A Few Common Myths of Classical Socialism Debunked
Ah, the famously and frequently misused and maligned term socialism. What hasn’t it been used to describe? Everything from Social Democracy (i.e., liberal capitalism) to the autocratic system of centralized state-centric class rule by the Soviet Union and similar “communist” nations… to Nazism! (i.e., “National Socialism”). So, it means something good or bad, democratic or fascist, tomato or tamahto, depending upon what the user wants it to mean, which will further vary with the context of the usage.
It has been utilized by the Left to legitimize a continuation of capitalism in regulated form (Social Democracy again) or to attempt to put a positive face on the former Soviet system (i.e., Leninism/Trotskyism/Stalinism/Maoism, courtesy of the “tankies” on the Regressive Left); or by conservative supporters of capitalism as an eternal system to twist the classless, stateless economic world order formulated by Marx and Engels beyond all recognition by comparing it to the state-supremacist system of the defunct Soviet Union, often exaggerating the genuine ills of that system to make capitalism seem saintly by comparison.
If you want to read about what Classical Marxian Socialism as described in the works of Marx and Engels happens to be (in books such as The Communist Manifesto and Capital), read my article here.
Then, let us delve into three of the most common myths of what is aptly called Classical Socialism — to distinguish Marx & Engel’s original formulation of it from all the myriad inconsistent and often wildly contradictory uses that cropped up in the 20th century.
Let’s Start With This Classic Bone-Headed Quote From Margaret Thatcher…
… which can be found plastered onto dozens of memes all over the Internet:
What it should say is: “The Problem with Socialism for Capitalists is that There is No Money to Run Out Of… or Print Up From the Federal Reserve, or Borrow From the Banks, or Acquire by Taxing the Hell Out of the Working Class… Shit, There’s No Working Class or Any Classes at All!”
Of course, we can hardly consider the late but very lamented war-mongering corporate lunatic to be an accurate source of info about Marxian Socialism. To be fair to the autocratic harridan, she was mainly trying to put down Social Democracy by uttering the conservative myth that the government in a capitalist system can actually go broke if you spend too much on social programs needed by the working class, with the suggestion that socialists would misappropriate the funds supposedly allocated for the workers.
Classical Socialism, however, is a classless and stateless system that has no money to limit worker access to only a fraction of their collective labor while allowing a small boss class (*waves to the capitalists in Bel Air*) to hoard a vastly disproportionate amount of it in the form of being allowed to accrue (I won’t say “earn”) far more inflatable money than they can ever possibly spend while an increasingly large proportion of workers barely earns enough to keep a roof over their heads and food in their stomach.
Workers as a whole would socially own all of the productive industries, services, and public tech and utilize it not to make a profit for their bosses but for meeting their collective needs and reasonable individual wants. No bosses, no capitalist class, with modern automation and AI handling the lion’s share of the tedious, dangerous, and unpleasant drudge work while greatly limiting the amount of labor hours required for everyone compared to today under capitalism.
In other words, workers would receive the full fruit of their labor, as modern productive technology that allows us to mass produce almost everything has made barter and the use of currency obsolete, counterproductive to the welfare of the majority, and utterly destructive to the planet & its biosphere. In fact, this meme courtesy of Anarchopac’s tweet that lampoons Thatcher’s quote is much more accurate:
And which also leads to the next idiotic myth often spewed by people on the Right and even on the Neo-Left…
Under Socialism Workers Would Receive Everything for “Free”
I used to hear that nonsense claim from people I knew on the job who were vigorously pro-capitalism despite the poor treatment and shitty wages they routinely received at the job they slaved at for a measly weekly paycheck that made them work hard almost for free.
In fact, you see that claim repeated in the episode description for the “Problem With Socialism” podcast here: “What is the problem with getting everything for free? Isn’t that what socialism promises? Join Felice Gerwitz and Jeff Diest from the Mises Institute as they delve into this question.”
This myth is based on the extreme fetishism for money that we’ve been indoctrinated with under capitalism. In other words, the way our commodification-minded thinking goes, if you receive something without a cash transaction, you’re getting it for “free,” with the implication that you’re getting a valuable product or service for giving nothing to the system in return. To put it another way, if someone doesn’t profit from the exchange in a monetary sense, that must mean that you just took something for nothing.
Never mind that the small amount of monetary compensation given to the great majority of workers as a “fair” exchange (under capitalist thinking) for their hard work normally allows them to purchase just a tiny amount of the value of their work. It denies them access to much that they might need and which may constitute a reasonable want that they well deserve for their hard work because they cannot “pay” for it. Even the capitalist-controlled government does not disburse gravely needed and abundant resources unless there is a fiscal “budget” to cover the (financial) “cost” of the items or services in question.
That would be completely untrue under a classless society of social ownership of all the industries and services. Workers would receive the full fruit of their labor directly in exchange for a reasonable share of the useful work in a vocation where they had a natural aptitude and interest. Plain and simple.
In a nutshell, this means that since we would collectively own everything, and all of us would put in a reasonable share of the necessary work in accordance with our individual abilities, all we would need to do if we wanted a certain product would be to walk into a nearby distribution center (we call them “stores” under capitalism) and take the desired item or order it online and have it delivered via an automated vehicle or drone.
If we wanted to eat and felt like cooking, we could walk to one of the local socially owned hydroponic gardens and take a reasonable amount of the produce that we may need to feed our family. Or grow it ourselves along with a few neighbors who likewise had a green thumb… no worries about “constraining the profits” of private owners who monopolize such crucial resources under capitalism.
If we were not inclined to cook, however, we would simply walk into one of the socially owned restaurants or food pantries and help ourselves to the buffet or the ready-made selection, which would be continually replaced.
Or we could order some raw material to use the 3D-printer we would all be entitled to have for making us a cake and likely produce other types of meals for us. The codes for it could be downloaded from a socially owned database in a vast cloud system.
And so on and so on. Much of this would be produced and maintained by automation that we collectively own, with minimal maintenance required by human hands (since planned obsolescence would be eliminated). Computers belonging to the commons could easily keep track of local and wide-scale product consumption and determine what levels of production and replenishment of this or that would be required.
All of this vast, mass-produced bounty would be provided by a combination of our collective labor and automation & AI systems belonging to all of us. None of this would be provided for “free,” i.e., for absolutely nothing given in return to the system. It would simply compensate us for our collective work and ingenuity sans the need for currency transactions.
Socialism Would be a Dictatorship With No Freedom of Choice
Yes, that claim again, via comparing the system formulated by Marx and Engels with the former Soviet system and its many offshoots, the latter of which had all the common features of capitalism that would be eliminated under Marxian Socialism:
1 — class divisions;
2 — an all-powerful state run by a handful of bureaucrats rather than a strictly industrial apparatus where all workers made important economic decisions as a whole;
3 — a system of currency that workers needed to purchase items, as opposed to no currency at all and full access to what they needed;
4 — and a professional military & police force under the sole control of the bureaucrats as opposed to no such oppressive forces used to enforce class rule or to impose some semblance of order by force.
With no state, there would be no oppressive apparatus forcing us to accept some form of class rule with a few writing and authorizing all the books and films et al.
With cooperation replacing competition, everyone would enjoy material security with poverty being eliminated as a result.
With no one benefiting at the expense of others but collectively from everyone else’s labor, there would be little impetus for criminal behavior and little catalyst for the type of rampant mental illness we see today that is the cause of so much erratic & violent behavior, substance abuse, etc.
And contrary to the claims of many who spout the above myth and insist on comparing Classical Socialism to Stalinism despite the two being antithetical to each other, there would be no prisons or gulags that would imprison people for disagreeing.
Anyone who insisted on the continuation of ruthless competition and disparity of material equality and the types of behavior that elicits would likely be looked upon with the same type of respect as those today who argue for the necessity of terrorist behavior.
Finally, for those who make the tired “human nature” claim to besmirch our entire species in the eyes of humanity so as to impose learned helplessness on us, I will remind everyone that human nature — i.e., human behavior — is first and foremost adaptable and very mutable depending upon what the environment we live in demands of us. We are not slaves to immutably fixed instinctual behavior like non-sentient members of the animal kingdom are; we are creatures who mostly function according to learned behavior that we pick up from the cultural zeitgeist in which we are raised and operate within.
Thank you for reading, and maybe in the future I will compose subsequent parts to this myth-busting feature. In the meantime, for no particular reason… here’s a guinea pig:
