For one time only, I will take you out of the echo chamber of decades of Cold War propaganda and Twitter activism on the left and right and attempt to advance a useful history of socialism for you that should clarify what the term means. As someone likely to be teaching this stuff in the very near future, this is a useful exercise for me, so feel free to push on certain points or ask questions.
In its crudest terms, socialism simply means the socialization of producing and distributing goods and services across a society. The idea that this could be useful predates Karl Marx and existed in many societies around the world, but often with exploitative labor relationships. Marx's innovation was to take the particular political economic system that existed in his time, industrial capitalism, and subject it to a ruthless critique. He wasn't the first to have done so, but he was the first to have done so comprehensively. He attacked the system at multiple points for resting on logical fallacies, historical processes of dispossession and disenfranchisement, and exploitation of labor, and forecast that ultimately it would implode. Key concepts included:
1) A labor theory of value, which is to say that everything in the market acquires value through the process of mixing human labor with materials.
2) A materialist approach to history, which is to say historical circumstances are best understood by looking at material circumstances, e.g. how are needs being met, what is scarce and what is plentiful, who controls resource allocation, etc. This allows us to analyze the creation and maintenance of classes over time, e.g. the working class (proletariat), the bourgeoisie, etc.
3) A theory of alienation, to explain how workers are set into competitive relations with one another and are separated from the fruits of their labor, that is, how processes of industrial production essentially make people cogs in the wheel. People are connected to things instead of each other.
4) A critique of primitive accumulation, which is to say understanding that the foundations of producing capital came from taking things out of common usage and making them privately owned, often arbitrarily and with violence.
5) A critique of commodity fetishism, which is to say the belief that there is a relationship between commodities and money that explains an economy, rather than relations between people. Marx posited instead that no item had an intrinsic value and instead value was predicated on subjective social determinations. In other words, there is no such thing as an "invisible hand."
6) That base determines superstructure, which is to say that the whole system of productive relationships needed to keep a society functional determines what politics, economics, culture, ideology, etc are possible.
Now Marx posited plenty of other concepts and I recommend reading his books to find out more. Capital Vols. 1 and 2 are probably where he lays things out most comprehensively, but most people who have brief brushes with Marx seldom read anything beyond the Communist Manifesto. While Marx's theory is much more complicated than what is listed above, I pulled these key concepts out because I think they're most useful to understanding the way socialism gets invoked today. Some of them have been critiqued or disputed extensively since he wrote them. Others have been substantially reinterpreted based on the exigencies of the moment. Marx himself was notoriously wishy washy about the means by which capitalism would fall, at times expressing sentiments in favor of its active overthrow and at others saying it would naturally give way to socialism. The best he did say was that the people will have to make the revolution for themselves based on their own particular circumstances in the time when capitalism meets its demise.
After Marx and Engels passed on, socialism went through many twists and turns as various thinkers around the world pondered what to do with this critique and how to make it relevant to make the revolution for themselves, so to speak. And this is where we get into trouble, because like most people, a lot of Marx's fans only read the Communist Manifesto and never bothered to read most of the rest of his work all that closely. In said manifesto, Marx posits what I consider to be the great poison pill of communism, which is the "dictatorship of the proletariat." Outraged by what he saw going on in the Hungarian Revolution, Marx believed for a time that the only way out of the domination of the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" was the total overthrow of the bourgeois class by the working class using force, if necessary, to abolish class altogether. Several years later in his "Critique of the Gotha Program" (i.e. social democracy), Marx would criticize approaches that favored just letting society evolve into communism as essentially weak and revisionist. Later, he tempered that critique saying it was possible if there was a robust democratic system to bring about such change, but he didn't believe such opportunity existed in his home country of Germany in the mid-late1800s, and given the circumstances, it's hard to argue he was wrong. In any case, many a would be revolutionary enthusiastically took up the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat as a way to force change in their own society. The question became who was the proletariat?
In Russia, like China, and later Cuba, Korea, and Vietnam, this was a complicated question. Marx had laid his system out for industrial capitalist societies and basically said little about agrarian societies with large peasant classes. Bourgeois capitalism was a necessary precondition that he believed societies had to pass through (and ultimately that the whole world had to pass through) before socialism could take hold. Most of the above mentioned nations weren't really ready. So what did they do? For the most part, they took three steps: 1) Liquidation of the propertied class through seizure of assets and wealth; 2) Development of a revolutionary "vanguard" party that had experience with bourgeois capitalism and would guide the process of social transformation within the confines of the nation (rather than as part of a larger international project), and 3) Proletarianization through a redistribution of citizens throughout the countries and massive educational and industrial production projects to forcefully create an industrial working class.
Anyone who knows anything about history can smell how the unfreedom crept into these processes. Lenin was the one who came up with most of these ideas as Russia was the first to fall. Even then, there were plenty of Socialists who loudly disagreed with him, but given the Bolshevik victory following the turmoil in Russia, everyone lined up behind the winners. It's been argued Lenin was more egalitarian at heart, but he died early and Stalin was the one responsible for executing his vision, which, to put it mildly, didn't go well. The now deceased Marx's Germany found itself deeply fractured following World War I with the social democrats nominally in power, but disgraced by their failure to prevent the war in the first place. They advanced their idea of gradual socialism Marx had critiqued back in the 1870s, and young people dredged up those writings to criticize them. Meanwhile fascists of all stripes were on the march and ultimately engineered their way into power. In the early years of Nazi rule, policies of centralized redistribution were still normalized enough that the Nazis had to accommodate them (hence the name "national socialists") but this was largely due to the influence of the Strasser brothers and their followers who quickly fell out of favor with Hitler. Over in the Soviet Union, Stalin had purged all of his enemies by wartime, including his main political rival Trotsky, who he'd politically marginalized before he was ultimately murdered. So in the pre-Cold War era that was World War II, the world had Stalin's authoritarian state command economy with socialist characteristics, a vanquished social democratic party in Germany, imprisoned Communists in Italy and Spain, a briefly united Popular Front in France that collapsed and was persecuted under the Vichy government, while Britain's Labour party and the United States' Democratic party offered a liberal democratic platform that was both an alternative and a response to socialism's demand for the working class to be prioritized. Canada's liberal party is actually a fascinating divergence from this path as Laurier basically assembled a ragtag political coalition for awhile that was mostly faced with reaching full statehood until the postwar era.
Any road up, after WWII, a lot of things change. China goes red. Cuba follows. Other countries try and some are successful, some fail. This coincides with a massive decolonization process begun after World War I where Leninist-Marxism ends up seeming to many to be a useful alternative to jumping on the bandwagon of so-called liberal democracy being peddled by the former imperial powers. The Soviets are at least a credible benefactor so, as Marx said, the base determines the superstructure. Leninism (or a brand of it) becomes the primary way of understanding socialism, though the "revisionists" Marx scolded never went away. They became the various social democrats around the world. Orthodox or "vulgar" Marxists are still around too, often doing party building projects in and around developing nations. Mao has his own version of proletarianism as he considers the dispossessed and rural peasant class (who Lenin famously had no use for) as the true working class. His innovations would guide the theorization of Marxism in analogous societies in Asia and Latin America. Socialism became deeply tethered to decolonization, but it was highly variable which strand of socialism and in some cases it wasn't ideology guiding a socialist political turn so much as groups who decided it was better to throw in their lots with the Soviets (or later the Cubans or Chinese) than the North Atlantic powers. But that doesn't get socialism or those political actors off the hook. I've generally found "that's not the real socialism" arguments unpersuasive. In reality, no party or country's political economic system is any more or less real than any other's as long as it makes a good faith attempt to connect its definitions of the system to its historical roots and apply the system according to its particular circumstances. There are varieties of socialism just like there are varieties of capitalism. There are even circumstances where they mix at both the national and international level. One of the projects of historians over the past 50 years has been demonstrating the uneven ways the formation of the working class has emerged and showing how even as capitalism was becoming the dominant system in Europe, there was resistance and the articulation of alternatives that in some cases were incorporated into the society and in others were roads not taken. This demonstrates to us that liberal democracy and capitalism can be separated from one another as not naturally fitting together, as many capitalists would like to argue. WEB DuBois, for example, famously argued that post-emancipation Reconstruction was the most radical proletarianization and bourgeois class liquidation in the history of the world up to that point, before it was dismantled. Even still, we have the radical reinterpretations of citizenship that came via the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments as a legacy of that time. Had the government not kowtowed to Southern pressure, who can say what further changes that time might have wrought?
So how does this relate to would be socialists today? Well, if we've already come to see socialism as a moving target of sorts, then obviously it's subject to some interpretation. What's usually the most useful way to understand how "socialist" someone is according to their own self-declaration or either the media or their opponents applying that label is to try to trace their thought to a particular past instantiation of socialism. Who have they read? One of the phrases I used above was "a good faith attempt to connect...definitions of the system to its historical roots." If there isn't this historical dimension, socialism is just a word. It can be as reductive as nationalization of industry or as expansive as any human relations wherein we share things. Neither definition satisfies even the most basic tests of understanding history or politics. So the question for any person using socialism to define themselves, or that someone else is defining as socialist, is which of the many lineages of socialism are they saying they subscribe to? It's likely that there is some blend and overlap, so which ones have they selected from and what are the strengths and limits of those selections?
If we were to take Bernie Sanders as an example, he has in the past identified himself as a "New Deal Democrat," but also a believer in social democratic principles found among parties in Scandinavia. Some of his policies seem to straddle the line between the two, but one in particular proposes the liquidation of a service sector called the insurance industry in favor of a single payer system where the state satisfies all health debts. This certainly leans more toward the ideals of European social democracy in the late 1940s and early '50s than to Roosevelt in 1936. But it doesn't lean quite all the way to the Bolsheviks in 1918, who directly took over management of the entire healthcare system.
Now we can take Pol Pot, who we can say nationalized healthcare by seizing Western medical facilities and limiting their availability while also recommending local treatments and saving more serious medical industrialization for after rice production had sufficiently increased. Is this socialist? This process of proletarianization is considered a pre-modern stage in Marxist thought. Mao, who inspired the Cambodians, believed, somewhat contrary to Marx, that agrarian production was the key to prosperity. The Khmer Rouge were in the process of dictatorship of the proletariat, but they seemingly missed the part that said only until class relations themselves can be abolished. Stalin also seemed to miss this part. But then again, just because you have sex out of wedlock doesn't mean you aren't a Christian, so why get caught up in the details? I'll grant you, that's a pretty big detail, but jettisoning it doesn't necessarily mean you're not still doing or trying to do Communism. This loophole in the ideology where you can interpose authoritarianism and have someone neglect the next phase completely seems to me a near fatal flaw if you're trying to posit that Marx and Engels developed a complete system. But I doubt even Marx and Engels themselves would've said that. Marx doesn't really mention this idea much in his later writings and as I said earlier, he hedges on revolution vs. democratic institutionalism more than enough. It would certainly be difficult to say that a person who favors a transition to socialism in an industrialized country could have much in common with the Cambodian communists of the 1970s, because historical materialism tells us that the ideology and economics of our situation couldn't be more different.
So in 2019, there are politicians around the world who are advancing various platforms that owe a debt to socialist theory, capitalist theory, liberal democratic theory, a cocktail of authoritarian theories, etc. Socialism as a world system doesn't seem like it's going to spontaneously emerge any time soon, but nations experiments with it as a critique and roadmap for identifying the excesses of capital are acting no less in the spirit of Marx than Hi Chi Minh was. I suppose in that sense, socialism is both a tool for "the ruthless criticism of everything existing," as Marx called it, and a guide to enacting radical redistributive social transformation, either quickly or slowly. The contradictions between justice and force are no more or less significant in socialism than they are in capitalist liberal democracies. So when questions arise of where socialism has "worked," they're operating at the wrong level of analysis. Capitalism has "worked" as a world system in the sense that it's survived, though it has certainly failed to produce prosperity or even basic survival for large numbers of people at various times. Politics typically decides how to allocate those market losses within nations. Fewer people are certainly starving and dying now than were under the feudal and mercantile systems that preceded it, but does that mean markets are the best possible way to distribute resources? By best, I mean fairest and most sustainable. That question, I suppose, is the socialist intervention.
Cold War politics mostly defined any use of socialism or communism as subscribing to ideals that actively advocated for the overthrow of democratic governments to take everything you earned so a bureaucrat of some kind could exploit you or throw you in a gulag if you were disobedient. It's not hard to see how this parody evolved considering the way socialist systems were being governed, but mostly this propaganda served to justify certain elites staying in power and the advancement of American imperial projects around the world. Most communist countries did the same, indoctrinating their people with ridiculous ideas about capitalism and democracy. Here and now, I believe it's possible to take a much more sober look at what these systems can mean, have meant, and should mean if we want to utilize them. There are plenty of terrible socialist ideas and terrible capitalist ideas and some good ideas that get attributed to both that aren't really representative of either. Neither have virtue on their own, but depend on whether and how the people get a say in using them.
In its crudest terms, socialism simply means the socialization of producing and distributing goods and services across a society. The idea that this could be useful predates Karl Marx and existed in many societies around the world, but often with exploitative labor relationships. Marx's innovation was to take the particular political economic system that existed in his time, industrial capitalism, and subject it to a ruthless critique. He wasn't the first to have done so, but he was the first to have done so comprehensively. He attacked the system at multiple points for resting on logical fallacies, historical processes of dispossession and disenfranchisement, and exploitation of labor, and forecast that ultimately it would implode. Key concepts included:
1) A labor theory of value, which is to say that everything in the market acquires value through the process of mixing human labor with materials.
2) A materialist approach to history, which is to say historical circumstances are best understood by looking at material circumstances, e.g. how are needs being met, what is scarce and what is plentiful, who controls resource allocation, etc. This allows us to analyze the creation and maintenance of classes over time, e.g. the working class (proletariat), the bourgeoisie, etc.
3) A theory of alienation, to explain how workers are set into competitive relations with one another and are separated from the fruits of their labor, that is, how processes of industrial production essentially make people cogs in the wheel. People are connected to things instead of each other.
4) A critique of primitive accumulation, which is to say understanding that the foundations of producing capital came from taking things out of common usage and making them privately owned, often arbitrarily and with violence.
5) A critique of commodity fetishism, which is to say the belief that there is a relationship between commodities and money that explains an economy, rather than relations between people. Marx posited instead that no item had an intrinsic value and instead value was predicated on subjective social determinations. In other words, there is no such thing as an "invisible hand."
6) That base determines superstructure, which is to say that the whole system of productive relationships needed to keep a society functional determines what politics, economics, culture, ideology, etc are possible.
Now Marx posited plenty of other concepts and I recommend reading his books to find out more. Capital Vols. 1 and 2 are probably where he lays things out most comprehensively, but most people who have brief brushes with Marx seldom read anything beyond the Communist Manifesto. While Marx's theory is much more complicated than what is listed above, I pulled these key concepts out because I think they're most useful to understanding the way socialism gets invoked today. Some of them have been critiqued or disputed extensively since he wrote them. Others have been substantially reinterpreted based on the exigencies of the moment. Marx himself was notoriously wishy washy about the means by which capitalism would fall, at times expressing sentiments in favor of its active overthrow and at others saying it would naturally give way to socialism. The best he did say was that the people will have to make the revolution for themselves based on their own particular circumstances in the time when capitalism meets its demise.
After Marx and Engels passed on, socialism went through many twists and turns as various thinkers around the world pondered what to do with this critique and how to make it relevant to make the revolution for themselves, so to speak. And this is where we get into trouble, because like most people, a lot of Marx's fans only read the Communist Manifesto and never bothered to read most of the rest of his work all that closely. In said manifesto, Marx posits what I consider to be the great poison pill of communism, which is the "dictatorship of the proletariat." Outraged by what he saw going on in the Hungarian Revolution, Marx believed for a time that the only way out of the domination of the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" was the total overthrow of the bourgeois class by the working class using force, if necessary, to abolish class altogether. Several years later in his "Critique of the Gotha Program" (i.e. social democracy), Marx would criticize approaches that favored just letting society evolve into communism as essentially weak and revisionist. Later, he tempered that critique saying it was possible if there was a robust democratic system to bring about such change, but he didn't believe such opportunity existed in his home country of Germany in the mid-late1800s, and given the circumstances, it's hard to argue he was wrong. In any case, many a would be revolutionary enthusiastically took up the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat as a way to force change in their own society. The question became who was the proletariat?
In Russia, like China, and later Cuba, Korea, and Vietnam, this was a complicated question. Marx had laid his system out for industrial capitalist societies and basically said little about agrarian societies with large peasant classes. Bourgeois capitalism was a necessary precondition that he believed societies had to pass through (and ultimately that the whole world had to pass through) before socialism could take hold. Most of the above mentioned nations weren't really ready. So what did they do? For the most part, they took three steps: 1) Liquidation of the propertied class through seizure of assets and wealth; 2) Development of a revolutionary "vanguard" party that had experience with bourgeois capitalism and would guide the process of social transformation within the confines of the nation (rather than as part of a larger international project), and 3) Proletarianization through a redistribution of citizens throughout the countries and massive educational and industrial production projects to forcefully create an industrial working class.
Anyone who knows anything about history can smell how the unfreedom crept into these processes. Lenin was the one who came up with most of these ideas as Russia was the first to fall. Even then, there were plenty of Socialists who loudly disagreed with him, but given the Bolshevik victory following the turmoil in Russia, everyone lined up behind the winners. It's been argued Lenin was more egalitarian at heart, but he died early and Stalin was the one responsible for executing his vision, which, to put it mildly, didn't go well. The now deceased Marx's Germany found itself deeply fractured following World War I with the social democrats nominally in power, but disgraced by their failure to prevent the war in the first place. They advanced their idea of gradual socialism Marx had critiqued back in the 1870s, and young people dredged up those writings to criticize them. Meanwhile fascists of all stripes were on the march and ultimately engineered their way into power. In the early years of Nazi rule, policies of centralized redistribution were still normalized enough that the Nazis had to accommodate them (hence the name "national socialists") but this was largely due to the influence of the Strasser brothers and their followers who quickly fell out of favor with Hitler. Over in the Soviet Union, Stalin had purged all of his enemies by wartime, including his main political rival Trotsky, who he'd politically marginalized before he was ultimately murdered. So in the pre-Cold War era that was World War II, the world had Stalin's authoritarian state command economy with socialist characteristics, a vanquished social democratic party in Germany, imprisoned Communists in Italy and Spain, a briefly united Popular Front in France that collapsed and was persecuted under the Vichy government, while Britain's Labour party and the United States' Democratic party offered a liberal democratic platform that was both an alternative and a response to socialism's demand for the working class to be prioritized. Canada's liberal party is actually a fascinating divergence from this path as Laurier basically assembled a ragtag political coalition for awhile that was mostly faced with reaching full statehood until the postwar era.
Any road up, after WWII, a lot of things change. China goes red. Cuba follows. Other countries try and some are successful, some fail. This coincides with a massive decolonization process begun after World War I where Leninist-Marxism ends up seeming to many to be a useful alternative to jumping on the bandwagon of so-called liberal democracy being peddled by the former imperial powers. The Soviets are at least a credible benefactor so, as Marx said, the base determines the superstructure. Leninism (or a brand of it) becomes the primary way of understanding socialism, though the "revisionists" Marx scolded never went away. They became the various social democrats around the world. Orthodox or "vulgar" Marxists are still around too, often doing party building projects in and around developing nations. Mao has his own version of proletarianism as he considers the dispossessed and rural peasant class (who Lenin famously had no use for) as the true working class. His innovations would guide the theorization of Marxism in analogous societies in Asia and Latin America. Socialism became deeply tethered to decolonization, but it was highly variable which strand of socialism and in some cases it wasn't ideology guiding a socialist political turn so much as groups who decided it was better to throw in their lots with the Soviets (or later the Cubans or Chinese) than the North Atlantic powers. But that doesn't get socialism or those political actors off the hook. I've generally found "that's not the real socialism" arguments unpersuasive. In reality, no party or country's political economic system is any more or less real than any other's as long as it makes a good faith attempt to connect its definitions of the system to its historical roots and apply the system according to its particular circumstances. There are varieties of socialism just like there are varieties of capitalism. There are even circumstances where they mix at both the national and international level. One of the projects of historians over the past 50 years has been demonstrating the uneven ways the formation of the working class has emerged and showing how even as capitalism was becoming the dominant system in Europe, there was resistance and the articulation of alternatives that in some cases were incorporated into the society and in others were roads not taken. This demonstrates to us that liberal democracy and capitalism can be separated from one another as not naturally fitting together, as many capitalists would like to argue. WEB DuBois, for example, famously argued that post-emancipation Reconstruction was the most radical proletarianization and bourgeois class liquidation in the history of the world up to that point, before it was dismantled. Even still, we have the radical reinterpretations of citizenship that came via the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments as a legacy of that time. Had the government not kowtowed to Southern pressure, who can say what further changes that time might have wrought?
So how does this relate to would be socialists today? Well, if we've already come to see socialism as a moving target of sorts, then obviously it's subject to some interpretation. What's usually the most useful way to understand how "socialist" someone is according to their own self-declaration or either the media or their opponents applying that label is to try to trace their thought to a particular past instantiation of socialism. Who have they read? One of the phrases I used above was "a good faith attempt to connect...definitions of the system to its historical roots." If there isn't this historical dimension, socialism is just a word. It can be as reductive as nationalization of industry or as expansive as any human relations wherein we share things. Neither definition satisfies even the most basic tests of understanding history or politics. So the question for any person using socialism to define themselves, or that someone else is defining as socialist, is which of the many lineages of socialism are they saying they subscribe to? It's likely that there is some blend and overlap, so which ones have they selected from and what are the strengths and limits of those selections?
If we were to take Bernie Sanders as an example, he has in the past identified himself as a "New Deal Democrat," but also a believer in social democratic principles found among parties in Scandinavia. Some of his policies seem to straddle the line between the two, but one in particular proposes the liquidation of a service sector called the insurance industry in favor of a single payer system where the state satisfies all health debts. This certainly leans more toward the ideals of European social democracy in the late 1940s and early '50s than to Roosevelt in 1936. But it doesn't lean quite all the way to the Bolsheviks in 1918, who directly took over management of the entire healthcare system.
Now we can take Pol Pot, who we can say nationalized healthcare by seizing Western medical facilities and limiting their availability while also recommending local treatments and saving more serious medical industrialization for after rice production had sufficiently increased. Is this socialist? This process of proletarianization is considered a pre-modern stage in Marxist thought. Mao, who inspired the Cambodians, believed, somewhat contrary to Marx, that agrarian production was the key to prosperity. The Khmer Rouge were in the process of dictatorship of the proletariat, but they seemingly missed the part that said only until class relations themselves can be abolished. Stalin also seemed to miss this part. But then again, just because you have sex out of wedlock doesn't mean you aren't a Christian, so why get caught up in the details? I'll grant you, that's a pretty big detail, but jettisoning it doesn't necessarily mean you're not still doing or trying to do Communism. This loophole in the ideology where you can interpose authoritarianism and have someone neglect the next phase completely seems to me a near fatal flaw if you're trying to posit that Marx and Engels developed a complete system. But I doubt even Marx and Engels themselves would've said that. Marx doesn't really mention this idea much in his later writings and as I said earlier, he hedges on revolution vs. democratic institutionalism more than enough. It would certainly be difficult to say that a person who favors a transition to socialism in an industrialized country could have much in common with the Cambodian communists of the 1970s, because historical materialism tells us that the ideology and economics of our situation couldn't be more different.
So in 2019, there are politicians around the world who are advancing various platforms that owe a debt to socialist theory, capitalist theory, liberal democratic theory, a cocktail of authoritarian theories, etc. Socialism as a world system doesn't seem like it's going to spontaneously emerge any time soon, but nations experiments with it as a critique and roadmap for identifying the excesses of capital are acting no less in the spirit of Marx than Hi Chi Minh was. I suppose in that sense, socialism is both a tool for "the ruthless criticism of everything existing," as Marx called it, and a guide to enacting radical redistributive social transformation, either quickly or slowly. The contradictions between justice and force are no more or less significant in socialism than they are in capitalist liberal democracies. So when questions arise of where socialism has "worked," they're operating at the wrong level of analysis. Capitalism has "worked" as a world system in the sense that it's survived, though it has certainly failed to produce prosperity or even basic survival for large numbers of people at various times. Politics typically decides how to allocate those market losses within nations. Fewer people are certainly starving and dying now than were under the feudal and mercantile systems that preceded it, but does that mean markets are the best possible way to distribute resources? By best, I mean fairest and most sustainable. That question, I suppose, is the socialist intervention.
Cold War politics mostly defined any use of socialism or communism as subscribing to ideals that actively advocated for the overthrow of democratic governments to take everything you earned so a bureaucrat of some kind could exploit you or throw you in a gulag if you were disobedient. It's not hard to see how this parody evolved considering the way socialist systems were being governed, but mostly this propaganda served to justify certain elites staying in power and the advancement of American imperial projects around the world. Most communist countries did the same, indoctrinating their people with ridiculous ideas about capitalism and democracy. Here and now, I believe it's possible to take a much more sober look at what these systems can mean, have meant, and should mean if we want to utilize them. There are plenty of terrible socialist ideas and terrible capitalist ideas and some good ideas that get attributed to both that aren't really representative of either. Neither have virtue on their own, but depend on whether and how the people get a say in using them.