Frances Goldin (1924–2020)

This is a book consisting of a series of essays about a possibility of a socialist USA. It is divided up into three sections – why capitalism is bad, what a socialist USA would mean and how to get there.

The U.S. is more or less infamous for its anti-communism agenda; and for many, socialism is synonymous with communism. In a way, they are right as communism is a branch within the socialist tree. But because of the propaganda, mostly done in the 50's and 60's during the Cold War, most Americans view socialism as something bad. They instantly think about Mao's China or Kim Jong-un's North Korea. Because of that, this book definitely caught my interest right away. That's very likely because I personally stand by socialism and its values; I'm not at all supportive of capitalism and therefore, to read about ideas about how to make one of the largest capitalist countries into a socialist country was way too interesting to pass up on.

But I felt the book spent most of its time trying to battle the ”socialism equals communism” thought concept – and it did an awful job at actually succeeding. There's quite a few socialist countries and yet, the book keeps mentioning communist nations without trying to explain the obvious and very big differences between socialism and its daughter communism. That being said, none of those countries are truly communist either. They are at best corrupt communist countries which more or less just means they are non-communist nations claiming to be. I felt that was a big flaw in the book because they were quite bad at trying to get their points and arguments across as to how and why socialism would succeed as the main ideology in the US.

The essays varied in quality quite a lot; somewhere really good and it was for those I pushed myself to finish the book. It definitely contains a lot of interesting thoughts, point of views and ideas. I do feel like I'm taking something with me after finishing the book, but none of them really have anything to do with why the US should become a socialist nation, how it will be done and how it will benefit the community in many ways. There's a lot of talk about benefits, yes, but there's a lot of talk and few suggestions. That does disappoint me as that is what the book claims to be. How to make the US socialist. It mostly contains a bunch of dreams of how it could look like. But how do we get there? And what is really the difference between socialism and communism? I doubt many who didn't know before reading the book truly knows it now.… (mere)