On Monday I gave a talk about socialism at Phillips Andover Academy in Andover, MA. Because Andover is one of the oldest and most expensive private schools in the United States, I thought it would be worth beginning with the subject of educational inequality. Below is the speech I prepared, though when I delivered it I ended up improvising a bit and going a bit more “off the cuff.” The students were delightful and asked thoughtful and challenging questions. I’d like to thank Derek Curtis for arranging the whole thing, he was extremely kind and helped me lug my bag across campus.
We’re going to talk about socialism and capitalism and whether those words are meaningful and how we should use them and I’m going to make the case that socialism is good and capitalism is bad and that you should be a socialist and use your life to try to make the world more socialistic. I am going to try to avoid just having a terminological discussion about what abstract terms mean, and instead talk about the principles that I think should guide us as we consider political and economic questions. (...)
The school you have here is amazing, it’s what a school should be. Your teachers are well-paid, your library is well-stocked, your grounds are well-maintained, you have every conceivable resource at your disposal. If you want to bring someone to come and give a talk, you can pay for them to come. But I think we all know that there is some kind of serious social injustice when some people go to schools where the gym has been condemned, and some go to schools that offer 30 different sports. Whatever we might think about how people earn success, when you’re young you don’t really earn much of anything. The kids in the Detroit School system are there because of the accident of their birth, and you are here because of the accident of your birth. That’s not to say that you don’t work hard, or that you aren’t smart—I am certain that you do and you are. But we all know that there is no element of justice in whether a 10 year old is hungry and homeless, because children really have very little control over their lives. The statistics on youth homelessness are really staggering—in the United States, it’s 4.2 million young people who are going to spend at least some part of each year not knowing where they’re going to stay. And while we often discuss the United States, when we start looking at the whole world things become just unfathomably unfair.
I’m beginning here, with a basic example of an unjustified inequality, because I think it’s important to see what I might call “the socialistic instinct” starts. Jack London, of Call of the Wild fame, was a socialist, and he explains in his essay “How I Became A Socialist” that it was not because he had read Karl Marx and accepted the dialectical materialist conception of history. It was because he went out into the world, and he realized that not everyone was like himself, and that the things he told himself about why some people deserved more than others simply broke down once he actually got to know people. (...)
Jack London’s socialism was formed by getting out of his bubble and actually trying to understand lives that were different from his own. And for me, that is where the socialistic instinct begins, not with economic theory but with a sense of solidarity, feeling a deep understanding, love of, and sympathy with your fellow human beings in very different circumstances, and wanting nothing for yourself that you do not also want for them. Terry Eagleton has a quote: “A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.” That really is the core of it. A socialist is, first and foremost, not just perturbed by injustice, but horrified by it, really truly sickened by it in a way that means they can’t stop thinking about it. It gives you the feeling that “we can’t do anything about that” or “that’s just the way of the world” is not acceptable.
I think both Jack London’s experiences, and my own observations here and at Harvard where I am a social policy student, testify to something important about inequality: The severity of the problem is never obvious when you are on top, because it is very hard to get concerned about things that you do not see before your eyes. Now, I have had days when I have looked around and felt like Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who argues that we are all far too negative and need to wake up and smell the roses. Look at our excellent bistros, our growing GDP, our iPhones, the diminishment in extreme poverty, our global peace. And all of those things do exist. But then I remember how many people are in prison, how many people spend their days making the iPhones and growing the food and cleaning the bistro floors. It’s so easy not to notice the lives of others, because those lives are kept conveniently out of view—the prisons are far away in the countryside, the cleaning staff come in at night, the kitchen staff are confined to the kitchen. One of the most disturbing things about inequality is that two completely different situations can exist in the same place: paradise and hell on a single patch of ground. In New Orleans, where I live, you can see what that was like in the antebellum years: beautiful, peaceful Southern manor houses that also housed the unimaginable suffering of slaves.
The world has, in many ways, improved, in ways that are impossible to deny. It has improved in part through the efforts of activists who gave their lives. People have the eight-hour workday and the weekend because courageous working-class movements refused to tolerate exploitation. We have to be grateful for all the bounties that other people’s hard work has given us. But in many ways, the world has gotten more unjust even as it has gotten better, because there is a greater gap than ever between human potential and the reality many people face. So, for example, life expectancy has long trended upward for the United States overall, but it’s actually gone down for the poorest people, so that while the rich are living longer than ever there is a greater gap than ever before between people’s life expectancies. That gap means that even if on average you’re doing better, you might still have a more unfair world than before. (...)
With that moral starting point, then, of a revulsion at the disparities between the many and the few, let’s try to elaborate socialism a bit more. The word “socialism,” just like the word capitalism (and in fact the word democracy, justice, republic, etc.) has a highly contested meaning and I don’t think there’s any full agreement among people who call themselves socialists. Some people think socialists are those who support government control of industry, and capitalists are those who support private control of industry. That definition can’t work, because there are many socialists who don’t believe in the government at all, the anarchist socialists like Emma Goldman, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin who believed that private power and government power were both tools used by the oppressors against the oppressed. What unites socialists in one big tent is a hatred of the concentration of wealth, and a belief that ordinary laborers deserve a fair share of the social product. The old slogan is “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” and that does get at the nub of it. Whether we’re talking about a government redistributing wealth, or whether we’re talking about the internal workings of a company, people should be taken care of according to their needs and give according to their ability.
This is why socialists have historically pushed for government programs to take care of the sick, but why socialists also believe in unions, which aim to balance the power of employees against employers. Because it’s not just inequalities of wealth that we object to, but inequalities of power. We talk a lot about workplaces, because workplaces are extremely undemocratic places and employees often have very little power and very few rights. Your boss can fire you for things you say and do outside of work, and in the United States you have no remedy. Because you need a job in order to live, this can limit your realistic range of options in dealing with an abusive or exploitative boss. (...)
It’s this dynamic that has caused the political scientist Elizabeth Anderson to call corporations a kind of “dictatorship,” because in their internal structure they are completely top-down. Anderson has argued that companies constitute a kind of “private government,” one that has a lot of control over people’s lives but that they often don’t have any say in the management of. We can see the way this impacts people like the Amazon warehouse workers, who don’t get any say as to how many boxes it’s reasonable to pack in an hour, or how many miles they can walk comfortably. That’s one reason that Elizabeth Warren has proposed a plan for something called “co-determination,” which they have in Germany, where workers would be guaranteed a certain number of seats on corporate boards in order to ensure that their interests were represented and not always sacrificed for the sake of maximizing profit.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Socialism as a Set of Principles and Innovation Under Socialism (Current Affairs).]
We’re going to talk about socialism and capitalism and whether those words are meaningful and how we should use them and I’m going to make the case that socialism is good and capitalism is bad and that you should be a socialist and use your life to try to make the world more socialistic. I am going to try to avoid just having a terminological discussion about what abstract terms mean, and instead talk about the principles that I think should guide us as we consider political and economic questions. (...)
The school you have here is amazing, it’s what a school should be. Your teachers are well-paid, your library is well-stocked, your grounds are well-maintained, you have every conceivable resource at your disposal. If you want to bring someone to come and give a talk, you can pay for them to come. But I think we all know that there is some kind of serious social injustice when some people go to schools where the gym has been condemned, and some go to schools that offer 30 different sports. Whatever we might think about how people earn success, when you’re young you don’t really earn much of anything. The kids in the Detroit School system are there because of the accident of their birth, and you are here because of the accident of your birth. That’s not to say that you don’t work hard, or that you aren’t smart—I am certain that you do and you are. But we all know that there is no element of justice in whether a 10 year old is hungry and homeless, because children really have very little control over their lives. The statistics on youth homelessness are really staggering—in the United States, it’s 4.2 million young people who are going to spend at least some part of each year not knowing where they’re going to stay. And while we often discuss the United States, when we start looking at the whole world things become just unfathomably unfair.I’m beginning here, with a basic example of an unjustified inequality, because I think it’s important to see what I might call “the socialistic instinct” starts. Jack London, of Call of the Wild fame, was a socialist, and he explains in his essay “How I Became A Socialist” that it was not because he had read Karl Marx and accepted the dialectical materialist conception of history. It was because he went out into the world, and he realized that not everyone was like himself, and that the things he told himself about why some people deserved more than others simply broke down once he actually got to know people. (...)
Jack London’s socialism was formed by getting out of his bubble and actually trying to understand lives that were different from his own. And for me, that is where the socialistic instinct begins, not with economic theory but with a sense of solidarity, feeling a deep understanding, love of, and sympathy with your fellow human beings in very different circumstances, and wanting nothing for yourself that you do not also want for them. Terry Eagleton has a quote: “A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.” That really is the core of it. A socialist is, first and foremost, not just perturbed by injustice, but horrified by it, really truly sickened by it in a way that means they can’t stop thinking about it. It gives you the feeling that “we can’t do anything about that” or “that’s just the way of the world” is not acceptable.
I think both Jack London’s experiences, and my own observations here and at Harvard where I am a social policy student, testify to something important about inequality: The severity of the problem is never obvious when you are on top, because it is very hard to get concerned about things that you do not see before your eyes. Now, I have had days when I have looked around and felt like Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who argues that we are all far too negative and need to wake up and smell the roses. Look at our excellent bistros, our growing GDP, our iPhones, the diminishment in extreme poverty, our global peace. And all of those things do exist. But then I remember how many people are in prison, how many people spend their days making the iPhones and growing the food and cleaning the bistro floors. It’s so easy not to notice the lives of others, because those lives are kept conveniently out of view—the prisons are far away in the countryside, the cleaning staff come in at night, the kitchen staff are confined to the kitchen. One of the most disturbing things about inequality is that two completely different situations can exist in the same place: paradise and hell on a single patch of ground. In New Orleans, where I live, you can see what that was like in the antebellum years: beautiful, peaceful Southern manor houses that also housed the unimaginable suffering of slaves.
The world has, in many ways, improved, in ways that are impossible to deny. It has improved in part through the efforts of activists who gave their lives. People have the eight-hour workday and the weekend because courageous working-class movements refused to tolerate exploitation. We have to be grateful for all the bounties that other people’s hard work has given us. But in many ways, the world has gotten more unjust even as it has gotten better, because there is a greater gap than ever between human potential and the reality many people face. So, for example, life expectancy has long trended upward for the United States overall, but it’s actually gone down for the poorest people, so that while the rich are living longer than ever there is a greater gap than ever before between people’s life expectancies. That gap means that even if on average you’re doing better, you might still have a more unfair world than before. (...)
With that moral starting point, then, of a revulsion at the disparities between the many and the few, let’s try to elaborate socialism a bit more. The word “socialism,” just like the word capitalism (and in fact the word democracy, justice, republic, etc.) has a highly contested meaning and I don’t think there’s any full agreement among people who call themselves socialists. Some people think socialists are those who support government control of industry, and capitalists are those who support private control of industry. That definition can’t work, because there are many socialists who don’t believe in the government at all, the anarchist socialists like Emma Goldman, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin who believed that private power and government power were both tools used by the oppressors against the oppressed. What unites socialists in one big tent is a hatred of the concentration of wealth, and a belief that ordinary laborers deserve a fair share of the social product. The old slogan is “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” and that does get at the nub of it. Whether we’re talking about a government redistributing wealth, or whether we’re talking about the internal workings of a company, people should be taken care of according to their needs and give according to their ability.
This is why socialists have historically pushed for government programs to take care of the sick, but why socialists also believe in unions, which aim to balance the power of employees against employers. Because it’s not just inequalities of wealth that we object to, but inequalities of power. We talk a lot about workplaces, because workplaces are extremely undemocratic places and employees often have very little power and very few rights. Your boss can fire you for things you say and do outside of work, and in the United States you have no remedy. Because you need a job in order to live, this can limit your realistic range of options in dealing with an abusive or exploitative boss. (...)
It’s this dynamic that has caused the political scientist Elizabeth Anderson to call corporations a kind of “dictatorship,” because in their internal structure they are completely top-down. Anderson has argued that companies constitute a kind of “private government,” one that has a lot of control over people’s lives but that they often don’t have any say in the management of. We can see the way this impacts people like the Amazon warehouse workers, who don’t get any say as to how many boxes it’s reasonable to pack in an hour, or how many miles they can walk comfortably. That’s one reason that Elizabeth Warren has proposed a plan for something called “co-determination,” which they have in Germany, where workers would be guaranteed a certain number of seats on corporate boards in order to ensure that their interests were represented and not always sacrificed for the sake of maximizing profit.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Socialism as a Set of Principles and Innovation Under Socialism (Current Affairs).]
