Socialism Schmocialism? Let's Get Real About Marxism in America

Look, I'll be honest. I've attacked Barack Obama many times for his "socialist" inclinations (which are genuine by training and upbringing), but so far this administration has not turned the United States into a genuine socialist regime. As Rick Moran argued before the election last year:

Calling Obama a 'socialist' simply isn't logical. He doesn’t share the belief that industries should be nationalized by the government or even taken over by the workers as many American Marxists espouse.

And that's the key: As long as the U.S. remains committed to a free-enterprise system - albeit with substantial market intervention by government - the U.S. will retain what's simply but technically known as a "mixed economy."

So, while it is true that President Obama is steeped in doctrinaire Marxist ideology, and through his activism and teaching he's practiced radical post-structuralist ideologies, this administration has so far worked within the normative boundaries of ideological acceptability. That's why, frankly, I greeted the news this morning of the GOP's "rebranding" of the Democrats as "Socialists" with a shrug.

I know most readers won't misunderstand, but let me be perfectly clear: The Barack Obama administration is indeed an ideological disaster for this nation. In economics, social policy, and international affairs, the administration is seeking to shift American politics to the extreme far-left of the spectrum. That said, we're still well short of "socialism" in the absence of state ownership of the means of production - and by that I'm not just talking about a trillion or two in government bailouts for privated industry. No, we'd need to see the toppling of the "capitalist state" altogether, and its replacement with a "workers' collective" legitimately organized along Marxist lines. As Eric Ruder notes at the May/June International Socialist Review:

In a society where all of the means of production are socialized, blind market forces would be replaced by democratic planning. The accumulated savings of society would not be handed over to a class of people, unelected and unaccountable, to invest for the purpose of their private gain. Instead, the economic output of society would be used to address the social needs of the producers. The critical determining factor of whether state ownership of the means of production (or the means of finance) has a socialist character depends on the answer to a simple question: If the state controls the economy, who controls the state?

The Obama administration’s state intervention in the economy today is designed to preserve decision-making power for the owners of banks and corporations ... This is not surprising, given the completely incestuous relationship between the state and private business, with a steady flow of businessmen into government jobs and then back again ....

The working class exerts its power, first through its ability to shut down production—the strike weapon. But if it is to assert its collective interests on society as a whole and against the employers as a class, it must seize political power. Only after the working class has seized political power can it begin to reorganize production and distribution in such a way as to gradually abolish the market and production for profit’s sake, and replace those relations with a purely socialized system of planning.

So it's going to take the literal "expropriation of the expropriators" to transform the U.S. economy from its current pattern of regulatory state capitalism to that of a full-blown workers' collectivist state.

But note something crucial here: While Barack Obama - to the dismay of the Socialist International - has indeed been "coopted" by the "agents of capitalist hegemony," his party's netroots-base is very much a radical "lumpen proletariat" agitating for the evisceration of capitalist "exploitation" in the U.S.

Amid this ideological tension between the president, the progressive capitalists within the administration, and the hardline Democratic base, we'll see the increasing shift to the compromise of "European statism." As Mark Steyn indicated recently, in "Prime Minister Obama: The Europeanization of America":

Europeanized health care, Europeanized daycare, Europeanized college education, Europeanized climate-change policy ... Obama’s pseudo-SOTU speech was America’s first State of the European Union address, in which the president deftly yoked the language of American exceptionalism to the cause of European statism. Apparently, nothing testifies to the American virtues of self-reliance, entrepreneurial energy and the can-do spirit like joining the vast army of robotic extras droning in unison, "The government needs to do more for me ..."

Most Americans don’t yet grasp the scale of the Obama project. The naysayers complain, oh, it’s another Jimmy Carter, or it’s the new New Deal, or it’s LBJ’s Great Society applied to health care… You should be so lucky. Forget these parochial nickel’n’dime comparisons. It’s all those multiplied a gazillionfold and nuclearized – or Europeanized, which is less dramatic but ultimately more lethal. For a distressing number of American liberals, the natural condition of an advanced, progressive western democracy is Scandinavia, and the U.S. has just been taking a wee bit longer to get there.

And this really isn't a matter of debate, although the radical leftists will deny it to no end, and they'll excoriate conservatives as "fearmongers" and "America-haters." But it is what it is. The problem is that the RNC doesn't have the time nor the inclination to explain to the public and the media the intricacies of democratic socialist philosophy. To relabel the Democrats as the "Democrat Socialist Party" is an attempt to brand them as the party of anti-Americanism. While true, it's unlikely that the GOP will be able to overtake the pushback from the media-netroots axis.

Just this afternoon, Digby got a post up entitled, "Socialist Schmocialist" (via Memeorandum). And Chris Bowers has joined in with, "The Name Calling is the Entire Point."

But recall, Mark Levin, in his new book, Liberty and Tyranny, gets around this problem of nomenclature by identifying today's Democratic collectivists as "Statists." And as I pointed out in "Renewing Socialism? Don't Even Think About It ...," it doesn't really matter how we label the ideological agenda of today's partisan radicals. The outcome will be the same: creeping tyranny and impoverishment, and the total obliteration of American exceptionalism, at home and abroad.