Socialism Is A Trashed And Ambiguous Term And Even When It Wasn't It Was Never Enough To Start With

After being in the hands of the Marxists, the National Socialists, and almost as bad, such socialists and socialist parties as the Fabians and various so-self-named futilities in the English speaking People and around the world, I don't think the word "socialist" is useful anymore.  And I don't think it's promotion on the left is either desirable nor workable.  Not if promoting what I've been talking about is the goal instead of any of the terrible governments which have asserted their socialism and which has made it a dirty word among its detractors and a signifier of even worse among many if not most of "its" proponents.

I don't think most of the ideas called "socialism" either were desireable or stood up to real life conditions - that what should have been the most egalitarian and just of economic theories certainly hasn't worked out that way in most "socialist" states.   

As I said yesterday,  socialism shouldn't be seen as an isolated end, a theory, a dogmatic catechism it should be seen and only really means anything good if it is the economic manifestation of egalitarian democracy, and that's where I think we should find its replacement in "economic justice".  As see in even the words of the late, arch-conservative, Pope John Paul II, economic justice makes democratic demands on how money, property, goods and services in the form of their just distribution so far superior to present day civil law in the United States, Britain and just about everywhere that its implementation would be the most radical improvement of the lives of everyone it touched.  Apart from the billionaires and millionaires who would be leveled to a level in which they could not exert the force they have wherever they arise, swamping the good of the large majority of people.  Equality is not simply a matter of providing the least among us with the bare subsistence they need so their untimely deaths aren't counted as a scandal, it's a matter of insuring that the ultra-rich don't destroy democracy as they have in Russia and China and in most poor countries (they are often the reason for the poverty, now that they can't make the excuse of colonial domination) and, undoubtedly now, in the United States.  

Clearly, if you read the theorists of socialism, by an overwhelming majority they are anti-democratic and, in practice and often in explicit pronouncement (such as the putrid literature of Fabianism) anti-egalitarian.  British socialism is imbued with a combination of old line aristocratic class system or an equally snobbish substitute for that based in self-bestowed merit.  Beatrice Potter Webb's  declaration that she was the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class.... was an explicit statement of what so many of them believe.   You can find the same attitude among many if not most of the socialists in the United States.  I have long had the feeling that the elite, academic socialists primarily saw the poor, racial minorities, etc. as a vehicle towards their own empowerment, often doing real damage to the real interests of those groups when they have associated themselves with their struggle for equality.   

So, it's time to face the whole reality of where we are and the counter-productive baggage that "socialism" has acquired both from the words and deeds of the socialists but also the response to their extravagances if not depravities.  Socialism was never a worthy goal in itself, the real goal is equality, democracy and economic justice.  Democracy, also, was not the ultimate goal, it was a means of providing the same things and whatever decency in life results from the equal distribution of the goods of life and access to services.  A decent life for everyone in a sustainable environment is the goal, not socialists to be able to say "we rule, man!," before their struggle to violently stay in power begins.