Yes, that is Karl Marx, as you color his beard, I will explain his theory of socialism.
"Yes, that is Karl Marx. As you color his beard, I will explain his theory of socialism." fizkes/gettyimages.com

I am a proud father. I have two kids. One has recently become, like his grandfather Ebenezer Mudede, an economist (both my son and father have the same first name). One of my responsibilities as a parent has been, from the beginning, to give my son and daughter a clear idea of what distinguishes capitalism from socialism, and socialism from communism. I believe I have raised them well. What you will not find in their growing heads are illusions about these important economic and political matters. But this is not so for millions of young Americans. When they hear, say, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham call the four congresswomen Trump told to go back to where ever they came from "a bunch of communists," all that forms in these young peoples' minds is a fog of possible meanings. Is communism even a bad thing? If so, why? Why does Graham make it sound so awful? And the fog thickens.

The young people of today were born after the end of the Cold War. Joseph McCarthy means as much to them as a dinosaur. This post will offer parents a way to make the economic form of communism (which still exists but only as a pure theory) relevant to a period that myself and many others are calling post-neoliberal (that matter is for another post). Where did communism come from? And why, by any stretch of the imagination, is it incorrect to apply it to the four congresswomen?

It's true that we can describe some of the ideas and programs of the Squad as socialist, and indeed, two of them, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, are members of the Democratic Socialists of America. But democratic socialism, a label that can also be pinned on Bernie Sanders, is not actually the same as the socialism of, say, Kshama Sawant, whose Socialist Alternative party is strictly anti-capitalist. It is important to make these distinctions to your kids, or else they will be politically muddled and not see how crazy the following statement by Liz Cheney actually is: "[The Squad] wants to impose the fraud of socialism on the American people." It takes only a little mental effort to see that it's much more reasonable to call Trump a racist than it is to call the Squad a bunch of communists and socialists.

A parent can begin with how mainstream media describes the Squad: The progressives of the Democratic Party. This label has an important history. Capitalism is progressive in one way, and its critics are progressive in another way. For capitalism, progress has occurred in two ways. One is with products, and the other in how products are manufactured. Consumer products must improve because new things create new markets or buyers and, in this way, a state that is the death of capitalism, permanent satisfaction, is avoided. The last thing capitalism wants are content consumers.

As for progress in the means and manner of making things, this was driven by the need to keep the costs of production and also distribution low. Machines replace human labor for no other reason than the former does not require a wage, the enemy of profits, which, in this system, go to those who own factories and merchandise. Technological advancement in production and products has been described as progress.

But the demand for high wages, better working conditions, robust consumer protections, and stable social services have also been described as progressive. This is where the four congresswomen make their appearance. They are part of a tradition that begins, in earnest, with workers who, in the middle of the 19th century, recognized that capitalism without checks and balances offered them nothing but lower pay, deepening social misery, and raw economic dispossession (this last is called primitive accumulation). Workers of the 19th century did not claim that capitalism was simply bad but that, without democratic intervention, it went in one direction only, which was described by the endless growth of profits. Young people of the US are in public schools because of the challenge to this profit logic. The same goes for your voting rights and common sensical welfare programs, like Social Security. Indeed, you would not even have 30-year mortgages (the foundation of the American middle class) without checks and balances imposed on the logic of profit growth. (Many of Cheney's voters in Wyoming are completely ignorant of this historical fact—without the socialism of New Deal housing policies, they would not own their homes.)

Communism was a solution to 19th century laissez-faire market ideology. Its point of attack was ownership. If everyone owned everything and the means to make everything, you would have, this way of political thinking concluded, a society that did not separate workers from the benefits of mass production (or cooperation). The socialist program is a little more tricky. In its 19th century UK form (there were others in France and Germany), it claimed that labor was the basis of capitalism, and therefore its productions should mostly go to those who made them, the workers. This was called Ricardian Socialism. There was also the idea, introduced by the philosopher Karl Marx, that socialism, as scientific, was just part of the natural development from capitalism to communism. It was not a matter of whether you liked socialism or not. It was just a hard law of historical development.

But there was also democratic socialism, which came into its own in the early 20th century and flourished, in the US, under the New Deal. At its core, democratic socialism did not demand the death of private ownership, but the establishment of a democratically directed distribution system that recognized and rewarded the cooperative side of mass production and association. Here we have the Squad. Your children must not be confused about this sort of thing. These congresswomen are not communists, and it's hard to believe that Ilhan Omar (Trump's main target) is anti-entrepreneurial, as that's the means by which many of the citizens she represents (black African immigrants) make ends meet.

Nor are any of the four Squad women socialists—as far as I know, they have not demanded that the rich be deprived of their property. For them, what matters is that everyone pay their fair share of taxes. Do not let your children confuse these two positions (communism and progressivism). The Squad is, correctly, progressive. But even this term has its problems, though that is a topic for another post.