Does Socialism Always Fail?

If you've interacted with enough right-wingers on social media, there's invariably one point that you've probably heard before:

"X always fails!"

Where 'x' is something they disagree with. It could be anything, but the context that it usually sees use is with socialism; as in, "socialism always fails!"

But does it? And is that really the question we need to be asking?

Defining Words

It can seem like we live in dramatically different worlds, the left and right, and that we use dramatically different terms. And that's because, more often than not, we are. The right-wing likes to Humpty-Dumpty words to mean whatever is fitting for the current topic at hand, and that's why it's vitally important to nail down definitions before you even think about that debate. Otherwise, you end up like me, citing numerous examples of functional healthcare systems only to be told that Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea are "failing nations."

And "state's rights" is a buzzword for

 "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

And most of the time, this is where your conversation will end. When you ask how someone is defining a word, they run into a brick wall, because they oftentimes don't think about how they're using the word, just that the world feels natural in that context to them. And since "feels natural" is entirely subjective, it's why you get folks who define "socialism" as "government attempts to help black people." Well, that and racism, but let's face it: racism feels natural to these people, too, as the picture to the left demonstrates.

But it's incredibly important, and it's probably one of the reasons why Socrates insists on defining terms in Plato's dialogs. It's not just Socrates being a gadfly; if we're approaching words and concepts from different angles, we're never going to be able to communicate at all, leave off efficiently.

So it's only natural to try and ask them how they're defining socialism, but there's just one problem: socialism does not have one single definition. There are a whole lot of different types of socialism, from market socialism to non-market socialism. Liberal socialism is a thing that actually exists, and what Germany practiced with the Rhineland model is technically socialism, while what the Nordic countries have is better called "social Democracy" or a welfare state. So "socialism" can mean a constellation of vastly different ideologies.

But there's an even deeper question here, and that's the question of what "fail" means. That verb is more important than the noun because the verb carries more weight in the sentence. The verb is describing an action, but it's an ambiguous action. What does it mean to "fail?"

Too Big to Fail?

When we start talking about what failure is, we have to define what a fail-state is. For instance, in most classes, a fail-state is "getting the answer wrong." Now, leaving aside the problem of an objective answer outside of anything other than mathematics (and even there, you can get some real mind-warping solutions that aren't always objective), one person's "failure" is another person's "success." For instance, you might see a C+ on a paper as a failure, but if it gave me the credit I need to pass the class, I'd consider that a success.

This implies that failure and success are entirely subjective, and I'm inclined to agree. And this is where we run into problems; the vast majority of people are not mentally equipped to handle subjectivity. They want one absolute, objective, "too big to fail" worldview that allows them to unambiguously declare whether something was a "success" or a "failure" without having to understand or grasp what those two words might mean and that their use might be situational. This situational, subjective nature is why defining the words is so important; at least then I can understand what you mean when you use the word and react accordingly.

Nowhere is this subjectivity better seen than in the statement "socialism always fails," and that's in part because the people who use it never stop to think about what "fails" means, and that using "always" as a qualifier is bad since all it takes to prove them wrong is one example to the contrary. But so long as they never have to define what it means to "fail," any counterexample can be dismissed as a "failure" without having to confront the reality of their "objective" statement. In effect, they are insulated from any challenge to their position at all.

Dialogues Are Important When We Can Have Them

Dialogues are complicated, messy things, and we need to have them. We need contrarian viewpoints and folks who look for flaws in plans to point out weaknesses, so we can shore those plans, or at least prepare potential preventative countermeasures.

Consider a universal healthcare system. That's a huge undertaking, and we absolutely need folks with a critical eye to pick it apart and point out potential problems with it. We need people to be technical. We need to be ready to receive that criticism, not as a personal attack as coming from a place of concern. In effect, we need conservatives who can argue in good faith and are intelligent.

And instead, we have screeching shit-monkeys who throw a temper tantrum anytime they don't get their way, will never consider the possibility they might be wrong (and rather than use that sentence as a chance for introspection and self-reflection, will respond with "but liberals do it, too!" as if that absolves them), and who deny things that are politically inconvenient for them, because they've come to treat politics as less running a country and more rooting for your favorite football club, come hell or high water. Rather than intelligent people, we have fools who think the proper retort to the fact that the number of uninsured Americans has gone up for the first time in several years, and the overall life-expectancy has fallen for the second or third year in a row, is "socialism always fails!"

And the sad part is, we've always had these people. It's just now they have a much larger platform and can reach more people.

These are not people who can contribute meaningfully to any conversation. They simply can't. You don't go to your dog expecting advice on finance and you can't go to these people for political opinions; you get toxic bile instead. And what's worse, this toxic bile is always in response to a warped self-fulfilling prophecy: they see themselves as unliked, so they behave in a way suggestive that they don't care if they're unliked, and in the process of behaving that way, they make themselves unliked. And when they respond to all criticisms with personal invectives and disingenuous factoids dressed up as statements of truth and then proceed to ignore attempts to inform them that they're wrong because they can't bear the thought of being wrong, they invite the personal attacks they're so sensitive towards. Then they treat all criticisms as personal attacks, resulting in people getting fed up with them and personally attacking them.

So the real question isn't "does socialism always fail?" It's not even if socialism can succeed. Socialism is irrelevant to this conversation because the problem of "socialism always fails" has nothing to do with socialism or fail states.

It's whether or not we're capable of having a reasonable dialogue, and so long as people insist that something always fails because confronting evidence inconvenient to them is far too taxing an intellectual task, that answer is a resounding, "no."