Ideology on the left

About that ideological thing.

Hillary is a progressive.

Bernie is a social democrat.

Progressivism is about harnessing capitalism to the public good and stopping capitalists running it exclusively for their own benefit, to the general harm.

It accepts inequalities of wealth and power and dispersed private ownership of the means of production as well as all other significant institutions in the belief capitalism and its market economy conduce to the general good when properly regulated and given limited forms of post-market redistribution.

It accepts only very limited and exceptional public ownership of significant institutions like schools or hospitals, and rarely if ever tolerates exclusive public ownership in any industry or line of enterprise.

But even non-Marxian socialists agree with Marx and the left anarchists in seeing private ownership of the means of production as civilization’s original sin, the primal and founding injustice of class society.

“Property is theft,” as Proudhon put it.

So, though details vary a lot, socialism, to the utmost contrary of progressivism, is about abolishing capitalism in the names of equality and justice and, usually, replacing private institutions with public ones, even at the cost of real losses in society’s overall economic success, though sometimes in the false belief than not much of a sacrifice would actually be necessary.

Social democrats are socialists in their hearts – often broken hearts - who have resigned themselves to smallish steps that uphold the socialist ideal and take society further in the direction of socialism than progressives would, on their own, want to go.

For Europeans, Bernstein is their model, not Lenin.

For Americans like Bernie it’s not Lenin, either, but Debs or even Harrington.

American publicists and politicos have done their level best to obscure and blur these differences.

But they remain.

PS.

Most non-Marxist socialists are and have always been clear that socialism is not and does not spontaneously become or lead to anarchy, despite the entire tribe of Marxists from Karl himself through the Leninist succession insisting on the ludicrous delusion that it does, some excommunicated dissenters apart.

PPS.

There are other differences between the two, outside our domestic politics.

Here is a piece at Salon that illustrates the point.

Think especially about the Chilean coup and what the two candidates' retrospective views on that event might be.