The terms included in this Glossary do not represent the last word on the issues that they describe. They represent the experience and understanding of the author and are open to alternative definitions, changes, additions and suggestions. Words do not have meanings all by themselves. They only have the meanings that we attribute to them, and these attributions occur in the flux of everyday life – in the street, as it were. The meanings that are given to words vary throughout society. What a thing means to one group may mean something different to another group, and there is a contiinuing struggle going on in society to determine what things really mean. The meanings that "stick" and are generally accepted as the true meaning of a word are the result of this struggle between competing groups. Not all social groups have equal power to determine which meanings prevail. Usually the meanings that we accept as true and real are the meanings that are held by the most powerful groups in sociey. By controlling the meaning of words, these groups are able to maintain and retain their power. Some words are very important in this respect. Words like Democracy, Freedom, Authority, Responsibility etc. are very powerful because their attributed meanings help to shape the way in which we see everything else. This is why the struggle to define the meaning of these words is very fierce and often brings other words into question - words like Ideology, for instance. I were to ask you for the differences in your own personal definitions of, say Communism and Socialism you would probably say that Socialism is a bit looser, more flexible, a bit “fluffier” as it were, than Communism. You might say that Communism had more rules, was a bit more strict. You would probably be slightly more sympathetic to the former rather than the latter.
The Dictionary suggests that Socialism is:
“The political and economic theory of social organisation which advocates that community as a whole should own and control the means of production, distribution and exchange: policy and practice based on this theory.”
It suggests that Communism is:
“System of society with vesting property in the community: each member working for the common benefit according to his capacity and receiving according to his needs.”
Given that “property” is also a “means of production” – it produces equity and capital that allows for an accumulation of more equity and capital, and that “ownership” implies property, then it is difficult to distinguish between the two, and your own definitions are clearly not based upon any dictionary understanding. So (presuming I am right in my predictions) what are they based on?
The answer is that they are based upon common, everyday understandings of the two entities. And where do these common, everyday understanding come from? They come from the owners of the means of production of information and knowledge – the Schools, the media, the Church etc. The next question is: Why do these institutions portray the differences between Communism and Socialism so vaguely and at the same time so differently?” To answer this we have to look at history, and particularly at the Cold War, to see that America spent billions of dollars during the 1950s and 1960s portraying Communism as an evil, and the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire. The legacy of this spending – through all of the media over the entire planet is a vague dis-ease on the part of most people when they think about Communism. During that time, every image of the Soviet Union portrayed in the West tended to be dark, misty, sinister, brutal, cruel etc. For almost 50 years it was all but impossible to find Western portrayals of the Soviet Union in a positive light. This did not happen accidentally. In the 1950s, the United States Government spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting American cultural activities in Europe. Jazz musicians like Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis etc., made their names in Europe. Paris was the centre of this cultural activity. Some of my best friends were beneficiaries of this cultural war. For a war it was. The American State Department had decided that it had to win the hearts and minds of the European Community to the American ideology of capitalism and to overcome the threat of spreading Communism, and it set out to promote American culture to Europeans in a very direct and state-supported way. It succeeded very well, and today, the legacy of that effort is to be found in the attitudes that people have differently towards Communism and Socialism.
Meanings, then, are not only not given, but they are socially constructed – that is to say that they are the object, the site, of a struggle between competing groups in society for power. These groups are struggling for the right and power to determine that their meanings should be the ones that prevail and become part of the common stock of knowledge and everyday discourse and conversation. The meanings that do prevail are those that are determined by the most powerful group – the dominant culture. And those are the meanings that we have today. As Marx said long ago:
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas; i.e., the class, which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production...”
It follows from all of this that meanings are continually contested and contestable, and this glossary is intended to stimulate and promote discussion of the meanings portrayed.
In a colonial country like Aotearoa-New Zealand, the meanings that prevail are those of the colonizer – the pakeha (usually British). As part of the ongoing process of decolonisation, tino rangatiratanga – call it what you will – it is important that the received meanings are continually challenged in the context of the system of oppression under which they originate and have prospered. |
Glossary 
