The Meaning of Socialism in 2021

With the beginning of the new year, things  look pretty grim for most American socialists

Bernie's movement is completely defeated,  

and meanwhile we witness the capitulation  of other 'democratic socialists' like AOC

And with that, even any semblance of  a common left seems to be disappearing

The bluffs of America's prominent left-wing  figureheads, like Jacobin magazine, Chomsky,  

the Young Turks, and Vaush are being called, and  now it's pretty clear these people have no idea  

what they're talking about or what they're doing. So maybe it's time to go back to the basics and  

brush up on some things people  might be taking for granted

For starters, on the meaning  of words like socialism.

What is socialism?

You probably have some idea of what it means. In countries that don't have strong socialist  

traditions, you might refer to definitions like  'workers ownership of the means of production

If you're more mature, you probably draw from  the wealth of real and concrete movements,  

political phenomena, and  states, both past and present

But when you live in countries like America,  

there aren't really any clear and easy examples  you can draw from in your immediate surroundings

Even if we're only talking about the  West, socialism is pretty redundant

In continental Europe, it's nothing new.  And even England has the labor party

The East and the global south,  meanwhile, speak for themselves

So Americans alone are confronted with the need  to understand what socialism is from scratch,  

in a direct and individual way.

This can even be related to the very  religious and civilizational foundations  

of Anglo-America. Like the Puritans before them,  

Americans struggle with understanding the weight  of tradition and laws that need to be unwritten.

When the pilgrims arrived on the continent,  they arrived in a place where they didn't have  

any roots or history. The very foundations of  civilization itself had to be built from scratch.

And that's actually why  American leftists, like Vaush,  

feel courageous enough to decide what is  or isn't socialism, even at the expense of  

the real and living traditions that gave  meaning to that word in the first place.

He read an explicit definition written  somewhere, and thinks reality follows  

from whatever sentence that happens  to be, rather than understanding that  

the sentence is only being someone's best  attempt to sum up realityjust sum it up.

But socialism never began as someone's  "definition." It was actually a real  

phenomenona first, and this phenomenona  would later come to be named socialism.

What's ironic about this uniquely  American problem with socialism  

is that America has actually played a  profound role in its history and development.

The same civilizational foundation unique to  America was also the basis for the emergence  

of its many artificial communities. In these  communities, the way people worked, ate, slept,  

and even married was determined reflexively,  by precepts both religious and pragmatic.

By this token, it was inevitable that  these societies were communal by nature.  

But this wasn't because the pilgrims  were Communists. It's because when you  

reflexively establish a community from  scratch, it's impossible to take social  

life -- including the way you work, eat,  clothe and shelter yourself -- for granted.

European feudalism, for example, couldn't  just be imported to the new world.  

Nobody could arbitrarily decide  to make themselves lord or king,  

because in spite of what Americans think  even today, kings and lords don't arise from  

arbitrary choices but objective contradictions  that develop through the course of history.

Nobody just wakes up on the wrong side  of bed one day and decides that private  

property, markets, or social  distinctions should exist.  

When you're creating a community from scratch,  in land you don't have any roots or history in,  

the material basis for these is going to  be undeveloped, especially when many of  

these communities were already commercial  enterprises funded by remote investors.

Nevertheless, these American communities would  come to influence, and some even influenced by,  

the ideas of European Utopian thinkers like  Charles Fourier (foo-yeh) and Robert Owen.

Traditional European society wasn't  only being broken down in the new world.  

What the alien and inhospitable environment  of the New World was to the pilgrims,  

the revolutions of Europe  were for European society.

England's industrial revolution and  land enclosures destroyed the stable,  

familiar and traditional way of living  peasants had been accustom to for centuries.  

Their landlessness gave rise to an unprecedented  existential and economic insecurity.

The French revolution, meanwhile,  overturned the codified hierarchies  

that had long allowed commoners to situate  themselves in an ultimately meaningful  

and consistent social reality. Universal  political rights weren't able to fill the  

vacuum left behind by the loss of the  ancien regime's concrete social bonds.

These two revolutions were distinct forms of  what was the same apocalypse, the apocalypse  

we now call modernity. To quote one of the  famous passages from the Communist Manifesto:

"All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their  train of ancient and venerable prejudices and  

opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones  become antiquated before they can ossify.  

All that is solid melts into air,  all that is holy is profaned,  

and man is at last compelled to face with  sober senses his real conditions of life,  

and his relations with his kind."  Communist Manifesto, Ch. 1.

All of this would shine a spotlight onto  something that would come to be called 'the  

social question', which had long been an object of  contemplation for European humanist philosophers  

but which only now acquired real world relevance.

Before the crisis of modernity, thinking about  social realities, as people like Hobbes and  

Rousseau had done, could be traced to  the lineage of the humanist tradition,  

which attempted to inquire into the real  premises of 'man,' be they physiological,  

natural, environmental, or  finally societal and social.

But the important thing is that before these  thinkers were thrust to the fore by modernity,  

these realities were ultimately  unwritten and could be taken for granted.  

Every society always had a way of relating  to the ineffable, sacred and sublime thing  

that made the people within  it part of a greater whole.

So the fact that sociality had to be explicitly  named and made reflexive implies a devastating  

loss of the ability to relate to it implicitly,  as mankind had done for all its history.

Going back to Utopians, people like  Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon were  

the first thinkers to articulate this  social question in practical terms.

Eventually this uniquely modern social crisis,  

and the fact that people were beginning to  catch onto it, would become evident to everyone.  

To again quote the Communist  manifesto, it became evident to

"Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot,  

French Radicals and German police-spies"  (Communist Manifesto, Preamble)

But this was still kind of a 'meme.' In terms  of real examples, let alone exact definitions,  

there wasn't really a clear picture of  what socialism or communism actually was.

There was a common, social crisis,  and an increasing awareness that  

this crisis could only be responded  to in a likewise common, social way.

The Utopians were responding to it  by envisioning what a better society  

would look like and how it would be  run from scratch, so the fact their  

ideas would largely be implemented in  America should come as no surprise.

As diverse and peculiar as Utopian  societies like Indiana's New Harmony,  

Ohio's Utopia, and New Jersey's Phalanx  were, with some prior American communities,  

like those of the Shakers even  taking religion as their foundation,  

they were taken as examples by many in  Europe of communism or socialism's actuality.

And so by 1845, Communist thinkers like  Fredrich Engels would come to view that

"[...] America was the  proving-ground of communism"

This wasn't because Engels thought  these societies conformed to some  

pre-existing definition of socialism.

Very simply, it was because they were examples  of the fact that economic relations, in short,  

the way people make a living, could be regarded  as being relevant at a common, social level.

This sounds like a truism today, but you have  to keep in mind that in the 19th century,  

even the very recognition of common, social  realities couldn't be taken for granted.

When the feudal and agrarian  relations that allowed people  

to take their substantive social  bonds for granted broke down,  

the cold brutality of all against all, dog eat  dog, and every man for himself took their place.

The way the English rationalized this abject  barbarism was by claiming that those who weren't  

able to survive the punishing cruelties of the  new laissez-faire society were just too unfit  

to live in general, that much like animals, they  were merely at the cruel mercy of nature itself.

In the prior history of humanity, there  had always been periodic catastrophes. But  

eventually they would pass, and life would go on  as it had before. But modernity was a catastrophe  

that kept repeating itself, over and over again,  with no real end in sight. Industrial capitalism  

wasn't something human lives could adapt to. The  newly formed proletariat worked like animals,  

even living day to day in ways animals  themselves would probably find intolerable.

So the main point of socialism's association with  'worker's ownership of the means of production'  

was never because people just wanted to extend the  

liberal-democratic notion of sovereignty  to the workplace. This "definition" has  

only recently become popular because of  the very contemporary crisis of liberalism,  

having already been surpassed by  Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.

The real point was what would be *entailed* by  this ownership, what this ownership would *mean*,  

which is that production would no longer be  incompatible with the majority of people's  

actual lives, that it would serve social  ends, rather than the purely private ends  

of individual capitalists. The real promise  of socialism wasn't about people exercising  

arbitrary choices for the sake of control,  but a more or less dignified, human life.

And if you think that's vague, it's because  it is. There's a reason the third chapter of  

the Communist manifesto describes more than  half a dozen types of socialist phenomena,  

some of which were called reactionary and  bourgeois. They were all united by this simple  

recognition that modern society's  'anarchy of production' was untenable.

The main thing to take away here, is  that socialism should be understood as  

an objective historical phenomena, rather  than some subjective doctrine. It doesn't  

come from some arbitrary idea about how society  should be. It's a way of relating to the fact  

that society became directly responsible for  the sphere of production in the first place.

In that sense, you could say that we're already  living in some kind of socialism, and have been  

since around the 1930s. There's more truth to the  often-mocked popular view, that countries today  

are mixed economies, or that we have 'socialism  for the rich,' than there is in the views of  

so-called 'Marxist' pseudo-intellectuals who  believe in fairy tales about ‘pure socialism.’

But today’s "socialism" didn't emerge from  societies being built from scratch, like  

the experiments of the Utopians. In fact one of  the main shortcomings of the Utopians, according  

to Marx & Engels, was that they were inevitably  restricted by the prejudices of their own social  

and institutional position in envisioning a new  society. For Marx & Engels, the seeds of a new  

society lie in the contradictions internal to the  old one, rather than the heads of social reformers

Both understood that socialism was an inevitable  consequence of economic transformations  

already underway. In Socialism, Utopian and  Scientific, Engels directly spells out that:

“In the trusts, freedom of competition  changes into its very opposite — into  

monopoly; and the production without any  definite plan of capitalistic society  

capitulates to the production upon a definite plan  

of the invading socialistic society.”  (Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Ch. 3)

These were also transformations whose  development was later elaborated by Lenin in  

Imperialism: The HIghest Stage of Capitalism.

For them, however, the revolutionary class  struggle was the decisive site in which  

these transformations were being given  meaning, both politically and culturally.

We may already be living in a type of socialism,  but it is still only within Marxism that a  

scientific understanding of it is possible. To  say we already live in a type of socialism should,  

if anything, reveal to socialists just how rotten  the current establishments of America and Europe  

really are. They conjure up phrases and pageantry  about ‘neoliberalism’ and the ‘free market,’  

trying to induce fear about the ‘bogeyman’  of socialism, all the while corresponding to

“so barefaced an exploitation of the community  by a small band of dividend-mongers.”

This might sound crazy, or even shocking, but  really think about it. Even the way we use words  

like socialism or capitalism assumes we're already  living in the former. We treat the economic sphere  

not as some primordial wilderness, as  the English did in the 19th century,  

but as a place where systems can be voluntarily  implemented, replaced or removed. This assumes  

a political relationship to the economy that's  actually already effectively socialist in nature.

Think about words like 'privatization,'  which reveals private property  

to be not a sovereign ends in itself,  as it was in 19th century liberalism,  

but an extension of the state's  own policy-making decisions.  

All the rhetoric about the ‘free market’ and  ‘free enterprise’ is nothing but a swindle.

So let's address the elephant in the  room: Why do the same contradictions of  

19th century industrial capitalism  observed by Marx, still persist?

Well just because socialism already more  or less prevailed, doesn't mean that what  

Marx observed and was describing in Capital just  disappeared. It rather transformed in new ways,  

pretty much rendering what most people  take as socialism today to be redundant.  

What this means is that socialists need to rethink  what the real site of today’s social commons is.

And there’s no point in being caught up  in these rigid categories in the first place,  

because capitalism itself was  never some self-enclosed system.

It's a question of understanding what the real  essence of capitalism was in the first place,  

which is by no means self-evident.

Pseudo-intellectual "Marxist" sounding nerds  talk about things like the 'value form,'  

but this is nowhere near specific enough.  What stands to question is rather this:  

What really *is* this apocalyptic  event we call modernity?

For starters, some things need to be  borne in mind about the way people  

lived and basis of civilizations *before* what  we call the era modern capitalism. We mentioned  

before that periodic crisis' and catastrophes  always occured in the history of humanity,  

but the thing that defined the ability for  civilizations to survive the test of time  

was the *living being* of the  people that populated them.

What's meant by this is  their general ‘way of life',  

which could not only generally support them,  their family, their traditions and customs,  

but could also be passed along to the next  generation. We're talking about something which  

risk analyst Nassim Taleb calls ‘anti-fragile,’  ways of living that have already been exposed  

and are able to subtly respond to most of the  difficulties life inevitably has in store.

It's this substantial livelihood that  defines the continuity of civilizations,  

without which no people would even  survive for more than a single generation.  

And so what's entailed by this real being;  this ‘circle of human life’ if you will,  

is some kind of original connection between people  and their - quite literal - means of production.

Marx titles the 26th chapter of his first volume of Capital "The Secret of Primitive Accumulation"

In it, he lays out how

"The capitalist system presupposes the complete  separation of the labourers from all property  

in the means by which they can realize their  labour." (Capital Vol. 1, Part VIII, Ch. 26)

In this way, peasants who were  once able to sell their labor  

through the commodities they themselves produced,

"must be obliged to offer for sale as  a commodity that very labour-power,  

which exists only in his living self."

So Peasants who onced possessed  some kind of living-being

"became sellers of themselves only after they had  been robbed of all their own means of production,  

and of all the guarantees of existence afforded  by the old feudal arrangements. And the history  

of this, their expropriation, is written in the  annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire."

Without analyzing the conditions that gave rise  to it, the simplest way to understand what we call  

modern history lies in this fundamental separation  between individuals and their living being,  

specifically in the form of their  original means of production.

So that should really put socialism into new  perspective: Above all, it should be understood  

as this striving for some kind of return to this  “Dasein”, as Heidegger called it, a striving which  

can actually be argued to be the main motor of  class struggle across the history of humanity.

It should come as no surprise that the American  industrial proletariat eventually becomes a  

type of 'middle class' with green lawns and  white picket fences, that this same industrial  

proletariat - whether in Western Europe, or even  the Soviet Union and China, eventually acquires  

some measure of substantial livelihood, losing  its amorphous and de-individualized qualities.  

These represent a return to the real and  definite being characteristic of the peasantry.  

The striving towards this being  never actually disappeared,  

but rather just assumed a new  form in the industrial society.

Despite this, socialism today has pressing  relevance. It's clear that in the West,  

and in America in particular,  

this 'middle class' has been disappearing.  19th century capitalism may be long gone,  

but the fundamental contradictions that gave  meaning to Marx's original discovery have endured.

It's clear some type of 'new  proletarianization' is happening,  

and the status quo isn't able to make sense  of it. Marxism has never been more relevant.  

So why do Marxists in America still fail to  acquire any meaningful political relevance?

For starters, it's because they're  committing the same mistake that  

Western Marxists have always made, which is  neglecting the objectivity of living being,  

confusing it for some leftover ‘petite  bourgeois’ or ‘middle class’ tendency,  

rather than the very substance of  the proletarian class struggle.

They un-dialectically assume the destructive  negation posed by proletarianization  

puts an end to this striving  toward a return to Dasein,  

when it’s actually this striving that’s really  at stake in it, as the negation of the negation.

After all, what was it that brought Communists  to power, in countries like Russia, China, and  

in the third world? Was it promising everything  will be turned into one big Amazon warehouse?

Actually that’s more or less what happened  in the West. Because in the countries where  

Communists acquired power, the majority  of the population were still peasants  

who were merely confronted with the  inevitability of proletarianzation.

Communist parties didn’t only promise that this  proletarianization could be dictated on new,  

and more humane terms, but effectively fought for  the ability for peasants themselves to possess  

the necessary independence to participate in  determining these terms in the first place.

In sum, what all successful Communist parties  

had in common was a program of ‘land  reform.’ Land reform, paradoxically,  

meant that the very increased socialization  corresponding to proletarianization, was the very  

means by which peasants could preserve or even  reacquire their lost sense of independent being.

This way, Industrial modernity didn’t have to  entail the savagery and brutality of Anglo-Saxon  

capitalism. Peasants would become dependent  on the centralized proletarian dictatorship,  

but this dependence also gave them a  newfound sense of independent human dignity.  

That’s exactly the reason people like Trotsky  would call Stalin a ‘vulgar democrat,’ or why  

ultra-leftists call Mao a ‘peasant warlord,’  it’s because instead of assimilating everyone  

into one universal amazon warehouse,  which was more or less Trotsky’s plan,  

they allowed the peasant particularity  to flourish in unprecedented ways.

Preserving or returning to the conditions of  life before industrial modernity wasn’t possible,  

as reactionaries always try to  swindle people into thinking.

But proletarianization doesn’t mean that the  more essential living being corresponding  

to it disappears forever. Rather for Marxists,  it represents its precise ability to persevere  

through the trials and tribulations of industrial  modernity has in store. That’s why only the  

Communists were able to revive the Russian and  Chinese civilizations, which would have otherwise  

continued to be crushed under the boot of  German, English, and later American imperialism.

Without the re-parcelization of landed property,  

which is the most fundamental means of production  of all, Communists would have never been able to  

gain the trust of the majority of their country’s  people. Without it, new forms of social ownership  

like the Soviet Kolkhozes or Chinese people’s  Communes, ones that emerged on the basis of a  

mutual interaction between the state and the  people, would never have even been possible.

But you don't just have to draw from  the past to understand how decisive  

land reform is for revolutionary socialists.

Take today's South Africa for example

Something a lot of people tend to forget,  is that South Africa's current ruling party,  

the African National Congress, or ANC,  was not only a socialist organization  

in the past, but was even aligned with  the socialist bloc during the cold war

The promise of land reform had been a decisive and  indispensable element of the then decades' long  

anti-aparthied struggle. And there's a  simple reason for that: Politicians and  

parties can make all the promises they want,  but at the end of the day, land; or economic  

space, the most important means of production,  is the only thing that makes promises a reality.

For the black majority to be able to rule and  live dignified lives in their own country,  

land is the simplest and most fundamental  premise. It's the foundation of civilization  

itself. It's what allows people not to have to  depend on politicians’ promises, but be able to,  

in the first place, cultivate a  sense of living-being independently.

And even speaking in terms of  state or central initiatives,  

you can't do anything if you don't  have land. Land is literally space,  

in the most abstract terms that could be  understood politically or economically.

While everyone knows aparthied  came to an end politically in 1994,  

it has since then persisted economically. And the  lack of the implementation of any land reform is  

arguably the most important reason there was a  peaceful transition of power in the first place,  

with the ANC coming to an understanding with  not only the Boer elites, but the forces of  

international Anglo-Saxon financial  capitalism they were bound up with.

Despite this, the ANC has  continued to assume the appearance  

of a nominally socialist party, and  South Africa as a nominally social state,  

with its reconstruction and development  programme initiated in the 1990s.

But an unprecedented type of 'proletarianization'  has occured in South Africa since then,  

ironically as a result of the end of political  aparthied. The people of South Africa are  

by and large affected by a type of terminal  landlessness, being unable to acquire any real,  

living existence, forced to live in overcrowded  slums and with decaying public infrastructure,  

effectively foreigners, and even  trespassers in their own homes.

Like the majority of countries today, South  Africa maintains the veneer of being a country  

for, by, and of its people.  That means that the government,  

when all is said and done, exists for  the South African people themselves,  

the improvement of whose welfare is  the very reason for its own existence.

This is what makes events like the Marikana  massacre, where 34 striking black miners  

were killed by the South African Police Service,  

so existentially shocking for  the people of South Africa.

On the 10th of August 2012,  miners initiated a strike,  

and eventually thousands of other miners  began to join in. On the 16th of August,  

police converged onto the scene of protest,  massacring 34 striking miners in cold blood.

What happened at Marikana provoked a powerful  question: Who is the South African state really  

for? The miners, already barely getting by with  poor pay, themselves even being the lucky ones  

in communities rampant with unemployment  and inhumane living conditions - came  

to epitomize a universal existential  reality of South Africa's black majority.

In killing the miners, the South African state  effectively killed its own substantive basis,  

which is the people. It symbolized the most  fundamental contradiction, outlined before,  

that separates a people from their own living  being - and in this case, their own state - which  

is the most important premise of a stable  and secure livelihood in today’s capitalism.

Today, you hear a lot of about people like  Bernie Sanders, AOC, or Jeremy Corbyn,  

but American leftists seldom talk about  what is arguably today’s most successful  

and vigorous revolutionary socialist and even  self-identified Marxist-Leninist organization  

in the contemporary era: The South African  Economic Freedom Fighters, or the EFF.

The EFF was formed in direct  response to the events at Marikana.  

It engraved the contradiction that was exposed  at Marikana, between the state and the people,  

into the foundation of its own being, discovering  in this contradiction the very raw material out  

of which a truly contemporary socialism  in the information age may be born anew.

It’s central program of land expropriation  without compensation, in accordance with  

the ANC’s own original freedom charter, has a  concrete simplicity that’s even more powerful  

than Bernie Sanders’ ‘free healthcare.’ They  aren’t just promising ‘free services,’ they’re  

effectively fighting for people to have the  breathing room to participate in producing  

the very wealth of the state in the first place.  But the organization itself has become a dynamic  

interface between the people’s consciousness  and concrete political aims such as this.

The form of the organization is almost as much an  accomplishment of socialism as the realization of  

the very demand it’s structured around. It’s  what Fredric Jameson's Universal Army looks  

like in the real world context, representing the  most dynamic relationship between individuals  

and collective forms of political association to  date. It's more than just a party. It's a symbol,  

that's able to cohere meaning across political,  cultural, and especially digital space.

The EFF wouldn’t just accomplish land reform,  but also be the interface by which the reform,  

and the cultural revolution corresponding  to it, would be given meaning and purpose.  

The way it’s able to organize people and  dynamically produce forms of collective  

identification is everything the ANC today fails  to do, which is unite people with politics.

And the most elementary form of this unity is  an army, but this is an army that engages in  

a plane of warfare arguably more  fundamental than armed conflict:  

the war of political meaning and information.

If leftists in America are really committed  to reviving socialism in their own country,  

they need to put down Jacobin magazine, stop  listening to fake Marxist nerds and podcasts - and  

start trying to learn from the experience  of organizations like South Africa's EFF.

Although directly emulating such an organization  would be ridiculous, the EFF’s ability to relate  

to the predicament of its people, in their case  South Africa's black majority, represents all the  

qualities missing in people like Bernie Sanders  and AOC. Politicians like them only promise to  

extend America's failed institutions over the  whole country, as a remedy for every particular  

ill, rather than minimally relate to the objective  contradiction that defines the relationship  

between the American people and their living  being. And Instead of producing truly independent  

forms of media and political culture like the EFF,  American progressives effectively do the work of  

MSM and the estabilishment for free, whether  independently or otherwise. [context justifying  

this alteration - we will show TYT/Cenk/Casparian  and ‘progressive columnists’ for big media here]

And it’s not like there’s no precedent  for something like this in America.  

American progressives always draw from events  like the New Deal, but a cursory glance into  

the history that culminated into it will reveal  that land reform was the real basis. Instead of  

trying to save, or worse extend, America’s  dying institutions, American socialists can  

learn from phenomena like the Farmer’s Alliance  or the Populist Party: national traditions that  

are the very raw material out of which a new  and authentic American socialism could emerge.

Studying from the Populists would teach  American socialists that the contradiction  

between the American people and the elites is  an objective one, with long traditions giving  

form to and making sense of this contradiction  dating to the very founding of the country.

But Instead of making sense of the fundamental  separation between the American people,  

and the state, institutions and media which claims  to represent them, so-called progressives choose  

to deny this separation all together. That’s  because the American left has been dominated by an  

urban professional-managerial class interested  only in furthering its social engineering aims,  

rather than leaders who know how to connect to  the longings of the country’s real majority.

Above all, it's learning how to  concretely articulate this separation  

that's of decisive significance  for American socialists,  

because it’s the very basis of  socialisms’ necessity in the first place.

Today, we stand on the precipice of  the next great era of world history;  

the African era, and the great scar that lines  the heartland of the African continent will  

prove to be the adobe out of which the new global  proletariat will rediscover its original mission;  

and which will mark a new chapter in  the history of socialist civilization.

And the EFF bares the memory of a separation  even older than the one revealed at Marikana.  

It's the memory of the devastation  that befell their ancestors from  

the very hour that European colonialism  arrived on the African continent.

Organizations like the EFF are destined to avenge  this most primordial and original of injustices  

not by rolling back the wheels of time,  but by the unleashing of the full wealth  

and power of industrial civilization under the  full leadership of the black, African majority.

By the memory of its forefathers,  and the whole people of Africa,  

in whom no longer lies dormant no longer  a calling whose mighty roar will shake the  

foundations of the Earth, the Economic Freedom  Fighters; the true sons of the soil; raise their  

banner from out the scar of the land; and the  wound is healed by the spear which smote it.