Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

President Donald Trump declared that America will never be socialist. He’s beating up a strawman, since there has never been a fully socialist country. That’s because, throughout history, every country, whether it considers itself socialist or capitalist, engages in capitalism to some degree, which is essentially the existence of a marketplace, where goods, services, information, and labor are exchanged.

Regardless of what is exchanged, everything exchanged becomes a commodity whose value shifts in line with the demand for it. The dynamics of the market also result in the gradual accumulation of wealth for some while denying essential items, such as housing and food, to those who cannot afford them.

While Wikipedia identifies two dozen different kinds of socialism, two primary approaches support its goal of upholding a society’s welfare. One approach is to realistically regulate the marketplace to ensure it provides everyone in society with their basic needs, allowing them to lead a satisfactory life. The other is pursuing the ideal communal society without a marketplace that forces competition for obtaining basic needs.

Capitalism is primarily the unavoidable dynamic of the marketplace and socialism is the inevitable response to it.

Capitalism’s active practice is maintaining a marketplace to exchange goods, services, and access to them through a price system. Money has the greatest exchangeability value because it allows for the acquisition of various types of resources, one of the most critical being political power. However, exchanges can be made through a barter system, in which tangible items, including human labor, can be directly exchanged between seller and buyer. This was the dominant system before the advent of written history.

Capitalism’s belief system is limited to preserving the marketplace because it results in greater accumulation of resources that can be used for many purposes. There is no aspiration to create a new society; rather, it is to protect the current market-based one. It is a continuation of Adam Smith’s philosophy, as presented in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which appeared just as the Industrial Age was dawning in the late 1700s. He believed that individuals pursuing their self-interest in the marketplace would benefit society through increased productivity and wealth.

Socialism as a practice can be seen as a popular response to the marketplace system that replaced the barter system. It aimed to regulate the marketplace so that no concentration of material or social advantages occurred to the extent that it disrupted a community’s cohesion.
Socialism, as a pronounced belief system challenging the marketplace, emerged in the 19th century, when the term “socialist” was introduced. It was first used to describe the effort to create cooperative businesses and communities as an alternative to capitalism’s marketplace economy.

The marketplace created civilization.

Although the term “socialist” was not used before 1800, some scholars argue that the marketplace spurred civilization. It also stratified the population along divisions of labor and the ability to obtain resources that could be converted into political power.

Christopher Ryan, author of Civilized to Death – The Price of Progress, argues that the development of agriculture led to the rise of civilization based on individual competition for personal gain through institutions that benefit from expanded commerce. Without directly mentioning marketplace dynamics, he describes them when he notes that the decline in community health resulted from its division into hierarchical........

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