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The totalitarian socialism that will be attempted to be imposed “democratically” in the coming years on the United States is Malthusian, environmentalist and neo-Marxist. To understand this, we must take note that in order to integrate Malthusianism into a body of Marxist doctrine, the theoreticians of neo-socialism gave their own justification to Marx’s always unfulfilled prophecy about the growing misery of the proletariat under capitalism.
Democratic socialism
It necessarily follows from Marxist economic theory that workers’ wages would fall to subsistence level, as proletarians reproduced in greater numbers with each increase in wage levels. That the prophecy was never fulfilled did not mean that Marxists abandoned it: they attributed to various causes what they considered a mere delay and insisted that it would eventually occur, although from Marx’s day to ours the opposite has not ceased to be the case. The justification for the “delay” that allowed a synthesis of neo-Marxism and Malthusianism was that of the ecological theorist, Barry Commoner.
“Marx believed that as capital accumulated, the amount of its fixed forms (productive machinery) —which relates to what he called the ‘organic composition of capital’— would increase […] the rate of profit would decrease. To counteract […] capitalists would need to make ever greater inroads into the portion of production that goes to the workers. The working classes would become increasingly impoverished and the growing conflict between capitalist and worker would lead […] to the revolutionary change […] that has failed to materialize —so far— […] for the environment […] As I noted in The Closing Circle, this situation leads to ‘a temporary cushion effect of debt to nature’ represented by the degradation of the environment in the conflict between employer and employee, which now reaching its limits can reveal itself in all its rawness […] the appearance of an immense crisis in the ecosystem can be considered […] the sign of an emerging crisis in the economic system […].”
So far, neosocialism has not taken power by force. It has employed low and medium intensity urban terrorism with tactics of dissipated molecular revolution. It has also manipulated information, rules and institutions to twist electoral results through disinformation and censorship in a collusion of big tech, big press, unions and politicians.
But clean or not, they have only risen to power through elections. Their tactics for moving towards totalitarianism are therefore very different from those of the revolutionary socialism of the last century.
That is why it must be insisted that this is not a social democracy with new themes: it is a revolutionary project of radical neo-Marxist revolutionary ultra-left, with aspirations as or more totalitarian than those of the two great socialist totalitarianisms of the last century —one of which came to power by democratic means and from there advanced rapidly to totalitarianism— and in that sense, the only thing that differentiates “democratic” socialism from the radical left of the New Democratic Party in Washington and Maduro’s dictatorship in Caracas is the 20 years in power during which Chavismo destroyed Venezuela‘s institutions and economy.
The first election won by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela was not even challenged like the Biden-Harris election. Once in power he took care of putting an end, as quickly as possible, to any division of powers and institutional independence. By means not unlike those already demanded of the Biden administration by its own ultra-left.
The whole thing, conservative friend, points finally to a feature of the old Soviet system -—retaken and retooled by Beijing’s new pseudo-capitalist techno-totalitarianism— rarely adequately analyzed: the exploitative Soviet incentive system. As the economist Mancur Olson explains, Soviet power “fixed people’s wages and salaries at very low levels, and took most of the value of individual production through implicit taxation […] people will not be able to afford to rest much because of the high rate of [implicit] taxation and […] as long as marginal tax rates were at zero, or very low, Stalin needed only small differentials in inframarginal rates […] The relatively high degree of equality in inframarginal payment, but lightly taxed, or tax-free, marginal profits, are precisely the conditions that maximized tax collection for the totalitarian leader.”
It is an exploitative system that depends on the impoverishment and dependence of the great majorities it falsely claims to liberate. All for the benefit of the privileged few who control totalitarian power. And that is perfectly compatible with a collusion of big mercantilist business with political power around a shared totalitarian ideology.
That is how German National Socialism worked in the 1930s. That’s how Beijing’s new techno-totalitarianism works, or the strange combination of a failed state and totalitarian dictatorship in Venezuela. Just as it still works in the Soviet-style in Cuba and North Korea. In the end they all aim to divide, weaken, impoverish, subjugate and exploit.
That and nothing else is what they intend to impose “democratically” in the United States in the medium and long term, against the determined resistance of the half of the country that still defends the constitution and legacy of freedom of the Founding Fathers.
Guillermo Rodríguez is a professor of Political Economy in the extension area of the Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences at Universidad Monteávila, in Caracas. A researcher at the Juan de Mariana Center and author of several books // Guillermo es profesor de Economía Política en el área de extensión de la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Administrativas de la Universidad Monteávila, en Caracas, investigador en el Centro Juan de Mariana y autor de varios libros
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