Semantics and a Good Article
The myriad connotations of the words socialist, capitalist, left and right are mind boggling. The funny thing about the whole argument is that it really doesn’t matter that much. Usually you can determine someone’s meaning from a few simple additional sentences. Enter the article I recently read on Lenin’s Tomb:
A strange kind of funk often descends on people, be they from the left or right of the political spectrum. Many people hold to the equation that state activity = socialism. What seems so obvious can suddenly become bizarre and endlessly confusing. People like Barack Obama, Winston Churchill and Gordon Brown are transfigured into revolutionaries. We end up with not just the workers state but also the degenerated workers state, the deformed workers state and the transitional genocidal workers state.
Its interesting how many historical forms capitalism has had to pass through, how many surrogate regimes it has had to use in order to survive. Capitalism has rarely existed in the form it was supposed to.
Right there we have some very interesting usages of the four aforementioned terms. It seems obvious to me that the author is aware of different forms of socialism and well as different forms of capitalism. In the rest of the article he proceeds to bash state-capitalism as being out of line with free market ideals. The article is very well written and the author seems to have a good handle on the different connotations of the terms. I highly suggest reading it.
So, what does this all mean? Well to paraphrase an older Libertarian Party idea, “If you still think it’s about left and right, you’ve missed the point.” The same is true for the capitalism vs. socialism debate. The average person arguing about these things has no idea how many different meanings each term has. If you want to keep it simple you could just boil it down to the controllers and those being controlled. Government is the tool of the controllers. Everything else is semantics.
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