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December 23, 2010

So who's a socialist?

Topics: Political News and commentaries

In his piece over at NRO titled "Galupo's High Bar," Jonah Goldberg discusses Scott Galupo's standard for determining who is and who is not ... a socialist, and in doing so not only reveals Galupo's standard as absurdly high, but also provides some rather jaw-dropping insight into what socialists themselves seek to achieve ... in their own words:

[...] By his (Scott Galupo's) standard, Lenin and a lot of other Bolsheviks weren't socialist either! After all Lenin's New Economic Policy allowed for private property and profit. Another non-socialist? Norman Thomas, the president of the American Socialist Party. Here he is explaining his view of private property:

It is not that Socialists want less private property. We want more private property in the good things of life. We do not mean to take the carpenter's kit away from the carpenter or Fritz Kreisler's violin away from Fritz Kreisler, or the home or the farm in which any man lives and works away from him.

We do intend to end private landlordism, and to take the great natural resources - oil, copper, coal, iron; the great public utilities, power, transportation; the banking system, the distributive agencies like the dairy trust, the basic monopolies and essential manufacturing enterprises - out of the hands of private owners, most of them absentee owners, for whose profits workers with hand and brain are alike exploited. And we intend to put these things into the hands of society.

Thomas' socialism was consonant with much of the socialism of the Fabian socialists, whom, according to Galupo must not have been socialists either. The truth is they were exactly the sort of socialists Stan describes -- gradualist pragmatists (much to the chagrin of HG Wells who wanted a more robust socialism, or "Liberal Fascism.").

Scott's standard also exonerates Bernie Sanders from the charge of socialist, even though Bernie accepts the label. Indeed, we can do this all day with self-described socialists across America and Europe (not to mention the Chinese!).

I should also point out that a strict focus on economics is not the only or even best way to understand or think about socialism. In fact, I think seeing socialism as a purely Marxist, economically defined, phenomenon is a distraction. In brief, I think socialism is a catchall label for a collectivist impulse to solve what used to be called "the social question." (link inserted by me)

Stanley Kurtz is equally critical of Galupo's extraordianary high bar for one being a socialist, and points out that according to Galupo, even if what Kurtz said in his book Radical-in-Chief is right and Obama once believed himself to be a socialist, he isn't one and never was.

Galupo insists that socialism can only mean the total elimination of private property. According to Galupo, mixed economies, even ones that lean heavily toward public ownership, don't count as socialist. There are a lot of problems here. First, my book argues that when Obama attended Occidental College, he was a socialist of the classic Marxist-Leninist variety. At that time, Obama looked forward to a revolution that would completely overthrow American capitalism and replace it with a system that would fit Galupo's "high bar" definition of socialism. So if my book is right, Galupo is clearly mistaken about Obama's past.

But the problems go deeper. My book argues that the mature Obama has adopted a gradualist vision for achieving socialism that largely matches the one adhered to by Michael Harrington, the most prominent socialist in recent American history. By Galupo's definition, Michael Harrington would not be a socialist either, whether he believed himself to be or not. Many "sectarian" socialists who retain a revolutionary vision and work outside of American electoral politics would agree with Galupo here. Yet a huge swath of people who do call themselves socialists idolize Harrington and consider him to be the most consequential American socialist of the past fifty years. I say that qualifies both Harrington and Obama as socialists. But even if we accept Galupo's strict definition, Obama would, at minimum, be guilty of deceiving the American people if he was in fact a socialist on the model of Michael Harrington.

As Kurtz goes on to note, American socialists changed their vision in the eighties, taking a new approach of running through community organizing (sound familiar?) rather than through direct nationalization - the "gradualist pragmatist" - type socialist that Goldberg mentions in his piece. And as Kurtz goes on to point out, if some of America's most die-hard socialists expanded their own definition of socialism -- or at least the pathway by which they hoped to achieve "classic" socialism over the long-term, then Galupo ought to be willing to rethink his definition as well (as it appears that Barack Obama and many liberal Democrats have done).

Which leaves us with one of only two possible conclusions about Barack Obama. He either isn't now and never has been a socialist (Marxist?), or he lied when he said he essentially said he was one (Obama attended "socialist conferences" and "hung out" with Marxist professors and was "in 100 percent, total agreement with these Marxist professors") ... and my money is on Obama being a "gradualist pragmatist" - style Marxist, with values and an agenda that run directly opposite that of the Constitution, traditional American values, and the free market

Posted by Richard at December 23, 2010 11:18 AM

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