Anyone against socialism has a hard-on for capitalism. Or maybe that’s not quite it. Let me rephrase. Anyone who fears socialism doesn’t understand it. As a bleeding-heart liberal, myself, I would vote for Sanders or Warren in a heartbeat if I were American. Here in Canada, we have Trudeau. And as bumbling as he can be when he tries his very best to form a coherent sentence, I’d take him over the alternative any day. I would have voted for the New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh in the last federal election if I thought he had a chance. Instead, I voted strategically so that the Conservative leader at the time, Andrew Scheer, would disappear into the homophobic, racist hole he crawled out of. Liking or even tolerating Justin Trudeau is an unpopular opinion here in Calgary, which is often referred to as Canada’s Texas.

Good ol’ Calgary, Alberta is the hometown I left almost a decade ago and swore never to return to. And now, under what were at first ironic and temporary pre-tenses, I’m as shocked as anyone to find myself back here semi-permanently. A few years on the west coast followed by some time in London (England, not Ontario), was all it took to tip this Alberta girl over the center line and into the depths of the left. It didn’t take much; I was never right wing. My family is. They’ve made a living in the oil industry, whether from a downtown skyscraper in stiff white collars or breaking their backs on the Fort McMurray oil rigs. If there’s money to be made by ravishing the earth for oil, you can bet someone in my family’s done it. I was always the outsider, the black sheep who was motivated more by creativity than money. In Vancouver, I went to art school, and I’ve been scraping by in pursuit of creative fulfillment ever since. For me, money is not the goal. Having enough to get by while working for fulfillment is and always has been my modus operandi.

All that said, it should not come as a shock that I fantasize about democratic socialism. And my goodness, you should see the look on my family’s collective face when I say so. I can hear their skin crawling as I try to explain to them that I’m not against capitalism per se, that Canada isalreadya socialist state in many ways, and it would benefit from being more so. That the socialist practices already in place are what makes Canada among the top-rated countries to live. A decent welfare program, the recent emergency payments to help people out with losses due to Covid, universal health care (of a sort). All these things are what make Canada an attractive place to be. But what people think about when they hear socialism is communism.

To be clear, I am notagainst the free market. The capitalistic free market we’re familiar with here in North America is far from perfect, but I can’t argue with its appeal. I like to believe the motive of capitalism is to foster a healthy and well-oiled economy, which in turn provides ample opportunity by way of jobs while encouraging innovation and healthy competition. That’s what I tell myself anyway, as I unpack my third KitchenAid Stand Mixer attachment (it’s an ice cream maker.) Am I a hypocrite? Aren’t we all? As my homemade pistachio ice cream churns away in the background, I must explain: my problem is not with capitalism itself. My issue is with the demonstrable and frankly insane wealth gap for which late-stage capitalism is solely responsible. These days, capitalism and corporate greed are one and the same. And corporate greed might be the single most callous and threatening presence in the modern world (and boy oh boy, does it have contenders.)

The right loves to paint a picture of socialism as a “threat to democracy”, which is hilarious. No true socialist state would even be possible without democracy. The very definition of a socialist state is one where business (production, distribution and exchange), is either owned or regulated by the community as a whole. How else would this consensus be achieved if not through democracy?

Why are so many people so vehemently against democratic socialism? Here are the two most common arguments I’ve heard:

1. Socialism is the same as communism and communism is evil.

2. Government subsidies and social programs make people lazy.

Let’s take a closer look at argument number one. First of all, socialism and communism are not the same thing. Let me repeat that. Socialism and communism are not the same. They do share one common element: both ideologies work to remove the notion of class privilege and value equality for all. The main difference is that socialism does this while keeping hold of democracy and individual freedoms, while communism tends to achieve an equal state through authoritarianism.

There are many differences between socialism and communism, but here are the two distinctions I find most important:

1. Under a democratic socialist government, individual liberty is important. Human rights, including free speech, are protected. Under an authoritarian communist regime, the reigns of conformity are tight. Personal liberty and free speech, especially views that are contrary to the governments’, are cause for punishment.

2. With democratic socialism, the market runs under a mixture of both public and private sectors. The state may nationalize essential industries like transport and energy, but most other sectors remain private. With communism, the state controls all industry with some, but very limited exceptions.

People who balk at the mention of socialism, when pressed, often refer with bulged-out eyes to historical villains like Hitler and Stalin. But guess what? Even though they themselves claimed to be, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were not socialist. And guess what else? America is! Not completely, of course. America, like pretty much every other first world country, is a mixture of socialism and capitalism. It’s interesting because by definition, capitalism and socialism clash. We’ve been over this, but just to drive it home; socialism is where the market is owned or at least partially controlled by the state via the community as a whole. Capitalism, on the other hand, is where the market is owned by a select few private individuals. Hello, one percent. Even though Hitler, Stalin and other genocidal authoritarians were self-proclaimed socialists, it is impossible for a dictatorship to be socialist. Because, once again, socialism requires democracy.

Make sense? Not really? It’s confusing, for sure. The definition of socialism has been up for debate for centuries. One thing historians can agree on is that the explanation of socialism has morphed many, many times throughout history’s long and complicated relationship with it. Nowadays, socialism is all too often and incorrectly used as a synonym of Marxism, and in turn, communism. When actually, socialism was first conceptualized long before Karl Marx. The ideals at the root of socialism can be traced to as far back as the hunters and gatherers of B.C. times. It’s okay if you didn’t know any of this. My conspiratorial brain thinks big industry (IE: capitalism), wants us to have a foggy, incorrect and even demonized view of socialism. Plus, it’s an easy mistake to make. The Nazi Party was essentially a nickname for the official party, the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. Does the right love to use this fun little tidbit as fodder to propagandize the dangers of the left? Yes, yes it does. But now that we can look back in hindsight with an established, coherent idea of what socialism actually means, it turns out those dictator dudes were not it. So, say it with me. Socialism is not communism. Now, onto argument number two.

If unemployed people can get by on government subsidies, they won’t have ambition or motivation to find a job. People would rather sit on their asses while collecting their easy-earned money, chuckling manically to themselves having figured out how to beat the system. Yeah, right. I concede there will always be deadbeats. There will always be people looking for the path of least resistance, lazy and unmotivated, happy to scrape by doing the bare minimum. These people exist, but they are the minority. The argument that financial aid makes people less ambitious is an easy one to make, though much harder to prove. In 2015, a study conducted by economists from MIT and Harvard randomly tested welfare programs in seven different countries and found “no systematic evidence that cash transfer programs discourage work.” In fact, it looks more like the opposite is true. In another study, economists found that giving cash grants for education to learn in-demand skilled trades to young and unemployed people in Uganda increased their earnings by 38%. Sure, both studies were conducted in the developing world, but there are plenty of other examples here in North America. For one, there is substantial data showing that America’s biggest welfare subsidy program, the Earned Income Tax Credit, encourages work. Data shows that social programs to assist the poor can and do decrease unemployment rates.

On the flip side, there will always be people born into wealth and privilege: trust fund babies who’ve never had to lift a finger to get exactly what they’re “entitled” to. It’s nothing more than the luck of the draw. Born white? Check. Born an heir to a corporate empire? Check. Ivy league education paid for entirely by a trust fund with money to spare? Check. It would take a lot of missteps to fuck that situation up. And alternatively, it would take a boatload of the right place, right time kind of luck to break the cycle if you’re born with the same amount of disadvantage.

I hate to break it to you, but the American Dream is a lie. The system is rigged. All you have to do is work hard, put your nose to the grindstone, and you’ll dig your way out of generational poverty often caused by systemic racism? Bull. Shit. As author Robert H. Frank summarizes in his book Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, “Luck is far more important to success in this life than we imagine.” That’s it in a nutshell. Luck matters. If it’s on your side, you’ll probably succeed whether you work hard or not. If the dice are against you, your chances of success are slim, even if you work your bones to dust. Harvard published a paper a few years ago outlining the public perception of things like economic mobility (the ability to move from the poorest class to the richest), and economic fairness. Nearly half of Americans surveyed believe lack of effort is the main reason for being poor.

The problem of wealth disparity in North America is shocking, and capitalism is entirely to blame. What’s the solution? No one, including myself, wants to be rid of capitalism entirely. But can a deeper form of socialism and capitalism co-exist? Like I mentioned earlier, they do. Even America has socialist policies. Still not sold? Look at Scandinavia. The democratic socialist Nordic countries have the highest standard of living in the world. Their residents pay high tax and reap the rewards of free health care, free education, and a society that is there for them if their circumstances change. If it was true that socialism makes people lazy, then why is Sweden the second most creative country in the world? Sure, America is high up on the list, but if you consider the population difference between the countries, it’s not all that impressive.

Capitalism isn’t the problem. Greed is. Unfortunately, our current system of deeply embedded capitalism and the unrelenting goal of corporations to grow at any cost allows greed to take the helm. Such an ugly trait, it’s shocking how so many people sprint towards it, paying no mind to the living, breathing human beings they must trample on to get it. That’s the thing about greed, though, about wealth; more is a moving target. It’s never enough.

What I want to know is — what’s wrong with enough? Wouldn’t the world be a happier, more livable place if everyone had enough instead of a tiny elite group having entirely too much?

Ashley J.J. White is a Canadian writer of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and critical essays. She is currently in the process of completing a BA in English, during which she hopes to further hone her craft. She has attended numerous creative writing workshops and intensives in Canada and the UK. Her work has recently been published by The Rainbow Poems, North by Northeast, Move Me Poetry, Know Thyself Heal Thyself, and more.