Yves here. Funny that when the workers, who’ve been on the losing side of a class war for quite some time, finally start to act like they might do something about it, the official minders start waving the “socialism” and even “communism” words as if they are magic talismans that will ward off demands for more just outcomes.
Having said that, propaganda does work, so it is possible that a sustained barrage of demonization will sway more than a few opinions. But media savvy young people are already predisposed towards socialism, having seen what our current tooth and claw variant of capitalism has done to their parents and peers, so they are likely to have a fair bit of resistance to all-too-obviously-self-interested messaging.
Socialism also covers a very broad swathe of policies and economic arrangements, so it would behoove erstwhile socialists to be ready to debunk caricatures or cherry picking and explain why. But perhaps most important is not to get defensive when accused of being a socialist, even is all you want is pretty tame redistribution and a revival of New Deal type policies, and flip the discussion: “So you like our current system of socialism for the rich [list many examples]. Why not less socialism for people who don’t need it and more for you and me?”
I do agree with the thrust of this piece, that is whether you want to call it socialism or not, the time is overdue for a broad-based restructuring of economic arrangements (even charitably assuming we have time for that with climate change and mass species dieoffs as existential threats), and that merely seeking concessions from the well off is inadequate.
One of my favorite anecdote along those lines, albeit in a very different context, is now nearly 35 years old. I wasn’t present, but I know the perp personally, and this is exactly the sort of thing she would have said.
The conference was on achieving work/life balance. A big focus was on what policies to ask or employers and how to go about getting them implemented.
My colleague, arguably the most successful glass-ceiling breaker and best paid woman in the room by being the first partner in M&A on Wall Street, stopped the conversation by saying: “Nothing will change until women own the means of production.”
But a completely different line of thought is to look at Japan, and marvel at how well they’ve coped with what conventional economists depicted as certain ruin, such as falling birthrates and a resulting aging society, hostility to immigration, borderline deflation and lousy growth. Japan alway had one of the most socialist versions of capitalism by virtue of giving much higher priority to job creation and stability (the latter of which was greatly weakened in the aftermath of its monster commercial/residential real estate bubbles) over growth and profits. Even though Japan has signs of distress, like homelessness and a young precariat, they are pale shadows of what you see in the Anglosphere. From a recent FT Alphaville article:
But here are three things we think might have helped Japan weather Japanification.
It has a lot of very old businesses
Japan is a society characterised by longevity. Usually ageing is seen as an economic problem, however in some instances it’s a plus — at least when it comes to businesses that have experienced more than a few peaks and troughs. According to the book, of the 5500-odd companies that are 200+ years old, more than 3,000 are Japanese.
Pringle puts this resilience down to less focus on short-term profit, and more “selfless dedication to service, abhorrence of pecuniary motives, modesty, a ceaseless and untiring search for perfection and endless patience.”
Immaterialism
When Pringle writes about the US version of money, he begins with the Jazz Age, when money first became both an enabler of desires and a source of anxiety:
Americans treat money as a means of realising their ideals and way of life . . .
. . . It would create not only a new economic model but also a new type of individual — the powerful, predominantly female, shopper. Americans would show the world that money, imaginatively used, could fuel capitalism . . .
. . . It was an age when optimism and creativity in commerce, marketing and finance were shadowed by doubt and anxiety about the effect of the new consumer society and its money-centrism on the human psyche and on social well being. In these ways too, it would prove typical of the modern era.
In Japan, on the other hand, “there is less emphasis on monetary measures of success”. One result of which is that “money is not a free standing object that you have and can do what you will with.” There is less inner turmoil — and social conflict.
Skilled conservationism
This lack of focus on material wealth has, in turn, led to Japanese culture wasting little:
Americans make an extravagance of virtue; they make a cult of waste, developing civilisation on the principle of rapid replacement of everything they use in daily life. That explains why Americans encourage individualism and democracy, whereas the Japanese do not; under their conditions, individual initiative ‘would have been disruptive’. They subordinate the individual to the group and discourage competition. The aim: a stable society.
Yves again. There are so many small things we could do to make our communities more humane, but they go against the grain of the times because they’d still require a modest level of public oversight and they’d undermine private sector grifting. For instance, I was visiting a small town in Italy. One of its amenities was a center for older people, open during the day. It was in an older building and the lobby looked clean and comfortably shabby. I could see a lot of magazines on the entrance table. I was told it had games, a modest library, TV, coffee and snacks. But can’t have that here. It would compete with Starbucks!
Now to the main event:
By Josie Sparrow, a philosopher, a writer, and an artist. She co-edits the radical journal New Socialist and blogs at peachtreepeartree.com. Originally published at openDemocracy
We’re often told that we can’t afford a better society. Even the most modest of reformist proposals, like those contained in the UK Labour Party’s 2019 election manifesto, are presented by our media and institutions as absurdly utopian. Despite the fact that many of its proposed policies would only have restored 2010 levels of public spending (with some, such as arts spending, falling short of even that), Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), claimed in an interview with ITV News that it was “impossible to overstate just how extraordinary this manifesto [is] in terms of the sheer scale of money being spent.”
The IFS’s own analysis of the Labour manifesto repeatedly presents all public spending initiatives as “giveaways” (a word mentioned five times in their initial response alone). This echoed the criticisms leveraged by former Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable. In an article for the Independent, Cable urged politicians to “stop pretending to be Santa handing out shiny presents.” Despite the performance of sensible neutrality, Cable’s reference to “the generous man with the white beard” made his intended target plain.
What were these “giveaways,” these “shiny presents”? A properly-funded healthcare system in which sick children wouldn’t have to lie on hospital floors? An end to the punishing austerity regime that sees precious lives extinguished all too early – like Errol Graham, who slowly starved to death after his ESA payments were stopped?
A chance, a glimmer of a chance, that we might be able to mitigate the ongoing ecological collapse? A functional, affordable transport system? An end to homelessness and the mental health crisis that claims so many lives? A complete overhaul of housing policy to ensure that the sort of wilful negligence that caused the Grenfell fire could never happen again?
What kind of system could consider these things unaffordable luxuries, and why?
“Cheapness,” Jason W Moore observes, “is violence.” Capitalism “expresses the ethos of the cheapskate;” it “feeds on the bodies of finite lives and labours.” The bean-counting logic of capitalism has no column in its ledger that can account for joy or flourishing, or the affirmation of life. And, as Andrew Key has pointed out, “to delimit the possible in advance, with a world-weary shake of the head, is also to imbue the status quo with powers of permanence and inevitability.”
It is in the interests of all those who benefit from the status quo to convince us that this is just the way it is; that economics is not just a law of nature, but the law of nature. To the powerful, market fluctuations are more serious than hurricanes and floods. This is why the World Economic Forum has only now, in 2020, declared climate change a serious (economic) risk, even though measurable and harmful effects have been experienced in the global south for at least 30 years (and the present ecological collapse arguably began in 1492).
People are starving, dying, getting sick; our non-human kin are suffering too. Again and again, we’re told by those responsible that to mitigate this suffering would be too expensive. The transactional logic of profit and loss, efficiency and scarcity, renders life disposable, possibility impossible. Countless lives are quite literally priced out of the market. But as Marx reminds us, “no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value in a pearl or a diamond.” Price is a social relation, not an immutable law. So many lives, sacrificed for an idea.
If price is just a social relation, albeit one that’s been singled out and given the appearance of pure, unconditioned reality, what does this economic attitude do to other types of social relation? In Capital 1, Marx quotes from a contemporary report produced by the Chief Inspectors of Factories, which quotes a factory boss as saying (in defence of the deliberate shortening of workers’ rest-hours), “moments are the elements of profit.”
Language like this reveals the ways in which, in order to sustain itself, capital needs to expand ever further into our lives, for our lives are nothing more than an accretion of moments, ready to be monetised. We see this not only in the actions of the powerful, but in our daily conversations; the ways our discourse so often takes wage labour as the only form of work; the way we’ll ask one another, ‘so what do you do?,’ meaning ‘how do you sell your life?’; the ways we’ll ask children, ‘so what do you want to be when you grow up?’ – meaning, ‘to whom will you sell your life?’
We see this on the left too, in the ways our discourse so often carelessly conflates the working class (i.e. that barely-cohered, heterogenous group of people whom the social order designates as a resource to be exploited) and workers or working people. We can argue all we want for an expanded definition of work, but it remains the case that in everyday language many people will likely take ‘working people’ to mean people who undertake wage labour. I can’t count the number of conversations I’ve had with disabled and long-term unemployed comrades who’ve shared their feelings of exclusion when met with this rhetoric, not to mention those whose labour is not currently recognised as work.
The forms of deprivation and marginalisation experienced by proletarianised people – the working class – are, as Jules Joanne Gleeson notes, “distinct from direct participation in exploited labour, and far more decisive.” The condition of being working class is thus not dependent on whether or not one’s labour is actively exploited in the wage market; rather, as Gleeson continues, “to be part of the proletariat can only be to have one’s creative potential constrained and delimited by more rudimentary forms of fulfilment being rendered starkly conditional.”
While it is unarguably the case that the transactional logic of wage labour structures this conditionality – in that its main purpose is to discipline unruly subjects into offering up their labour for exploitation – for the left to accept this logic uncritically is to refuse the possibility of a better world. To relate to our comrades only as workers risks shading into a narrow form of solidarity that reifies the same conditions we seek to resist. The economic attitude thus inflects and infects our relations to the world, to our work, to our own imaginations; to our understanding of time, and even to one another.
And so we assert ourselves as our productive capacities (‘worker’) or our reproductive capacities (‘mother’), because that’s the system of value in which we are formed. To value something: to attach a price to it. One form of social relation and identity construction elevated above all others. Perhaps this is what makes some people feel suspicious when promised four extra bank holidays, universal basic services (including internet access, already considered a basic human right in seven countries), or stronger protections for our leisure time. The transactional logic of profit and loss has rendered possibility impossible. A politics grounded solely in the economic is a politics incapable of addressing this difficulty. Nor, however, should we settle for a politics that treats the cultural as something politically necessary, but separate from and secondary to the economic.
Rather, as Iris Marion Young says, culture should be taken as “one of several sites of struggle interacting with others.” I would add that our relationships and affective lives – the ways we construct, express, and actualise ourselves and one another; the ways we feel – these too are sites of struggle. Our goal must be, as George Padmore wrote in 1944, not to “wring concessions from the ruling class,” but to undertake “a fundamental transformation of the existing social order.”
To imagine that this can be achieved only through economic means is to mistake the part for the whole, whilst also overlooking the many parts – the many selves – that make up the whole of the proletariat. To acknowledge our shared condition should not automatically mean that we accept the flattening universalism of the economic attitude. Aimé Césaire, in his critique of European humanism, discerned the exclusionary basis of much universalism. Building on his work, I want to call for a socialism that is “equal to the world.”
How might we do this? What could this mean? How would it feel? The answer is this: militant kindness, or radical love – a wilful kind of love that refuses and resists injustice, passivity and exploitation. It’s how we recognise one another in all our vulnerability and pain and complexity, our perfect imperfection; and how we recognise that the only form of power worth having is the power we create together.
We actualise our capacities – our creative potential – most fully when we are truly together, in recognition and in reciprocity, and in mutual liberation from proletarianisation. This is the beginning of solidarity, the beginning of love, the beginning of the end of the economic attitude; and the end of that reduction of everything to a resource, even love and care, even one another; the end of capital’s false scarcity and the beginning of forgiveness, of promise, of possibility. In joyful togetherness.
This world is already here, between us. It’s in every moment of softness, of gentleness, of vulnerability, of love. I may not feel that I deserve goodness or joy, but I believe that you do. And that’s enough for me to believe that a socialism equal to the world, to all of us, is not only possible, but inevitable.
This is good stuff both the comment and the article that gives room to an open discussion and I am waiting for NC commenters to pipe in. I feel sorely overwhelmed by the hundreds and hundreds of instances that come to my mind in defence of socialism vs.self-interest dominated markets. I could try to rank those according to their importance and an obvious one is Health Care: A market thing or a human right? An economic activity or a necessary service for all? Yesterday, a commenter felt a need to express that HC is a market thing: Me pays, me has healthcare, you don’t pay, go die. Cavemen might feel ashamed to see how human progress has resulted in such primitive proposition, even if it is as sophisticated as the promotion of private-public partnerships to reach this outcome. Let me leave here a link on a 2017 (still germane) on the privatization of healthcare in the EU. The creeping privatisation of healthcare.
Though HC is such an important issue the elephant in the room is environmental protection & conservation and climate change. This is where most clearly can be seen that unrestrained capitalism is the real utopia while socialism is the only pragmatic way to go. Back again to the EU, fighting climate change is, like in HC, seen as an economic activity, a thing of the Market, a game of competition. Market efficiency will solve the issue and lets put everyone in competition to see what gives. Again Public Private Partnerships are pushed as the preferred pathway to find so called “market solutions” that besides will create billions of jobs. The opposite view, a (real) socialist ‘green new deal’ is too expensive again. I can think, for instance, an example of what is wrong with this proposition. Let’s take the case of electric mobility. The issue here is that everybody knows that current technology cannot provide for massive implementation of this. We need a solution! Let’s search for new batteries. As a result we have a large corporation like, let’s say Mercedes Benz, secretively developing their platform together with private and public partners in Quebec and in France on solid state batteries. Volkswagen does the same with their own partners, so does Toyota, etc. All trying to develop the same thing duplicating, multiplying the very same efforts to see who is the first and who comes with the best solution. In the end all them will come up with more or less the same solutions artificially made incompatible to compete in a market to see which outcompetes the rest and becomes triumphant with high rewards for the winners. On the way lots of waste will be generated: waste of time, in useless efforts, in installations materials and residues, exactly what we should try to avoid. In a socialist GND those efforts would be shared in the first place and the solution would come up earlier (of course some rewards should be envisioned) and we would enjoy a common platform from the very beginning. It would be faster and far less expensive to build and develop. Yet some say we cannot afford it. A model for such cooperation could be the ITER (nuclear fussion project).
Other examples come to my mind…
>A market thing or a human right?
Look, even that is a bit off putting. A human right? Calling health care a “right” makes it sound like something I should demand from a doctor. You owe me.
Jesus, I can’t even imagine the joy I would get if I could save a child, or improve and extend somewhat somebody’s grandma’s life. Send a working person, whether a janitor or a VP, back out of my office relieved that that bump is really just a bump.
Healthcare should be framed as, because it is, a celebration of life.
I bet AOC would get this.
Health care is a human gift.
Providing it is an obligation.
There was a Socialist who once thought very deeply about all this.
Simone Weil: https://www.iep.utm.edu/weil/
“Calling health care a “right” makes it sound like something I should demand from a doctor.”
Not quite.
A right is something you demand from society, it’s a political act.
A society that does not provide care for its members is a failed society. Building a new society is a celebration and a joy, and of course work and sacrifice.
try this
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/8870/deontology-perfect-vs-imperfect-duties
maybe it helps
This article illustrates and perpetuates an old confusion between a reformist approach (“the system can be improved and saved”) and a socialist approach (“the system is too far gone to be saved and must be replaced”). This was the fundamental distinction in the 20th century between the so-called “bourgeois” Liberal and left-wing parties, and the Marxists. The fundamental question – is the system repairable – is the central one in politics today. If yes, the reformist initiatives of the Corbyn/Sanders type might work. If not, something else will be required, and quite soon.
And economics is central to this. For all its waffle, and its touchy-feely conclusion, the article doesn’t really deny the centrality of economic relationships: there is really no other way of analysing society. Objectively, what counts is your relationship to the components of wealth: money, property and land. You are an employer or an employee, a property or land owner or a tenant, a shareholder or not. The unemployed and the disabled are generally outside the ruling economic group, but not necessarily (you can be a disabled property owner, for example). Historically, reformists have believed that this economic relationships can be made tolerable for society as a whole if they are tweaked to avoid extremes of wealth and poverty, and socialists have said that such tweaks are in the end not going to last. Socialists, I think, have had the better of the argument, although it’s not over yet.
Socialism, at bottom, is about the replacement of a liberal society where all life is a struggle between rational actors trying to maximise their financial and personal benefits and autonomy with a society based on cooperation and non-exploitation. Because such a society would not need the instruments of exploitation (essentially the finance industry) it would be radically simpler, and focused on happiness and the common good, rather than individual gains. Such a society would not be dominated by economic criteria, as ours is, but can only be built by paying attention to the economic forces that divide people now, and seeking to overcome them.
A few quibbles: I would say that the Japanese have a distinguished tradition of struggle for democracy–notably the great popular movements during the Meiji era. So democracy and Japan aren’t incompatible. Likewise, Japanese individualism is quite healthy. The difference is that Japanese individualism recognizes social ties, whereas the stereotypical U.S. expression of individualism has been for people to go on and on about how they hate their parents. One can see that this kind of U.S. separation-at-all-costs individualism ends up in a ditch.
I will recommend Anu Partanen’s Nordic Theory of Everything, in which she points out how much different social organization is in Scandinavia and her native Finland from what she has found on moving to NYC. Her description of the economic travails of having a baby should give Americans pause. Likewise, she has much to say about upper-middle-class women and their search for men with stable jobs–something that supposedly doesn’t go on in our supposedly feminist society but that she notices right away: Women looking for a good provider, even in the 21st century. So women would be freed by socialism.
I think that the article goes off the tracks in the last few paragraphs about love and so on. Forgiveness–oh, no, more Methodist youth camp stuff.
I don’t want a political system that claims it is about love, just as I don’t want political campaigns about deplorables, U.S. greatness, Minnesota hot dishes, and waving military service in the face of civilians. As David points out above, socialism is about cooperation and non-exploitation. I’d add the two big ideas that Bobbio highlights in his discussion of the Left: Equality and solidarity.
Leave the Hallmark movie stuff to Hallmark studios.
“socialism is about cooperation and non-exploitation” — and to cooperate and not exploit each other is actually love in action. I don’t consider that Hallmark card-ish.
i don’t, either.
when i stop and help a guy change a tire, what is it that makes me even want to?
Humanism is what’s missing in our systems and ideologies.
and reciprocity.
i help that guy because maybe it will encourage him to help some other stranger…which might be me.
and if he turns out to be a rabid racist nutjob?
well now he’s been exposed to a real lefty and otherwise representative of everything he’s been taught to hate.
what effect will being thus welcomed into the human family have on that guy?
there’s no immediate way to tell.
what is certain is what will happen if i drive on by…or stop, determine he’s an a$$, and drive way after yelling at him: either nothing changes, or he gets worse.
…and!…that i can feel this way…and act this way…without a god sitting on my shoulder, and after my childhood and adolescence of torment and bullying from racist rednecks just like this proverbial guy with a flat…well, what’s your excuse?
Good comment.
I look around and it seems as if everything about our lives is predicated on a dim view of “human nature” and I wonder how it is (especially if you knew what my life has been like) that I don’t. I don’t think humans are *born evil*.
But everyday something shows me that perhaps I’m wrong.
Thank you Yves, for posting this.
Carla and Amfortas: Private emotions like love and that poor, overused word “passion” are for our private spheres, which are sorely tattered by late-stage capitalism.
We seem to have no expectations of public behavior. How about non-exploitation, cooperation, solidarity, and equality?
To quote Bobbio:
Hope is a theological virtue. When Kant states that one of the three great problems of philosophy is “What must I hope for?,” he engages the problem of religion with that question. Yet secular society holds to other virtues: rigor in our criticism, a methodical doubt, moderation, not engaging in abuse of power, tolerance, respect for the ideas of other people, in short, worldly and civic virtues. (from De Senectute, Einaudi, Turin 1996)
That is an important distinction. I think our private passions, as individuals, fuel our public behavior, both as individuals and in groups. The lack of moral rigor as individuals can be directly shown to destroy society in the form of hypocrisy.
So my model train collection can be analyzed to find the root of my behaviors? I can sort of see that… :D
DJG: What you have to crank into your thinking is that love is also trust, and without trust, cooperation and non-exploitation will be difficult to realize.
I agree with your statement “Leave the Hallmark movie stuff to Hallmark studios.” I doubt singing a round of kumbaya will do much to deal with Neoliberalism. The problems we face in the near future and terrible messes the Market has made and and works to make worse are a lot bigger than sharing the love or whatever the tail of this essay is going on about.
As I read the essay I found the words ‘comrades’, ‘workers’, ‘proletariat’ and ‘working class’ slightly retro.
“brother” and “sister” is a little better where i live…reminds them of church.
of course, i’m one of those people that calls everybody “hun”.
A distinction is frequently summoned up when the powers-that-be wish to make a concession to the poor . That distinction is between the deserving and the undeserving and I thought just the other day that distinction is never made by anyone about the rich . Why ? Because no-one considers it relevant – you’re either rich , or you’re not . You are never going to be challenged on it. But not so the poor. . This distinction has come to symbolise in my mind the locus of the social contract in a society . Short of allowing our fellow citizens to starve to death in the streets we draw our line in the sand somewhere whether it’s a border wall or one more hoop to jump through before essential relief is given when illness , or unemployment strike. And who decides where that line is drawn ? Needless to say those that fall on the ‘ I’m ok ‘ side of it. But here’s rub : healthcare , homelessness, uncared-for commons are ALL matters of life and death . When in 1861the Queen’s Consort Prince Albert died of typhoid fever the necessity for improved public health was suddenly apparent and implemented . Affordability wasn’t in the equation , or sufficiently in the equation to halt measures taken to provide clean drinking water and secure drainage.
So we have been here before in earlier times . The star man of unaffordability needs to be torched and to do so can we please all agree to be grown-ups and agree that money is created out-of-thin-air and let’s we the people decide who gets to create it .
The best thing that you can say about socialism is that it is a more humanistic way of viewing an economy. In contrast, capitalism reduces every thing and every one as a commodity. Consider the following quote by Harvey Cox in “The Market as God”-
“As everything in what used to be called creation becomes a commodity, human beings begin to look at one another, and at themselves, in a funny way, and they see price tags. There was a time when people spoke, at least occasionally, of ‘inherent worth’— if not of things, then at least of persons. It is sometimes said that since everything is for sale under the rule of The Market, nothing is sacred. The Market is not omnipotent— yet. But the process is under way and it is gaining momentum.”
So when a Bloomberg or Musk or Zuckerberg sees you, all he really sees is a commodity ready to be monetized. And that is why people are no longer citizens but are now consumers. That is also why you have bureaus for consumer affairs but no bureau for citizen affairs.
I’ll note, per the Bible, that a just economic system should require minimum socialism.
Therefore that our economic system requires so much socialism is prima facie evidence that our economic system is NOT just and lo and behold an ethical analysis based on such principles as equal protection under the law demonstrate that.
I know a just system is frightening to some but:
1) The vast majority would gain more than they would lose.
2) An added benefit would be to forestall Divine Judgement and the peace of mind of so doing.
If people followed the actual Golden Rule
(“Do unto others as ye would have other do unto you”)
Then maybe we could actually have “Liberty and Justice for All”
Instead of a huge and damning hypocrisy.
Some systems, like government-privileges for private credit creation, are inherently unjust no matter who works in them.
So it’s not just a matter of good people vs bad people.
Sure it is. Because those systems are created by people, so IMHO it is in fact that simple. Its not just about who is working within any system, it is about who creates it and why. It is about who modifies it to suit them and why.
Yeah, yeah, if people would just be good, everything would be fine. And how, exactly, do you propose we might accomplish that?
Yeah, yeah, if people would just be good, everything would be fine. HotFlash
See my comment above
I watched a movie the other day where one of the villains uttered these words: “America is the greatest country in the world because we believe that at his core, a man is greedy, selfish and covetous”. It’s human nature to grab all you can while the getting is good, that’s why the self-made billionaire is the demigod, the Pope figure, of American culture, and socialism goes against this innate desire to crush your fellow humans on your way to amassing your fortune. Or so the story goes.
To truly discredit socialism, it has to be framed as a snare designed to trap human nature itself while its nemesis capitalism is sold as that which liberates human potential and points the path to self-actualization. Limiting or liberating innate drives, that’s what’s at stake here, according to those who warship at the capitalist altar and as such, socialism must never be allowed to thrive because according to them, it’s the greatest of all crimes because it impinges upon man’s freedom at his very core. Never mind that in the real world, the effects of runaway capitalism, especially as they affect the 99%, are the very definition of slavery, not freedom.
As I often protest, if we focus on economics as an agent of change we are still thinking like capitalists. Humanity is not in an economic or political crisis, it is in a spiritual crisis. We have chosen Mammon over god, the self over the Self.
I will add the the Japanese might have a genetic predisposition to to seeing human unity more easily based on the population carrying a more archaic versions of a gene called VMAT1 (SLC18A1), also nicknamed “The God Gene”. These carriers in the modern age are more prone to mood disorders. Genes can be over ridden by environment, so I am not being deterministic. Human kindness and unity can be embedded in us genetically, IMHO, after a few generations.
http://www.koseisouhatsu.jp/en/activities/release/20191202_research/index.html
This is probably why the psychedelic movement is making waves again. One quick way to tap into the archaic past before the individualists ruled the world.
As I often protest, if we focus on economics as an agent of change we are still thinking like capitalists.
Sorry, but how can one love without being just to others too? Or by ignoring the injustice done to them?
Here it is:
Micah 6:8
Long ago, socialism meant ‘the ownership and control of the means of production by the workers, or the community in general’, not the enhanced Bismarckian Welfare state, which keeps the home front quiet while imperial games are pursued abroad. Using my perhaps outdated definition, it seems to me that socialism is readily available to middle- class people at least in the richer liberal polities. Indeed, there are thousands of businesses whch meet the definition, including cooperatives, some partnerships, communes, and other entities. In general, however, people do not seem very interested in such arrangements. I think this is likely to be a problem for the socialist cause.
>Long ago, socialism meant ‘the ownership and control of the means of production by the workers
This is an honest question, as an over-trained Tech School graduate I really don’t know: If that was the definition of socialism, what was the definition of communism? People back then were very careful (unlike in today’s Mad Men society) with what words actually meant, so there has got to be a reason for the separation.
In the primordial days of left-wing politics, mid 19th century, they were largely interchangeable. The best description of the distinction that arose out of that tumultuous era that I’ve seen is Richard Wolff’s description that socialism is, fundamentally, the workers controlling the means of production. Communism is, ergo, a type of socialism, namely the Marxist end game of To Each According to Their Need, From Each According to Their Ability. Socialism, however, comes in all sorts of flavors: statist, non-statist, revolutionary, reformist, scientific, market, gift economy, municipalism, anarcho-socialism, etc. So all communism is socialism but not all socialism is communism.
AIUI, once Socialism has been perfected the state will ‘wither away’ and you will be left with Communism.
That may or may not appeal, but it seems to me that giving the state ownership/control of everything is a funny place to start that process.
I would try to get to socialism first, and then develop theories about how communism might be achieved. Socialism (as I define it above) does not require special emotional states, like love for one’s fellow sentient beings, that may be difficult for many; only a modest understanding of the advantages (for most of us) in a more cooperative, more reasonable social order. Weak tea, maybe, but suitable for an ill and decrepit society.
In my view the state will never ‘wither away’ of its own accord, nor would it be desirable. Any civilisation larger than a village will always need some kind of state if it wants to remain civilised.
So, yes, Socialism is ambitious enough.
For those curious to resolve these questions, two very short/clear sources are Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Program” and Lenin’s “The State and Revolution.” ( I know a lot of folks here are probably anti Lenin but it’s worth the read).
As said above, communism occurs after the state has “withered away.” In order to address this seeming contradiction, Grebo, you have to understand that Marx sees the state (more or less accurately imo) as a repressive apparatus of the dominant classes. Two conclusions come from this. First, we shouldn’t be simply putting control of everything in the hands of the capitalist state – this, as you correctly surmise, is at best a short term victory. The idea is to abolish it and put in it’s place a truly democratic, socialist state (there is plenty of room for debate over mechanisms).
Second, the primary (not only) job of a socialist state would be to repress the capitalist class and capitalist relations in general. If this is done for a sufficiently long time, classes will theoretically cease to exist and the state as a repressive apparatus becomes unnecessary, resulting in communism – which funnily enough at this point is indistinguishable from anarchism, with the ideological differences arising over the necessity or lack thereof of a transitory socialist state.
I did read Lenin many years ago and I’m afraid I found it interminably dull and clear as mud. Some key ideas like the state ‘withering away’ and the dictatorship of the proletariat are hardly more than mentioned.
Unlike Marx and Lenin we have a (notionally) democratic state and instead of getting the workers to rise up and revolt we only have to get them to vote.
I don’t think handwaving about some far future anarchist/communist classless utopia will help with that.
We need to bring “an end to capitalism’s false scarcity.” Yes we do. And in the process we would automatically bring an end to the drive for profit. It sounds like a solution to me. Especially when the “value” of money is so selectively flexible and at risk of being hijacked. I live in fear that Zuck and Larry will figure out a way to privatize all money. That there will be enough people fooled into some cryptocurrency because it is separate (“protected” from inflation caused by social spending, etc.) from sovereign currency. Well, where does that leave us? At the complete mercy of manufactured scarcity backed by the draconian laws of profiteers. Money is one thing and one thing only – it is cooperation. Money is socialism.
The nice thing is we already have a good way to begin to do this. MMT. We need to give society control over fiscal spending.
Except our economy runs off bank deposits, not fiat, and a government-privileged usury cartel may create those too, but not for the general welfare but for their own welfare and that of the most so-called “credit worthy”.
And the big names of MMT would do nothing to eliminate those privileges but, at least in the case of Warren Mosler, a banker himself, INCREASE them.
“Fool me once, shame on you …” is a lesson Progressives should learn unless they truly are bank toadies themselves.
The persistent and maybe insurmountable obstacle to new social welfare initiatives goes back to our sad legacy of slavery. There are just too many who do not want ANY of their tax dollars to be spent, shared, or otherwise used to benefit brown people. Homogeneity of the population is a primary reason why social welfare practices work in a country like Japan. I wish this pessimistic conclusion were not true, and I plan to work hard for Bernie this season, but it is an uphill battle. I think the two strongest arguments are (1) we have always had a mixed economy, and the pendulum has just swung too far in favor of cutthroat capitalism, and (2) Why do Lockheed Martin and wealthy companies get so much government money? Socialism for the rich, competition and free enterprise for the rest of us.
There are just too many who do not want ANY of their tax dollars to be spent, shared, or otherwise used to benefit brown people.
Well, yeah, I have heard that same thing. Many of my relatives are still in Michigan and so, yada, yada, But two days ago I had a New Mexican ex-pat ask me, “Well, why should I pay for Donald Trump’s kids college?” I told him, “Frank, 1.) Donald Trump would never send his kids to a state college, and 2.) if Donald Trump were taxed at a progressive rate, his fair share, he would be paying *way* more than for his kid’s tuition.” He looked stunned. He’ll be back in the US, back in the US, back in the USSR shortly for residency requirement, but admitted that he could ask the same of his family in FL and elsewhere.
Frank is not a dumb guy, far from it, but ex military and the indoctrination is pervasive. I have to ask, though, in cases where a one or two line refutation takes the wind out of the sails, why do we not hear such more often?
Yves, was Trento the small Italian town you mentioned?
This is undoubtedly the meatiest discussion yet published by nc.
A fundamental question has been raised invarious places above. Just how do we judge our relationship with others? Is it simple economics? Is it via some form of morality?
But let me raise one issue with including links in the blog. Should links reference work that lies behind a paywall? In the openng by Yves she llinks to an FT item. Given the increasing number of paywalls, it can become a bit expensive to belong to them all.
Mathematicians have noticed this and now recognize that when society funds their work through taxes, etc. the results should be open to society. This is also an approach being taken in medical research. If you get a federal grant, your work should be available to all.
Paywalls?
What are they? ;)
Thanks, Krystyn.
Owners and editors of blogs have the right to remove comments. Courtesy might require explaing the reason to those posting comments.
I believe the first thing necessary to thwart Neoliberalism is to debunk the crazy belief that the best answer to every problem is to design a better Market as a solution. Next debunk the truly weird belief that whatever answer comes from a ‘well-designed’ Market must be the best answer because the Market knows what is best. Then demolish a chunk from the sacred edifice of economic ‘theory’ by restating the definition for a market and point out that the market definition is the font of the axioms underpinning much current economic ‘theory’. Then challenge the wise men of economics to identify one example of a market in the real world that satisfies the definition of a market.
Having cleared out some of the mysticism of Markets there are many ancient features of a Good Society that clearly have no business in a marketplace: Healthcare, Science, Education, Defense, Justice, Politics, Banking and Finance, … the Arts. The Market has already demonstrated how badly it handles these features of a Good Society — and they are not ‘rights’ but the foundation for building a Good Society.
The Market has created many large messes that must be cleaned up. Great wealth must be eliminated as a threat to the public welfare. It should be taxed away and properties must be confiscated. The great wealth was stolen from Society. The notion that an entrepreneur has rights to all the new wealth generated from a venture ignores the extent that Society gave that entrepreneur the laws and a portion of the Society’s wealth to make the venture possible. There can be differences in wealth and status … but they should never be allowed to confer Political Power. The great Cartels must be dismantled. They stifle Industry and Innovation, and they threaten the public welfare with their power of wealth and control over vital resources.
Two great threats loom in the future for Humankind and Society — the Climate Chaos as the Earth transitions to a more ancient more inhospitable Climate era [assuming the climate systems eventually dampen to a quasi-stable state] and resource depletion as the number of souls grows past the Earth’s capacity to support them and as critical non-renewable resources run out. The Market has made a great mess of both these problems.
Is this Socialism or Communism or what? Does it matter? Is Neoliberalism really a form of capitalism or just a hodgepodge of nonsense generated by a few hundred ‘think’ tanks funded with piles of money by the holders of Great Wealth? No matter how gross, unfair, or dangerous an outcome the Market provides Neoliberalism argues the Market provides the best of all possible outcomes. Not surprisingly those outcomes always serve the interests of Great Wealth and concentrated Power, and fill the coffers of the Wealthy, the Cartels, and a variety of autonomous organizations serving their own abhorrent ends.
Humankind thrives in striving to great things which transcend mere living. A Good Society should sponsor the discovery and creation of great things … Knowledge, large projects like the Race-to-the-Moon, or building pyramids … great things which inspire and offer meaning to our existence.