What is "liberal socialism"?
I guess a brief explainer is in order.
Paul Crider asks What Is Liberal in Liberal Socialism for a new piece in Liberal Currents:
What it means to be a socialist in the Trump era has less to do with Marxist theory, revolutionary vanguardism, seizing the means of production, or even worker cooperatives, and much more to do with a series of ethical commitments that remain largely unwelcome within mainstream liberal politics even as they continue to sharpen in salience.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of truth to Paul’s assessment of US socialism in the 21st century. Even at the height of the Bernie Sanders era, in fact, only a minority of Americans associated socialism with worker control of the means of production. The great achievement of Sanders wasn’t about giving Americans a thorough education in socialist thought; it was about challenging a powerful ideological taboo against even talking about socialism. Before, liberalism could simply ignore socialism; now, it has to try to co-opt it.
Thus we get arguments like this:
It’s worth recalling what was illiberal about socialism in the twentieth century…In economics, they enacted central planning that both stifled human creativity and caused poverty…Individual flourishing was suppressed in theory—individual lives were inconsequential next to the transcendent collective…As the Cold War recedes ever further into the rearview mirror, the identification of socialism with illiberalism becomes more and more anachronistic.
So according to Liberal Currents, socialism is not about “central planning” (IE state ownership and management of industry), which Milton Friedman taught us causes poverty; neither is it “an alternative to liberal individualism based on the shared ownership of resources,” as even the most remedial Wikipedia level-texts would have you believe. Instead, it’s about, uh, ethics.
On one hand, it’s hard to blame Liberal Currents for trafficking in these ideas when even Jacobin occasionally flirts with similar sentiments. But on the other hand, this article doesn’t just get “liberal socialism” wrong — it gets it exactly wrong. The idea of liberal socialism has a thorough and well articulated body of literature spelling it out, and the author here just doesn’t seem very familiar with it.
In brief, liberal socialism has always been organized around four ideas:
THE DEFENSE OF 20th CENTURY COMMUNISM. Simply put, liberal socialism holds that the foundational liberal ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity were most fully and powerfully realized not in capitalist regimes like the United States, but rather in communist countries like the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. It rightly credits the USSR for the primary role it played in defending the free world against Nazi Germany during World War II. While it acknowledges communism’s crimes and mistakes, it refuses to let capitalism use this to deflect from its death toll of over 2.3 billion over the last 80 years.
THE ABOLITION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY. Liberalism must finally decide which will prevail: capitalism, or rationalism. For the capitalist experiment, in true scientific fashion, has been tried for hundreds of years; and the scientific analysis of its operation and its consequences, advanced over 150 years ago by Karl Marx, has proven that it is unsustainable. The question of whether we will abandon private property and abolish the ruling class is not, in that light, merely an economic question; it is also a question about our commitment to the longstanding liberal ideal of reason, of choosing logic and facts over ideology any mysticism.
THE END OF BOURGEOIS RIGHTS. The abolition of private property, of course, means that the bourgeoisie will no longer be able to hoard the capital that he leverages to exploit workers. It will lose its right to that wealth. It will lose its right to set wages. It will lose its right to donate inordinate sums of money to public officials in exchange for political power. It will lose its right to build an enormous apparatus of mass media to serve as a megaphone for its exclusive interests. And crucially, before the bourgeoisie loses these rights de facto, it must lose them de jure. “Can there be equality between the exploited and the exploiters?” asked Lenin, one of the central luminaries of liberal socialism. The answer, of course, is no. Thus,
THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT. With private property abolished and the bourgeoisie dissolved, only workers will remain. And because liberal socialism means democracy, the sovereign right and authority of workers in the socialist state cannot be challenged. The dictatorship of the proletariat must prevail.
This, of course, is what true liberal socialism has always meant: the defense of communism, the abolition of private property, the end of bourgeois rights, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Don’t let the revisionists at Liberal Currents convince you otherwise.
Refer enough friends to this site and you can read paywalled content for free!
And if you liked this post, why not share it?