If you've been reading the news in the last few months or seen a few articles lately, you might have noticed that socialism is currently enjoying a surge in popularity in the United States. According to Gallup polling, a majority of young people now have a favorable view of socialism.
A majority of Democrats like socialism, while just under half like capitalism. Several high-profile socialist candidates, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have attracted national attention and socialist organizations continue to grow in popularity.
One problem that this causes is a misuse of the word 'socialism'. Like many other terms, it has been overused, purposefully misused, and accidentally over-applied to the point where it is nearly meaningless. Toss in a few red scares and decades of red-baiting in this country and you get an idea of socialism that is distorted.
So to help out, here are a few definitions you might find useful during your next political debate.
Socialism
Karl Marx, the founder of a school of socialist thought, as depicted in Hungary. All Marxists are socialists, but not all socialists are Marxists. (ATTILA KISBENEDEK/AFP/Getty Images)
In the broadest possible sense, socialism is an economic system where the means of production are socially owned. The “means of production" being the raw materials, factories, and machines used to make goods.
This is as opposed to capitalism, where the means of production are privately owned.
What “socially owned" means is another question entirely. The most popular answer in the 20th century was "owned by the government"; this is called state socialism. There are a variety of other approaches, some of which don't include the state at all. These often involve cooperatives, worker-owned businesses, or communes.
Democratic socialism
Democratic socialist Eugene Debs campaigns for president. He ran five times and won 6% of the vote in 1912. Bernie Sanders keeps a plaque honoring him in his Senate office. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)
Democratic socialism is the model that is currently getting the most attention. It calls for the means of production to be socially owned, and that this ownership incorporates large amounts of democratic management. This typically includes things like worker's cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises that both workers and consumers help manage.
Many groups that follow this ideology, like the Labour Party in the U.K., have supported state socialism run by an elected government as well.
As the name suggests, this model demands political democracy and opposes authoritarian socialist movements. It also explicitly rejects the Soviet system of governance and economics.
People who currently subscribe to this ideology include Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in America and Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. The Democratic Socialists of America are currently the most famous democratic socialist organization in the United States.
Social democracy
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, two prominent social democrats. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Social democracy is a system that leaves the means of production in private hands but assures that regulations, some public control of the economy, and extensive entitlements exist to keep everybody at a decent standard of living. This is often identified with the Nordic model, but most western democracies have had social democratic governments at some point in the last century.
This system is technically a capitalist one since the means of production are still privately owned. In the United States, however, we often refer to this as “socialism" anyway. This is why Scandinavian economists and officials keep correcting us when we call their counties socialist.
Since he has no interest in “seizing the means of production" this is what Bernie Sanders actually is. Most progressives in the United States, such as Elizabeth Warren, are social democrats in practice. In the same way, progressive organizations are essentially social democratic ones.
National socialism
National Socialists, also called Nazis. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
This is the Nazi ideology. The 'national' part designates it as separate from international socialism, which hoped to unite the global working class. Democratic socialist movements are typically international in this way, making Nazism opposed to them.
The socialism part is complicated. The original Nazi party platform called for nationalization, social welfare programs, land reform, a guaranteed standard of living, and profit sharing. Official rhetoric blamed supposedly Jewish dominated big business for the Great Depression.
As soon as the Nazis were in power, they decided they liked big business, dissolved trade unions, reduced social welfare, tied farmers to the land, and privatized parts of the economy. Regulations were stepped up to assure that companies followed government programs, but on the whole, the anti-capitalist elements of the party platform were forgotten.
The Nazis were also anti-communist because of their opposition to equality, class conflict, and social ownership of the means of production. They crushed the left at the first chance they got.
This combination of ideas may seem strange, but fascism is a peculiar ideology that allows for odd combinations of ideas. Nazism is typically viewed not as a socialist ideology but as a fascist one, and people claiming that the democratic socialists endorse the same policies as Nazis are mistaken.
People who support this ideology are Nazis, and no major American political figure currently is one.
Communism
Supporters of the Russian Communist Party mark the anniversary of Stalin's death. (MLADEN ANTONOV/AFP/Getty Images)
Communism is two things. The word is most commonly used to refer to the political ideology associated with the USSR. That ideology, officially called Marxism-Leninism, favors a dictatorship of the proletariat, state control of the economy, and a society organized toward removing the remnants of capitalism.
There are, however, a hundred strains of communism and a thousand significant figures who would protest this definition of communism. These people argue that what the USSR did wasn't really communism, that everything was great until Stalin showed up, or even that Russia didn't go far enough.
Communism is also the name for a hypothetical society that comes after the final socialist revolution when classes, the state, and money have faded away. Communist parties and governments are, at least in theory, working to create this society.
All communists are socialists since they want social ownership of means of production, but not all socialists are communists since they might not support the Soviet model or think the utopian society is possible. This distinction is important but often missed.
No major American political figures are communists, but there are a slew of small communist organizations.
Excavation of a triceratops skull in South Dakota.
David Schmidt, a geology professor at Westminster College, had just arrived in the South Dakota Badlands in summer 2019 with a group of students for a fossil dig when he received a call from the National Forest Service. A nearby rancher had discovered a strange object poking out of the ground. They wanted Schmidt to take a look.
"One of the very first bones that we saw in the rock was this long cylindrical bone," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "The first thing that came out of our mouths was, 'That kind of looks like the horn of a triceratops.'"
After authorities gave the go-ahead, Schmidt and a small group of students returned this summer and spent nearly every day of June and July excavating the skull.
Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
"We had to be really careful," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "We couldn't disturb anything at all, because at that point, it was under law enforcement investigation. They were telling us, 'Don't even make footprints,' and I was thinking, 'How are we supposed to do that?'"
Another difficulty was the mammoth size of the skull: about 7 feet long and more than 3,000 pounds. (For context, the largest triceratops skull ever unearthed was about 8.2 feet long.) The skull of Schmidt's dinosaur was likely a Triceratops prorsus, one of two species of triceratops that roamed what's now North America about 66 million years ago.
Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
The triceratops was an herbivore, but it was also a favorite meal of the Tyrannosaurus rex. That probably explains why the Dakotas contain many scattered triceratops bone fragments, and, less commonly, complete bones and skulls. In summer 2019, for example, a separate team on a dig in North Dakota made headlines after unearthing a complete triceratops skull that measured five feet in length.
Michael Kjelland, a biology professor who participated in that excavation, said digging up the dinosaur was like completing a "multi-piece, 3-D jigsaw puzzle" that required "engineering that rivaled SpaceX," he jokingly told the New York Times.
Morrison Formation in Colorado
James St. John via Flickr
The Badlands aren't the only spot in North America where paleontologists have found dinosaurs. In the 1870s, Colorado and Wyoming became the first sites of dinosaur discoveries in the U.S., ushering in an era of public fascination with the prehistoric creatures — and a competitive rush to unearth them.
Since, dinosaur bones have been found in 35 states. One of the most fruitful locations for paleontologists has been the Morrison formation, a sequence of Upper Jurassic sedimentary rock that stretches under the Western part of the country. Discovered here were species like Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Allosaurus, to name a few.
Triceratops illustration
| Credit: Nobu Tamura/Wikimedia Commons |
As for "Shady" (the nickname of the South Dakota triceratops), Schmidt and his team have safely transported it to the Westminster campus. They hope to raise funds for restoration, and to return to South Dakota in search of more bones that once belonged to the triceratops.
Studying dinosaurs helps scientists gain a more complete understanding of our evolution, illuminating a through-line that extends from "deep time" to present day. For scientists like Schmidt, there's also the simple joy of coming to face-to-face with a lost world.
"You dream about these kinds of moments when you're a kid," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "You don't ever think that these things will ever happen."
The following is an adapted excerpt from the book What's the Use? It is reprinted with permission of the author and Hachette Book Group.
What is mathematics for?
What is it doing for us, in our daily lives?
Not so long ago, there were easy answers to these questions. The typical citizen used basic arithmetic all the time, if only to check the bill when shopping. Carpenters needed to know elementary geometry. Surveyors and navigators needed trigonometry as well. Engineering required expertise in calculus.
Today, things are different. The supermarket checkout totals the bill, sorts out the special meal deal, adds the sales tax. We listen to the beeps as the laser scans the barcodes, and as long as the beeps match the goods, we assume the electronic gizmos know what they are doing. Many professions still rely on extensive mathematical knowledge, but even there, we have outsourced most of the mathematics to electronic devices with built-in algorithms.
My subject is conspicuous by its absence. The elephant isn't even in the room.
It would be easy to conclude that mathematics has become outdated and obsolete, but that view is mistaken. Without mathematics, today's world would fall apart. As evidence, I am going to show you applications to politics, the law, kidney transplants, supermarket delivery schedules, Internet security, movie special effects, and making springs. We will see how mathematics plays an essential role in medical scanners, digital photography, fiber broadband, and satellite navigation. How it helps us predict the effects of climate change; how it can protect us against terrorists and Internet hackers.
Remarkably, many of these applications rely on mathematics that originated for totally different reasons, often just the sheer fascination of following your nose. While researching this book, I was repeatedly surprised when I came across uses of my subject that I had never dreamed existed. Often, they exploited topics that I would not have expected to have practical applications, like space-filling curves, quaternions, and topology.
Mathematics is a boundless, hugely creative system of ideas and methods. It lies just beneath the surface of the transformative technologies that are making the twenty-first century totally different from any previous era — video games, international air travel, satellite communications, computers, the Internet, mobile phones. Scratch an iPhone, and you will see the bright glint of mathematics.
Please don't take that literally.
There is a tendency to assume that computers, with their almost miraculous abilities, are making mathematicians, indeed mathematics itself, obsolete. But computers no more displace mathematicians than the microscope displaced biologists. Computers change the way we go about doing mathematics, but mostly they relieve us of the tedious bits. They give us time to think, they help us search for patterns, and they add a powerful new weapon to help advance the subject more rapidly and more effectively.
In fact, a major reason why mathematics is becoming ever more essential is the ubiquity of cheap, powerful computers. Their rise has opened up new opportunities to apply mathematics to real-world issues. Methods that were hitherto impractical, because they needed too many calculations, have now become routine. The greatest mathematicians of the pencil-and-paper era would have flung up their hands in despair at any method requiring a billion calculations. Today, we routinely use such methods, because we have technology that can do the sums in a split second. Mathematicians have long been at the forefront of the computer revolution — along with countless other professions, I hasten to add. Think of George Boole, who pioneered the symbolic logic that forms the basis of current computer architecture. Think of Alan Turing, and his universal Turing machine, a mathematical system that can compute anything that is computable. Think of Muhammad al-Khwarizmi, whose algebra text of 820 AD emphasized the role of systematic computational procedures, now named after him: algorithms.
Most of the algorithms that give computers their impressive abilities are firmly based on mathematics. Many of the techniques concerned have been taken "off the shelf" from the existing store of mathematical ideas, such as Google's PageRank algorithm, which quantifies how important a website is and founded a multi-billion-dollar industry. Even the snazziest deep learning algorithm in artificial intelligence uses tried and tested mathematical concepts such as matrices and weighted graphs. A task as prosaic as searching a document for a particular string of letters involves, in one common method at least, a mathematical gadget called a finite-state automaton.
The involvement of mathematics in these exciting developments tends to get lost. So next time the media propel some miraculous new ability of computers to center stage, bear in mind that hiding in the wings there will be a lot of mathematics, and a lot of engineering, physics, chemistry, and psychology as well, and that without the support of this hidden cast of helpers, the digital superstar would be unable to strut its stuff in the spotlight.
The importance of mathematics in today's world is easily underestimated because nearly all of it goes on behind the scenes. Walk along a city street, and you are overwhelmed by signs proclaiming the daily importance of banks, greengrocers, supermarkets, fashion outlets, car repairs, lawyers, fast food, antiques, charities, and a thousand other activities and professions. You do not find a brass plaque announcing the presence of a consulting mathematician. Supermarkets do not sell you mathematics in a can.
Dig a little deeper, however, and the importance of mathematics quickly becomes apparent. The mathematical equations of aerodynamics are vital to aircraft design. Navigation depends on trigonometry. The way we use it today is different from how Christopher Columbus used it, because we embody the mathematics in electronic devices instead of pen, ink, and navigation tables, but the underlying principles are much the same. The development of new medicines relies on statistics to make sure the drugs are safe and effective. Satellite communications depend on a deep understanding of orbital dynamics. Weather forecasting requires the solution of equations for how the atmosphere moves, how much moisture it contains, how warm or cold it is, and how all of those features interact. There are thousands of other examples. We do not notice they involve mathematics, because we do not need to know that to benefit from the results.
