Christopher Hitchens, a hater of religion, once said of Martin Luther King that he was not a Christian.
To which I reply, so much for Christopher Hitchens.
One can pretty much say anything about anything, if one is redefining words to suit one’s own interests, treating them as private property instead of public property. I can truly say that an apple is a potato if, by “apple,” I mean an irregularly shaped brown or reddish vegetable that grows in the ground.
And if one man like Hitchens can get away with this narcissistic nonsense through sheer bluff and swagger, what can not a whole class of people get away with generation after generation?
In effect, generations of anti-socialists have been telling us that an apple is a potato.
And it has not helped one bit that at the same time many potatoes have been calling themselves apples. In other words, just as many people violate the teachings of Christ in word and deed and call themselves Christians (Hitchens doing a variation on the theme by labelling a man who followed Christ as a non-Christian) many people have discredited socialism by falsely claiming to practice socialism when they were doing no such thing. In the one instance, Christ is slandered; in the other instance, it is socialism which is slandered. Most of us seem to understand, whether we are religious or not, that there is such a thing as genuine Christian practice; there are people we would call real Christians, and others we would call hypocrites. Socialism, however, is not granted the benefit of these kinds of distinctions: if some regime committing genocide, for example, calls itself or is called socialist, why then it must be socialist, and that is the end of the matter.
What, then, is socialism? Simply put, there are two basic principles running throughout socialist thought since its beginnings:
1) a socialist society is one where those who do the work own and control the means of production
2) a socialist society runs fundamentally on cooperation, not competition or domination. Brotherhood and sisterhood are the reigning context, not “the struggle of all against all.”
Whatever disagreements (and there are many) socialists have had amongst themselves, these are the two golden threads running through the history of socialist thought. A genuine critique of socialism, whatever else it does, must say that these goals are not desirable. For obvious reasons, this is very seldom done.
Much of the confusion in arguments over socialism is that they confound arguments over whether socialism is possible with arguments over whether socialism is desirable. If it can be made clear that socialism is what is broadly but accurately defined in the two points above, these two issues can be separated from each other and clarified; then an informed, intelligent discussion can take place. Likewise, two kinds of anti-socialist will be distinguished from each other, with the nature of both being made clearer.
The first kind of anti-socialist is simply ignorant of the meaning of the word we are discussing. He or she has been told that the depravities of Stalin or North Korea etc. are manifestations of socialism. It does not help that historically, many of those spreading these lies have called themselves socialists and have even believed their own propaganda. Naturally, the person who has been misinformed by all this will become an anti-socialist, and with good reason. (See, by the way, Noam Chomsky’s highly illuminating “the Soviet Union Versus Socialism” on why both the Soviet and capitalist empires falsely claimed the label of socialism for the U.S.S.R.).
The second kind of anti-socialist may or may not be ignorant of the true meaning of the word “socialism” but at heart, wittingly or not, hates the ideal outlined in the two points. She does not want it to be possible.
To know that “socialism” means the two-point socialism above and to insist doggedly on this fact is to found the whole debate about socialism not on the interpretation of history but in the realm of the desirable or normative. Let us establish what it is we should want before we look at how it has not been reached historically. The leftist who refuses the label “socialist” to the old Soviet Union refuses to be backed into a corner where he must either deceitfully justify the crimes of that regime or surrender the dream of socialism altogether. Why does Stalin get to decide what is and is not possible?
And of course, “socialism can only ever be a dream” is the next line of defense, usually presented in a tone of impatience and contempt. The allegation that socialism is not possible is one that must be taken seriously. However, this impatient reaction is not just a matter of a sensible person rejecting hopelessly utopian fantasies. The type one anti-socialist resists the two-point definition of socialism because she will have to admit she has been fooled by lying definitions. Nobody likes to admit they have been fooled, that sources they thought reliable turn out to be biased or ignorant. But it is worse for the type two anti-socialist: when the historical monstrosities he has been criticizing turn out not to be socialism, he has lost the rhetorical advantage of socialism being evil practically by definition.
Of course, the type two anti-socialist can and most assuredly will switch gears and claim it was the two-point socialist dream which caused the reality of what is falsely called socialism. But one can argue against this point far more honestly and effectively than if one decides to justify Pol Pot. (The point that the socialist dream is itself the cause of a nightmare, by the way, has a great many holes in it. It seems to be a convenient theory which its perpetrators seldom analyze in any historical context. People who advance this theory do not seem to have actually looked at revolutionary processes, what causes them, what makes them go well or badly.) Those who say “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” do not seem prepared to tell us straight up what kinds of intentions we should have.
Note therefor, that the type two anti-socialist needs to keep “socialism” in the two-point sense off the table. The idea or ideal of socialism, much as its enemies disparage it as a fairy tale, is quite dangerous to anti-socialism. When socialism steps in and claims its right to judge any government or movement calling itself socialist or claiming to move towards socialism, the terms of the debate are no longer the property of socialism’s enemies.
The fight over the word “socialism,” therefore is not simply about what the anti-socialist, in his ignorance, thinks the word means, but what he wants the word to mean, what he even needs the word to mean in order to defend his own ideology. Hitchens’ seems to have decided that Christianity is evil by definition. Ipso facto a good man like Martin Luther King cannot possibly be a Christian. We learn nothing about religion or King by this blarney. We do learn something about Christopher Hitchens.
Capitalism’s first line of defence is to make sure alternatives to it do not enter even the imagination, let alone the concrete political or economic sphere. As long as “socialism” is merely a word for some kind of monstrosity, two-point socialism can not be talked about. And what cannot even be talked about becomes even harder to imagine and nigh impossible to share. The socialist movement, on the other hand, needs “socialism” in its basic sense to mean the two-point variety, or there is no way we can even talk about what we want or how to get it. That kind of silence, of course, is what anti-socialism wants, and thinks it has a right to, so spoiled has it been by an unfair cultural struggle which confuses and silences any language with which the Left might express itself intelligibly.