Today's (and tomorrow's) socialists are NOT those of the 20th century who were indeed responsible for its obscene butcher's bill and the penury and despair of countless millions forced to live through it. Instead, this is a NEW socialism; Democratic Socialism, by name and definition.
It is a socialism that expertly harnesses the free market to produce goods abundantly, efficiently, and perfectly in tune with consumer demand. At the same time and by general and democratic agreement, the "excesses" of capitalism are curbed, and the vast productive capacity of the system is carefully and competently managed to provide decent and satisfying lives for ALL the members of a democratic socialist society. THIS time, things will be different—you'll see...
Richard, I've written an article explaining why the DSA's "new socialism" will lead to exactly the same results as the various older forms of socialism:
Since the point of socialism is to get rid of the market-generated profit-and-loss incentives that guide production by private capitalists, one can't "harness" capitalist institutions absent such market-generated incentives and still sustain production without implementing full-blown central planning, with all that entails.
As for the excesses of the current system (or to put it more precisely, the systematic exploitation of productive people by ultrawealthy economic elites), an obvious difficulty here is blaming it on something vaguely described as "capitalism" instead of analyzing in detail how exploitation actually works and what sort of principles of economic organization it relies upon. I call your attention to this paragraph from my article:
"This analysis of corporate elites, however, is deeply flawed. It is not private ownership of the means of production that empowers malefactors of great wealth, but rather a corrupt political system that sells lucrative spoils, privileges, and immunities to them. Only unrigging markets (i.e., implementing radical libertarian reforms) can prevent such concentrations of power and unearned wealth by corporate elites without wrecking an economy. By promoting a sort of half-way house between capitalism and socialism, the DSA is unwittingly playing into the hands of corporatists, who can always find ways to harvest unjust political rents from government interventions, even from selective collectivization efforts."
The reason why an analysis of the 1930s Italian fascist and German Nazi systems (and the 1930s Japanese system as well) is so important is precisely because they tried to impose comprehensive state management of the economy through regulation, price controls, and state-ownership of equity stakes while preserving the outward legal forms of private ownership and market exchange. This is what "corporatism" means--it got its name not from the English word "corporation," but rather from an Italian fascist neologism ("corporazione") describing an institution that we nowadays call "public-private partnerships."
Fascist-style corporatism is precisely what you are describing above as the DSA's goal, though I must observe there are other ideological tendencies within the DSA that would favor other dreadful outcomes. The difficulty here is that the DSA's platform is a hopelessly confused mix of vague and often mutually-incompatible economic principles that all sorts of socialists can pin their hopes on without having to confront hard questions about what their movement is actually working to achieve.
I've written a couple of other articles explaining what fascism is and explaining how a desire for economic autarky was an important driver of Hitler's aggression and how it intersected with his racism:
There is a book I referenced in one of my articles (John Flynn's _As We Go Marching_ https://mises.org/library/book/we-go-marching ) that does discuss the strong parallels between the New Deal and the Italian and German examples. Ultimately, FDR's attempt to impose a formal corporatist structure on the economy in the 1930s was foiled by the Supreme Court, and his subsequent 1940s war-time economic controls were mostly dismantled by Truman (though Truman's Korean War vintage Defense Production Act does have a latent potential to bring back full-blown corporatism for "strategic" reasons).
It is important to separate the issue of control over the means of production from the issue of coerced transfers of wealth (Social Security being the first major example of this in the U.S., and arguably the most important legacy of the New Deal). The latter diverts labor and natural resources from investment in capital formation by deterring and consuming voluntary savings, but doesn't establish centralized control over the entire economy.
This war on thrift caused by the welfarism of FDR's New Deal along with LBJ's Great Society (and the financing of all this via the creation of fiat dollars out of thin air) is the principal cause of the stagnation of America's industries and of the decline of the productive elements of the middle class over the past half century. I do bring this up in many of my articles on the mises.org website.
> It is a socialism that expertly harnesses the free market to produce goods abundantly, efficiently, and perfectly in tune with consumer demand.
That is Corporatism. Also known as Syndicalism. Same thing, different languages.
This is why Fascism often describes itself as "A third way". As a sort of in-between pure "Red" Marxist-Socialism and Capitalism. The idea is that you divide up the economy into major syndicates by industry and have the people that are responsible for production (aka "the workers") form their own governance over that industry. Then they send (usually elected) representatives to coordinate economic action through the central state.
Modern variations of this like to also use the term "New way" or "Third way" despite it is not actually new at all. They also like to use terms like "Private Public Partnerships"
This approach was very popular in the early 20th century. Nazis were corporatist regime, so was Italian Fascism. This is the Franco system in Spain until the 1970s. Salazar and Portugal until the 1960s. Vargas in Brazil, Roosevelt and the New Deal, Metaxas regime in Greece, and Peron in Argentina.
Pretty much all major economies nowadays practice some form of corporatism to lesser or greater degrees. Because pure socialism means giving up any sort of functioning economy they allow some element of free market capitalism to provide the wealth they depend on to maintain political power.
Far from being the "guiding light" and "responsible caring adults" they portray themselves as they are parasites in every meaningful sense except being literal bacteria or worms. They expect that everybody in their countries happily works and lives with less and less while they gobble up a huge portion of the economy for their increasingly failure prone and hamfisted political machinations.
At the very best this approach leads to economic stagnation and eventual political upheaval. At the worst it leads to millions of corpses.
We have had a hundred years of this crap at this point and we have seen all the possible outcomes.
Anyway, I think today socialists or democratic socialists are no different from the socialists of 20th century. I also find it very dangerous that we reduced the communism of 20th century to only Stalin's famines, Gulak, Mao's Tiannamon or Cultural Revolution but forget what communism is about: the total control of the state over the economy to create a "classless" society, which is used justified the totalitariasm of socialism and which today socialists still largely advocate for.
Say once you say healthcare should be controlled by the state, what follows is also the food people eat, the medical devices we use, etc.
I’m quite simplistic in my thinking here. You either sign up for personal Liberty/sovereignty, or you are a collectivist. There are many flavors to this but they all result in statism. I would argue that the current occupant of the WH engages in central government planning although we call it industrial policy. “Re-on shoring” industry generally means huge giveaways at more than 50% of the “YUGE billions being invested in the world’s hottest country” that make the worst asset sale by a large urban center look sane. Government should not be picking winners and losers as the market does it far better. Buying shares in at least ten major corporations at a share that could impact BOD policies, I see as nationalization. As for democratic socialism being “something new,” I disagree. The Frankfurt School were Marxist retreads in their Critical Theory. Keynes was a means of making Fabian socialism palatable to the masses.
Statism locks in yesterday's status quo and regresses.
Unfortunately, statists know how to hand out so many targeted benefits at everybody's expense that no one wants to be the first to give up their benefits. Free markets can't do that.
"it was worth World War II, the Holocaust, the Russian Civil War, Lenin’s famine, Stalinism, dekulakization, Stalin’s famines, the Chinese Civil War, Mao’s mass-murderous Land Reform Movement, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge, and much, much more"
Burnham is missing here. He classified New Deal, fascism and communism together as the forms of the new managerial control that was replacing capitalism.
I think, unfortunately, a big take away here is that it is not enough to be *against something bad*.
Truth is, Republicans and Democrats have both been socialist, or facist, for a very long time. The reason you can read Hitlers program into nearly any politicians platform is? They *both* embrace it.
You can count the handful of Republicans that are against debt spending and welfare programs on one hand. And don't even get me started on Trump.
I don't know how you make the choice if it ends up being the Christian Socialist of the Right, JD Vance, against the Democrat Socialist of the Left AOC. At that point we're just picking poisons.
Socialism is just liberalism carried to a logical end. Liberalism is political egalitarianism. Socialism notes that one cannot have perfect equality without economic equality.
Gregor's rarely read book is like millions of others that should be available as a audiobooks narrated by AI. The stuffed shirts at university presses would rather than nobody read their stockpiles of rare gems.
Itis not controversial to claim German Nationalism was invented by Johan Herder and Johan Fichte, and it is maybe superficially less obvious but no less true to say that Herder and Fichte are impossible to imagine without Rousseau. And Rousseau invented pre-Marxist socialism. I think it is plausible to argue that socialism and fascism would never have existed without Rousseau’s philosophy ever existing and are both schisms of his earthly utopia theology. Rousseau is the fountain head of all of the worst totalitarian movements from the Jacobin terror to Marxism (where Rousseau is explicitly credited and criticized only for not being serious enough) to the Nazis (whose single focus is natural purity, return to nature, à la Rousseau, with Wagner's Sigfried as Rousseau's noble savage and Hitler crediting Wagner explicitly as his religion).
There have been political factions who wanted to redistribute wealth toward the poor for ages and ages. Does it really matter whether this philosophy is called "socialism" or not? I don't think it makes any sense to wish that the idea never arose.
Personally I wonder which of these movements a libertarian like yourself would have supported. Land redistribution, for example, seems important even before the modern capitalist era. Perhaps if you go far enough back, the Coase theorem wouldn't apply, because mass transactions in a feudal or Roman or pre-historical era were too inefficient.
The goal of the Molotov-RIbbentrop pact was to cause a war between Germany and the Entente that would exhaust both. Then when they were deadlocked in trench warfare sometime around 1942 for 1943 Stalin would stab Germany in the back and get Central Europe for free. Also there might be socialist revolutions in France/Britain because of the war.
From the POV of someone that thinks communism was a good thing and democracy was barely different than fascism, this was brilliant. Just got bad luck in France 1940.
We can never know what was in his head, but there is a lot of evidence that he wanted the war when it happened (probably even wanted it a year earlier).
Germany started losing ground to the Entente in AirPower in 1938 and would have started losing ground in land power after 1939 (looting the Skoda works bought them a year). Their economy was also in ever increasing shambles and the terms of trade with the Soviet Union were abysmal (they invaded the USSR before having to pay many of them).
Why stop at just one step of causal chain? If capitalism had never come into existence, socialism wouldn’t have come either. And what led to capitalism, the origin of all modern sins? Perhaps it would be better for all of us if Adam hadn’t eaten the apple.
The existence of capitalism may have been what socialists cited as their reason for inventing socialism, but there's no "inevitably" there. There are (and were) lots of non-socialist reactions to capitalism.
You're beating a dead horse, Bryan.
Today's (and tomorrow's) socialists are NOT those of the 20th century who were indeed responsible for its obscene butcher's bill and the penury and despair of countless millions forced to live through it. Instead, this is a NEW socialism; Democratic Socialism, by name and definition.
It is a socialism that expertly harnesses the free market to produce goods abundantly, efficiently, and perfectly in tune with consumer demand. At the same time and by general and democratic agreement, the "excesses" of capitalism are curbed, and the vast productive capacity of the system is carefully and competently managed to provide decent and satisfying lives for ALL the members of a democratic socialist society. THIS time, things will be different—you'll see...
Richard, I've written an article explaining why the DSA's "new socialism" will lead to exactly the same results as the various older forms of socialism:
https://mises.org/mises-wire/socialism-always-leads-totalitarian-tyranny
Since the point of socialism is to get rid of the market-generated profit-and-loss incentives that guide production by private capitalists, one can't "harness" capitalist institutions absent such market-generated incentives and still sustain production without implementing full-blown central planning, with all that entails.
As for the excesses of the current system (or to put it more precisely, the systematic exploitation of productive people by ultrawealthy economic elites), an obvious difficulty here is blaming it on something vaguely described as "capitalism" instead of analyzing in detail how exploitation actually works and what sort of principles of economic organization it relies upon. I call your attention to this paragraph from my article:
"This analysis of corporate elites, however, is deeply flawed. It is not private ownership of the means of production that empowers malefactors of great wealth, but rather a corrupt political system that sells lucrative spoils, privileges, and immunities to them. Only unrigging markets (i.e., implementing radical libertarian reforms) can prevent such concentrations of power and unearned wealth by corporate elites without wrecking an economy. By promoting a sort of half-way house between capitalism and socialism, the DSA is unwittingly playing into the hands of corporatists, who can always find ways to harvest unjust political rents from government interventions, even from selective collectivization efforts."
The reason why an analysis of the 1930s Italian fascist and German Nazi systems (and the 1930s Japanese system as well) is so important is precisely because they tried to impose comprehensive state management of the economy through regulation, price controls, and state-ownership of equity stakes while preserving the outward legal forms of private ownership and market exchange. This is what "corporatism" means--it got its name not from the English word "corporation," but rather from an Italian fascist neologism ("corporazione") describing an institution that we nowadays call "public-private partnerships."
Fascist-style corporatism is precisely what you are describing above as the DSA's goal, though I must observe there are other ideological tendencies within the DSA that would favor other dreadful outcomes. The difficulty here is that the DSA's platform is a hopelessly confused mix of vague and often mutually-incompatible economic principles that all sorts of socialists can pin their hopes on without having to confront hard questions about what their movement is actually working to achieve.
I've written a couple of other articles explaining what fascism is and explaining how a desire for economic autarky was an important driver of Hitler's aggression and how it intersected with his racism:
https://mises.org/mises-wire/america-turning-fascist
https://mises.org/mises-wire/economic-autarky-racism-and-hitlers-quest-lebensraum
Why do you not include New Deal in all this?
There is a book I referenced in one of my articles (John Flynn's _As We Go Marching_ https://mises.org/library/book/we-go-marching ) that does discuss the strong parallels between the New Deal and the Italian and German examples. Ultimately, FDR's attempt to impose a formal corporatist structure on the economy in the 1930s was foiled by the Supreme Court, and his subsequent 1940s war-time economic controls were mostly dismantled by Truman (though Truman's Korean War vintage Defense Production Act does have a latent potential to bring back full-blown corporatism for "strategic" reasons).
It is important to separate the issue of control over the means of production from the issue of coerced transfers of wealth (Social Security being the first major example of this in the U.S., and arguably the most important legacy of the New Deal). The latter diverts labor and natural resources from investment in capital formation by deterring and consuming voluntary savings, but doesn't establish centralized control over the entire economy.
This war on thrift caused by the welfarism of FDR's New Deal along with LBJ's Great Society (and the financing of all this via the creation of fiat dollars out of thin air) is the principal cause of the stagnation of America's industries and of the decline of the productive elements of the middle class over the past half century. I do bring this up in many of my articles on the mises.org website.
> It is a socialism that expertly harnesses the free market to produce goods abundantly, efficiently, and perfectly in tune with consumer demand.
That is Corporatism. Also known as Syndicalism. Same thing, different languages.
This is why Fascism often describes itself as "A third way". As a sort of in-between pure "Red" Marxist-Socialism and Capitalism. The idea is that you divide up the economy into major syndicates by industry and have the people that are responsible for production (aka "the workers") form their own governance over that industry. Then they send (usually elected) representatives to coordinate economic action through the central state.
Modern variations of this like to also use the term "New way" or "Third way" despite it is not actually new at all. They also like to use terms like "Private Public Partnerships"
This approach was very popular in the early 20th century. Nazis were corporatist regime, so was Italian Fascism. This is the Franco system in Spain until the 1970s. Salazar and Portugal until the 1960s. Vargas in Brazil, Roosevelt and the New Deal, Metaxas regime in Greece, and Peron in Argentina.
Pretty much all major economies nowadays practice some form of corporatism to lesser or greater degrees. Because pure socialism means giving up any sort of functioning economy they allow some element of free market capitalism to provide the wealth they depend on to maintain political power.
Far from being the "guiding light" and "responsible caring adults" they portray themselves as they are parasites in every meaningful sense except being literal bacteria or worms. They expect that everybody in their countries happily works and lives with less and less while they gobble up a huge portion of the economy for their increasingly failure prone and hamfisted political machinations.
At the very best this approach leads to economic stagnation and eventual political upheaval. At the worst it leads to millions of corpses.
We have had a hundred years of this crap at this point and we have seen all the possible outcomes.
"we have seen all the possible outcomes." Never.
Is this a sarcasm?
Anyway, I think today socialists or democratic socialists are no different from the socialists of 20th century. I also find it very dangerous that we reduced the communism of 20th century to only Stalin's famines, Gulak, Mao's Tiannamon or Cultural Revolution but forget what communism is about: the total control of the state over the economy to create a "classless" society, which is used justified the totalitariasm of socialism and which today socialists still largely advocate for.
Say once you say healthcare should be controlled by the state, what follows is also the food people eat, the medical devices we use, etc.
"Is this a sarcasm?"
Yes
The antagonism between socialism and fascism is just sibling rivalry. Stalin murdered Trotsky; does that make Trotsky an anticommunist? Hardly.
Saying that socialism and fascism are opposites is like saying that catholicism and protestantism are opposites.
I’m quite simplistic in my thinking here. You either sign up for personal Liberty/sovereignty, or you are a collectivist. There are many flavors to this but they all result in statism. I would argue that the current occupant of the WH engages in central government planning although we call it industrial policy. “Re-on shoring” industry generally means huge giveaways at more than 50% of the “YUGE billions being invested in the world’s hottest country” that make the worst asset sale by a large urban center look sane. Government should not be picking winners and losers as the market does it far better. Buying shares in at least ten major corporations at a share that could impact BOD policies, I see as nationalization. As for democratic socialism being “something new,” I disagree. The Frankfurt School were Marxist retreads in their Critical Theory. Keynes was a means of making Fabian socialism palatable to the masses.
Freedom provides flexibility and progress.
Statism locks in yesterday's status quo and regresses.
Unfortunately, statists know how to hand out so many targeted benefits at everybody's expense that no one wants to be the first to give up their benefits. Free markets can't do that.
"it was worth World War II, the Holocaust, the Russian Civil War, Lenin’s famine, Stalinism, dekulakization, Stalin’s famines, the Chinese Civil War, Mao’s mass-murderous Land Reform Movement, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge, and much, much more"
GOOD, and accurate, list. It will get longer.
Burnham is missing here. He classified New Deal, fascism and communism together as the forms of the new managerial control that was replacing capitalism.
I think, unfortunately, a big take away here is that it is not enough to be *against something bad*.
Truth is, Republicans and Democrats have both been socialist, or facist, for a very long time. The reason you can read Hitlers program into nearly any politicians platform is? They *both* embrace it.
You can count the handful of Republicans that are against debt spending and welfare programs on one hand. And don't even get me started on Trump.
I don't know how you make the choice if it ends up being the Christian Socialist of the Right, JD Vance, against the Democrat Socialist of the Left AOC. At that point we're just picking poisons.
Which flavor of poison is deadlier (apt to line more people up against the wall)? My druthers favor the other one.
Socialism is just liberalism carried to a logical end. Liberalism is political egalitarianism. Socialism notes that one cannot have perfect equality without economic equality.
Gregor's rarely read book is like millions of others that should be available as a audiobooks narrated by AI. The stuffed shirts at university presses would rather than nobody read their stockpiles of rare gems.
Itis not controversial to claim German Nationalism was invented by Johan Herder and Johan Fichte, and it is maybe superficially less obvious but no less true to say that Herder and Fichte are impossible to imagine without Rousseau. And Rousseau invented pre-Marxist socialism. I think it is plausible to argue that socialism and fascism would never have existed without Rousseau’s philosophy ever existing and are both schisms of his earthly utopia theology. Rousseau is the fountain head of all of the worst totalitarian movements from the Jacobin terror to Marxism (where Rousseau is explicitly credited and criticized only for not being serious enough) to the Nazis (whose single focus is natural purity, return to nature, à la Rousseau, with Wagner's Sigfried as Rousseau's noble savage and Hitler crediting Wagner explicitly as his religion).
There have been political factions who wanted to redistribute wealth toward the poor for ages and ages. Does it really matter whether this philosophy is called "socialism" or not? I don't think it makes any sense to wish that the idea never arose.
Personally I wonder which of these movements a libertarian like yourself would have supported. Land redistribution, for example, seems important even before the modern capitalist era. Perhaps if you go far enough back, the Coase theorem wouldn't apply, because mass transactions in a feudal or Roman or pre-historical era were too inefficient.
The goal of the Molotov-RIbbentrop pact was to cause a war between Germany and the Entente that would exhaust both. Then when they were deadlocked in trench warfare sometime around 1942 for 1943 Stalin would stab Germany in the back and get Central Europe for free. Also there might be socialist revolutions in France/Britain because of the war.
From the POV of someone that thinks communism was a good thing and democracy was barely different than fascism, this was brilliant. Just got bad luck in France 1940.
It may have been Soviet goal but hardly Hitler's who probably expected the pact to deter England from declaring war.
We can never know what was in his head, but there is a lot of evidence that he wanted the war when it happened (probably even wanted it a year earlier).
Germany started losing ground to the Entente in AirPower in 1938 and would have started losing ground in land power after 1939 (looting the Skoda works bought them a year). Their economy was also in ever increasing shambles and the terms of trade with the Soviet Union were abysmal (they invaded the USSR before having to pay many of them).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY_S9X5HdOM
Why stop at just one step of causal chain? If capitalism had never come into existence, socialism wouldn’t have come either. And what led to capitalism, the origin of all modern sins? Perhaps it would be better for all of us if Adam hadn’t eaten the apple.
The existence of capitalism may have been what socialists cited as their reason for inventing socialism, but there's no "inevitably" there. There are (and were) lots of non-socialist reactions to capitalism.