What’s in a name?

Godwin’s law states: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” In my experience, a similar law applies to the words “socialist,” “communist” and “Marxist.” All three words are used interchangeably and as epithets, not descriptions of governments or economic systems.

Let’s start with Marxist:

“The assumption behind most political debate is that Marxist texts contain a detailed design for a “socialist” society. That assumption collapses into oblivion on contact with the actual literature.

 

“Marx spent the overwhelming majority of his intellectual energy analyzing capitalism — how surplus value is extracted, how class relations form, how markets expand, how crises emerge from systemic contradictions. Das Kapital, all three volumes of it, is fundamentally a forensic examination of capitalism’s mechanics. Volume I alone runs to nearly 900 pages of dense analysis of the commodity form, the working day, and the accumulation of capital. What it does not contain is a chapter on how to run a railway network, set agricultural output targets, or adjudicate between competing industrial priorities.”

 

*snip*

“Marx himself acknowledged the ambiguity about what would follow capitalism. In his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, he described a future “communist” society that would initially emerge “just as it emerges from capitalist society” — a transitional condition shaped by what it was replacing, not a clean design dropped in from outside.

 

“The practical consequence is significant. If you handed ten newly formed nations the complete works of Marx and asked each to build a functional economy from those texts alone, you would get ten different institutional arrangements.”

History demonstrates this.

“ Yugoslavia under Tito built a system of worker self-management and “market socialism” that looked nothing like the Soviet command economy, and both claimed Marx as their theoretical foundation. Cuba’s centrally planned economy, Vietnam’s post-1986 Doi Moi market reforms, and China’s state capitalism today all operate under “communist” party rule while functioning in structurally incompatible ways.”

What’s going on here? It turns out, that the terms “socialist,” “communist” and “Marxist” are branding. They are marketing devices, not operating systems. And the west embraced and weaponized this branding in its propaganda.

“. . . whenever a country that called itself socialist experiences economic failure, repression, or collapse, those outcomes are cited as proof that any alternative to capitalism must inevitably produce the same results.”

 

In fact, there’s no necessary connection between socialism, communism or Marxism and market failure or authoritarian repression. The obvious counterexample is the Great Depression, which was an economic failure of capitalism. As for authoritarianism, Pinochet’s Chiile, Suharto’s Indonesia and today’s Saudi Arabia are just a few examples of authoritarian capitalism.

“Authoritarianism flourishes across all historically documented economic systems no matter the labels thrown upon them, going back 1000s of years. Its recurring features — concentrated power, weak accountability mechanisms, suppression of organized opposition — are structural problems of governance, not the product of any particular ideological label.

 

“There is also a theoretical irony here that deserves more attention than it receives. If you actually read Marx and Engels, they were not advocating for permanent state control at all. In the Communist Manifesto they wrote that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Marx’s concept of communism involved the eventual dissolution of class domination and the withering away of coercive state power. Engels, late in his life, explicitly criticized authoritarian tendencies in the workers’ movement.”

 

So the core problem is that using the same words to describe modern Scandinavia and Stalinism is useless, as sterile exercise in obfuscation. So what is to be done?

“The relevant questions are structural: How does a system coordinate production across large populations? How does it allocate resources and process information about scarcity and demand? How does it correct mistakes and adapt to changing conditions? How is decision-making power distributed, and what mechanisms hold that power accountable? How does it handle ecological constraints?

 

“These are the questions engineers, systems scientists, and institutional economists ask — and they are hard questions with complicated answers that vary enormously by context, scale, and historical circumstance. They do not yield to tribal shorthand.

 

“Comparing Sweden’s universal healthcare system with the U.S. private insurance model is a tractable empirical question with measurable outcomes: cost per capita, mortality rates, coverage rates, administrative overhead, patient satisfaction. Asking whether one is “socialist” and the other “capitalist” tells you almost nothing useful about how either actually works. The label is a distraction from the mechanism.”

Epithets are easy. Engineering is hard. But if humanity is ever to make real progress, it need the discipline to abandon labels and branding and do the hard work of defining and implementing what actually works for everyone.

 

https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/the-myth-of-marxism/?fbclid=IwY2xjawRVetJleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFwbEhnWXdpVUFxc3cwd3Jhc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHsHlKh5RHqdt8yMCJxosIiQUKUHekP9zpyNlHngOwuulXOo-lsLnoziFGH9p_aem_RknSR6rUU6bP6_wKiYAu0Q