What Socialism Is

[From 7/28/08, in response to a letter characterizing Barack Obama as a "socialist."]

To the editor:

Letter writers such as Scott Hobbs (“Teepen confused on socialism meaning,” July 28) who regularly paint Democrats—and specifically Obama—as “socialists” need to crack open a book and learn what Marxism and Communism were really about. However much you might hate progressive taxation, it is simply qualitatively different than eliminating the private ownership of the factors of production. Even if you find it onerous, government regulation is not the equivalent of the total nationalization of the economy.

These are not minor distinctions, but fundamental to the very definition of what Soviet Communism was, and why it failed.

The attempt to tie Democrats and liberals (the latter of which was a term of abuse within the Soviet political structure) to Marxism is incredibly ignorant of the actual history and structure of Soviet Communism.