Answer:( I GOOGLED IT) :)
But socialism should not be accepted just because it’s cool now, even if it happens to be very cool indeed. Nor should it be accepted simply because so many of the greatest intellects and humanitarians of the last century were socialists or anti-capitalists (including Bertrand Russell, Helen Keller, Nelson Mandela, George Orwell, Malala Yousafzai, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, Noam Chomsky, and Oscar Wilde). Socialism should be examined carefully, like any political proposition, and its proponents should defend their ideas carefully and rigorously.
However, in order to actually have a sensible discussion about whether, for example, the radical socialist agenda of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez makes sense and should be implemented (I think it should), we need to clear away a few glib critiques of socialism that pop up over and over. They are: (1) it’s vague and cagey (2) it’s a recipe for calamity, and (3) it’s hypocritical. I am certain that once we show why these criticisms fail, Current Affairs will never again receive angry correspondence from the public asking us if we have heard about a little place called Venezuela.
1. Socialists are vague about what socialism means: sometimes it’s “the abolition of profit” and sometimes it’s “Scandinavia.”
There’s incredible amounts of slippage in DSA messaging between “we should have an integrated national health care system like all other rich democracies” and “we should eliminate profit unlike any other rich democracy.”
“In most economic issues… the new socialist movement doesn’t look that different from a standard progressive Democratic agenda.” — Noah Smith, Bloomberg Opinion
The impossibility of defining Socialism has often been emphasized, and sometimes regarded as reproach. But neither in Politics nor in Morals is any important idea or system ever capable of being exactly defined. Who can satisfactorily define democracy, or liberty, or virtue, or happiness, or the State, or, for that matter, individualism any more than Socialism?
What do I mean when I say that Labour was “officially a socialist party”? I mean that until the coward and war criminal Tony Blair took it out and replaced it with mushy pap about “realizing our true potential,” there had always been a clause in the Labour Party constitution calling for popular control of industry:
We can no more hope for a perfect definition of what socialism is than what love or democracy is. But like those other terms, it suggests a value worth pursuing, one whose meaning we can debate, but which offers a valuable orienting principle.
2. History proves that socialism inevitably results in disaster. Look at the USSR! Look at Venezuela!
Inflation in Venezuela is reminiscent of Weimar Germany. Roughly 85 percent of Venezuelan companies have stopped production to one extent or another, in the most oil-rich country in the world…The disconnect between socialism’s record and its invincible appeal also stems from leftists’ denial of what it really entails. —Jonah Goldberg
.
