As I intimated yesterday, I used to be a socialist. This isn't true anymore, and perhaps I should muse on that a bit. The easy, simple, and wrong answer would be something trite and irreverent, like "I grew up". But that's not it, really.

You will frequently encounter two thought-abrogating clichés, when discussing the difference between socialism and capitalism. Indeed, many people simply take them as a given, perhaps to avoid having to quibble with them. I am, however, not under any such obligation, having--despite and perhaps because of my current employment in marketing--a dramatic and ingrained hatred of bullshit. The two clichés, unordered in terms of frequency or falsity, are as follows:

1. "There has never been a true socialist state. The Soviet Union was [Stalinist/Leninist/whatever else you want to pick], and doesn't count."

Nonsense. If the 20th century as a whole has left any legacy, it is the monumental, cataclysmic failure of Marxism as a political and social doctrine, a failure that leaves open the question of why so many people continue to profess to be Marxists while so few, for instance, continue to believe in the spontaneous generation of maggots. For example:

* "From each/to each" only really works when everyone's abilities are equivalent and everyone's needs are identical. People profess to enjoy fairness but all desire supremacy; socialism rams into this cognitive dissonance head-on, and the result is lines for toilet paper and the creation of the Trabant.
* A planned economy is fundamentally unworkable. It has been argued that the planned economy is ancillary to socialism proper, but this misses the point: a socialist economy requires direction, either because resource scarcity necessitates that not all things that people desire can be created, or because creating what people "need" (presuming this has been arbited somehow) nonetheless necessitates planning. Modelling an economy however, is one of those tasks that supercomputers look at, go wide-eyed, and then ask if they can't get back to something easier like predicting weather patterns in China from the flapping of butterfly wings.
* In a similar bit of cognitive dissonance to my first point, people think aspirationally and act brutishly. Absent incentive ("absent incentive" describes most functioning of a socialist state) people do nothing. This is why so little innovation has come from the communist states (here I realise that you can say something like "oh, but what about [phages, or something]" but even you know you'd be kidding yourself, so we can avoid that, I hope.

This point, Point 1, has with it an occasional corollary or replacement that gets phrased as "socialism is nice, but it would never work in reality". I am not sure why anyone still says this. It's a silly tautology. Go find a geologist and say "the flat earth is nice; it's a shame the earth has to be round," or tell a physicist that rain falling upwards would be dandy, if it weren't for that gravity thing. I imagine most opponents of socialism and communism don't actually believe it would be nice were it not for the whole, you know, reality thing--so why bother tossing out this bone?

Seriously. "Socialism would be nice but"? What's nice about it? Everyone being provided for by some benevolent mothering entity? Did we not get enough of that in childhood? Or is it the fact that everyone is the same, and we all get to act in the same way and reap the same rewards of our sameness? You know who else that describes? Imperial Stormtroopers, termites, and seats in an auditorium. We--as primates--are conditioned towards individualism and social hierarchy. Our brains are ordered for it. Sameness isn't blissful, it's barmy.

Anyway.

2. "An extreme capitalism is just as bad--or worse--as an extreme socialism".

This is frequently said rather smugly, and as a fact. It's supposed to argue for a happy medium between the two, and as I said earlier I suspect that it's something people say because they don't want to get into the dirty business of debating the issue on its merits--kind of an "agree to disagree" thing. But I don't have to "agree to disagree" so instead I can say: what the fuck? How does anyone know that?

Short answer: they don't.

Long answer: it's one of those things that is supposed to "go without saying" but actually doesn't. Unfettered capitalism gives us a tendency towards consumption and resource acquisition. "In theory" (in quotes because this is what people believe, though not necessarily what scientists who study economics would say), unrestricted market dynamics will produce large, unwieldy monopolies that stifle innovation. This conceit is fundamentally the same as George Orwell's: the notion that an entity can be so controlling, and so omnipresent, as to completely stomp out all dissent.

As in government, though, this just isn't so. That dominion has to be absolute, or--like water through cracks in a dam--dissent and change will always break through. The failure of every fascist government to remain so is testimony enough to this. But, indeed, absolute dominion is itself impossible--governments looking to forestall their own entropic decline will find that they can't win, and they have to play the game. It's the same with monopolies: even at the liminal boundary, the worst that can be said for, say, Microsoft or Electronic Arts or IBM is that they have forestalled mainstream adoption, not locked down innovation itself.

Another objection to capitalism is that it produces social inequalities--the Gini factor. But so what? We're accustomed to thinking of raw income as a direct measure of attainment and happiness, but it is in fact orthogonal. An equivalent comparison would be comparing the P-51 unfavourably to the F-15 because the former weighs less--it is a mark of change, to be sure, but not itself significant. The reality is that growing income disparities, such as they exist, have done little stop the auxiliary rise in living conditions. What counts as "poverty" today in the first world seems shocking until you realise that Louis XIV would've killed for a cell phone.

In the broad scheme of things, this doesn't really matter all that much. People will continue to accept socialism the same way as they do astrology or religion--on faith. One would hope that reality might marginalise those who would make decisions based on what they would like to be true, rather than what is true. One might, indeed, urge people to cast off the shackles of such an intellectually bankrupt worldview as Marxism.

After all, they have nothing to lose but their chains.

-Alex