Fear of “Socialism”

The term “socialism” has come to mean so many different things that it has effectively become useless as a term of meaningful discourse, at least in the United States. Candidates for office throw the word around with reckless abandon, failing to notice that 1) the policies they are denouncing, even if fully implemented, are still laughably short of anything resembling true socialism in the traditional sense of the term, and 2) they themselves support such policies for certain privileged sectors of the population. Reactionaries who use the term to attack social welfare programs and universal health care, for example, have barely a peep to make about corporate welfare, or the gigantic theft of money by the security establishment. They understand all too well the imperatives of “personal responsibility” – for the sectors of the population whose task it is to produce commodities and not ask questions. For the sectors of the population they represent, the welfare state is indispensable.

Corporate propaganda has largely succeeded in getting people to blame the government for everything. They want people to believe that the government is the enemy (”Don’t let them take your hard earned money!”) and that corporations are our friends, or at least better. Even programs that are demanded by large sectors of the population are made to look like outrageous intrusions into people’s lives. The idea is to make everyone be out just for themselves, to destroy any basis of solidarity (except, of course, when a war needs to be fought on false pretenses; then we hear endless platitudes about “Standing together”). An ideology of free market fundamentalism is to be implemented for all but the important people. Meanwhile, the latter are only too happy to help themselves to the public trough, getting the government to bail them out when their enterprises fail, to impose tariffs to protect them from superior foreign competition, to get state governments to do their bidding or else face an exodus of jobs to Third World countries, to make the government pay for the externalities dumped onto society by the corporation’s institutionally psychopathic pursuit of profit. When one becomes a commissar for big business, one easily adopts the notion that anything to the left of the Third World-isation of the United States is equivalent to Stalinist dictatorship. Or Nazi dictatorship. One finds no difficulty in shrieking about the depredations of health care for poor mothers and kids living in Chicago slums (the thought that one might actually have a civil conscience that extends to helping people is apparently too scandalous to entertain), while finding nothing noteworthy about the CEO firing 3,000 workers to fatten the company’s profit. If this doesn’t strike you as obscene, then there’s something wrong with you. It’s that simple. But then, if you’re paid to extol these views, it’s not something that will much bother you, because you’ve succeeded in getting even working class people to partake in your sickness.