Congress's Bizarre Assertion On Socialism
Communism is a limit on wealth; socialism is a limit on poverty; capitalism is a limit on those limits; democracy is a limit on capitalism; and fascism is a limit on democracy.
Friday, a US Congress funded entirely by the pooled resources of its nation’s citizens to provide common direction and services, voted overwhelmingly in favour of a motion that read:
That Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States.
Of the 11 preambles in the lengthy text, none accurately refer to the general principles of socialism or its impacts. Intended to embarrass newly elected New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a declared democratic socialist, ahead of his meeting with Donald Trump later that day, it was a political landmine planted by the Republicans to trip so-called moderate Democrats into showing their colours. Or at least those of their donors.
Unfortunately for the American left, 86 Democrats fell for it and voted for the motion, being more afraid for their corporate sponsors than for their citizens’ well-being.
Democratic socialism, at its core, is about limiting poverty. It is about ensuring everyone has the basics, that we may pool our resources to achieve common goals. It does not limit wealth except where wealth inflicts poverty. Democratic socialism is, then, the institutional defense of the common good.
Practical democratic socialism manifests itself through social programs like welfare, public healthcare, employment insurance, public pension plans, public transportation and communication infrastructure, libraries, waste management, public lands and parks, and many other government funded or government run services and systems. Some, like law enforcement and fire fighting are taken for granted to such an extent that it’s easy to forget that these are services provided through the pooling of our resources.
When Congress denounces socialism “in all its forms,” these are the things they are attacking. Socialism is a lot more than the public ownership of the “means of production” but even that is subject to interpretation. A government that regulates the exploitation of people and resources is taking ownership of the means of production; public regulation is itself an element of democratic socialism.
It does not mean that people cannot get unreasonably rich in a democratic socialist economy, but someone who does must recognise the public contribution to their success. Taxation is not theft, it is simply the pooling of resources. The term “taxpayers” is an epithet, one that must disappear from our lexicon; we are citizens, participants in society who contribute what taxes we can to benefit from what services we require.
While socialism seeks to limit poverty, communism seeks to limit wealth. Everything belongs to everyone; no one person can have too much. In so doing, everyone can have too little. The resources to fund such a society are limited from the lack of personal incentive to perform. Communism, often conflated with socialism, is only its most extreme form.
Capitalism and socialism may coexist. Capitalism and communism may not. Under a modern interpretation of democratic socialism, you can get as rich as you want, so long as you don’t starve those who got you there — namely, your employees and your fellow citizens.
Unrestrained capitalism, the system which the Republicans and the 86 “moderate” Democrats voted for on Friday, does away with all elements of democratic socialism. The trouble is that capitalism without any socialism decays to fascism. As much as communism is an extreme form of socialism, fascism is an extreme form of capitalism.
Regulation is a fundamentally democratic-socialist principle. In practice, our regulatory environment is set up with the intent to say, roughly:
You may exploit resources, but not here — this location belongs to all of us.
You may exploit those resources, but you must share royalties with the state — the resource itself belongs to all of us.
You may exploit labour, but you must pay a reasonable wage, for anyone contributing to your enterprise is entitled to live off the proceeds of their labour.
You may exploit resources via public infrastructure, benefitting from the labour of people raised and living on public education and services over that same public infrastructure, who in turn eat safe food guaranteed by laws and regulations that we, collectively, came up with and implemented through government.
Government itself is merely the way in which we decide how much we need to share and define our common needs. We regulate what social programs and structures address those common needs through our democratic processes. Thus, regulation is, at its core, democratic socialism.
Deregulation is a fundamentally capitalist principle. Regulation limits exploitation. Those who want to exploit resources or labour are the capitalists, and in the endless search for more capital, seek to reduce the limits on their exploitation. It is not by accident that several of the wealthiest people in the United States were in attendance at Donald Trump’s swearing in, sitting in front of his own cabinet. Nor is it a coincidence that in the ten months that have followed, democratic structures and regulations limiting exploitation have been systematically undermined by that billionaire-backed government.
When exploitation becomes completely unregulated, fascism becomes inevitable; democratic structures and human rights become nothing more than obstacles to the pursuit of greater wealth. Socialist principles like minimum wage are beaten down to the point that the state has to feed and house working people while the abusive corporations that exploit those people are celebrated and absolved from their responsibilities, ironically forcing more traditional socialism to exist while those corporations are not contributing their share of the costs to the resource pool we call taxation. This is how we have ended up in a place where we cannot afford to invest in the kind of nation-building mass infrastructure programs of the past. Unregulated capitalism, left to its own devices, will eventually result in fascist governance, with no rights left for the people or limits on their exploitation.
Thus socialism without capitalism is communism; capitalism without socialism is fascism. We maintain the balance through democracy.
If you drill into their values rather than the labels they wear, the vast majority of Canadians are democratic socialists who believe in pooling their resources through taxes and expecting infrastructure, regulation, and services in return. Many support capitalists without realising that they are the resources capitalists exploit and are not, themselves, capitalists.
When Congressmen condemn “socialism in all its forms,” they are being exploited by the capitalists they defend while attacking the very democracy that brought those same congressmen into that room to vote, contributing to democracy’s eventual demise.