually framed by the warped imaginations of those who think that capitalism can exist without "government interference in the economy," when the reality is that capitalism is itself a government regime, and "pure socialism" is never really imagined at all.
Let's start with this idea of "impure socialism," because this is what's meant to discourage people from advocating socialism. Impure socialism is typically imagined, by those who argue against it, as the Soviet Union. Usually this complaint is itself used in connection with disputes about property. The anti-socialists argue that if we take away the means of production from its super-rich, corporate ownership, then it will be like the Soviet Union all over again. Never mind that the super-rich have far too much in the way of property for their own collective comfort, and that most of the rest of us are just trying to make ends meet.
First off, I'm not terribly afraid that the Soviet Union is going to come back, and you shouldn't be concerned with this non-possibility either. The Soviet Union was the successor regime to a regime which attempted 20th-century industrialization with a governmental structure (that of the Czars) which was based more or less upon the 4th-century Roman Empire. It isn't surprising, then, that the Czarist regime fell, and was replaced by another brutal regime intent upon imposing its absolute will upon the people. This isn't the occasion for today's call to replace capitalism. Most significantly, we're no longer the peasants which populated Russia in 1917, who had neither cellphones, nor the Internet, nor advanced global capitalism to deal with.
Oh, sure, occasionally there are complaints that we already live under a species of "totalitarianism" -- the most articulate of these is no doubt Sheldon Wolin's suggestion that we live under what can be called "inverted totalitarianism." The label of "inverted totalitarianism" is a device to compare and contrast two things (the authoritarianism of contender regimes, the USSR and Nazi Germany among others, in the first half of the 20th century, and the authoritarianism of late-capitalist 21st century consumer society) -- but I think Wolin's compare-and-contrast exercise distracts from an understanding of what is distinctly unique about this era of history.
The "totalitarian" regimes were regimes from the semi-periphery of the expanding capitalist system that attempted to compete with the core nations of the capitalist system, in much the same sense in which minor colonial powers such as Germany and Italy competed with major colonial powers such as the UK and France in the conquest of Africa between 1870 and 1914. What made these regimes "totalitarian" was their employment of forced-march industrialization strategies under dictatorial governments -- the USSR under Joseph Stalin, for instance, in which the masses became a forced-labor squad for the implementation of the "five-year plans," or Nazi Germany, which industrialized on a war footing in preparation for a planned conquest of Europe. By contrast, what Wolin calls "inverted totalitarianism" is merely late capitalist government under conditions of corporate domination. (A reading of Wolin's book bears this out.)
So I don't think the bogeyman of "impure socialism" in the form of the Soviet Union and "Red China" (as someone called it in the comments section of one of today's diaries) should frighten us away from the idea of "socialism." Once in power, the 21st-century public, connected by cellphones and Internet, is not going to appoint a Stalin or Mao to run its affairs. Still, it's important to see arguments of "why we can't have socialism" in light of today's global situation.