Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker is managing editor of Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture. He is the editor of seven books, his most recent being Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy (with Michael J. Thompson) and The Political Thought of African Independence. He has published in Salon, Democratic Left, Dissent, New Politics, and elsewhere.

Michael J. Thompson is Professor of Political Science at William Paterson University. His most recent books include The Specter of Babel: A Reconstruction of Political Judgment as well as the forthcoming, Twilight of the Self: Cybernetic Society and the Eclipse of Autonomy.

Fifty Shades of Red

Ian Williams

Struggling to define pornography, a US Supreme Court judge famously declared "I know it when I see it". "Socialism", democratic or otherwise, is equally resistant to objective definition, not least since its various forms, whether in theory or in practice, are no more scientific or falsifiable than Scientology or phrenology. Like most social sciences it suffers from a surfeit of subjectivity. National Socialism, Arab Socialism, Christian Socialism, African Socialism, revolutionary socialism and democratic socialism have little in common except a shared pretension to look after ordinary people, or at least some of them.

As that acute political philosopher Humpty Dumpty said, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less". When Alice riposted, "the question is whether you can make words mean so many different things", Comrade Dumpty countered, "The question is which is to be master-that's all". And he had it exactly right: all too often the real issue been mastery over polemical enemies, not least by using one's own idiosyncratic definitions. Populists across the ages have used the rhetoric of socialism to excuse their grabs for power and their ruthless retention of it afterwards.

Many avowed socialists, particularly but not exclusively on the Leninist wing, adopt the anathematic approach to socialism. They have lists of features that are "unsocialist" - or not really socialist, excluding their rivals and including their allies. Anything that falls short of absolute perfection, as defined in this ad-hoc way, is not the real thing.

We self-styled advocates for "democratic socialism" usually realize that the term is a tautology, and only use it because so many authoritarian regimes and parties have misappropriated both words and abused them in an Orwellian way. Any rational socialist would accept that barbed wire and socialism are antithetical - citizens should not be held in paradise against their will. If you need border guards and police to stop people running from it, then it is unlikely to be socialism as we want to know it.

Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker is managing editor of Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture. He is the editor of seven books, his most recent being Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy (with Michael J. Thompson) and The Political Thought of African Independence. He has published in Salon, Democratic Left, Dissent, New Politics, and elsewhere.

Michael J. Thompson is Professor of Political Science at William Paterson University. His most recent books include The Specter of Babel: A Reconstruction of Political Judgment as well as the forthcoming, Twilight of the Self: Cybernetic Society and the Eclipse of Autonomy.

Fifty Shades of Red

Ian Williams

Struggling to define pornography, a US Supreme Court judge famously declared "I know it when I see it". "Socialism", democratic or otherwise, is equally resistant to objective definition, not least since its various forms, whether in theory or in practice, are no more scientific or falsifiable than Scientology or phrenology. Like most social sciences it suffers from a surfeit of subjectivity. National Socialism, Arab Socialism, Christian Socialism, African Socialism, revolutionary socialism and democratic socialism have little in common except a shared pretension to look after ordinary people, or at least some of them.

As that acute political philosopher Humpty Dumpty said, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less". When Alice riposted, "the question is whether you can make words mean so many different things", Comrade Dumpty countered, "The question is which is to be master-that's all". And he had it exactly right: all too often the real issue been mastery over polemical enemies, not least by using one's own idiosyncratic definitions. Populists across the ages have used the rhetoric of socialism to excuse their grabs for power and their ruthless retention of it afterwards.

Many avowed socialists, particularly but not exclusively on the Leninist wing, adopt the anathematic approach to socialism. They have lists of features that are "unsocialist" - or not really socialist, excluding their rivals and including their allies. Anything that falls short of absolute perfection, as defined in this ad-hoc way, is not the real thing.

We self-styled advocates for "democratic socialism" usually realize that the term is a tautology, and only use it because so many authoritarian regimes and parties have misappropriated both words and abused them in an Orwellian way. Any rational socialist would accept that barbed wire and socialism are antithetical - citizens should not be held in paradise against their will. If you need border guards and police to stop people running from it, then it is unlikely to be socialism as we want to know it.