Searchlight’s Editorial on ‘Socialism’ spot on!

Fri, Jun 18, 2010
Editor: I must commend your editorial in last week’s issue of The Searchlight newspaper on the subject of “socialism”. You have brought sanity to the discussion. Your critique of the stance of the anti-socialist zealots who peddle their sectarian and distorted version of Christianity to demonise “socialism” was spot on.{{more}}

It is amazing the elementary errors that some presumably educated people make on the discussion of socialism. The first mistake is that they contrast socialism and democracy. The contrast should be between socialism and capitalism, two economic systems. Democracy is a political system. You can have a democracy with socialism or capitalism. And you can have undemocratic rule with socialism or capitalism. A socialist democracy is found in countries like Britain, Norway, Sweden, India, Canada, and Denmark, even though some may not be called such. A capitalist democracy exists in countries like the USA and Italy. There has been undemocratic capitalist rule in Nazi Germany, Pinochet’s Chile, and Franco’s Spain. There has been undemocratic socialist rule in the Soviet Union, and some many say, in Cuba but not the Cubans themselves.

“Socialism” is a very elastic concept in theory and practice. Clearly, if one calls Cuba, Venezuela, Britain, South Africa, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland “socialist”, it obviously has different meanings in different contexts.

It is obvious, therefore, that there can be one extreme form of unfettered capitalism along a continuum where statist socialism is at the other extreme. In-between are mixed variants of both systems. All CARICOM countries have such mixed systems with some tending to more collectivism (for example Barbados) and others to private enterprise (Trinidad). The real issue is on what mix should one have and where the State should advance or retreat.

The matter becomes complicated even further, with “state capitalism” as against “state socialism”, and so forth. In mainland China, there is a one-party “communist” rule but it is naked capitalism (state and private) in practice. SVG, Barbados, St. Kitts and Dominica are more “socialist” than mainland China, judged from the standpoint of greater or lesser equality in the distribution of income.

I follow the rule in Psalm 41: “Blessed is he that considereth the poor; the Lord will deliver him in time of trouble”. The socialist tends to look out for the poor and the community as a whole; the capitalist tends to look out for himself and the rich first and the rest trickle down to the poor. Democratic socialism or social democracy is Christianity in action.

George John