Socialism as a contested label
In the excerpts, “socialism” is treated less as a fixed doctrine than as a word whose meaning has moved over time. Bob Zadek introduces John Judis, author of The Socialist Awakening, as an avowed socialist and frames the episode around what the term means as it is used today rather than several hundred years ago. Judis, described as a socialist since the 1960s, says he was once an orthodox Marxist who believed workers should own and control the means of production, that there should be no capitalist class, that markets should disappear, and that central planning should prevail — a vision he characterizes as the Soviet Union plus democracy. He dates his disenchantment to the 1970s and to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and says he began rethinking socialism in the 1990s under the influence of the historian Marty Sklar. Is Socialism Still a Dirty Word? (2021)
Judis describes the socialism he now writes about as something developing within capitalism rather than a stage to follow it, visible in public ownership of energy, transportation, and healthcare, and in the New Deal itself. He connects its recent popularity to Bernie Sanders’s 2015–16 primary campaign, noting that Sanders won more votes than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton combined among 18-to-29-year-olds, and that roughly 50% of the young — a generation that did not grow up during the Cold War — say they prefer socialism to capitalism. He cautions that the polls depend on how questions are asked, and that among Democrats perhaps 15 to 20% prefer the socialist label to progressive, liberal, or moderate. Is Socialism Still a Dirty Word? (2021)
The communes and “scientific socialism”
Joshua Muravchik, author of Heaven on Earth: The Rise, the Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism, tells Zadek that the early socialist communes were of two kinds. Religious communes sometimes shared property, but their purpose was worship rather than socialism, and some did quite well. By contrast, about 40 to 50 communes created by socialists to experience or prove socialism — New Harmony among them — broke down very fast; historians who studied them put the median lifespan of a socialist commune at two years. Muravchik calls them a uniform disaster. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
Muravchik argues that Marx and Engels arrived after these experiments had already failed and knew it — Engels in particular attended meetings of Owen’s society and read its newspaper. Their response, in Muravchik’s account, was to label the failed experimenters “utopian socialists” and to claim for themselves the discovery of “scientific socialism,” which he calls a prophecy and really a religion. He observes that the people Marx and Engels dismissed were in fact the experimental ones, and that the experiments had clear results: they all failed. Zadek extends the point to the present, saying that when today’s Democratic Socialists, AOC and Bernie Sanders, are asked how they will pay for their Utopia, they treat it as a detail to be dealt with later. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
Coercion, the welfare-state compromise, and the kibbutz exception
Zadek puts it to Muravchik that socialism, having always failed when tried voluntarily, requires force to have any chance, and that longer-lived socialist countries exist only through its use. Muravchik agrees in substance, saying Lenin and those who emulated him — Mao, Fidel, Ho Chi Minh — understood they could not get people to surrender their freedom and so made them surrender at the point of a gun. He then describes the democratic socialists — the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party, and the German and Scandinavian Social Democratic parties — who, once voted in, began to nationalize industries and take away elements of private property. In each case, he says, economies started sinking, and the socialists themselves settled for a compromise: welfare states with higher taxes and new social insurance, paid for out of wealth produced in the private sector, which they left alone. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
Zadek describes Sweden as a capitalist country with a vigorous free market and substantial private property, using the free market as the engine that drives the welfare system, and asks whether the American democratic socialists have declared war on that system. Muravchik says they certainly do not embrace it, and that Ocasio-Cortez is even more strident than Sanders. He also distinguishes his own youthful socialism: as leader of the Young People’s Socialist League, a group Sanders briefly belonged to, he took the democratic part to heart and hated violent, dictatorial regimes that called themselves socialist, drawing a thick line between his ideal and those autocrats — a line he says Sanders and AOC do not draw. He cites Sanders’s praise of the Soviet Union after a visit, his mid-1990s interview calling the Sandinistas’ work magnificent, his praise of Castro after Castro’s death, and the refusal of Sanders and AOC to criticize Maduro. He notes that AOC and Rashida Tlaib belong to the Democratic Socialists of America, whose website carries the slogan “Solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution.” Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
Muravchik offers the Israeli kibbutzim as the one counter-example of socialist communes that really did work — about 200 of them, voluntary, accommodating different needs and wishes, and an important part of Israel. They succeeded, he says, because the settlers were passionate Zionists, part of rescuing the Jewish people after the Holocaust and building a country where Jews could be safe, and could therefore tolerate a system in which everything was shared and everyone was involved in everyone else’s business. After a couple of generations or several decades, almost all voted to transform themselves to a free-market basis. Zadek summarizes the lesson as an overriding passion for Zionism supplying energy that pure socialist society does not. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
Fiscal collapse and the entitlement warning
In a separate episode, Zadek’s monologue warns that 43 cents out of every dollar then being spent was borrowed, that the country was bankrupt, and that without significant reform of Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and defense spending — and a radical reduction in spending — the country would not be viable, with the currency worth nothing. He frames the stakes as liberty, freedom, and personal responsibility, and says developed countries throughout civilization implode when they spend more than they have. He then tells his guest, Gary, that on return he will give the audience the same goosebumps he gave Zadek on foreign policy, troops in Europe, and troops in Asia. A Better America (2010)
Across episodes: the same question, differently argued
The excerpts show the socialism question argued in more than one episode, with the treatment changing between them. In 2019, Muravchik and Zadek treat socialism as a system that cannot survive voluntarily and must rely on coercion, with the kibbutzim as a voluntary exception that dissolved once its Zionist motive faded. In 2021, Judis — himself a former orthodox Marxist — presents a socialism that has already abandoned central planning for something like advanced social democracy, with markets retained and industries regulated or nationalized only if necessary, and locates its rise in Sanders’s popularity among the young. The earlier episode’s emphasis on coercion and the later episode’s emphasis on an evolving, softer definition are advanced by different guests, and the excerpts do not show either position being revised in light of the other.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the outcome of any election, the text or fate of any bill, or the holding of any case. They do not give a founding date or founding principle for the Democratic Socialists of America beyond the slogan quoted, nor do they describe the internal workings of any socialist party. Several passages break off mid-thought — Zadek’s monologue ends as he hands off to Gary, and the Judis episode cuts off at a section heading — and nothing beyond those points is reported here.