Social Democratic Policies: Parts to the Whole

The ever-growing popularity and relevance of socialism in modern American and international political-economics reflects a change in the current modernity of the world at-large. Once considered a near taboo subject, especially to Americans as the political ideology of the former USSR, socialism’s revival contributing to the conversation on the general welfare, spiritual prosperity and moral uprightness of nations has come about largely due to the major existential issues affecting modern times. Issues such as extreme income-inequality, climate negligence and injustice, infringement upon labor rights, lack of affordable healthcare options, large-scale tax evasion and fraud, and even lesser discussed but pressing matters such as infrastructural development both in rural and urban areas are just some of the things that are commonly addressed through modern socialist agendas. The implications of socialism’s potential impact on the world’s economies has been the subject of fiscal, social, and philosophical debate since before even the time of Karl Marx; the father of modern progressive political-economics, as the idea’s controversial reputation for promoting such ideas as "extreme egalitarianism" and even "wealth oppression", has passionately been disputed by advocates and proponents for right wing conservative policies and expansion on private ownership for centuries. Proposed implementation of governmental control over industry, labor and the workings of the economy at-large has proven to be a considerable but historically inconsistent route to allowing people to feel financially liberated in their national economies, and is often a major cause of concern for the opposition to socialism. This is not entirely without due reason, as socialism is an idea that fundamentally challenges what people living in the US and many other meritocratic capitalist nations around the world have generally accepted as a way of life in promoting individualism, capitalism and wealth generation and retainment. However, socialism’s growth throughout time into a more modern proponent of equity and welfare for the working class cannot be ignored, and also I argue, should not be taken solely as a whole, but in pieces that can situationally be implemented into our economies and governments in order to promote the general welfare, domestic tranquility, political stability, and subsequent spiritual prosperity and economic security to the entire population of a nation.

Socialism is, in theory, an answer to the woes of capitalism. While capitalism champions individual drive and and the liberation of the market to clear the way for business-minded individuals to continuously generate and retain wealth, socialism is critical of this and says that it is not the the liberation of the markets that will truly allow people have financial freedom, but the regulation of them by government ownership and the championing of laborer rights. In Karl Marx’s Capital he describes the detriments of the capitalist system stating “The degradation, misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degredation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital”.[1] Marx believed that many of the ills of the human condition including all the aforementioned came about because of the championing of the capitalist system that took much of the meaning and pleasure out of daily work. Marx, as well as many socialist thinkers throughout history have claimed that capitalism is a detriment to man’s psychology and actively continues his cycle of degradation, coercion and oppression. A recent 2015 psychological article on the implications of both capitalism and socialism on the mental health of societies says “the factor most responsible for the relatively poor health in the United States is the vast and rising inequality in wealth and income that we not only tolerate, but resist changing”.[2] Illustrating this disparity is the Gini coefficient, which represents a nation’s level of wealth inequality on a scale of 0 to 1 (the closer the coefficient to 1 being the more unequal a nation's wealth is). According to Statista.com, in 2019 the United States Gini coefficient measured at .48, a .05 percent rise from 1990 where the coefficient was .43 describing plainly the growing wealth gap in America.

Many psychologists recognize that the issue within the human condition that creates misery is not necessarily poverty itself but inequality, and many advocate for socialist reform wishing to change this narrative. This would be done not only by granting stronger labor rights through the work of worker unions and government regulations on hours and the minimum wages that company owners can pay their employees, but also through a social paradigm shift in socio-economic thought that is proclaimed by many advocates of socialism to be inevitable in human development.

Marx proposed that socialism would be able to fix these woes by allowing

the worker class to hold the power so often held by the “bourgeoisie”, but in the workers more conscientious hands. Marx thought that society was increasingly being divided into separate and opposed camps of social thought, and that the Bourgeois was contributing to this divide by championing profit over labor rights and the common good. This divide which is known as conflict theory, was stated by Marx and his associate, and to combat this they assert “that Socialist policies undoubtedly give more power and advantage to the common worker.”[3] By taxing large corporations and conglomerates at a higher rate, as well as wealthy individuals, the government can accumulate more funding to devote to public services like social safety-nets, education, public health works, and infrastructure, creating jobs in the process. This is why socialism is often looked at as a vast creator of jobs, sometimes even more so than capitalism, with funding works for the general public as well as giving the working class more power to make their demands heard.[4]

Defining socialism itself, the concept of classical Socialism calls for a political-economic system where the de-privatization of business and the market, and it's transference into the hands of the government is meant to foster greater economic equality and stabilize the distribution of wealth into the hands of the working class, rather than just the wealthy and powerful. It’s a system designed to ensure that wealthy business owners and the owners of the general means of production do not hold the sole mass of power in an economy and ensures that labor class empowerment and the general welfare is both the responsibility and at the forefront of a country's economic mission. Usually, countries that have a greater sense of tradition, national identity and often homogeneous cultures will transform their economies into socialist ones largely due to the greater idealization of community and the common good for the nation. Because of this, the people of these countries can more efficiently be motivated into working for the benefit of the whole rather than just the individual. Countries such as China, The former Soviet Union, and smaller countries like Cuba and Vietnam have implemented this national ideology into their country’s political-economic systems to somewhat shaky results, at times becoming more unified, equal, and economically satisfied, but also at times becoming more subjected to political corruption and governmental repression.

For example, in Cuba, state socialism, which is “the substitution of the state for the capitalist and of the government ownership and operation of industry for the present method(capitalism)”[5] was largely pushed through intense nationalism and political mobilization by Prime Minister Fidel Castro, and the political ideology he implanted within Cuba called Fidelsimo was kept popular largely through political demonstrations and absolutism to the ideal of La Patria, meaning homeland. The Cuban authoritarian government refrained from empowering individualism and claimed individualistic institutional reform was contrary to the national interest. This resulted in large exodus’s from the country, most famously in 1984 when 32,000 people left on rafts unstopped by the government for fear of harming popular support for the socialist regime.[6] This speaks to another problem within the ideology of classical socialism, the uncompromising suppression of individualism. When people are unable to feel as though they have individual freedom, history tells us they become unsatisfied, even if they’ve been given financial security through socialist means. Furthermore, when this constraint on freedom is imposed through an authoritarian and repressive government, it only magnifies the problem and breeds resentment as well as corruption.

Exemplifying this further, after the conception of the USSR in 1922, political power quickly became the most effective means of maintaining power and influence over society at large in Russia. Individuals would aspire for positions in government so as to have a seat at different tables and gain favors and personal spoils along with it. They would deal under the table and engage in criminal activities in order to obtain bureaucratic power, as well as dealing in the black market to obtain private and financial gain. Resultantly, Russia would consistently report high rates of political corruption in their government. Harvard political scholar John Kramer writes “In 1970 a criminologist reported that economic crimes such as bribery and embezzlement accounted for almost one quarter of the crime in the country”[7], which illustrates the rampant disregard and apathetic nature towards the integrity and conscientiousness we would normally expect from those seated in public positions of power.

Finally, classical and authoritarian socialism can also have had major impacts on a country’s technological advancement and economic output. One of the largest problems with socialism is generating efficiency and consistently motivating workers to work at peak performance, and tension in this area can often be bolstered by hard-nosed governments who are able to assert power over their people stemming from the state-owned industrial sectors. This can have negative effects on the technological advancement and the economic output of a socialist nation, as well as indicate that socialism may at times fundamentally oppose democracy. In China, for many years production was based on mass-production in agriculture due to its enormous population and workforce, and this had the capability of keeping it firmly in the mix of some of the largest economies in the world. However in the mid 1900s, China began to see other countries pull ahead due to technological advancements and industrialization. This initiated China to speed up it’s progress as an industrial nation, and under chairman Mao Tse Tung, China implemented the Great Leap Forward, a government initiative to industrialize China and improve it’s industry output through rapid industrialization and simple hard work.[8] Because China by now had already established itself as a socialist nation that smothered any form of individualism and personal gain, this was an extremely difficult thing to incorporate into their culture and it had disastrous consequences. China saw famine and mass starvation along with political corruption, as Mao falsely asserted in 1960 “under present conditions of productions there would be one-third agricultural man-power surplus in rural areas”[9]. Mao Tse Tung’s socialist practices during China’s economic advancement illustrates the deceit and apathy often had towards loss of life in socialist states looking to modernize and grow their technology and industrial sectors and the corruption in these states that often takes the form of propaganda and misinformation to the public.

However, in more recent times a newer and more modern form of socialism has risen out of the failure and hardship of past socialist attempts. This method of socialism, often called Democratic Socialism or Social Democracy, opts to maintain a level of private ownership present in the economic system while further integrating more government intervention against anti-competitive practices, as well as funding further public services to heighten economic equality and promote egalitarianism. Nordic countries such as Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland practice this form of socialism to effective results. This system is often characterized by high taxes, strong labor protections, and wage coordination resulting in a strong welfare state that performs well economically and consistently measures in high levels of happiness for its citizens.[10] They also tend to have high standards of living health, education, well-defined property rights and a reliable judicial system. However, one must point out that these nations are much different geographically, and culturally than countries like the United States. While these nations are small in population, largely homogenous in ethnic background and culture, the U.S is anything but. However, with the U.S’s steady and usually reliable system of government, the political stability and steadfast democracy that’s made the U.S famous may be enough to allow these implementations to flourish.

In its most favorable form when combined with aspects of both capitalism and democracy, socialist policies can contribute to a healthy society where social and political cohesion is strong and workers can feel like they are respected and have economic and therefore political power in their country’s national decisions. Socialism also aims to generate economic prosperity by providing more accessible education to a wider audience. The theory of egotistical altruism asserts that the good for the whole is directly related to the good of the individual and socialism plays upon this idea in political-economic form. If a number of people are given greater access to resources and better opportunities and become a net-positive to the whole of society, then their simple existence, prosperity and value offers a direct value to the rest of the world. The more people we have educated and taking on positions of skill and merit the more good for the world is possible, and therefore the more good for the individual. Providing education, and especially higher-education in modern developed countries, through direct taxation of a nation's assets, including individual income, businesses, property, and other taxable goods would generate the funding needed to create this system and route to generating more economic activity. Creating goods and offering services, as well as coming up with ways to make systems more tailored towards maximizing the positive summation of the world are also crucial to bolstering this economic claim as well.

Many argue the most realistic form of socialism is Democratic Socialism which allows a country to, in spirit, retain its status as a capitalist meritocratic system, and would expand upon a coming new era of government regulation in business that would effectively put an end to the coercion and immorality that socialist scholars so often accredit to capitalism. Whether this system however, could take hold in countries such as the U.S where so much of the national direction is based on remaining the number one superpower in the world begs the question: Would socialism, the human rights and the ethical and long-term benefits it would bring ever outweigh simple GDP numbers and the economic fire-power of capitalism to a nation's voters? So far, the answer has been no, but with 21st century life becoming ever more and more unequal we may one day see democratic socialism in the United States.

References

Kramer, John M. “Political Corruption in the U. S. S. R.” The Western Political Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 2, 1977, pp. 213–224. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/447406. Accessed 16 Jan. 2021.

White, Gordon. “Corruption and the Transition from Socialism in China.” Journal of Law and Society, vol. 23, no. 1, 1996, pp. 149–169. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1410472. Accessed 16 Jan. 2021.

Spargo, John. “Socialism as a Cure for Unemployment.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 59, no. The American Industrial Opportunity, 1 May 1915, pp. 157–164. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/1012903?refreqid=search-gateway:bd1176fcbef69bc5465a0b702d90b2ad.

Spargo, John. “The Influence of Karl Marx on Contemporary Socialism.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 16, no. 1, 1910, pp. 21–40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2762990. Accessed 16 Jan. 2021.

Wolff, Richard D., and Stephen Cullenberg. “Marxism and Post-Marxism.” Social Text, no. 15, 1986, pp. 126–135. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/466496. Accessed 16 Jan. 2021.

Lott, Bernice. “Relevance to Psychology of Beliefs about Socialism: Some New Research Questions.” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, vol. 16, no. 1, 2015, pp. 261–277., doi:10.1111/asap.12092.

Pérez-Stable, Marifeli. “Caught in a Contradiction: Cuban Socialism between Mobilization and Normalization.” Comparative Politics, vol. 32, no. 1, 1999, pp. 63–82. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/422433. Accessed 19 Jan. 2021.

Clark, Colin. “Economic Development in Communist China.” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 84, no. 2, 1976, pp. 239–264. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1831899. Accessed 20 Jan. 2021.

Andersen, Torben M. The Nordic Model: Embracing Globalization and Sharing Risks. Taloustieto Oy, 2007.

[1] Karl Marx, Capital, 645 [2] Bernice Lott, Relevance to Psychology of Beliefs About Socialism: Some New Research Questions, 9 [3] Richard D. Wolff and Steven Cullenberg, Marxism and Post-Marxism, 2 [4] John D. Spargo, Socialism as a Cure for Unemployment, 3 [5] John D. Spargo, Socialism as a Cure for Unemployment, 3 [6] Marifeli Perez-Stable, Caught in a Contradiction, Cuban Socialism Between Mobilization and Normalization, 6 [7] John H Kramer, Political Corruption in the USSR, 2 [8] Colin Clark, Economic Development in Communist China, 4 [9] Colin Clark, Economic Development in Communist China, 2 [10] Andersen, Torben M. The Nordic Model: Embracing Globalization and Sharing Risks