About Socialism
This post originally contained two videos from the The Colbert Report on Comedy Central that aired on Oct. 30, 2008 but those videos have been taken down and are no longer available. But here are the gists of those two videos.
On a campaign stop in Toledo on 10/12/2008 Joe ‘the Plumber’ Wurzelbacher confronted Barack Obama claiming that Obama’s tax policy would penalize his business Obama replied “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” The right-wing media and the McCain/Palin campaign started red baiting Obama calling him a socialist and ‘the redistributor in chief’.
« This is the punch line »
Socialist Candidate for President – Brian Moore
After the Obama the Socialist segment Colbert introduced Brian Moore the actual Socialist Party USA presidential candidate. Colbert questioned Moore asking: “What do you mean, he wants to redistribute the wealth. That makes him a pinko, right?” But Moore countered Colbert asserting that Obama was not a socialist, that he, Moore, was the socialist.
There’s socialism and then there’s socialism, what liberalism, social democracy, democratic socialism, whatever one wishes to call it, is about is the redistribution of wealth, trying to distribute wealth more fairly, more equitably, socialism1, on the other hand, is about the reallocation of capital, how is capital allocated by a capitalist entity be it a widget manufacturer or a travel agency. If Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx are correct, that the value of a commodity or service is determined by the labor that goes into its creation, be it intellectual or manual, then that value, under a socialist economy, must be allocated to the ‘workers’ that produce that value, be they workers or managers or owners or inventors. A socialist economy is not about equitability but about contribution, who contributes how much value to a given product or service. That is socialism, and everything else is some form of capitalism, no matter what one chooses to call it.
1 See: Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
This is the actual passage from which that Marx quote is consistently taken out of context and misquoted [emphasis mine]
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!