Barack Obama and the Meaning of Socialism
Written by Richard M. Ebeling
Wednesday, 29 October 2008 00:00
The political airwaves recently have been filled with charges and counter-charges about whether or not the Democratic Party presidential candidate, Barack Obama, is a socialist.
The Wall Street Journal and Investors Business Daily both ran articles on Tuesday, October 28, quoting from an interview that Obama gave with Chicago public radio station WBEZ in September 2001.
Looking back at the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, Obama said that the Supreme Court had focused on “court-imposed remedies regarding segregation and voting rights.” But, he went on, “the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in society.”
The Supreme Court, Obama went on, “didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it has been interpreted.” And, thus, the Court “wasn’t that radical.”
At the same time, the Civil Rights Movement never “put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.”
During the heyday of communism, socialist governments in the Soviet bloc often formally called their systems “People’s Republics.” For instance, South Korea is the “Republic of Korea.” North Korea is the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”
Why the difference? Because in the eyes of socialists and communists western democracies were not really “free.” They argued that what prevailed in the West were false “bourgeois freedoms” – freedom of speech and press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly and association, and freedom to vote and elect people to political office, and freedom to own and use private property.
“Real freedom,” they said could only come with the end of capitalism and its system of profit-based exploitation of the workers by greedy, self-interested capitalists. The democratic systems of the West were merely political shams used to dupe the masses into a “false consciousness” to passively accept their oppression by the ruling capitalist class.
Only under socialism and communism would the workers – the broad masses of the population – have freedom through the common ownership of the means of production and through redistribution of wealth from the immoral and unjust hands of “the rich” to the deserving and needy toiling laborers and the poor.
True democracies were “People’s Democracies” and "People's Republics" where the economy was controlled by the government – in the name of the people and for their benefit – and redistributive justice (“social justice”) assured that each received what they rightly deserved.
In the post-World War II period, socialists in Western Europe were forced, slowly but surely, to give up on the ideal of socialist central ownership and planning of agriculture and industry. Its economic inefficiencies and potential for political abuse, corruption and tyranny became too clear to too many people in Western society for it to remain a shinning ideal for the socialists to espouse.
What the Social Democrats in Europe retreated to was the interventionist-welfare state. To have social justice, they argued, it was not necessary for the government to fully nationalize industry and all other economic activity. It is sufficient for the government to “tame” capitalism through a spider’s web of controls, regulations, and commands; and to use the tax system to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor and the deserving middle class, and to establish a network of social safety nets such as social security, national health care, public housing, and state subsidization of all education.
This is basically the ideal that Barack Obama, from all his public statements, clearly believes in and wants to see expanded beyond the extent to which they are already practiced in America. Thus, he wants to use the tax system to “spread the wealth” and apply the regulatory powers of the government to more forcefully manage and direct the economic affairs of the citizenry – all for a particular interpretation of the “common good,” of course.
His criticism of the Supreme Court goes back to the fact that the Constitution of the United States was designed to secure people in their individual rights to life, liberty, and honestly acquired property. It was not designed to micromanage the population’s personal, social, and economic affairs, and redistribute wealth from some who are designated “the rich” to others labeled “the poor.”
So is Barack Obama a “socialist”? Only he knows the answer to that in terms of a self-identifying label. But what his ideas do represent is a traditional socialist critique of capitalist society, and the belief that it is the duty of government to use its police powers to redistribute wealth in the name of the mirage of social justice.
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