As I explained recently, it matters a great deal how we define ‘socialism.’ Our choice of definition makes a measurable difference in terms of what level of government intrusion into our lives that we are willing to accept.
Yet despite the unmistakable difference in outcomes depending on what definition we choose, the right-of-center political movement is surprisingly resistant to changing its mind when it has adopted the wrong definition. I am not going to speculate as to the origins of this resistance, but if it is a fear of being perceived as an intellectual turncoat, it might be worth remembering the following words of wisdom attributed to British economist John Maynard Keynes. When criticized for changing his mind too often, Keynes is said to have replied:
When someone presents me with a better argument than mine, I change my mind. What do you do?
There is, of course, also the possibility that some pundits, analysts, and scholars to the right of center are not too worried about the policy consequences of their writings and sayings. If so, it is very unfortunate: if we do not understand socialism, we also do not understand the policy that promotes socialism. If we cannot see that policy for what it is, we eventually become useful conduits for an ideology the end goal of which is the very antithesis of what both conservatives and libertarians want.
In addition to understanding the practical repercussions of mistaking socialism for something it is not, it might help to listen to what socialists themselves have to say about their ideology. It might also help to explore what analysts of this ideology had to say in a time and place where socialism was still a relatively new acquaintance; perhaps they saw it with eyes unsullied by the already-prolific presence that socialism has in our societies today.
The following analysis of the definition of ‘socialism’ is based in part on the first chapter in my book Democracy or Socialism: The Fateful Question for America in 2024 (Palgrave McMillan, 2021). The title of this chapter is “Defining Socialism.”
Socialism emerged as a coherent ideology approximately 150 years ago. When it did, it sparked a debate over one specific but for civilization existential question: what should the relation be between the state and the individual?
In the mid-to-late 19th century, the world was home to a plethora of different forms of government, though democracy in the modern sense was not as represented as it is today. That does not mean non-democratic governments were in any sense authoritarian; the art of government with due respect to the individual citizen has preoccupied many a political leader since that art was formulated already during the renaissance.
Socialists had in mind a different relationship between the state and the individual. Instead of preoccupying themselves with the limitations of state power over the individual’s personal, expressive, and religious freedoms, the socialists placed their spotlight on the economic role of the state. Specifically, they were concerned about the state’s ability to reduce the economic differences between individual citizens, and citizens clumped together in ‘classes’ or other social categories.
Rudimentary forms of critique of economic stratification can be traced back as far as to the early 19th century, but it was not until Karl Marx formalized a theory for what is now best known as ‘economic inequality,’ that the socialist movement gained the systemic intellectual prowess to propel its ideology into the making of policy.
In doing so, the socialist movement gradually gained opportunities to give the state a very different role from what it had previously enjoyed. Wherever socialists gained political momentum and legislative influence, they turned the state into a tool for reconfiguring economies, even societies, in the image of their theoretical ideal.
That ideal was one where there were no meaningful economic differences between individual citizens.
The socialist ideology has been practiced in various forms, most notoriously under the Soviet empire, which stretched its tentacles from Saxony to Sakhalin. However, this was but one form of socialism—a special case, as we will see in a moment. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is a catastrophic mistake to limit the definition of socialism to what history has often referred to as the collectivization of the means of production. This is the property-rights based definition of socialism: the socialist practices his ideology by confiscating the private property of his fellow citizens.
A closer examination of the anatomy of socialism shows that this property-based definition is only a special case of the ideology. Another definition, centered around economic redistribution, is actually the general case of socialism. This definition, which is given hardly any attention at all by opponents of socialism, is the foundation of what is by far the most successful practice of the socialist ideology. It has been put into policy practice and has been allowed to define the purpose of government in almost every European country, in Canada, and in the United States.
In short: wherever the majority of government spending is being used to redistribute income, consumption, and wealth from better-off citizens to those who are worse off, the redistribution-based definition of socialism is already being practiced.
Wherever economic redistribution is the main function of government, socialism will gradually expand this practice, until there are no longer any meaningful economic differences between individual citizens. Yet prominent critics of socialism, such as Senator Rand Paul (The Case against Socialism, Broadside 2019) and author and commentator Dinesh D’Souza (United States of Socialism, All Points Books 2020) in America, and Cato Institute senior fellow Johan Norberg in Sweden, remain convinced that an expanding, economically redistributive welfare state does not move us closer to the socialist end goal of complete economic egalitarianism.
The lack of understanding of the redistributive definition is a relatively new phenomenon. There is a large body of scholarship on the matter; an eminent contribution was penned by British economist Henry Smith of Ruskin College, Oxford. In an article in The Economic Journal in 1957, Riskin explained (p. 412, emphasis added):
The basis of western or democratic socialism, whether it be as empirical as the doctrines of the British Labour Party or pays lip-service to a revision of Marxism like the bulk of the continental parties, is criticism of the justice in distribution and the efficiency in production of unregulated free enterprise.
One of the most successful contributions to socialist political thought in the 20th century was based on this definition of the ideology. It came in the form of a book in 1934 by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and his wife, sociologist Alva Myrdal. Titled Kris i befolkningsfrågan in Swedish, it has never been translated into English (see this article for a brief overview).
As I explain in The Rise of Big Government, the book by Mr. and Mrs. Myrdal explained in detail what policy reforms were needed in Sweden in order to reconfigure society to the point where economic redistribution was essentially complete. Government should take over the funding of health care, education, housing, income security, and child care; the complex welfare state thus envisioned would reduce parents to custodians of their own children.
The welfare state would be funded by heavily taxed private corporations. In order to maximize the productivity of those corporate taxpayers, the Myrdals propose several eugenic policies to, as they say, enhance the quality of the population stock and the workforce.
This is the very same welfare state that the Swedish government started building in the late 1930s and expanded upon until the socialized pension system was implemented in 1960.
Within three decades, the democratic-socialist government in Sweden had completely reconfigured society and the economy in the image of their ideology—and they had done so without eliminating private property.
Sweden practiced socialism by means of democracy, not authoritarianism. Yet as mentioned earlier, prominent contemporary critics of socialism are unable to understand that this is indeed socialism.
Perhaps they would appreciate to consume one of the earliest and most informed contributions to an understanding of what socialism is. As part of a broader debate on socialism in The American Economic Review in 1911 (vol. 2, pp. 347-367), one of the contributors highlighted the definition of socialism adopted at the time by the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of America (AER 1911, p. 350):
Socialism is the modern movement of the working class to abolish the private ownership in the social means of production and distribution, and to substitute for it a system of industry, collectively owned and democratically managed for the benefit of the whole people.
This concise definition presents socialism precisely as a general case of economic redistribution and a special case of state takeover of private enterprise. Socialism starts with the elimination of “private ownership in the social means of production and distribution” of the proceeds of production. It ends with “a system of industry, collectively owned and democratically managed”.
The purpose of the latter is to facilitate the former. This also means that if the former can be achieved without the latter, then—as in the case of Sweden—socialism can be practiced without imploding into its special case, communism.
Democratic socialism has been successful in both Europe and America. By creating large, redistributive welfare states, socialist practitioners have achieved a large part of their goals without having to be associated with the extremes of their ideology in countries like the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, or North Korea. To this point, Foreign Affairs published a survey in 1966 where the respondents associated the term ‘communism’ with the Soviet and Chinese economic systems, but reacted more ambiguously to the term ‘socialism.’ The results appear to show that when the respondents associated ‘socialism’ with welfare-state benefits—and thereby with economic redistribution —they thought favorably of socialism.
Opponents of socialism who refuse to understand it as a system of economic redistribution are well advised to read Beyond the Welfare State (Duckworth 1960) by the aforementioned Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal. In this book, which was published when the democratic socialists in Sweden had already spent more than two decades implementing the very socialist policies he and his wife had outlined in 1934, Myrdal triumphantly declares victory for socialism over its opponents.
When socialism is rolled out as economic redistribution, explains Myrdal, the electorate will gradually shift in universal favor of the socialist project. Those who oppose it will have to concede, be converted, or be eliminated by means of universal suffrage.
Myrdal points exactly to socialism qua economic redistribution. I apologize for the long quote, but the best way to understand what socialism is, is to listen to the socialists themselves (Beyond the Welfare State, p. 27):
The urge for economic equalisation is everywhere present, and it is commonly proclaimed as a principle. Its sphere of operation is not limited to taxation and to redistributional expenditure schemes like those for various forms of social insurance. It enters into, and determines, the scope of all other state intervention. The important thing is that it then becomes one of the main driving forces behind the general trend towards increasing the volume of state intervention … Generally speaking, the less privileged groups in democratic society, as they become aware of their interests and their political power, will be found to press for ever more state intervention in practically all fields.
The expansion of economic redistribution does not end until there are no economic differences left that can motivate more economic redistribution.
