I enjoyed this essay. However, because it’s a post, it starts from a general theme, one of great interest to me, and particularises on a city thousands of miles away. It’s interesting, but it’s thousands of miles away. It’s the theoretical discussion that attracted me most.

The definition of socialism is muddied because, over time, since Marx, it has become muddied. Just look at the official name for the most repressive regime on Earth: the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. So, is this our classic iteration of democracy? Does the last word on what happens in North Korea lie with its people? We might more accurately apply those adjectives to the United Kingdom, or to Sweden: the Democratic People’s Kingdom of Sweden. Yet, that would convey an entirely different view about the constitutional make-up of Sweden. No country that vaunts itself as democratic includes the word “democratic” in its name. If they ever do, we know to be on our guard.

And so with “socialist”: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was socialist in many respects: guaranteed work from adulthood to death. Free childcare. A guaranteed house over your head. Equality. But it was equality for some and not for others: the lesson is that even the strictest of socialist regimes cannot entirely eliminate privilege. And that death? Well, how that is procured might well be at the behest of the socialist regime that governs you.

What these words mean have obverse and reverse sides; they always have and they always will. Their attraction lies in the obverse when the obvious benefits of that obverse appeal to you. Because you are poor, for instance, or out of work. But free services for the poor need to be paid for and so it is the reverse of the coin that the opponents see: the need to pay. The midpoint that is achieved when the needs of the poor are met with a moderate contribution by those able to pay and nonetheless enjoy a comfortable, if not lavish, lifestyle is the nub of the argument.

I grew up in an age of tolerance. The swinging sixties, where you could let it all hang out and just be regarded as a bit weird. The outliers of that age were not outliers, they were fashion-conscious trend-setters. When Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix killed themselves with warm baths or barbiturates, they were not that much different to Judy Garland or Queen Cleopatra. All four of them greatly influenced their times, constituted cultural icons, right down to today. And yet they remain safely ensconced as “outliers”, in a category of their own.

In the modern age, outliers are, to an astonishing degree, simply not tolerated. For it has been seen that outliers can become in-liers. In my youth, one comical feature of every national general election was the appearance on a ballot paper somewhere in the country (it varied from Scotland to London and all points between) of a stage artist by the name - the official name - of Screaming Lord Sutch, 3rd Earl of Harrow, who between 1963 and his death in 1999 stood for election - and failed - 39 times. He was irrepressible, the names of his parties changed, from National Teenage to Official Monster Raving Loony Party, but he always got around 500 votes. Nowadays he’d be here, garnering “likes” and counting himself pleased to have gotten 500. But … he never painted an RAF jet. It’s not being an outlier that gets you proscribed. It’s painting an RAF jet. Because that will test the limits of tolerance to their breaking point. What else will test them to breaking point? Well, the eternal rule of “suck it and see” applies there, but we’re seeing all too clearly that the answer is virtually “anything will get you very quickly to breaking point”.

It is testing limits to breaking point that is the mark of popularity, success or of condemnation and proscription. And the extent to which tolerance will nowadays stretch is remarkably more limited than it was even in Karl Marx’s day, if only because his bourgeoisie never really understood the potential power of organised labour. We can adopt any definition we wish, out of the multiplicity that history has given us, to embrace or condemn whatever definition of socialism we want to go for, but one question we cannot evade when we do so: the extent to which we view the society - the basis out of which the notion of socialism even emerged - as including all of us or as being a selective company with defined roles for certain of its members and unassailable privileges for others. In an early article of mine (endlesschain.substack.c…), I put it like this: “Hypothetical though the question is, it ultimately asks us how far we view humanity’s existence as a holistic entirety of which we are but part, and how far we view it as a unique privilege for us, ourselves, alone; for which the lives of others are a valid collateral sacrifice.”

I send my salutations to the good folk of New York and I wish them a wise and judicious election, when it arrives. They say your city is a melting pot, and that is untrue. You cannot melt people. You are instead a complex machine in which every new cogwheel must find its efficient and workable place. But machinery that expects to be incorporated and receive something for nothing will receive much besides. It will soon experience the zero-sum efficiencies of overbalancing the equation. Energy out = energy in less friction, and so friction must be kept to an absolute minimum.

In the end, I must disagree with you. For all socialism in America might mean the provision of services for those who need them by those who can afford to provide them, socialism has always ultimately meant control of the means of production, and, on that score, socialism is a fata morgana for the US. You were founded as a slave-based society, and you will remain that to the end of all time. Your revolution is 250 years old. Is it not about time to dust it down and revive it?

Alternatively, you can almost ironically say that we all live under socialism wherever we are, for everything we use and consume ultimately comes from China.