Letter: The road leads somewhere

Days after a Denver socialist beat a long-standing incumbent, her allies swept a slate of primaries in New York City. The Democratic Socialists of America promised the East Coast one week and the Mountain West the next, and they made good on it. The result is not the story. The story is where this road leads, and why the people cheering loudest for it are the ones least willing to say the destination out loud.

Because this road does lead somewhere; it always has. The pattern is not a matter of opinion or partisan alarm. It is written into the theory the movement was built on and confirmed by more than a century of hard experience across four continents. Anyone willing to read that record honestly can see the shape of what is coming.

Supporters call it democratic socialism and present it as little more than compassion with a policy agenda: a stronger safety net, healthcare guaranteed as a right, and a fairer distribution of a wealthy nation’s resources. The adjective democratic is carrying almost the entire weight of that reassurance. It is there to promise you that this is not the socialism of ration lines and secret police, that this iteration will be gentle and lawful, and that it will halt precisely wherever a majority of voters decides it should halt.

But socialism was never conceived as a stopping point. In the theory that gave the movement its name, it is explicitly a stage of transition, a way station on the road to something further. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Marx laid out two phases of the society he envisioned: a first, lower phase that later writers came to call socialism, and a higher phase, full communism, toward which the first was always meant to progress. Vladimir Lenin, in State and Revolution, made the sequence explicit and operational: socialism is the lower stage, communism the higher, and the passage between them is to be secured by what Marx had called the dictatorship of the proletariat, a period in which the machinery of the state is used to crush the old order and prevent its return.

This is not a slur invented by socialism’s opponents. It is the movement’s own founding architecture. The people carrying the banner today are the ideological heirs of that tradition, and the largest socialist organization in the country makes no secret that its ultimate aim is to move the United States beyond capitalism altogether. The comfortable distinction between socialism and communism, the one that lets an American voter tell himself he is endorsing Denmark rather than the Soviet Union, is far thinner than he has been led to believe. In the original blueprint, one was always designed to become the other.

The most common answer to all of this is a single word: Scandinavia. Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, the argument goes, are socialist, and they are prosperous, free, and happy. If that is socialism, what is there to fear?

The answer is that those countries are not socialist, and their own leaders have said so plainly. The Danish prime minister once felt compelled to correct American admirers directly, noting that Denmark is a market economy. The Nordic nations are capitalist countries with private ownership, competitive markets, open trade, and some of the most business-friendly regulatory environments in the world.

What they also have are large welfare states funded by broad and heavy taxation. That is a policy choice about redistribution layered on top of capitalism. It is not socialism in the sense the word actually means, which is public or collective ownership of the means of production. The distinction is not academic. A generous safety net leaves the private economy and the independent civil society it supports intact. Socialism, properly defined, does not, because it requires the state to seize and direct the productive capacity of the nation, and a state powerful enough to do that is a state powerful enough to silence anyone who objects.

The movement now winning American primaries is not campaigning merely for Danish tax rates. Its literature calls for social ownership, for breaking the power of private capital, and for a fundamental restructuring of the economic order. When its candidates invoke Scandinavia, they are borrowing a reassuring image for a project that goes considerably further than anything Scandinavia has ever attempted.

You do not have to take the theory on faith, because the twentieth century ran the experiment repeatedly, on an enormous scale, with a grimly consistent result. Russia in 1917, China in 1949, Cuba in 1959, Cambodia in 1975, Venezuela at the turn of this century: each began with the vocabulary of equality and liberation, and each attracted sincere idealists who believed that this time the outcome would be humane. In each case the trajectory bent the same way.

Sincerely,

Jim Outman

Owego, N.Y.