Communism, Socialism, Marxism

It seems like every government initiative that aims to help people has been labeled as socialism over the last decade, and now, the opponents on the right have escalated their name-calling to include "communism". And it doesn't matter what Joe Biden or any Democrat comes up with, it's communism according to Republicans and other right wingers. Let's look at what it really is from two angles: (1) Is it really socialism (or communism) and (2) If it is socialism, is it bad?

In the early days of our Republic, the government had a limited role. Many people look nostalgically back to those days as a paradise of freedom (or "freedoms" as the faux patriots of today have taken to calling it). There was no income tax, there were few government regulations and there were places you could escape to where the government couldn't easily reach you, even if it was so inclined. There was also so slavery. And as industrialization grew and spread, freedom became a very elusive concept, not because the government was oppressing anyone, but because a small cohort of wealthy industrialists were. Little by little, often under pressure from unions, and women's rights groups the governement took on the role of protector of those with little or no power. Sure, certain freedoms were curtailed: the freedom to operate unsafe workplaces, the freedom to employ small children, the freedom to abuse workers, the freedom to operate monopolies. Government agencies sprung up to regulate food production, to oversee approval of drugs, to ensure workers' rights. Eventually the New Deal created the Social Security Administration; years later the freedom to discriminate based on race, gender or religion became illegal (although it just went underground - it didn't disappear). By the seventies the government took on the role of protecting the environment by curtailing the freedom to wantonly pollute. All of these things could be categorized as socialism, some more, some less, but can any of them (allowing of course for overreach at times) really be categorized as bad for the country? Aren't they all just establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty? Aren't they good things?

The problem with tagging something as socialism is that most people will conflate social programs in a democratic, constitutional republic with socialist dictatorships. No progressive politician has ever called for common ownership of the means of production, for elimination of private property, or prohibiting the formation of for-profit businesses. No one has called for nationalizing major industries. No one is suggesting that the president should assume dictatorial powers (no one currently in power anyway). Mandating paid parental leave isn't going to turn us into Venezuela or Soviet Russia. With a wide swath of the electorate, all it takes is to call a plan "socialist" for them to be adamantly against it. But even the effectiveness of that epithet is fading, now, in order to really get people riled up, you have to ramp up your rhetoric and call things "communist", which has an even eviler association, especially for people who remember the Cold War. 

So yes, using a broad definition for "socialism", many Democratic programs are socialist, just like minimum wage laws, OSHA, Medicare and interstate highways...even police and fire departments and public libraries. But what they aren't are imitations of socialist failures like Venezuela or Cuba (although it could be argued that much of Cuba's problem is US sanctions) and they certainly aren't a harbinger of a replay of the Soviet era dictatorships. 

As always, thinking is hard work, but I recommend it.