{"id":87815,"date":"2025-11-23T07:49:16","date_gmt":"2025-11-23T07:49:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=87815"},"modified":"2025-11-24T07:34:48","modified_gmt":"2025-11-24T07:34:48","slug":"socialism-and-anti-socialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2025\/11\/23\/socialism-and-anti-socialism\/","title":{"rendered":"Socialism and anti-socialism"},"content":{"rendered":"

I asked recently <\/a>what term might replace neoliberalism as a descriptor of the economic ideas that many readers here find acceptable.<\/span><\/p>\n

The contrast I was seeking was something that might be the opposite of the politics of care, which I often talk about.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some suggestions stood out. Mammonism was good. So too was the economics of extraction. Most, however, seemed to me to require too much explanation to be of value: if something makes no sense on first hearing, it is unlikely to work at all. I might be wrong about that, but I have an inkling that's true, which is why I have always tried to find or work with terms that resonate instantly as to what they mean. Tax justice did. So did the term Green New Deal. Funding the Future does. In its day, Tax Research did. I think the politics of care does.<\/span><\/p>\n

What is agreed here is that neoliberalism does not work in that way. And nor can I get that excited by any alternative so far, barring one, which is anti-socialism.<\/span><\/p>\n

We all know what being anti-social is.<\/span><\/p>\n

As the Resolution of Congress I have noted today<\/a>, passed this last week, shows, anti-socialists<\/span> are also what our opponents clearly think themselves to be.<\/span><\/p>\n

And there is a massive advantage to using a term that forces the debate to use the term you want, and to use its obvious opposite when explaining just what the other side is, especially when the term used appears both pejorative and yet accurate when describing their behaviour. And since they are anti-socialists, they are most definitely proponents of anti-socialism.<\/span><\/p>\n

That, however, requires embracing a term - socialist - that I have often resisted, because it is very often portrayed in materialistic terms, and life is about much more than that, in my opinion.<\/span><\/p>\n

So let me offer two definitions here and see how they work. They are of socialism and anti-socialism.<\/span><\/p>\n

Socialism<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Socialism<\/span> is a system of economic organisation in which the purpose of economic activity is the promotion of the well-being of people and the stability of the society they form, rather than the accumulation of private wealth.<\/span><\/p>\n

It begins from the premise that the essential foundations of life, such as health, education, care, housing security, energy, water, and the monetary system itself, are too important to be left to markets whose priorities are profit, scarcity, and exclusion.<\/span><\/p>\n

It then builds from this idea to create a broad range of ideas and approaches that typically include:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n

    Collective responsibility for essential services which<\/span> are provided as public goods \u2014 universal, state-funded, and free at the point of use \u2014 because a decent society cannot function without them.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  2. \n

    Democratic control over key economic issues, requiring that policy on and major decisions about essential services, investment, energy, infrastructure, and money creation are made through accountable public bodies or cooperative structures, and not by unregulated private actors.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  3. \n

    Limits on extraction and rent-seeking.<\/span> Socialism aims to reduce the power of those who live off the returns of ownership rather than on sums earned by contributing, shifting rewards as a result away from rent, speculation, and monopoly profit extraction towards labour, care, and productive activity.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  4. \n

    A commitment to equality.<\/span> Socialism requires that the distribution of income and wealth in a society reflect social priorities rather than market accidents. It uses taxation, labour rights enforced by law, and public ownership and market regulation to achieve this outcome.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  5. \n

    Plural forms of ownership.<\/span> Public, cooperative, mutual, municipal, and small-scale private ownership can all co-exist within a socialist society and economy. What matters is that ownership structures serve a social purpose rather than impose private power.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  6. \n

    A rejection of the idea that markets represent freedom.<\/span> Socialism argues that real freedom requires security, education, health, time, and agency, all of which are things that markets alone cannot guarantee.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    These approaches do require a caveat to prevent misinterpretation. S<\/span>ocialism does not abolish markets. Nor does it imagine an all-powerful state. Rather, it defines the appropriate roles of each.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    The result is that socialism treats markets as tools, not masters, recognising that markets can work well for non-essential goods, most especially when abundance, competition, and choice genuinely exist, but markets are unreliable, and often harmful, when applied to life-critical systems such as health, care, housing, education, core infrastructure, pensions, energy, and the monetary foundations of the economy.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Because of this, in a socialist system:<\/span><\/p>\n