Socialist principles are an unloved entry in the contemporary lexicon of Western political thought.

Neoliberalism is the dominant ideology, riding roughshod over ideas that societies should be mutually-supportive communities with progressive economies dedicated to the well-being and flourishing of all.

From the 1980s, a neoliberal ideology has been deployed by big banks, big business, media magnates, and their political cheerleaders and puppets to purge the capitalist economies of the last residues of what they deride as its socialist residues. Among its many negative consequences has been the shift of capital into the grasping hands of the wealthy few. The state has been stymied as an agency for nurturing the well-being of the whole nation. Poverty levels have risen; they are unlikely to fall in the short- or medium-term, and anything could happen in the long term. Wages are stagnating or falling, even as CEO pay levels go through the roof. This is what Thomas Picketty describes as “hypercapitalism” – an ugly mixture of rampant greed, rapidly growing socio-economic inequality, and the cancellation of redistributive and social justice measures. What is needed today is a powerful antidote to the toxic consequences of neoliberalism’s possessive individualism.

The problem is that while operating under the guise of socialism, a range of ruthless dictatorships around the world have appropriated socialist ideas for their own perverse purposes. The Communist Party of the defunct Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party, and the communist governments of North Korea and Vietnam, for example, have all traduced socialist ideals, drafting them into jingoistic slogans that totally distort the moral content of socialist thought. This is the same thing as Christian nationalists in America appropriating genuine Christian principles to support their neoliberal agenda. Only an ingénu would be seduced by such flimsy ideological facades.

Socialism’s philosophical roots can be found in the “golden rule”: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. For socialists this means: Care for others as others care for you. Socialism’s ethical principles are grounded in such values as co-operation, compassion, conviviality, community, and cosmopolitanism. Their primary focus is social justice. These principles are not exclusive to socialism, but they are at the forefront of its ethical thinking. It’s time to return to these ethical injunctions, caring for others as others care for us. It’s also time to clarify the role that the state has to play in establishing and sustaining the structures by which mutual caring in society is extended to all, not just to the privileged few.

In addition to recalling the ethical basis of socialism, this also requires rethinking related moral philosophies that have affinities with socialism, including philosophical liberalism’s delicate balancing of self-regarding and other-regarding actions (John Stuart Mill), Burkean conservatism which, like socialism, seeks to protect the fragile interconnectedness of human societies. For a while it seemed that the emergence of communitarian ideas might be the beginnings of a contemporary quasi-socialist revival (see Amitai Etzioni, _The New Golden Rule: Community and morality in a democratic society_). However, this hopeful project became bogged down in the confused and bumbling politics of “the third way” as practised by leaders like Tony Blair and Barack Obama whose instincts were more neoliberal than communitarian, much less socialist. It was soon brushed aside by loud-mouthed neoliberal ideologues, many of whom occupied the economics departments of universities.

The problem is that the very term socialism is now so misunderstood, so misappropriated, and so laden with negative meanings, that we have to find another term for it. Various attempts have been made in the past to demonstrate that socialist principles can operate successfully within democratic political systems and enhance them. Thomas Pickering has proposed “participatory socialism” for it, to link far-reaching redistributive policy-making to a form of democracy that transcends the mechanisms of representative government. On this reckoning, representative government is accurately portrayed as an arrangement that facilitates the circulation of power elites in and out of government, detached from the interests and needs of the majority of citizens. Representative government is only a pale shadow of what an authentic democratic government should be.

Finding another term for socialism will not be easy. The economic monopoly that is the chief feature of state-capitalist societies (for example, the old Soviet Union, in China, Vietnam, or in North Korea) results in authoritarian governments dominated by party apparatchiks and business oligarchs, such as we see in contemporary Russia’s kleptocracy. Their signal characteristics are venality, brutality, and the merciless persecution of critics and oppositions.

In the contemporary world, advocates of socialist principles have to make the case that an updated version of those principles is capable of operating humanely and successfully in a mixed economy. The way to achieve this will be to establish a strong public service sector in the economy to break neoliberalism’s iron grip on hypercapitalism’s privatised and deregulated chaos by bringing effective competition right up to the neoliberalised private sector. It would curb the rent-seeking impulses of the private sector and act as a regulatory brake on its monopolistic and profiteering tendencies. Of course, the public sector would need to have ironclad legal and constitutional immunity from interfering politicians, especially from reactionary defenders and beneficiaries of the hypercapitalist status quo.

This calls for a major reimagining of the philosophical foundations of socialist thought, to drag us out from under the ruins of neoliberalism and the populism on which it feeds. So what do we name such a project? Social liberalism? Public enterprise liberalism? It seems — at least for now — that it has to be labelled anything but socialism, even though the philosophical underpinnings of socialist thought offer the most ethically and socially responsible exit from the ideological trap of neoliberalism in which we are all presently ensnared.