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Published in: Society 5/2019

22-08-2019 | Symposium: Politics, Politicians, and Possibilities

What we Talk and Don’t Talk About when we Talk About Socialism

Author: Eugene Goodheart

Published in: Society | Issue 5/2019

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Excerpt

Socialism in The United States of America!? What has been thought could not happen here, namely fascism, has also been the conventional wisdom about socialism and communism. Given the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders and the election of Donald Trump, the answer may be in the affirmative. Both can happen here. Sinclair Lewis’s novel, ironically titled It Can’t Happen Here, was a warning against complacency about the fascist threat within our borders. Trump has been viewed by many on the left and even by some on the right as representing a fascist threat. I’ll leave that subject to others. My subject is socialism, which Sanders and many of his followers openly embrace. I don’t intend to enter into a debate about prospects of its realization on their terms, but rather to shed light on what the term socialism entails as well as on its relation to communism, capitalism and democracy.1

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Footnotes
1
What we don’t talk about is National Socialism i.e., Nazism, because of its horrific inhumanity. Why even think about its association with a benign idea? Let’s, however, talk about it. The Nazis concentrated all power in the government but permitted corporations to operate in the interests of the government. Nazi Germany was a welfare state for the Aryan race, the non- Aryans having effectively been purged. In the Soviet Union, the purging that took place targeted class (the kulaks) and political dissidents. Anti-Semitism also played a role in the personal behavior of the leaders, notably Stalin, but it was gratuitous and cultural, not built into the Marxist ideology, though present in Marx himself, Unlike Stalinism which was nationalist in its socialism, though internationalist in its ideology, Nazism was internationalist in its ambition to conquer the world, while calling its socialism national.
 
Metadata
Title
What we Talk and Don’t Talk About when we Talk About Socialism
Author
Eugene Goodheart
Publication date
22-08-2019
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Society / Issue 5/2019
Print ISSN: 0147-2011
Electronic ISSN: 1936-4725
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-019-00400-6

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