Does It Matter What Counts as Real Socialism?

Socialists and anti-socialists routinely argue about what counts as “real socialism.” But I don’t think this argument matters quite as much as you might think. What does matter is ensuring that when we compare capitalism to socialism, we’re comparing apples to apples.

To begin, I’ll note that socialists often specify socialism purely in terms of institutional structures. For instance, socialist institutions are publicly financed and provided, centrally planned, free at the point of delivery, and so on. Public libraries are occasionally spotlighted as a socialist success story given that they seem to meet these criteria.

The problem with this specification is that it counts many institutions that socialists tend to dislike as socialist. For instance, the police would count as socialist (Bernie Sanders agrees!) according to this specification, as would the military.

The next move is to add a second, outcome-based criterion: these institutional structures must also not disproportionately serve the interests of the rich, well-connected, or insiders. So this criterion might rule out the police and the military, but not public libraries.

But if socialists include outcome-based criteria in their specification of socialism, they extend the same courtesy to defenders of capitalism. Capitalism, then, is not simply an economic system that privatizes the production and distribution of goods and services; it must also (for example) distribute those goods and services in an equitable and humane way (see Jason Brennan’s Why Not Capitalism? for more on this idea).

Notice, though, that the central socialist objections to capitalism evaporate when we use this new specification of capitalism. Under real capitalism, employers would never exploit their employees. Businesses would never pollute excessively. The rich will voluntarily transfer large sums of money to the poor to equalize the wealth and income distribution. And of course people would be free to start their own democratically-run worker cooperatives. It’s hard to see what sort of problems a socialist could have with this sort of arrangement.

So socialists face a dilemma: (1) specify economic systems strictly in terms of their institutional structures, in which case the police and the military count as socialist institutions or (2) specify economic systems in terms of both their institutional structures and realization of desired outcomes, in which case they are deprived of their main objections to capitalism.