As a communist I agree with Julie Borowski. Socialism is not cool.
YouTube transcript
Julie Borowski has a video on her YouTube channel called "socialism isn’t cool". I have put a link to it below. Julie calls herself a libertarian. I call her a utopian capitalist. Libertarians are utopian because they believe in a free market, limited government form of capitalism that has never existed and never will exist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdMUU4JEST0
Anyway, is her negative view of socialism justified? The answer depends on what you mean by socialism. The word is used to refer to quite a variety of people and systems. Obama apparently was a socialist because he was keen to get the US government involved in more stuff, particularly health care insurance. Bernie Sanders is a socialist because he says he is and he wants even more government than Obama. We have full blown welfare states in Europe with ruling parties that are members of the so-called Socialist International. We have China, Cuba and Vietnam that call themselves socialist but where the private sector of their economies is becoming more important by the day. And we used to have the now defunct Soviet Union where everything except private vegetable plots were state owned.
Then there is the only sort of socialism that I support. It does not exist at the moment and you never hear about it. It is what communists mean by the term socialism. It is the period of revolutionary transition from capitalism to communism when people and society still have a lot of stuff left over from capitalism that cannot be shaken off immediately. It is a period when the old and the new fight it out. The only experience so far of this sort of socialism is in the so-called communist countries. However, in those countries the new could only make limited progress and before long was overcome by the old. As a result socialism became an empty shell that finally collapsed in the Soviet bloc or in the case of China and Vietnam morphed into the state capitalism that we have today.
So I agree that anything presently called socialism is pretty creepy.
However, where I obviously disagree with Julie Borowski is thinking that this leads to an endorsement of capitalism.
She says we need the profit motive. But I think we can do better than that. People working, creating and innovating because they like what they are doing, won't need to be supervised by some profit taking capitalist or his henchman. And equality will be fine when we are sharing increasing prosperity.
She claims that socialism has to mean top down decision making. On the contrary, there is nothing about social ownership that prevents direct relations between enterprises and the use of a decentralized price system, notwithstanding the voluminous writings of the Austrian school economists. In particular, proposals for investment projects and funding approval do not have to be centralized.
She says that capitalism separates the economy and state. However, that separation only occurs in the libertarian free market utopia that does not and never will exist in reality. Corporate handouts are part of the system. State involvement and all its perversities are not some exogenous imposition on the system. They are part of it. It is inevitable that capitalists will turn to government for a special deal and that politicians will accommodate them. Capitalism is always going to be crony capitalism.
See you next time.