Communism? Socialism? What’s in a word?

“Socialism”??? “Communism”??? What’s in a word? And why should anybody care??

Of course, for many of us who grew up in the Cold War United States, these are just vaguely equivalent curse words, the latter one being a little nastier and scarier than the former.

But aren’t the precise contents of these words, like so many others, merely a vague matter of personal tastes and ideological preferences? “You say tomato…” So how much does the historical etymology and meaning of such words as these actually matter?

A lot, actually. For better understanding, the sociologist Émile Durkheim was especially helpful.

In his book, “Socialism and Saint-Simone” (among others), Durkheim offers a really compelling explanation for why these etymologies have very deep philosophical and ideological significance.

For instance, one of the most common initial reactions of more intelligent rightist and reactionary philosophers has long been to readily acknowledge many of the inherent flaws (or “contradictions”, as Marx put it) of capitalism, but reject the possibility that anything much can or should really be done about them. (Think, today, of someone like Jordan Peterson, a man who, while far from being a genius worthy of the kind of adulation he receives in the media, is nonetheless NOT — unlike, say, a Ben Shapiro — an easily dismissible, blithering idiot after a mere five or ten minutes of listening.)

In this case, whether you take seriously the proposals of socialism, or dismiss them as mere idealistic daydreams, rests in significant measure upon whether you attribute the ills of capitalism to a really unique set of problems and social relations of relatively recent historical vintage, or whether you merely dismiss them as a kind of inevitable set of “innate tragic flaws of the human condition since time immemorial”.

Now, the fact that socialism — even the word itself, that is — is something of very recent vintage, as are also many of the reforms it proposes (eg, coordination of economic affairs on much larger scales than people have hitherto attempted, or was even possible in an age predating modern communications, transportation, and so on, for example), strongly suggests that we ARE talking about historically specific and uniquely modern problems. The fact that these observations and ideas have independently arisen in multiple places and from multiple thinkers at once over a comparatively short timespan, and across the rapidly industrializing modern world, further supports that contention, and correspondingly undermines rightist and reactionary arguments. Etc.

But what, you say, if you are a really, really radical type of guy or gal, an anarcho-primitivist, say? In that case, what do you care, if you insist that all our problems go clear on back to the domestication of animals for agriculture??!

Well, this stuff still kinda matters. A lot. Again, kinda like the distinction between the general and the specific, the “quantitative vs qualitative”, the longterm and the shorterm, the “eternal facts innate to the human condition” vs “snatching your finger out of the car door before someone slams it on you”.

So it still behooves you to at least be aware of the fact that the kinds of proposals that properly fall under the heading of “socialism” (eg, extensive coordination of economic factors to tackle large scale, modern problems, interventions like full employment and the Green New Deal, say, or nationalization of certain industries) are very distinct from the kinds of proposals that have been referred to as “communism”, since long before the word “socialism” was even coined, and which have been sketched out by (mainly utopian) visionaries for hundreds of years predating modern capitalism (eg, the collective ownership described in late mediaeval/early Renaissance writer Thomas More’s novel, “Utopia”).

All of this is important for many reasons, not only as a debating point in arguments with reactionaries, but also, far more importantly, because if we are really talking about certain concrete, uniquely modern phenomena in human history (eg, metabolic feedback loops, both within human societies and economies — things like overproduction, deflation, etc, and even within the whole planetary biosphere — eg, things like the accumulation of greenhouse gases), then adopting urgent, concrete reforms is not merely a question of eternal, “nice-to-have” idealism, but of essential, life saving interventions against avoidable, new and unique catastrophes.

Look at it this way: “abolishing war/making peace” can be thought of as a timeless human aspiration. Maybe we’ll get there some day, and maybe not (compare: “communism”). But abolishing nuclear weapons is probably an essential, fairly short-term “to-do” item if we are to avoid annihilating ourselves altogether (in the next twenty years, say), due to the rapidly escalating dangers associated with the high precision “super-fuze” enhancements made by Obama in 2009 to US “counter-force” missile stockpiles, extremely high velocity (Mach-10 plus) new missile designs, maneuverability characteristics of the latest guidance systems that make them practically immune both to ABM countermeasures and early detection, etc (compare: “socialism”).

(So, in the case of nuclear weapons, we see an example of a situation where the accumulation of “quantitative differences” finally results, in Marx’s parlance, in “qualitative differences”: these rapid innovations in the nuclear stockpiles of both the biggest nuclear powers are rapidly destabilizing and destroying any possibility of longterm “deterrence”, by eliminating the option of a survivable counterstrike capability and foreshortening the timeline for decisionmaking down to a matter of mere minutes, to the point where the entire process is headed towards complete automation and nearly total elimination of human decisionmaking, and a war could be triggered by accident without any possibility of realistically averting it. This puts us in a qualitatively new condition on top of a qualitatively new condition, ie, the existence of nuclear weapons itself created the possibility of a literal apocalypse unique in human history, while these latest developments, if not stopped, make the probability of such an apocalypse horrifyingly more and more likely and possibly even inevitable, given what we know about the mean-times-between-failure of complex systems.)

Durkheim himself, interestingly, refused to adopt a partisan position towards any particular political doctrine. He declared his position towards “socialism” as equivalent to the position of a doctor towards a symptom of a medical condition: its existence, or rather, advocacy for it, is to be taken as a sign that something real and socially significant is afoot, something we are compelled to try our best to understand, just like when a patient complains they feel an intense pressure or pain in their chest, like a big weight that needs to be removed, means we should pay close attention to the patient’s particular sensations. It does not follow that, for example, there is an actual weight there or that we know the precise cause or how to remove it. But it gives us an important clue about their condition, and its possible treatment, as well as the urgency thereof.