What I used to think about socialism (part 2.1)
Starting to draw a distinction between socialism and liberalism
This week I’ll start writing about my experience learning that socialism and liberalism are actually distinct ideologies, but this topic is going to stretch into several letters. First off, I’m going to try out answering a question from a reader.
A reader asks: What would it look like if workers controlled things? How would workplaces function without hierarchy? Aren’t some people better-suited to leadership than others? Aren’t decisions by committee usually slow and compromised?
These are good questions. I think they speak to some misconceptions that I’ve held about socialism, too. There’s certainly a story that socialism is about making people equal. But that’s outside my particular definition of socialism from last week: socialism is about democratic control over institutions. Democracy can take a lot of forms, and it’s probably best understood as an asymptote, not a discrete state. There are aspects of democracy that require equality: one-person-one-vote has to apply in some contexts. But democracy doesn’t mean you never have to do what someone else says. Under socialism, hierarchies will still exist, but they will be more voluntary. Under capitalism, the hierarchies in your life, e.g. you vs. your boss or your landlord, are not very voluntary, as if you reject them someone else can take away your healthcare or your housing.
As for what decision-making might look like in a cooperative, the analogy I think of is a board of directors. In a contemporary corporation, the board is the highest body of decision-making, yet it makes almost no day-to-day decisions about a company’s operations. Instead, the board hires executives to manage the company. If the board is displeased with the performance of the executives, they vote to replace them. Now imagine that the board is made up of all the workers at the company, and only the workers at the company, and each still holds one vote. That’s a rough sketch of a cooperative form. In such an organization, there are still leaders and decision-makers. There are even still pay disparities: Workers would likely be happy to vote to pay some people more, say, if they possess a skill that required more training or practice, but it’s hard to imagine the 3000x disparities we see today. My takeaway from this thought experiment is that there are lots and lots of ways to organize production, and democracy should be a chief consideration in analyzing them.
I’d love to answer more questions from readers. Shoot me an email at jason.prado@gmail.com and I’ll try and include it in a future letter.
On to this week’s topic. If you don’t know me, you might not know that I grew up in a conservative Christian family. My parents have voted Republican their whole lives, and as a young person I absorbed the politics of my family and the conservative Texas communities in which I was raised. Until I was about 17, at least. Then, I started learning about other ideas from friends I made in high school and from the internet.
A year later I went to Stanford and was immersed in liberalism. I was so enchanted by it. These geniuses had the answers to everything. Through the power of social entrepreneurship we could remake and improve the world while also building successful businesses. In fact, that was the only way to do anything positive sustainably. The good news of the market was coming to every corner of the planet, and as the emissaries of progress we just had to carry the message. I even got a subscription to The Economist and read every issue cover-to-cover for a summer.
A few years on, I saw a post from a friend of mine decrying the inadequacies of liberalism. My friend was a staunch supporter of progressive values and civil rights; I was confused because I thought of him as one of the most liberal people I knew. I asked him, what is the alternative to liberalism? He replied something about “the left” and since it was Twitter and I didn’t want to seem stupid, I didn’t ask anything else. I assumed I was on the left; I hated Fox News and I liked Jon Stewart, wasn’t that the left?
It was years later, in the context of the nascent revival of the American left, that I learned about the left and how it’s different from liberalism. Here’s how I think of this revelation now: I used to think that liberals are like socialists-lite. If you become more and more liberal you become a socialist. But then I learned that liberal has a lot of different definitions, and liberalism and socialism are in conflict, so now I think they’re pretty different things (and I don’t consider myself a liberal).
Let’s start with the question of what is liberalism? My working definition: Liberalism is an ideology that focuses on individual liberties that has historically been aligned with representative democracy as a form of government and the capitalist mode of production. The enticing idea of liberalism is that individuals should be free to act in their own self-interest, and by doing so the well-being of the populace overall is maximized.
Richard Wolff, a Marxist economist, tells a good story about the promise of liberalism in the French Revolution, and how it led to the development of socialism. When the Revolution upended the feudal order and installed a liberal democracy (after a meandering path, no doubt), there was a promise that it would deliver liberty, equality, freedom, and democracy. Observing French society the better part of a century later, Marx noticed that while the liberal society was almost certainly better for most people than the feudal system, it had not delivered on that promise. The class system persisted. Workers toiled on behalf of a select group of others, but now the masters were called bosses instead of lords. He posed the question, what would a world without toil and domination look like?
This is the irreducible conflict between liberalism and socialism: Under liberalism, our workplaces are owned and controlled by elite individuals for the pursuit of profit. We face institutions like our workplaces as individuals. My boss is just another individual that I freely contract with as a fellow individual. The myth of liberalism is that we do so voluntarily, and we have the freedom to work somewhere else. But as I mentioned at the start of the letter, this voluntariness is an illusion in a world where a boss controls your access to your doctor and your ability to put food on the table. Socialism, on the other hand, imagines that every institution I face could be accountable to me and all its stakeholders.
I’ll wrap it up here for now. There’s a lot more to say about liberalism, as it is the dominant ideology in our society. In the future I plan to cover more related topics, like:
Why do we see liberal and conservative as the two poles of American politics?
Why, to a socialist, are both the Democratic and pre-2000s Republican Parties liberal?
What is the relationship between liberalism and fascism?
Until next time, please go vote for Bernie Sanders holy crap.
(Image Credit: By Nojhan - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=770240)
This is a great post! Keep them coming. Defining terms in context is important in order to make sure everyone is speaking the same language. Also, this helps prevent manipulation of masses via misinformation. For years, for example, the Republican Party has labeled "leftists" as "communists," which put them in a category with the "America's enemies," Russia and the Soviet Bloc. This still persists today. Even "Bloomy" (my nickname for Mike Bloomberg) who is a "conservative Democrat" gets in on the game by calling Bernie Sanders a "communist." Unfortunately, this works, because generally speaking most people do not understand these terms. With the internet, though, and more freedom of speech, these attacks become less and less effective. I like Jason Barrett Prado's approach to identifying the terms, both historically and contemporarily. If you know the terms and you are confident, you have confidence and self-worth, which will help you fight the battle against those that would manipulate you.
Looking forward to "What is the relationship between liberalism and fascism."