What We Talk About When We Talk About Socialism

Lately I've been trying to break out of my political bubble and expose myself to views other than those of technocratic, center-left, American bloggers. A good friend recommended Jacobin, a new academic-ish radical journal. It's a kind of Dissent for our generation.

It's exactly what I needed to break out of that bubble, and the latest issue has been spinning around in my head for the past few days, especially this provocative and disorienting essay by James Livingston, a historian at Rutgers.

Livingston thinks the transition from capitalism to socialism will be a gradual change, rather than an upheaval―like the transition from feudalism to capitalism―and he enlists a lot of heavy hitters to make that point, citing Gramsci and Capital: Volume III, a tremendous advantage, given that no one has ever read Capital: Volume III. Specifically, he brings in Gramsci to argue that revolution is a matter of cultural hegemony, rather than seizing state power. And he brings in Marx to argue that modern capitalism, in the form of publicly traded limited liability corporations, is fundamentally different from the capitalism that came before. There's some other junk too about patents and the internet, but I'll have more to say about all of this later.

Most importantly, Livingston is willing to look for socialism in unintuitive places like the U.S. Military and the writings of Irving Kristol because he think that socialism is hiding in plain sight.

Aside from the fact that Livingston is being deliberately provocative, there's one major weakness in Livingston's essay: Livingston thinks that "socialism is our desire" because it's always out of reach, and calling yourself a socialist allows you to categorically reject any ethic of responsibility.

To say you're a socialist is to place yourself at the margin, beyond the pale, on the run, off the reservation, or at sea: you're a mariner, a renegade, a castaway, you march to a different drummer, you're above all a dissenter from the political mainstream.

I can't tell if this is mockery or not; I'd guess that it is not. But counter-culture thinking is a bit like religious fundamentalism, it's hard to tell if it's a joke.

"Why do we want socialism?" strikes me as a strange question. I'm not particularly interested in dismissing socialists as holy fools; A more charitable assumption is that socialists want socialism because they think that it is good and right, regardless of the scowls of anti-humanist Marxists.

Luckily, there's a substantial literature on what is good and right, and Joseph Heath wrote a very good paper on how, and why, both Habermas and the Analytical Marxists have tried to provide Marxism with ethical foundations. I like this paper a lot, so get ready for a long quote!

Purists who denounce analytical Marxists for “selling out” the faith in their move toward liberal egalitarianism have generally failed to consider the possibility that Rawls might have already “sold out” liberalism, by accepting the Marxian critique of early modern social contract theory. The original Marxist objection to social contract theory is that it provided only formal equality in the public sphere, in a way that masked the substantive inequality that was systematically reproduced through the institutional structures of the private sphere, such as the economy, or the family, or the educational system. The standard Marxist strategy of social critique was therefore to take any given social institution and analyze it in terms of its distributive consequences. (Thus, for example, “Marxist feminism” analyzed patriarchy in terms of the exploitation generated by the gendered division of labour.) Rawls however starts out A Theory of Justice by essentially accepting the Marxist analysis of social institutions, arguing that every system of cooperation generates both a common interest (in ensuring that each does better than he or she could do acting alone) and a conflict of interest (because the parties are not indifferent as to how the benefits of cooperation are distributed). If one thinks of "cooperation” in Rawls's view as a correlate of “social labour” in classical Marxism, it is easy to see the parallel. Every social institution, according to this analysis, is going to contain a set of rules that (implicitly or explicitly) determine, not only how much is to be produced, but who gets what portion of the social product. As a result, with Rawls's framework, every institution in the “basic structure” of society can be criticized from the standpoint of distributive justice.

Here we see many of the same contradictions as in Livingstone's essay. It isn't totally clear where bourgeois individualism ends, and where socialist emancipation begins.

There's much more to Heath's essay, but suffice it to say that focusing on the specifically moral deficiencies of capitalism leads to an indictment of inequality, rather than a bald declaration that the abolition of the market is historically inevitable.

And if the abolition of the market is not historically inevitable, it can be evaluated, and we may have reasons to keep markets around.

I think an account of morality makes Livingston's ideas more plausible and coherent, but this kind of account raises the question of whether we're still talking about socialism, i.e: worker's control of the means of production.

I'll try to have an update soonish with an answer, including a scintillating history of central banking.

You can Bank On It.

Bide your time with my hilarious great ape tumblr!