Socialism is scary, or so we have been told. In America, we have been subject to a vast misinformation campaign against leftism, made most apparent in our collective understanding by McCarthyism. A common misconception about leftism is that there exists only one form of it, authoritarian Stalinism, and that accepting even a bit of socialist policy will lead to the decline of our civilization. So what exactly is socialism?
Socialism is an economic system in which workers, rather than an elite group of property-owners who hoard wealth, control the means of production. It is an ideology that believes in the collective ownership of goods rather than the private ownership of property by an elect few.
Under capitalism, most of us will spend the rest of our lives in perpetual debt paying off houses, student loans, car payments and more. We have been fooled into believing this is liberation from the rule of aristocracy. Though it gives the illusion of freedom, the only real choice we have is which company we want to sell our labor value to. Capitalism does not exist without the exploitation of workers. Socialism is about removing power from these the exploitative forces and redistributing it to the people whose labor has been taken advantage of to facilitate capitalists’ leisurely existence.
In this set of relations, workers are alienated from their work because they do not see the fruits of their labor. Instead, they are given a wage set by capitalists, often not a livable wage, but a wage that is enough to quell dissent. The workers’ power is in their labor, which capitalists exploit in order to produce capital.
If you are a member of the working class, meaning you work for a wage or a salary you can support the system of social and economic control that seek to exploit you, that does not give you access to power of the capitalist class.
Class consciousness, recognizing your place as a subject produced by a set of historical and material conditions, is something that must be achieved by the masses. While capitalism narrates its existence as a transhistorical process, the natural conclusion of history due to some vague notion of “human nature,” socialism recognizes capitalism as another stage in history with a new set of masters exploiting the real subjects of history, the neglected working people of all races, religions and creeds.
Socialism is not an unrealistic fairytale, but a disillusionment from the ideologies that covers up the massive violence of capitalist exploitation; it is the only path to true liberation. Capitalism will only ever value humans to the extent that they are able to consume products or provide labor for the non-working classes. Socialism offers dignity to the laborer by putting an end to the processes of historical class violence and trauma.
