So I want to devote this program to going over with you the three major ways this idea
of socialism is understood, because those ways are relevant today, those ways are fighting
it out amongst themselves in terms of the allegiance, feelings and thoughts of people
around the world, and they're going to shape our future.
Here's the first one.
In this view, socialism has to do with the government.
The government is to come in and regulate, control a private capitalist economy; an economy
governed by private enterprises, owned by private citizens, who trade with one another
in an institution called the market; where they buy and sell their labor, their work,
their products, their services.
It's a capitalist economy, private enterprise markets, but one in which the government is
brought in.
Some people mean socialism by that; and they mean particularly, that the government is
brought in, in a certain way.
Number one, the government is to regulate what the private enterprises do, so that they
are less self-serving, profit oriented, and are more socially concerned.
That's why minimum wage is something socialists always supported.
Many of them want there to be limits on how much prices can be raised by corporations,
or how much profits can be earned by the.
The second reason socialists want the government to come in, is to redistribute wealth, because
capitalism has this tendency to concentrate wealth in very few hands, and deprive the
mass of people.
The Socialists want the government to come in, using taxes and using government spending,
to do a bit of redistribution; to equalize a system that turns unequal very quickly.
For these people, socialism means that the government comes in, regulates and taxes to
make what we might call capitalism, because it leaves it, leaves business in the hands
of private enterprises and markets, but we could call it capitalism with a humane face,
capitalism with a certain welfare focus, welfare of all the people.
Here are some examples: Denmark, Norway, Germany, Italy, France.
Those countries are often referred to as socialist; their governments are often governments of
socialist parties, and that's what those parties mean.
They will have the government regulate and redistribute.
That's one concept of socialism around the world.
It's pretty close to what Bernie Sanders means in the United States, or what Jeremy Corbyn
means in Great Britain.
But, here's the second one.
In the second view, this first one doesn't go far enough, because, yes the government
comes in, controls things, and redistributes.
But it's in a perpetual war, which the government often loses with those very private enterprises
who try to get around the government regulations; who try to get around the government taxation.
We're all familiar with those examples of companies.
For example, Amazon which has earned billions in profits the last two years, and paid absolutely
no taxes to the United States government.
Indeed, this last year they're getting a refund in excess of a hundred million dollars.
Private corporations do everything in their power to use their profits to use their political
power to undo, to evade all of those socialistic regulations and redistributions.
This has led some socialists to say you have to go further, it isn't enough to regulate
and redistribute.
The government should directly take over the enterprises.
There shouldn't be private enterprises, because those will always be run for the profit of
the private owner.
If you want the economy to serve everybody, then the agent of everybody, the government
that we all elect, at least in theory, should take over and run the businesses so they behave
in the way that's good for everybody, and there isn't this perpetual war between a regulating
government and private enterprise.
Moreover, we shouldn't allow the market to decide who gets what, because the market always
delivers whatever is scarce to the people with the most money.
It's an institution for those who are rich, and who stay that way by using the market.
These socialists go further.
The government should take over enterprises, literally own and operate the factories, stores
and offices, and instead of the market deciding who gets what, it should be planned in terms
of what we want for the society as a whole.These kinds of socialists after the 1920s took the
name communists, to signal that they went further than the other socialists in order
to take over, through the government, the apparatus of the economy.
For some people, socialism means the government regulates a private capitalism to make it
more humane, to make it less unequal.
For other people, socialism means that the government takes over the enterprise, and
plans the distribution of output, rather than leaving it to the market.
This second group of socialists, not always, but often takes in the communists, to show
how they're different from the first group.
In those kinds of experiments, the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and
for parts of their history, Cuba, Vietnam, and so on, are examples.
Now let's get to the third kind of socialism that's contesting to become the important
kind in the world today; to become the kind believed in and followed by most people; to
win your interest as well.
This approach is in a way an evolution out of the other two.
It's a kind of critical evolution because it is advanced by people who see some merits
in the first kind of socialism -government regulation - the second kind -government operating
enterprises - but argue, we don't think that's enough in one way, and it's too much in the
others.
Here's how it's not enough.
It's not enough because it doesn't change the workplace, the place where the mass of
people do their economic thing, using their brains and muscles to transform objects into
the goods and services we all need to live the lives we want to live.
It doesn't change it enough.
Meanwhile, it does something too much.
it gives too much power to the government.
A government that has this much power to regulate and redistribute, let alone a government that
takes over owning and operating, is a government that runs us the risk that it'll do a lot
more than these economic things, using its power for political, or cultural controls
of a society, that we have seen, and we don't want again.
These kinds of socialists have a new focus.
For them, what will really make a difference, what will take us beyond capitalism, and be
a better way of organizing society, focuses on the enterprise, the workplace.
Our economic system has its good points and it's bad points, in large part because we
don't allow democracy into the workplace.
These socialists say capitalism never allowed for that.
Capitalism is a hierarchical way of organizing an enterprise.
A few people, the owners, the shareholders who have the big blocks of shares, run capitalist
enterprises.
The mass of us have no control at all.
The capitalists run it for them.
The way to change society, to make it better, is to have the people who work in an enterprise,
all of them, one-person, one-vote, have democratic control of the workplace.
This is just as important as having democratic control of the community in which you live
in, the neighborhood in which you exist, and so on.
This kind of socialism is micro-focused.
It says: let's not talk only about the government and private enterprise.
We don't mind private enterprise.
The government doesn't have to control everything; there has to be some coordination.
But the big issue for us, say these socialists, is the transformation of the workplace, the
socialization of the workplace, so it becomes a community run democratically, rather than
something run by a small number of people who put their benefits, the so-called bottom-line,
as profits for them, rather than a good life for everybody.
Those kinds of socialism are arguing with one another for your attention and your allegiance.
To be interested in socialism, doesn't mean you're necessarily the believer of one or
the other.
Most real socialist societies have mingled the control role/function of government with
the ownership function of government.
What most experiments have not done is really tried that other kind of socialism, that revolutionizes
the workplace, brings democracy to the workplace for the first time, and says that's the way
to get beyond the limits of capitalism, its inequalities, its instabilities, its injustices.
The question that's being fought out, is not the question capitalism versus socialism,
or at least it's not only that.
It's also a struggle going on among these different definitions and meanings of socialism,
that are just as important to what's going on, as the so called struggle between capitalism
and socialism, that was so crucial in the last hundred years.