“We are socialists. We are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system, the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being, according to wealth and to property instead of responsibility and performance. And we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”
I will tell you who said the above quote later, but it is a pretty good summary of what a socialist believes. Socialism, technically, is the government's ownership of all the means of economic production, but there are varying degrees of that. It is rare in history that a government has ever owned every single business, restaurant, manufacturing plant, etc. Still, there have been those societies where such has been the aim and practiced to a great degree. The Soviet Union was one, Communist China another, and other such countries, because of strong government oversight and even ownership of much of the economic production, called themselves “socialist.”
Socialists are socialists not because it has proven to be an effective means of producing the goods and services that people want and need. In 1921, when Lenin thought he could run the Russian farming industry and tried to take it over completely, he created a horrible famine, couldn’t feed his army and cities, and had to back up and give the peasants some free reign. Still, millions died before his “New Economic Policy” emerged. Stalin did the same thing in the early 1930s with his ”Five Year Plan,” and he didn’t care how many people starved to death in the process; the figures are estimated at anywhere from 3 million up to 10 million. We’ll never know. Same with Mao Zedong in China. His “Great Leap Forward” in the late 1950s and 1960s was a socialistic experiment to control farm production as well, and the latest estimates put the death toll at over 40 million, the worst in human history. This is what attempts to apply socialism have produced in the past 100 years.
The USSR collapsed, and while modern Russia isn’t a pure “capitalist” country, it allows for more free market exchanges. China also has retreated somewhat from socialism after Mao and calls their current economy “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which is a hodge-podge of capitalism, state-owned enterprises, huge amounts of borrowing money to build infrastructure, and stealing Western technology to grow its military and industries. People can own a business in China if the government allows them. It’s almost more “fascist” than “socialist.” Fascists usually allow private ownership of businesses, but under strict government regulation, a fascist government will often tell a business what to produce and how much. But it will often leave the ownership in “private hands.”
What is crucial to understand is that the key point of socialism is not to maximize production or provide the most efficient use of resources; it never does that. The point of socialism is power. Totally, 100% power in the hands of the government elite. Tyranny. Controlling the people. Because if you can control the people’s economics, you can largely control them.
Socialists like to camouflage this tyranny under the terms used in the quote that began this column—exploitation of workers, income inequality, property, and wealth in the hands of a few—all of which are also common under socialism. Socialists preach equality. They hammer it ceaselessly (e.g., DEI). They never produce it, but it sounds good while poverty increases and the dead bodies pile up.
Socialism and its close relatives, Marxism and communism, are Leftist philosophies. And they require force because people are not equal and never will be. “If people are free, they will not be equal. If people are equal, they will not be free.” No two countries ever apply socialism the same way; local situations are considered as need is perceived. Sometimes, socialist countries fight or invade each other (e.g., China and Vietnam), even though socialism claims to, ultimately, be an “international” movement (globalist). However, it has never been successful internationally, and Stalin finally adopted what he called “socialism in one country,” which, frankly, is a contradiction of terms because socialism is indeed intended to be international. “Workers of the world unite,” not “workers in one country alone unite.”
Thus, the main characteristic of socialism is the desire by those who use it for their economic system for personal power through force. That, actually, is its whole purpose—the government, to control as much of the economy as possible, must have as much power as possible. Thus, capitalism, with its free markets, is utterly anathema. The aim of socialism is not to help the people economically; just look at the socialist countries in the last 100 years to see how “successful” socialism has been in lifting its people out of poverty and into economic prosperity. But that isn’t what the Soviet Union et al, wanted to do in the first place. It was all about totalitarian power. Government control. The elite.
They lust for power; that’s all there is to it. That’s socialism.
Thus, the quote at the beginning of this article. “We are socialists. We are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system...And we are determined to destroy this system...” The man who spoke those words was Adolf Hitler. Hitler didn’t really care about economics, except that they might help him obtain and hold the powers he craved. He only cared about power. Totalitarian power. He attacked “Jewish Bolshevism” in the USSR, not because he opposed how they produced goods, but because he wanted their land. Hitler couldn’t have cared less what kind of economic system Russia had.
The Democratic Party in America has now become a socialist organization. For one reason—like Hitler, Stalin, etc., they want total political power. That’s their raison d’etre. And they believe socialism is the road that will lead them to it. It “works” in China. Just ask Tim Walz.
Subscribe to my substack: mklewis929.substack.com. History, Bible, the “why” things happen, not just the “what.” Follow me on “X”: @thailandmkl. Go back to a great age in American history and read my Western novels, Whitewater , River Bend, Return to River Bend, and Allie’s Dilemma, all available on Amazon.