Directional Socialism

 In Walter Greenwood's classic proletarian novel Love on the Dole, the heroic martyred socialist Larry Meath—when pressed to justify his political views—never gets much further than explaining the principle of surplus value. The laborers are the ones who did all the work to produce wealth, he argues—so why should they get to keep so little of the proceeds? 

This is why Robert Tressell called his own working class protagonists "ragged-trousered philanthropists"—they were charitably supporting a class of owners and capitalists in a state of idleness—and received only contempt for their pains. ("Is it not enough that you eat the bread of others' labor, but you must despise them as well?" as Ernest Crosby once asked of the bourgeoisie). 

As an argument for socialism, of course, this is incomplete. One could well say to socialists (and many characters in Tressell's novel do in fact say): you can't just point out what's morally wrong about the present distribution of resources; you have to explain what you would do differently—and how your system would actually work. 

Still, though, one can also turn this argument around and say: it is surely no complete defense of capitalism either to say: "oh, it may be fundamentally morally unjustified and indefensible, but no one has ever come up with a workable alternative."

And so, we are indeed entitled to at least start with the question: Has capitalism any moral justification? 

Theoretically, its defenders assure us, capitalism is one of the best and noblest of social institutions because it rests solely on voluntary exchange between free agents who each get the benefit of the bargain. 

A bond investor offers the temporary use of their cash for some productive purpose, in exchange for a guaranteed rate of interest. An equity investor offers the same in exchange for an ownership stake in a company and a right to any dividend distributions. A factory owner offers the use of their plant to some workers in exchange for keeping a share of the produce. 

Ostensibly, then, everybody wins. Capital that would otherwise be sitting idle is put to some productive use; workers have jobs and wages, while capitalists reap the profits; and since everyone agreed voluntarily to the contract—where is the injustice? 

The problem comes in when we ask—why do some people have the cash and the factories and the other capital in the first place, such that they are able to convince the other party to do all the work, while they sit back and do nothing? Why should they get such a "long smooth run for their money," to borrow a phrase from D.H. Lawrence, while the other party has to sweat? 

It may be true, after all, that the employees agree to the bargain. But since they are often starting with nothing, they have no real alternative—other than to starve; whereas the capitalists are starting with a great deal. 

The contract may be free and "voluntary," then; but it is not struck between parties with equal bargaining power. And so—as social critics from Shelley on have observed—what appears to be freedom could really be described as a form of wage slavery: 

'Tis to work and have such pay

As just keeps life from day to day

In your limbs, as in a cell

For the tyrants' use to dwell [...]

When one party has to sign the contract under penalty of a slow death by starvation—and the only benefit they will get from it will be to delay starvation so long as they can work, until they eventual expire of exhaustion and are thrown on the scrap heap—one could say that that contract ought to be held lawfully void for duress. 

To quote Ernest Crosby again, in that poem we cited above in which he accuses the ruling classes of "eat[ing] the bread of others' labor": You who spurn the man that takes an unfair advantage of his competitors in sport or at the card-table, you are at the same time playing the game of life with loaded dice[.]

But—why are the dice loaded? Why is the bargaining power so unequal at the front end? Why, when the contract is first struck, is one party starting with a factory or spare capital lying around and the other side with nothing? 

One could imagine some ideal yeoman republic in which the only people who get factories are the ones who started with nothing like everyone else, but who, through intense hard work and exceptional prodigies of forbearance, foresight, and delayed gratification, eventually saved up enough extra cash to buy a factory of their own. 

We could say that such a hypothetical person had earned the right, at the end of their life, to their "long, smooth run for their money." It is in some sense "fair" to reward self-denial and patience (these being admitted virtues—though, they are hardly the only virtues—so we could also ask why we would reward them so much to the exclusion of all others? Why have a system that fosters only ants and not grasshoppers?).

But I think anyone could see that this account of where factories come from is a kind of "just-so" story compared with the actual origin of property in our society. 

Capitalism may be all well and good in theory, then—but what about in practice? 

In practice, we all know, in a time of one of the largest transfers of intergenerational wealth in American history, that most capital comes from someplace very different from some honest laborer's piggy bank. Factories don't just appear because the stork brought them. Rather—"Some people's money is merited, / And other people's is inherited," as Ogden Nash once put it—and the emphasis in our current social moment must increasingly, I fear, be placed on the latter category. 

Is there any moral justification for inherited wealth? No philosopher, not even the Robert Nozicks of the world, has ever attempted or managed to come up with one. This is always a bit of a lacuna at the end of libertarian arguments for capitalism. They say: "well, Wilt Chamberlain earned his money (we will not discuss at this time the question of whether Wilt Chamberlain's children earned theirs)."

Any moral justification for inherited wealth would seem to require some theory of collective intergenerational responsibility. We would have to believe that the virtues as well as the sins of the Fathers should be visited somehow upon the Sons to the umpteenth generation. That hard work and pluck and self-denial somehow transfers from parent to offspring along with the Original Sin in Adam's seed. 

This raises the question, though, of whether there was even some initial act of virtuoso self-denial and delayed gratification at the very beginning of the chain. Did some distant ancestor of every current heir of past wealth accumulate the capital in the first place through nothing but "hard work" and tenacity?

There, we see, we are once again in the realm of the "just-so" story. We all know that in reality, most property and capital started with land. And much of the land was taken by force from someone else who was already living there. 

It's notorious enough by now in this country that most of the land occupied by white settlers in the United States was stolen from indigenous people, by various combinations of fraud and force. 

But in mitigation of the white settlers, we can also point out that their land was stolen from them first—by the original capitalists. Many people from the British Isles had to travel to the American colonies, not because they really wanted to go far from home and fight with a bunch of strangers for their land, but because staying at home was not an option. 

As Oliver Goldsmith shows in his great poem "The Deserted Village," the enclosure of common land in the villages of rural Britain pauperized many of the former peasantry and forced them to seek a desperate fortune in the New World: 

 To distant climes, a dreary scene,

Where half the convex world intrudes between,

Through torrid tracts with fainting steps they go,

Where wild Altama murmurs to their woe.

Far different there from all that charm'd before, 

The various terrors of that horrid shore[.]

So, the theft of land in the Americas had its origin in turn in the theft of land in Britain, at the hands of various feudal lords who enclosed formerly common property by act of parliament. 

There's a reason the Tory MP in Tressell's Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (which I've been reading all week and which largely inspired this post) is called "Sir Graball D'Encloseland." 

"By far the greater part of the land," as Tressell's protagonist puts it, "is held by people who have absolutely no moral right to it. Possession of much of it was obtained by means of murder or theft perpetrated by the ancestors of the present holders." 

Anatole France, in his great satire Penguin Island, makes the same point when he describes one incident early on in the development of the penguin community, in which one of the larger penguins bashes another penguin's skull in, in order to seize its land. The good Father Maël is horrified at the spectacle—but another character, a stout defender of the established order, chides him: 

Take care, father, [...] that what you call murder and robbery may not really be war and conquest, those sacred foundations of empires, those sources of all human virtues and all human greatness. Reflect, above all, that in blaming the big penguin you are attacking property in its origin and in its source. [...] The sole and proud origin of property is force.

This is what we're really talking about when we talk about inherited wealth, or say that some distant ancestor received such and such a landed property in the Domesday Book in return for "services rendered to the king." Some penguin bashed another penguin's head in to seize it, going all the way back to the Norman Conquest. 

Okay, but if inherited wealth has no moral justification that anyone has ever been able to come up with—other than the appeal to force and the fait accompli—why then does our society have so much of it; and why, within my lifetime, was the already fairly modest estate tax cut several times over, with these cuts being extended by a succession of Republican administrations? 

I suspect the answer is not that so many people were convinced by a moral argument that real property had some justifiable origin in the grant of an English King our country later rebelled against. 

I suspect the answer is that people want the money. And one of the reasons they want it so much is that we want a "long smooth run" and not to have to work every day in the sorts of jobs that people have to take when they have no capital and no alternative to taking a job but to starve. 

It would seem that we perhaps are not so sure after all that all those labor contracts negotiated under conditions of capitalism really are "mutually beneficial" and that the laborer gets a fair share of the bargain, given that we apparently do all we can through the political system to ensure that we will always have the bargaining power on our side and we will never have to sign the sort of dreaded labor contracts we routinely make other people sign. 

It would seem, then, that "really existing" capitalism actually has no moral justification; and even the people who claim to believe in the system most ardently don't actually think it has a moral justification either; otherwise they would be happy to swap their lots with the workers who ostensibly get such a fair and good bargain for their side of the labor-capital exchange. 

But as we said at the outset, merely establishing that capitalism is unjustified does not prove that socialism would work any better. As the Tory characters in Tressell's Ragged Trousered Philanthropists are always telling their socialist co-workers: "What the bloody 'ell kind of system do you think we ought to 'ave? If everything's wrong, 'ow's it goin' to be altered?" 

One can poke a lot of holes in any particular proposed socialist scheme. I've poked plenty of them myself. How, one can ask, if there is no profit motive or difference in monetary outcomes, is society to incentivize production—unless it is by the means that historical socialist regimes in Marxist-Leninist countries have often employed—namely, to replace the incentive of the wage with the incentive of the knout, the machine-gun, the gulag, and the gallows? 

In which case, as I've pointed out before, all we've managed to do is to replace "wage slavery" with literal slavery—economic compulsion with physical compulsion—so how is anybody better off? 

The socialist commonwealth laid out in the "Great Oration" section of Tressell's novel is better on this point than many socialist proposals. Tressell suggests that under socialism, people in publicly-owned facilities will still be paid a wage in paper money. And people who are physically capable of working their fair share, but refuse to do so, will not be sent to jail or the gulag for it—they will simply be denied their wage payment until they come back to work. 

"If a man will not work, neither shall he eat," says the socialist Barrington in Tressell's novel. Which may sound harsh—but let us remember that this is the current penalty under our "free" capitalist society as well—except we don't guarantee a job to anyone who wants it; whereas under the ideal socialist commonwealth, the government would—so the only excuse for not taking it would indeed be laziness, as people are so often unfairly charged with today. 

This form of compulsion through the threat of denying a wage is not only the same one capitalist society deploys—so no capitalist could object to it on grounds of coercion—it is also much preferable and more in keeping with democratic institutions, it seems to me, than the other forms of compulsion socialist writers have suggested to get around the problem of "incentives." 

I like it a lot more than Bertrand Russell's suggestion, in his essay "In Defense of Socialism," for instance, that "In so far as work has to be enforced, it will be enforced by the criminal law, not by economic sanctions." 

For the life of me, I can't figure out how, if economic coercion is a violation of human dignity and freedom (which it is), physical coercion of this sort—enforced by police and prisons—would be any better!

But I like Russell's suggestion for what to do "with them wot WON'T WORK!!!" (to quote one of the anti-socialist critics of Barrington's speech in Tressell's novel) better in turn than John Ruskin's proposal, in his supposedly proto-socialist "Unto This Last": Those "being found objecting to work," Ruskin writes, "should be set under compulsion of the strictest nature, to the more painful and degrading forms of necessary toil, especially to that in the mines and other places of danger[.]" 

No thank you, sir! 

Here we can see how many socialist writers have done the work of their libertarian critics for them by making the road to socialism sound indeed like another name for the road to serfdom (to use Hayek's phrase)—or to Belloc's notion of the "servile state." 

This, of course, points to another standard objection to socialism—even under the less coercive variety envisioned by Tressell. Let us grant for the sake of argument that we had truly democratic socialism with free elections to all the positions of trust and responsibility; let us grant that this government was legally obliged never to jail people for refusing to work, but merely to dock or withhold the wages that everyone else received until they came back to the government factories. 

(Though even Barrington, in the novel, suggests that some thankless tasks might have to be performed by everyone in a compulsory year or two of national service—corvée labor or conscription, in other words; in which case we're back to physical compulsion again.)

Even under an ideal version of this arrangement, then, one can ask—does it not concentrate and centralize a rather frightening amount of power in the hands of the state? And how much do we trust the state to make good use of all this power and all these resources? (How good of a job do you think our current freely elected government is doing with them, for instance?)

To argue along Tocquevillean lines—couldn't we say that private property, however unjustly acquired in the first instance, is a better safeguard for individual liberty than any scheme that would put all property in the hands of a single central governing body? 

There is some force to this argument—but it should not delude us into thinking it is a reason to leave things the way they are. Just because concentrating all private property in the hands of the state might be a bad idea; that in itself is no reason to think that we should not redistribute or tax rather more of this wealth than we do currently. 

Here as elsewhere, then, I think the great mistake of historical socialist movements was to conceive of "socialism" as some sort of comprehensive alternative "system" to capitalism, rather than as a simple direction in which we can move. 

Arthur Koestler writes in one of his essays that the reason we so often fail to perceive fascism until it is too late is because we think it should be something "solid" and "palpably different from our forms of life," whereas it is really more like "a gas which can be put into any container regardless of shape."  

If fascism and authoritarianism, then, are not really physical states "palpably different" from our current way of life—but simply negative directions in which we as society can move if we are not careful—so too, then, perhaps democratic socialism is not a different "solid state" we will someday reach or achieve, but simply a positive direction in which can move, along the opposite vector. 

We should stop talking, then, about "achieving socialism" as if it were a comprehensive new system we will some day erect. I think we shouldn't want such a socialist utopia even if we could get it. 

Between absolute socialism—in which even bartering household goods or saving some of one's wages would be outlawed—and absolute capitalism, in which even the fire department is privatized and there is no help for old age or disability but the treadmill or the grave—there is nothing to choose. Both would be hell on earth (and have been hell in the places where they have been attempted).

Rather, I think we should see socialism as a direction. 

And as soon as we reframe it in that way, we can see that we are already a much more socialist society today than we were at the time Tressell was writing. And indeed, that life has become more tolerable and humane precisely to the extent that we have become more socialist. 

Today, you can't just lose your whole life savings because a private bank somewhere goes out of business, as used to happen routinely in this country (it happens to a character in Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, for example, and to another in John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer). The reason is that the government now guarantees deposits up to a certain numerical limit. 

If we like this degree of added financial security and predictability in our lives—I can tell you that we don't have "capitalism" to thank for it. 

Today, if you work all your life, you won't just end up in the workhouse at the end of it, as in Tressell's novel. Instead, you will get an old age pension or social security benefits, if you live in any Western democracy. 

If you like that as well—let's just observe that "capitalism" had no hand in that either. 

This is not to say that there should be no markets or no private property whatsoever. But I think anyone fairly looking at the balance between capitalism and socialism in our current society will see that it is way too far on the former side than the latter. 

I am an enthusiastic supporter of Isaiah Berlin's suggestion, ultimately, that we think about politics much less often as a matter of choosing between absolutes or planning for future utopias. Instead, as Berlin put it, we should seek an "uneasy equilibrium" between competing values and unavoidable trade-offs. 

And I think it's obvious to anyone—as soon as they realize how impossible it is to come up with a moral defense of the current capitalist distribution of property—that our present social order has gotten into a profound state of disequilibrium. 

There may have been a time, even within living memory, when most people in America—at least if they belonged to the dominant ethnic group—really did start from roughly the same place, and the unequal rewards they reaped had something to do with their hard work and pursuit of useful education and acquisition of valuable skills and willingness to delay gratification over the course of their lifespans. 

Whatever truth there was in this vision of how the whole system worked a few decades ago, though, it is obviously not the country we live in anymore. 

And I suspect a lot of the renewed interest we're seeing in democratic socialism in our country's primary elections in blue states this summer has something to do with this fact. 

Matt Yglesias on a recent podcast episode of The Argument was expressing his consternation at the fact that we have so much economic angst in this generation, given that by every objective measure, people are better off and richer than they ever were before. 

But perhaps our present angst has its origins in the fact that even if "all boats are rising" in some sense, people perceive that the differences in size between the various boats have no moral justification and are not related in any way to a fair recognition of different owners' societal contributions. 

No one—not even the beneficiaries—can give a plausible moral argument for why some people should start off life at such an advantage over others. Even if the fastest deserve to win the race (which is itself questionable—why is fastness the only virtue we want to reward?)—there seems no excuse at all for a race where some of the contestants get a head start. 

Even the beneficiaries of our current historically unprecedented intergenerational wealth transfer cannot independently justify it or provide any moral account for why it should be so. We can only say, as we enjoy the proceeds with a guilty conscience, as William Vaughn Moody puts it: 

Who has given to me this sweet,

And given my brother dust to eat?

And when will his wage come in?

A system than cannot justify itself is indeed marked for extinction. That doesn't mean we need to tear it all down and stage a socialist revolution to build some comprehensively different system in its place (we've reviewed all the plausible objections to that proposal already). 

But it does mean that we should make directional strides towards a whole lot more socialism than we have at present.