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10 Misconceptions About Socialism

Socialism and other left-wing ideologies are oftentimes misunderstood by many people, especially in the US.

By Hector Miranda Plaza, July 31, 2021

Since the beginning of the Cold War, the word “socialism” has been entrenched in the American psyche as a synonym for bread lines, dictatorship, and government control. Compared to most of the world, where many regularly refer to themselves as socialists, the US is one of the only places where the term and those affiliated with it are not just seen with skepticism, but are automatically treated as enemies by others.

As a result of this deep stigma cultivated by decades of government indoctrination, many are as closed off to exploring what the word socialism means as they are ill informed on it. Therefore, to help further inform a fair discourse on socialism and left-wing politics in the US, I’ve set out to answer ten of some of the most common misconceptions and questions people have about socialism.

1. What is socialism?

The most concise definition of socialism is, “public ownership of the means of production”. However, this only scratches the surface of it. At the core of leftist thought are ideas such as the labor theory of value, which stipulate that the value of every product we consume is ultimately derived from the work required to produce them.

This is because it is only the processing of raw materials by labor which can make products which we consume; a tree, for example, might have intrinsic value by virtue of it existing, but its material value to us would only come to be once it’s refined and extracted by workers into something usable like planks. This idea in and of itself is not exclusive to socialists, as even the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, subscribed to this belief. 

Socialists add on to this by asserting that, if all value is derived from labor, then the only way for a business in capitalism to profit is to extract the value of the work preformed by its employees. For example, imagine you are working at a chair company whose chairs are worth $200.

If the value of the capital used in production is $100, then the rest of the $100 in value comes from the work you did to assemble the chair. However, if a private businessman owns the materials and the capital necessary to produce the chairs, you as a worker do not receive the full $100 in value you generated. 

In addition to seeking to recover his material costs, the businessman would seek to make a profit, lest he have no incentive to do business. This profit comes in the form of them taking a large chunk of the value the worker generated.

Since he himself doesn’t own the necessary capital to engage in such an enterprise, the worker has no choice but to accept a wage which is only a fraction of the value he generated in exchange for his work; either he agrees to this arrangement, or he starves. The businessman, for his part, uses the profits to purchase more capital and to employ more workers, which he uses to make more profit and repeat the cycle. 

As a solution to this dilemma, socialism proposes that the workers themselves take control of the materials and capital necessary to produce goods themselves, as accumulating them under this arrangement would necessitate the exploitation of others. As some may put it, the workers should seize the means of production. 

Many socialists see this as the first step towards communism, a post scarcity society which has no need for classes, the state, or money. 

Socialism is a blanket term which encompasses a wide coalition of specific ideologies which vary radically, which results in there being no single interpretation of socialism. However, socialists generally agree on this general framework. 

2. Does that mean the government controls everything?

No. When we usually think of socialism in the context of government control over the economy, we usually refer to the USSR, Cuba, and to some extent China. The aforementioned states are guided by Marxism-Leninism, which advocates for the creation of a vanguard party which would seize the state and use its power to manage the means of production. This is also referred to as state capitalism, as it replaces the capital owners with the state while maintaining the fundamental structures of capitalism.

However, this is just one interpretation of how a socialist economy should operate, and one which as sharply declined in popularity after the fall of the Soviet Union. One solution is to organize in worker run co-ops, which allow workers to democratically manage their businesses and to vote on how to distribute the profits made. Some more libertarian socialists might advocate for organization at the micro scale, with communally owned means of production and decentralized planning.

Some even think that eventually computers should take on the role of markets, making the economic calculations necessary to ensure a more efficient distribution of resources than in capitalist markets. This is by no means an exhaustive list of all the strains of socialism, but it should serve to give you a taste of the intellectual diversity fostered on the left. In short, public ownership does not have to mean government ownership, and there are certainly alternatives to it.

3. Is socialism only achieved through revolution?

Although some might picture a violent communist revolt led by plucky idealists when they think of socialism’s implementation, this doesn’t have to be the case. In fact, the debate over how to establish socialism has been one present among socialist groups since their inception. Some advocate for internal reform of current structures through democratic action, such as Salvador Allende of Chile, others advocate for mass collective action such as strikes, like many syndicalists, and some still for violent revolution. There are many more possible ways by which to transition to socialism, and much of the discussion inside the left revolves around this.

4. Are socialism and authoritarianism linked?

No, not intrinsically. After all, we claim to live in a free society, yet the place where we spend most of our week, the workplace, is one with a deep lack of representation and worker input which socialists seek to transform.

Although there are still some authoritarian socialists, such as Marxist-Leninsts, most nowadays seek to not only preserve political and individual freedoms, but also to expand them. It’s commonplace for many socialists to advocate for the right to bear arms, to freedom of speech, and to be able to live freely as an individual without exploitation provided you don’t harm others in doing so.

5. What makes someone a socialist?

If you believe that you and your fellow employees should receive the full value of your work by controlling your workplace in a way representative or your interests, then you are a socialist. For some of you out there, this means that people like Obama or Joe Biden are not socialists, and policies such as universal healthcare aren’t necessarily “socialistic” depending on your definition of socialism. However, the term has so many interpretations that even capitalist social democrats like Bernie Sanders can still get away with calling themselves socialists, even if their platforms are by and large not socialist. 

6. How can everyone be equal under socialism? After all, everyone is different.

When we socialists talk about equality of classes, we don’t refer to class in the way most people typically do. In such an analysis, class refers not to the amount of money one has or earns, but how one earns it. If you make a living by working for a fixed rate of pay and a boss, you are part of the working class.

If you make a living by owning capital, such as a company, and utilizing it to extract the labor value of your employees, you are a part of the capital owning class. Put another way, a doctor who makes a six figure salary has more in common with a woodworker or a retail worker than he does with the bosses who might earn around his income bracket.

This isn’t to say that, as some might think, they should all be paid the same amount. All labor has different values, and the value of a doctor’s labor is obviously more than that of a retail worker. What unites them, however, is that they both don’t get paid a part of the value they created. Socialists do not seek equality of income, but rather equality in receiving the full value created from one's work.

7. Under socialism, there wouldn’t be an incentive to work.

Under capitalism, work has become something we loathe. Most of us work jobs we hate for most of the day, just to be able to survive and return to that same job the next day, and the day after that. Because of this, work remains a primitive necessity when for the first time in human history we have the means for it to be something more.

Productivity has increased to the point where, unlike our ancestors who had to farm, hunt, and build to just survive, we could easily survive by working far less than we do now. The only reason we don’t is because, among other reasons, it means greater profits and exploitation of us by the capital owning class, and because we’ve become accustomed to a “hustle culture” where productivity is arbitrarily prioritized above all else. 

The fact that we’d be working less doesn’t mean we’d be less productive, but rather that the productivity formerly spent in alienating work would be spent in much more fulfilling endeavors. We could spend more time on work which doesn’t see a direct profit or wage, such as raising a family or pursuing individual passions.

Or, we could spend that time innovating in the cutting edge of the sciences, medicine, and technology. Many of the innovations we enjoy now, such as the polio vaccine, were made free specifically because they were made not for profit but for human satisfaction. By removing the profit motive from our society, we could expand that strong impetus for innovation to all other aspects of life.

8. Socialism sounds good in theory, but in practice it’s never worked.

Once again, when speaking of socialism in such broad strokes, we run into the problem of narrowing down the definition of socialism. However, socialism, regardless of which specific brand of it has been implemented, has seen many successes around the world. In the USSR, GDP increased tenfold from its beginning to its end, illiteracy was eradicated, education and healthcare services rose to be among the best in the world.

In the Zapatista-controlled parts of Chiapas, residents enjoy free education, direct democracy, and lower rates of hunger and crime than their surrounding Mexican counterparts. Additionally, they receive nearly free and better healthcare outcomes than those in their surroundings, have higher vaccination rates than their surroundings, own the majority of their workplaces, and are net exporters. In Cuba, life expectancy rose to 75, infant and adult mortality declined, education became free, and GNI more than tripled. In the Seychelles during France-Albert René’s rule, electricity, clean water, and intrastructurewere made readily available, the island grew culturally unified and infighting between the island’s many ethnic groups declined, and literacy rates rose to 90%.

In Burkina Faso under Thomas Sankara, child mortality dropped to 14%, literacy shot up from 13% to 73%, promoted gender equality, and millions were vaccinated against preventable disease. These are just some of the many examples that show that the socialist experiment is not only feasible, but can also bring great triumphs.

This isn’t to say that these experiments haven’t had their flaws. Places like the USSR, Burkina Faso, and the Seychelles were without question authoritarian and repressive places to live, with the government cracking down harshly on dissent and protest. Look no further than the scores of uprisings put down by the Red Army in the Warsaw Pact, or the political internment and execution of thousands in Cuba and other authoritarian states mentioned above for proof.

Additionally, while the necessities of life were often better provided under socialist governance than under the previous governments, many consumer goods whose demand is flexible such as cars were scarce. These aforementioned facts do not mean that we should discredit their successes,but rather that we must learn from both their successes and failures for the future.

9. You socialists use the same cop out whenever a socialist state fails: “that wasn’t real communism.”

Since the Communist Manifesto was written more than 150 years ago, socialism has spread to every country and every continent. As mentioned before, this fact has resulted in one of the largest, diverse, and broad coalition of ideologies to ever exist. Because it is such a broad ideal, therefore, a socialist state’s failures can be seen as a result of the specific “brand of socialism”. The question isn’t whether or not a failed experiment was “real socialism”, since there’s no one interpretation of socialism, but rather how it came short and how we as a movement can learn from those shortcomings. 

This process of experimentation, of implementing new systems and seeing what works, isn’t unique to socialism. Capitalism, during its nascent stages of the 16th-18th centuries, saw experiments and implementations in the Netherlands, many Italian city-states, and more. Many of these resulted in great failure; the tulip crash, for example, resulted in catastrophic losses for many individuals and their savings. Yet, despite these failures and many others, capitalism came to prominence. Why should socialism be any different?

10. Communism killed more than 100 million people. 

Many on the right cite this number as evidence of the evils of communism, but this is far from the truth. The figure of 100 million dead comes from the Black Book of Communism, which has been repeatedly shown to be false. For example, of those counted in the tally by the authors died of causes unrelated to any conditions caused by a socialist experiment, such as old age, or even Nazi soldiers killed by the USSR during World War II.

Other times, even by the authors’ own admissions, death tolls were pulled out of thin air and passed as legitimate. So far, some contributors have even gone as far as distancing themselves from their work on it and denouncing it. While there were certainly instances where purges or mismanagement by socialist governments caused unnecessary deaths, such as the Four Pests Campaign in China and the Holodomor in the Soviet Union, the number of those who died is far below 100 million.

This isn’t even to mention the inverse of this statistic, the death toll of capitalism. Despite the fact that we produce enough food to feed more than 10 billion people, that we have the net resources to effectively eliminate the most deadly translatable diseases, and that we have the means to ensure everyone has access to clean water, around 9 million die of hunger globally, 1.5 million more die of preventable disease, and more than 8 million die from a lack of clean water.

These numbers alone add up to around 18.5 million deaths a year caused by an unequal distribution of resources; at this rate, even if the alleged death toll of communism was accurate, capitalism would also kill 100 million in a matter of less than a decade. This is not a problem of supply, like many would like to believe, but of a deeply flawed allocation of resources under our current economic system. 

Ultimately, those on the left have the same political motivations as everyone else: to ensure a better future for not just a select group, but for everyone. With that said, I encourage you to talk to actual people on the left, and of other beliefs in general. When you do that, you begin to tear down the walls of labels and antagonisms and see that most of us have more in common than you think. It is precisely these barriers which we socialists seek to destroy, be they economic, social, or political, with the hope of advancing our common goals and aspirations for progress and a better tomorrow. 

Hector Miranda Plaza is an author for and co-founder of Young Patriots Magazine.