“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?

Capitalism has passed through periodic crises, of varying magnitudes, in every epoch throughout its history, for hundreds of years since its inception in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, on roughly four to seven year cycles, a fact that Marxist economist Richard Wolff, for example, never tires of pointing out. Observations for hundreds of years throughout the same period have been recorded by scholars about the realities of these crises, and those of every stripe, by no means limited to explicitly socialist or leftist ones.

We are accustomed to seeing a paradox in the principle that that which is harmful may often at the same time be that which is most attractive. But really there is no paradox. The most obviously and immediately lethal parasite is never the most dangerous one. It would kill its host too fast to spread. The most dangerous adversary is always the one not immediately recognized as such. In that light, it is no longer any kind of mystery why people “vote against their own interests”, for example.

According to philosopher Slavoj Zizek, there are at least two distinct concepts signified by the word “future”, although some languages nowadays customarily use only one word for both of them in common parlance. He has repeatedly brought up this metaphor, but I have yet to hear him fully flesh out its consequences. But the concrete example he gives is from French, “l’avenir” vs “le futur”. A quick search indicates that “l’avenir” implies something along the lines of “henceforth” or “hereafter”, whereas the word “futur”, future proper, implies a point potentially indefinitely separated in time from the current moment.

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