NOW from the housetops may be heard voices of fear and warning, saying to the people, "Beware! You are marching toward Socialism. The declivity is there!" The people scoff or stop their ears, and the march continues. Then the voice of despair may be heard saying, "We are lost. The people do not care. Nor will they hear the truth."
It is evident that the people do not believe it; and this, despite anything the voice of despair may say to the contrary, is owing partly to the fact that socialism is the wrong word. As an epithet it is worn thin. When spelled with a capital S it stands for a political doctrine that has neither a clear common definition in the world, nor one that makes any immediate sense to American society. Marxian socialism in Soviet Russia is not like Fabian socialism in Great Britain. National socialism in Germany was Nazism. Chinese socialism may turn into something unique, notwithstanding the Soviet pattern with which it begins. And again, socialism in a surplus country like this – the one great surplus country in the world – would certainly be unlike any kind of socialism hitherto imagined.
Fifty years ago Arthur Balfour said: "Socialism means the public ownership of the means of production and distribution; that is Socialism and nothing else is Socialism."
There is probably no better definition. All the rest is method. Private property as a means of production may be abolished by violence as in Soviet Russia, by edict as in Hungary just now, or by nationalization as in Great Britain.
But try making that definition square with what may be called the Truman Program, or the Fair Deal, or for that matter the New Deal before it. Here are great departures, indeed, all very earnestly denounced as socialistic; yet if they do not propose to abolish private ownership of the means of production and distribution, then according to the definition they are not socialistic. Neither in the last annual message of the President on the State of the Union, nor in the report of his Council of Economic Advisers, was there a word agreeable to the proper definition of socialism, spelled with a big orthodox S.
