Happy quarantine, everyone. I’m on the last few days of my contract and, after traveling to Washington D.C. a few times over the past weeks, I’m parked here at home for the foreseeable future. I’ve abruptly switched from being a Gucci Socialist to a Soylent Socialist.
Needless to say, I think the response to COVID-19 from our liberal government is lacking. CDC Director Robert Redfield even said, "I guess I anticipated the private sector would have engaged and helped develop for the clinical side … I can tell you, having lived through the last eight weeks, I would have loved the private sector to be fully engaged.” Well, it’s hard to say it comes as a surprise. Maybe dynamicism isn’t an inherent property of capitalist production like some thought?
People sent in questions! Thank you to a reader for asking: What are some examples of the success of socialism that might contradict people's assumptions about it?
I’m tempted to talk about the Soviet Union, a country where a working class of enslaved, illiterate, backward peasants seized state power and went from serfdom to Sputnik in 40 years while surrounded by a ring of imperialist enemies. But socialists talk about the Soviet Union way too much as it is, and I’m not a total tankie.
I also want to ask, can we definitively say capitalism is successful? Citizens of the capitalist core countries certainly enjoy an unprecedented quality of life. But what of the countries outside the core? Is it working for them? Asked another way, is there an example of a country going from poor to rich under capitalism, without conquering or enslaving another people, or becoming client to an empire? I think answers in the positive are scant at best. Maybe the best thing to be isn’t communist or capitalist, maybe the best thing to be is a fucking thief.
But actually, what are signs that socialism might be successful today? I usually point to Wikipedia if I’m talking to older people or Minecraft if I’m talking to younger people. Where’s the market relation driving creators on these platforms? It seems humans can be quite productive and creative without having their healthcare depend on it; maybe we should just give people healthcare and see what cool stuff they do with their free time. In government, the US has a beautiful socialist tradition, e.g. the municipal Sewer Socialists. I also use the example of the Mondragon Co-operative Corporation in Spain. In short, it has 85,000+ employees, almost all of whom are voting members. They elect a managing director and make decisions about production collectively. And finally, a book from last year makes the case that Amazon and Walmart organize internal economies on scale with a nation state, and they don’t use a market to do so, they use algorithms. Maybe the 2020s are the decade of cybernetic socialism.
But I am not attached to socialisms of the past and present. Socialism is a system of the future, not the past or present, and there’s only so much we can learn from a few socialist experiments in a capitalist world.
This week I am continuing my discussion of liberalism. I’d like to talk about where the liberal/conservative dyad comes from, and the shortcomings of this one-dimensional spectrum.
Previously I defined liberalism, but we don’t usually use liberal in the philosophical sense. We talk about it as a shorthand for one side of an argument.
When we consider a conflict, we imagine there to be two participants, and it’s convenient to have names for the two sides. In an assembly during the French Revolution, it was decided that everyone who wanted to do the revolution would sit on the the left of the room, and everyone who was loyal to religion or the king would sit on the right. We like directional analogies, so left and right stuck. It so happened that the advocates for change wanted to adopt liberalism, thus left = liberal and right = conservative in this way, kind of. (I’m not a history person, so this is probably an oversimplification.)
But there are more than just two directions to go when we change our society. You’ve probably seen political compass charts. A popular kind of political compass we use today puts the question of economic distribution along the x-axis and an individual rights spectrum along the y-axis. From the top left quadrant going clockwise, these extremes are then supposed to correspond to communism, fascism, American libertarianism, and anarchism. You’ll also see political compass quizzes showing any number of values on any number of axes. I don’t endorse any particular scheme, but it is clear to me that any one-dimensional consideration of political alignment is insufficient. Why, then, do we have only liberal and conservative?
Noam Chomsky often argues that if you want to build a powerful authoritarian system, you would not stifle all dissent like a Big Brother. Instead, you would nurture intense dissent and conflict within one realm of society or within a small range of possibilities while insisting that there is no alternative within other realms. Looking at MSNBC and Fox News, it would be hard to say that doesn’t describe our world. Major media entities represent different positions on the spectrum of social issues, but no corporate media represents a viewpoint that there are alternatives to capitalism. The American news junkies in your life probably didn’t know before 2016 that there exists a left outside of The New York Times. Chomsky himself has been entirely censored within American mainstream media for repeatedly pointing that for-profit media serves profit before it serves viewers. It couldn’t be any other way.
I like the term the left because it seems to be more resistant to semantic bleaching than other terms. Terms change and get used up over time. I’m sure there is some reason behind the names Democrat and Republican, but it is lost today. Progressive means essentially nothing in the mainstream discourse. Even Elon Musk, who is dumb as shit, identifies as a socialist, yet I’m sure he has no interest at all in handing over control of his factories to workers. And since becoming a socialist, I mostly use the term liberal to complain about people to my right. By positioning itself outside of the liberal mainstream, always skeptical of hierarchies, the left persists as a useful term, to me.
I think I have one rant about liberalism to get out of my system before moving on to another topic. If you all promise to read Combat Liberalism I’ll skip it. I hope you and yours are safe at home; please stay safe and healthy.
I've been meaning to get better acquainted with Chomsky's thinking. Do you have a recommendation of where to start? Thanks in advance. 🙏