The crowd at the Socialism Conference applauds after a round of cheers for “Free abortion! Yes, we can!”
JULY 2018
“What’s up, Comrade?” I greeted Bob at the conference-level foyer in the Chicago Hyatt Regency, where we had infiltrated the largest annual gathering of American socialists.
“It’s like a Bizarro-World version of APEE,” he answered.
Had to laugh at that. The Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE) brings together “teachers and scholars from colleges and universities, public policy institutes, and industry with a common interest in studying and supporting the system of private enterprise.”1 Bob and I are longtime members and past presidents of the association and have served for years on APEE’s board of directors. This was definitely not our usual crowd.
We expected—and noticed immediately—the poorly groomed, unhygienic men and the deliberately unattractive women who wanted to strike a blow against the patriarchy. But these folks were actually in the minority. Most of the people in attendance were dressed more casually than you might expect at a conference, but they looked fairly normal.
Our standard economist uniform of khakis, dress shirt, tie, and blue sport coat would have stood out, so we went casual too. My jeans and Brooks Brothers button-down didn’t draw any attention. Bob and his colleague Daniel Serralde blended in even better in their Communist-red T-shirts. This was field research. We didn’t want to draw unnecessary attention to ourselves, but we weren’t there to deceive anyone either.
After traveling the unfree world and witnessing the economic stagnation, starvation, poverty, and political tyranny imposed by socialist regimes, Bob and I came to the Socialism Conference to answer our own question: How can so many Americans, particularly millennials, view socialism so favorably? We wanted to hear what these self-described young socialists had to say, and there were plenty of millennials to ask.
In fact, it was our age more than our attire that made us stand out. Eyeballing the crowd, we guessed that more than two-thirds of the attendees were under thirty-five years old. The next-largest demographic was 1960s-era hippies who were now seventy or older. There were very few people like us, who came of age during the 1980s and ’90s, the years of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, their successors George H. W. Bush and John Major, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, after which socialism seemed pretty thoroughly refuted.
All down the hallway, young people were selling T-shirts and other merchandise sporting such asinine slogans as “Solidarity,” “People over Profit,” and “Tax the Rich, A Lot.” There was an occasional “Smash Fascism” or “No More Cops” shirt that we could sympathize with, but for the most part it was crazy stuff like Communist cat calendars, which looked like they’d been printed on someone’s fifteen-year-old inkjet printer. They were selling for the very capitalistic price of twenty dollars. I nudged Bob with my elbow. “These kids sure seem enterprising for a bunch of commies.”
“Nah, this is just a typical socialist black market,” he said.
And he was right. It appeared that none of this black-market capitalism was sanctioned. They weren’t selling goods from tables that they had registered and paid for with the hotel and conference organizers. They were selling goods willy-nilly, pulling them from duffle bags, stacks on the floor, and cardboard boxes. For whatever reason, normal hotel conference rules weren’t being enforced.
Another thing that seemed to be missing was a clear definition of what constituted socialism. Communists and socialists of all stripes agree on at least one thing—that private property should be abolished and replaced with collective ownership. This means that, in practice, the government should control everything that goes into “the means of production,” including raw materials, factories, and labor. The government, not individuals, decides what to produce, how to produce, and for whom to produce. But that wasn’t the focus of the conference’s opening rally.
The rally had three scheduled speakers: activists Haley Pessin and Denise Romero, and Dave Zirin, a sportswriter for the lefty magazine The Nation. But everyone got into the act when at one point early in the rally, most of the people in the room started a spontaneous, “Free abortion on demand. We can do it. Yes, we can,” chant that lasted a good minute or two.
Although socialist countries like Soviet Russia and Castro’s Cuba have high abortion rates, free abortion seemed like an odd item to draw such enthusiasm from people attending the opening rally at a socialist conference. After all, abortion is not exactly a central pillar of a socialist system.
The crowd at the Socialism Conference applauds after a round of cheers for “Free abortion! Yes, we can!”
Oddly, none of the speakers at the opening rally commented on the importance of central planning and abolishing private property. Instead, we heard things like “Damn the Supreme Court to Hell,” in reference to the court’s recent ruling limiting the power of public unions to coerce fees out of non–union member employees. There was also plenty said about the immigration crisis and the separation of illegal immigrant parents from their children. We were reminded that, “Democrats are deporters too.” Of course, President Trump was the frequent target of negative remarks. No big surprise there.
Most of what we heard was just support for a wide array of leftist political positions that have little to do with Marx or socialism. As libertarians, we actually agreed with quite a bit of it, but one thing the attendees didn’t seem to know anything about was economics.
Speakers criticized “capitalism”—which they equated with the mixed economy of the United States—but did not talk much about what a socialist system would look like or how it would function. They were passionate about making a world where “people are put before profit,” but they did not make a case for how socialism would do this. We heard about the “sick barbaric system called capitalism” and were assured that “Communism will win!” That comment drew an enthusiastic round of applause.
After the rally, Bob and I decided to divide and conquer. He went off to a session about Salvador Allende, the elected socialist leader of Chile who killed himself during a right-wing coup in 1973. After a few minutes, he snuck into my session and sat next to me. “The Allende session was postponed. Apparently, the speaker got called into work,” he whispered, barely containing his laughter. I couldn’t help but wonder where the speaker was employed.
I attended a session on Korea, curious to hear if that was an example of Communism winning. No such luck. The session, titled “Empire and Resistance: Korea’s Secret History,” featured lectures by Diana Macasa and David Whitehouse. Diana is a member of the San Francisco branch of the International Socialist Organization (ISO). David is also a Bay Area activist and has written for a few socialist publications. Diana and David focused most of their remarks on how Korea has struggled against domination by the Japanese, Russian, American, and Chinese imperialists.
Most of what we heard seemed factually accurate, but they failed to discuss the difference between North and South Korea’s economic systems. Diana mistakenly claimed that “South Korea today is among the most unequal countries in the world” as a result of capitalism.
But it’s not.
Economists use something called a Gini coefficient to measure income inequality across countries. In 2015, South Korea’s Gini coefficient of 33.5 ranked it the fifth most equal country out of the eighty-two countries in the world with reported data.2 More generally, research with Bob’s index has shown that there is really no relationship between how capitalist a country is and how unequal its incomes are. The big difference between the poor in freer economies and unfree economies is their average income level. In the most economically free countries, the poorest 10 percent of the population earns about $12,000 per year, while the poorest 10 percent of the population in the least free countries earns only $1,100.3
In David’s part of the talk, he described how the economies of North and South Korea began to diverge in the 1970s. He accurately stated that as many as two million people, or 10 percent of the population in the North, died of starvation in the 1990s. He acknowledged that while the South is unequal, it’s relatively rich, and many people must live on less than two dollars a day in the North.
We found it amazing that there was no mention of the fact that North Korea has a socialist economic system and the state owns most of the means of production, while the South has embraced capitalism. Instead, David blamed the North’s economic collapse on natural disasters, the end of Soviet aid after the fall of the Soviet Union, and American economic sanctions. But while it’s true that Soviet economic aid propped up North Korea, and that freer trade with the United States would benefit the North (and Cuba too, for that matter), Soviet economic aid was never a major cause of economic growth. Most of the capitalist Asian Tiger nations received minimal foreign aid but grew wealthy at precisely the time that North Korea stagnated.
North Korea’s state-run economic system is far and away the biggest cause of that country’s poverty. Without strong markets, trade with the United States would be like duct tape on a broken car radiator. Blaming natural disasters only invites questions about why natural disasters seem to hit socialist nations so much harder than they hit capitalist nations.
Why were we surprised that the speakers at the Socialism Conference didn’t talk much about socialism? Well, I guess no one wants to admit that they like a system like North Korea’s. Still, the International Socialist Organization, which has branches in about forty U.S. cities, was one of the sponsors of the conference, and many of its members were in attendance. The ISO is pretty explicit that it wants true socialism—that is, socialism the way Bob and I are using the term. The ISO’s website has a manifesto titled “Where We Stand.” Its opening paragraph reads:
War, poverty, exploitation and oppression are products of the capitalist system, a system in which a minority ruling class profits from the labor of the majority. The alternative is socialism, a society based on workers collectively owning and controlling the wealth their labor creates. We stand in the Marxist tradition, founded by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and continued by V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky.4
Notably absent from that list of names are Kim Il-Sung, Castro, Mao, and Stalin. You see, “A socialist society can only be built when workers collectively take control of that wealth and democratically plan its production and distribution according to human needs instead of profit” (emphasis added).5 Inserting the magic word “democratic” allows them to claim that “China and Cuba, like the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, have nothing to do with socialism. They are state capitalist regimes. We support the struggles of workers in these countries against the bureaucratic ruling class.”6
In short, the ISO supports the essential defining feature of socialism—abolishing the private ownership of the means of production and replacing it with collective ownership, which in turn means replacing markets with central planning. But then by inserting “democratic” into planning, it gets to claim that real-world implementations of collective ownership, which has always resulted in political tyranny, isn’t what they mean. Oh, but wait, remember Venezuela? That was democratic socialism, right? Wrong. Bob will have to explain. I missed that session.
* * *
It was day two. Wearing my Cincinnati Reds cap (ha ha, get it?), I was in a room packed with young socialists waiting for the session called “Did Socialism Fail in Venezuela?” I expected to hear either an admission that the Venezuelan socialist economic model had failed (but for reasons aside from socialism, such as falling oil prices) or an optimistic assertion that it was still succeeding, despite all the current evidence to the contrary, and that time would prove the socialists right.
The speaker, Eva Maria, was a Venezuelan-born socialist who now lives in Portland. Eva gave a very sophisticated and mostly first-rate rundown of the current crisis in Venezuela. She talked about food shortages, corruption, and Maduro’s political crackdown with a degree of honesty that I admit surprised me. She even acknowledged that most of the social gains in Venezuela were because of high oil prices in the mid-2000s that filled the state’s coffers and allowed it to spend more on health care and education.
After about thirty minutes, she switched gears and began to denounce the “state capitalist” system of Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela.
Wait? What? Did she say the capitalist system of Venezuela?
Yep, she did. “Socialism has not failed in Venezuela, because it has never been tried!” she shouted to wild applause in the steamy and increasingly odorous room.
If option one was admitting that Venezuelan socialism had failed, and option two was maintaining that it would still be vindicated, I was certainly not expecting option three, which was arguing that Venezuela’s economy had collapsed because it was too capitalistic! Notwithstanding the socialist rhetoric of Chavez and Maduro, and despite the praise they had received from Western socialists, Venezuela is really just as capitalist as the good ol’ U.S. of A.
Or so she claimed.
I must have missed class that day in graduate school when the professor explained that nationalizing firms and controlling prices were hallmarks of capitalism.
This is the same dirty trick socialists have played for decades. Whenever things go south, as they inevitably do, they claim that it wasn’t “real” socialism. I find the whole thing more than a little disingenuous and very irritating. When socialists, democratic and otherwise, held up Venezuela as a great socialist experiment in the 2000s, the message was, “See, we told you so; socialism works!” But when the failure happened, the message changed to, “No, wait—that’s not real socialism!” They want to claim socialism during the good times but disavow it during the bad.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be too harsh here. I am sure many of the people in attendance at this conference were not extolling Venezuela’s kind of socialism even in the heady days of the 2000s, when Sean Penn and others were singing its praises. The socialists at this conference seemed to prefer something called “socialism from below,” an idealized world in which workers communally own firms and trade only locally with other worker-run firms. It’s almost anarchic, as there’s little role for the state. I have to grant that this utopian, stateless vision is not what has been tried in the USSR, China, Cuba, or Venezuela.
Still, I’m not sure how this ideology jibes with the practice of real-world socialism. Lenin and Trotsky were not leaders of a hippie commune—they literally created state socialism and tried to spread it around the world. To separate the state from socialism in any large society is like trying to separate private property from capitalism. It can’t be done. I’ll say it once more for the people in the back: socialism, in practice, means that the state owns and controls the means of production. This is what socialism meant to Lenin and Trotsky, and this is what socialism means today.
If these kids want to live on communes and call it socialism, then Ben and I encourage them to do so. They should understand, though, that small voluntary communes suffer from the same economic information and incentive problems that larger socialist systems do, just on a smaller scale. Invariably, they have to rely on markets outside the commune because the division of labor, among such a small population, will be unable to supply all of the community’s wants (unless they’re willing to accept a very low standard of living).7 Your commune ain’t gonna make an iPhone, comrade.
The young, naïve socialists who dream of socialism “from below” are caught in a conundrum. Non-state socialist communes can only work (poorly) on a small scale in an otherwise capitalist world. To replace capitalism with this system necessitates centralizing power in order to plan the economy. That ultimately results in state ownership, control, and tyranny. Society-wide socialism “from below” that doesn’t entail state ownership is a contradiction in terms.
* * *
So what the hell is socialism if every country that has ever collectivized the means of production is not socialist? Many of the conference attendees we asked thought socialism meant simply aspiring toward a world with better conditions for various marginalized groups. Few correctly identified collectivism or state ownership of the means of production as the defining characteristic of socialism, and most had not come here to celebrate that.
I [Ben] spoke with three young women after the conclusion of the opening rally, all of whom were associated with the Berkeley International Socialist Organization. I told them I was writing a book on socialism and asked if they’d mind answering some questions so that I could better understand what attracts younger people to socialism. They readily agreed. I asked them why they attended the conference.
An attractive, well-dressed woman answered first. “The urgency is because of Trump, immigrant rights, Black Lives Matter, indigenous rights.”
Her friend said she “wanted to meet a lot of comrades.”
The third woman had a streak of green dyed into her hair and unshaved legs. She told me she was “new to socialism, and here to learn with my best friend, but also for the solidarity of it all.”
I asked them to describe the essence of socialism. One answered that “uncompromising socialism is fully committed to systematic change and ending oppression of all types.” I asked if that meant abolishing private property and was told, “Abolish everything—not just private property. Abolish borders, rent, everything.” She also said some shit about intersectionality that I didn’t understand.
By this point in the book, I bet you’re not surprised that Bob and I hit the hotel bar after the last evening session. The objective was to continue interviewing the conference attendees, of course. Anti-Hero IPA was on tap. The handle was a green raised fist with a bright red star on the wrist.
Anti-Hero IPA is a product of Revolution Brewing, Illinois’s largest independently owned brewing company. The hotel obviously knew its audience this weekend. It sold well, and it tasted good too. It’s one of the twenty-seven different major beers made by Revolution Brewing, which also makes scores of other specialty brews. In addition to IPAs, the company brews Belgian quadrupels, barley wines, American-style lagers, oatmeal stouts, reds, and many other varieties. Alcohol contents range from 2.3 percent in a grapefruit radler to 16.6 percent in a barley wine. Many of the company’s cans and tap handles feature raised fists, red stars, and other Marxist-inspired images.
But let me tell you—this privately owned company produces a variety and quality of beer that no socialist country we visited could touch. And the kids were drinking it up. Though, in fairness, I bet they would have drunk the bland Cuban beer and perhaps the god-awful North Korean beer if they had been on tap too.
That evening, we each had conversations similar to the one I’d had earlier with the young women from Berkeley. Bob went outside and bummed a cigarette from a young man who appeared to be carrying all his worldly possessions in his backpack. Bob asked how he got interested in socialism. His answer, and I swear this is true, was that he saw a Che T-shirt at a bar one night and decided to research Che and the Cuban Revolution. Make fun of the propaganda T-shirts all you want, but they recruit new comrades to the cause.
Our friend Daniel Serralde actually comes from a socialist family. When a young lady at the bar overheard this she practically gushed, “Oh my gawd, are you a red diaper baby?!” He said, “Almost.” Daniel explained that his grandfather was Basque and Jewish and fought with the Republicans against Franco. “COOL!” she practically squealed. Having a relative who fought against the fascists gives you some serious street cred with this crowd.
Bob talked to two young women who had progressed from pro-choice activism to full-blown socialist activism; and, indeed, abortion and environmental activism seem to be common gateway drugs to socialism. Many of the conference sessions reflected a broad concern for “social justice” issues; abolishing private property and replacing it with collective ownership was more of an afterthought.
If you want to get a flavor of what really interested the attendees at the conference, aside from singing the praises of Marx and Lenin, here’s a list of some of the conference sessions:
• Black Lives Matter at School
• A World Without Borders? Marxism, Nations, and Migration
• Capitalism and the Gender Binary
• The Rise of Red Power and the American Indian Movement
• Artists Against War
• Gender and Disability
• Whose Clinics? Our Clinics! Defending Abortion rights
• What Do Socialists Say About White Privilege?
• All Eleven Million: The Fight for Immigrant Rights
• From TrumpCare to Medicare for All: The Growing Movement for Single-Payer Health Care
• Socialism and Women’s Liberation
• Athletes in Revolt: Black Lives Matter in Sports Today
• U.S. Imperialism under Trump
• From #MeToo to No More: How Can We End Sexual Harassment and Assault?
• CSI Is Lying to You: Junk Science in Criminal Convictions
• Queens of the Resistance: A Revolutionary Drag Show
The thing is, Bob and I are also concerned with a lot of the same issues discussed in these sessions, but it’s not obvious what they have to do with socialism. I went to the “World Without Borders” session. The speaker was Denise Romero, one of the activists from the opening rally. She said a lot of things that were certifiably crazy. For instance, she claimed, “Capitalism is failing because it overproduces things and then can’t sell it.”
People have a virtually limitless desire for goods and services in general, but if any particular good or service is overproduced, the price falls and companies adjust their production downward.
Another doozy was her statement that “the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA] is bad because it’s exploiting Mexicans.” Actually, NAFTA has promoted Mexican economic growth and lifted many people out of poverty. This strong Mexican economic growth has actually stemmed the tide of migration. While migration from Mexico surged in the early days of NAFTA, more recently, more Mexicans have returned home than have come to the United States.8
Neither Bob nor I like borders, or what he calls “lines politicians draw on maps.” We’re both big free trade advocates. Since the time of Adam Smith, economists have understood that when goods are traded between countries, it makes people on both sides of the border richer. Ditto for free capital flows. And guess what, the same is true for people who want to move. We think people should be free to move between countries, because it benefits both the migrants and the native-born citizens in the destination countries.
Does that last part surprise you? It shouldn’t. Capitalism, by which we mean free markets, eschews any government rules or regulations that prohibit responsible adults, regardless of where they happen to live, from making trades.
When a worker moves from Massachusetts or Ohio to work in Texas, as Bob and I did, he does so because he thinks it’s in his self-interest, and the employer who hires him obviously thinks he’s the best candidate available. The economics underlying our choices are no different whether the worker is a Mexican or a Somali or an Indonesian.
Economists estimate that if international immigration restrictions were removed, we’d have massive global economic gains. Economist Michael Clemens has suggested that the gains would range from 50 to 150 percent of world GDP.9 On average, that’s a doubling of global income. The largest gainers would be the immigrants themselves. Greater global migration would contribute to a massive reduction in world poverty—just as internal migration has in China today, as we saw in Beijing and Shanghai.
This may come as a surprise to people who watch Fox News, but native-born citizens in destination countries win too. On average, incomes go up for natives when immigrants move in. Of course, some immigrants take jobs from some of the native-born citizens, but immigration also creates other jobs at the same time, because immigrants demand goods and services too. Immigration, like international trade in goods, both creates and destroys jobs. The long-run net effect on the total number of jobs for natives, though, is a wash. International trade, whether in labor (through migration) or in goods (through imports and exports), changes the mix of jobs and makes us all more productive.
Virtually all of the conservative fears related to immigration—how it affects our economy, jobs, wages, and the welfare state—are out of step with the social-science research done by economists. I edited a whole book on the topic. Like this book, it’s written for normal people to understand, but without all the fun drinking and carousing.10
Most immigration is caused by oppressive government policies in origin countries. Migrants move from poorer, less free countries to richer, more economically free countries.
There’s a reason the boats don’t sail from Miami to Havana.
In fact, it’s no accident that socialist countries build walls, guard towers, and minefields to keep their citizens in. Denise Romero forgot to mention this in her “World Without Borders” talk at the socialist conference. But we agree with Denise that some migration was forced by bad U.S. policy. She pointed out, “Ending the war on drugs and war on terror will result in fewer people needing to migrate.” We agree. The U.S. government’s war on drugs is unwinnable because, in the language of economists, it is a supply-side war, where demand isn’t very price-sensitive.
That means when the U.S. government scores a “win” in the war, the price of the remaining drugs goes up more than the usage falls. As a result, net revenue to drug cartels increases, which increases their ability to corrupt law enforcement and buy weapons and other smuggling equipment. The result has been an endless cycle of increasing violence along the entire supply chain in Central and South America, and it has surely resulted in some people emigrating out of the most violent areas.
We feel the same about the war on terror. The wars and violence associated with it in the Middle East are a major reason for Europe’s immigration wave. However, our reservations about the war on terror and U.S. militarism overseas are broader than just their effect on immigration. Thus, we sympathized with the points made in conference sessions “Artists Against War” (though we’re not at all artsy) and “U.S. Imperialism under Trump.” But being against war doesn’t require being anti-capitalism and pro-socialism. It requires being against, well, war.
In fact, advocates for capitalism can be against war precisely because war undermines capitalist institutions and freedoms. Our economist friend, Chris Coyne, wrote a book entitled After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy, in which he shows that when the U.S. engages in foreign intervention, it rarely creates the kind of lasting institutional change that supports what some might call a “neoliberal” society.11
Economist Robert Higgs’s classic book, Crisis and Leviathan, shows how crises in the United States, especially wars, have led to expanded government at the expense of markets.12 Chris’s latest book, Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism, co-authored with another friend of ours, Abby Hall, has shown how U.S. military interventions abroad “boomerang” back to the United States in ways that decrease our freedoms at home.13 See, anti-war isn’t a uniquely leftist position. Capitalists should be anti-war too. We’re anti-war, anti–border walls, and pro–free trade (which includes freedom of movement).
Pro-market guys like us have reservations about the criminal justice system too. The conference organizers should have invited our non-socialist buddy Roger Koppl to give a talk during their session “CSI is Lying to You: Junk Science in Criminal Convictions.” Roger’s book Expert Failure is among the best on the topic.14
We could go on, but we think you get the idea. The United States has plenty of problems. Agreeing that something is a problem doesn’t mean that socialism is the solution. In fact, we think most of the problems identified by socialists, especially poverty and inequality, are a result of too much government—not too little. Although the United States organizes the bulk of its economic activity through markets (remember, it ranks eleventh on Bob’s economic freedom index), it is far from the free-market, capitalist society Bob and I favor. We think eliminating many existing government interventions and allowing a greater reliance on markets and voluntary civil society is the best way to address all the major problems our country has.
The socialist conference we attended in Chicago was not at all unusual. In fact, it was consistent with the wider socialist network in its focus not on socialism per se (or as it really is), but on leftist-liberalism generally. The July/August 2018 issue of Washington Monthly did an in-depth story titled “The Socialist Network: Are today’s young, Bernie-inspired leftist intellectuals really just New Deal liberals?” that examines whether the beliefs of prominent young socialists are actually consistent with the definition of socialism.15
In a speech at Georgetown University in the fall of 2015, self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders stated, “I don’t believe the government should own the corner drugstore or the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.” Um, hello? Not socialism. You’re spotting it, too, aren’t you?
Nathan Robinson, editor of Current Affairs, wrote that either “(1) Bernie Sanders is unaware of the definition of socialism, or (2) Bernie Sanders is fully aware of the definition of socialism, and is lying about it,” and “Socialism means an end to capitalism. Bernie Sanders does not want to end capitalism. Bernie Sanders is not a socialist.”
But in his interview with Washington Monthly, Nathan Robinson admitted, “I’ve sort of come around to the idea that ‘socialism,’ the word, should less be used to describe a state-owned or collectively owned economy, and more used to describe a very strong commitment to a certain fundamental set of principles. It should be used to describe the position that is horrified by solvable economic depravations, rather than a very specific and narrow way of ordering the economic system.”
Meanwhile, in the very magazine Robinson edits, Fredrik deBoer said that socialists “seem to be falling into the models of the welfare state without really knowing we’re doing it.” As summarized by Washington Monthly, deBoer argued that “socialism means moving sectors of the economy into communal ownership—not merely expanding the welfare state, which is social democracy.”
We saw this same range of conflicting opinions at the conference, too. On my last night there, I asked a young man in the bar about the Hartford Whalers hat he was wearing. He was from one of the New England branches of the International Socialist Organization. Remember, that’s the group that wants democratic socialism with collective ownership.
I asked him if most people at the conference were really socialist—that is, did they believe in abolishing private property and insisting on state ownership of the means of production. He answered that, “You don’t become a radical overnight. They have to start somewhere.”
He himself claimed to identify as a real radical who wanted real socialism. So, I asked him to pick a country closest to his ideal system. He told me all countries are so far away from what he wants that it’s hard to say, but, if forced to pick, “I guess a Nordic country with a big welfare state.”
Okay, so let’s return to the question we started with. Why is socialism popular with millennials? We think a significant number of them identify as socialists without understanding socialism’s defining characteristic—which is state ownership of the means of production and the abolishment of private property.
They define socialism as a more radical brand of progressive or leftist beliefs.
A significant number of socialist leaders at this conference, however, did support socialism as we understand the term and would socialize the means of production if given the chance. We fear that they are using social justice causes like abortion, the environment, and immigrant rights to bring more young people into the fold.
This is about more than semantics.
Socialist leaders see that they have an opportunity with young people if they identify socialism as an ideology that is pro-abortion and pro-environment. (It has certainly been the former, in practice, though not the latter, and neither issue is central to socialism.) But if they convince young people that “social justice” equals socialism, that true pro-choice, pro-immigrant, pro-environment activists should be socialists and repudiate private property and embrace collectivization or state ownership of the means of production, it’s likely that a good many of them will.
This is a slippery slope, and it’s not a new strategy.
Most peasants who supported the Bolshevik Revolution didn’t know or care about Karl Marx; they just wanted freedom from the tsar. They didn’t know that the Bolsheviks would later collectivize their farms, immiserate them, starve them, and exile them to Siberia.
The typical comrade attending the socialist conference in Chicago wasn’t an evil jerk who wanted to see more suffering and tyranny. The typical comrade there only wanted “socialism from below” or “democratic socialism” or leftist-liberalism to the max.
But they fail to see two important things. First, whether you call it democratic or not, collective ownership fails to create the powerful incentives and market information that are necessary to create economic prosperity. It is a demonstrable fact that socialist systems inevitably lead to economic stagnation and leave average people much worse off than they would be under a capitalist system. Second, collective ownership, and the centralization of power that comes with it, is an invitation to tyranny that has been accepted by socialist regimes over and over again, almost without fail.
In the end, we’re inclined to agree with a point made by Liz Bruenig, the young columnist for the Washington Post, who caused a stir recently with her article titled, “It’s Time to Give Socialism a Try.”16 After receiving a lot of negative responses, she wrote in a follow-up column, “It makes sense to think of socialism on a spectrum, with countries and poles being more or less socialist, rather than either/or.”17 We’re sympathetic to this point. Full socialism (no markets) and full capitalism (all markets) are opposite poles on a spectrum. Every country on earth is somewhere in between. In fact, Bob’s spent most of his career creating and updating an index that basically measures where on the socialism-to-capitalism spectrum different countries fall.
Both economic theory and empirical evidence suggest that countries that embrace markets to a greater extent and eschew socialist policies to a greater extent enable humans to live wealthier, longer, better, and more fulfilling lives. And after trotting around the globe to visit many of the countries that are on or have been on the spectrum nearest to pure socialism, we can confidently attest that socialism just plain sucks.