Tag: Socialism

Luxury Beliefs and the End of Scarcity

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

One of the things which struck me when I recently read The Communist Manifesto (plus two earlier drafts of it in FAQ form) was that Karl Marx seemed to believe that the industrial revolution meant the end of scarcity. When he described a never-before-seen problem of over-production, he made it sound like the problem was too many products now existing with nothing to do with them, not a bad use of scarce resources. And much of the insanity of the Communist Manifesto follows at least somewhat logically from that incorrect premise. Having said that, as I was recently cleaning up the family room, it did strike me how much junk it’s easy to accumulate in the modern world—and I mean stuff literally no one wants and you can’t give away, so all you can do is throw it out. In certain ways, if you’re reasonably well off, it can feel a little like a post-scarcity world. And this reminded me of something Rob K. Henderson talks about with regard to luxury beliefs—that the wealthy no longer show off their wealth with luxury goods, but by flaunting luxury beliefs.

If you’re not familiar, luxury beliefs are basically beliefs so stupid that you can only survive them if you’re rich enough to avoid the consequences of them. (Technically, Rob defines a luxury belief as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while inflicting costs on the lower classes.”) The basic idea, as Rob describes it, is that it used to be the case that the rich flaunted their wealth with fancy clothes, fancy cars, jewelry, and the like. But these are now too accessible, so instead the wealthy flaunt their wealth in ways which are not so accessible. In a sense, this is not entirely new. Bertie Wooster, P.G. Wodehouse’s satire of the idle rich, and his friends flaunted their wealth through being conspicuously stupid in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. Even earlier, in his 1910 book What’s Wrong With the World, G.K. Chesterton remarked:

Sir William Harcourt, that typical aristocrat, put it quite correctly. “We” (that is, the aristocracy) “are all Socialists now.”

That said, I think that Rob is right that there is something peculiar to our time in the abandonment of luxury items as signifiers of status. And I think that no small part of it is the general level of material wealth. It’s true that there are still very expensive versions of common things, but they’re usually not all that much better. They’re mostly just more exclusive. An exclusive watch doesn’t keep the time better, or sparkle brighter, than a cheap watch. To know which are the very expensive handbags you need to be able to recognize logos. Gold, as in the metal composed primarily of the seventy ninth element on the periodic table, is still quite rare, but gold the shiny color is everywhere. To quote Chesterton again, this time in response to the common phrase that “not all that glitters is gold”:

All is gold that glitters, for the glitter is the gold.

That is to say, people valued gold because it’s pretty. Now that there are things equally pretty, some people cling to the exclusivity of the rarity of one particular gold-colored metal, but most people don’t really care. You can buy children’s jewelry for a few dollars that’s as pretty as anything you buy for tens of thousands of dollars in a real jewelry store—at least if you don’t pull out a microscope, and most of us don’t even rent microscopes, let alone own them. (Admittedly, the children’s jewelry isn’t as durable, since the pretty part is usually on the outside, as a paint, but the children’s jewelry is so cheap one might as well throw it out and buy new once the glitter has been worn off.)

This is true of many other things, too. Chemically synthesized pigments and plastics have made things that used to be extremely rare now universal and extremely cheap. Digital distribution of media from books to music to movies have had a similar effect. And here we come to the point about the end of scarcity: scarcity is quite far from over, but I can see how people raised in affluence and with certain kinds of tastes could mistakenly think that we’ve basically come to the end of scarcity.

To spell that out a little: affluent people tend to be raised in such a way that they think of having a job as a normal and desirable way to spend their time; they often (mostly erroneously) think that if they didn’t need to work, they’d still work anyway. So it would not be hard to ignore that they do work for which they happen to be paid well. On the other half of it, if their tastes happen to run to things that have become extremely cheap, they will tend to have the ability to get more than what they want. These are the people for whom it is very difficult to buy birthday presents because they already have everything they want. That’s not a matter of being fabulously wealthy, it’s just a matter of what they want costs $100 per month in subscriptions and maybe another $100 per month from Amazon (and their cell plan and internet bill are, to them, just basic living expenses they can easily take care of) and they spend most of their time on social media or consuming stuff they get from their subscriptions. If such a person has no curiosity about how things like the phone they use or the cell service they pay for work, I think it’s possible to see how they would, without thinking about it, assume that scarcity is over.

If a person does make such a mistake, I suspect it might easily lead them in the direction of some of the very destructive places the belief in the end of scarcity led Marx. For example: if scarcity is over, there are no question about how resources should be allocated which need to be answered. They can thus be ignored, or else whatever the answer which sounds most pleasing on the hearing of it can be accepted. Since scarcity is over, there’s no real need to motivate people to work, since you have unlimited everything anyway. Since scarcity is over, there’s no need to take care of anything since you can always replace whatever is destroyed through neglect with a new one out of the infinite supply of new ones. Since scarcity is over, the only reason anyone is lacking anything is because someone is keeping the infinite supply of things from getting to the person who is lacking.

I suspect that this illusion of scarcity having ended is a big part of why luxury beliefs seem plausible to so many people.

If Real Socialism Has Never Been Tried

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized1 Comment

One sometimes hears the claim that real socialism has never been tried. The many things that have claimed to be socialism—German National Socialism (Nazism), Italian Fascism, Soviet Communism, Chinese Communism, East German Communism, North Korean Communism, Vietnamese Communism, etc. etc. etc.—were not socialism, they were authoritarianism. I’m not, here, interested in debating the point, though I can’t help but note that defining socialism to be, roughly, “a system where people voluntarily share things rather than selling them” makes it not a political system but just a free market with impressively effective preachers of the gospel and extraordinarily receptive listeners to it (since it would be pretty much exactly how the early christian community operated in the pagan world, as described in the Acts of the Apostles, before the church expanded much outside of Jerusalem).

No, what I propose to do in this post is to just grant the proposition that no one has actually tried real socialism and see what follows from it. If we grant this premise, we come to some pretty strange conclusions. Well, perhaps not so strange.

The first question we must ask ourselves, if no one has ever tried real socialism, is: why did all of the people who set out to try real socialism fail to try it?

This is a very important question. We have had many people in many places throughout the last 100 or so years who have tried to set up socialism. People like Vladimir Lenin, Adoplh Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-Sung and Hồ Chí Minh, were not joking. They thought that capitalism was evil and that the government and the economy should exist to benefit the people, not a rich minority or the well-born or an elite of any kind. There are plenty of others who thought the same thing, too. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg formed the Communist Party of Germany, which merged with the Social Democratic Party of Germany (itself a merger of other, earlier parties) to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, which was the ruling communist party of East Germany. They weren’t kidding. Hugo Chavez formed the Movimiento V República, which went on to join with other socialist parties to become the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. He wasn’t kidding. Does anyone think that Fidel Castro was joking?

By hypothesis, all of these people—and others—failed to try real socialism. They tried to try real socialism but just couldn’t succeed enough to actually give it a try. So what is so difficult about trying socialism that, so far in human history, every single one of the many people who have tried to try it have all failed? And they didn’t just fail a little bit, either. They have generally produced the worst hell-holes that the world has ever seen. Some of that is, undoubtedly, owing to the more advanced state of technology in the world when all of these people tried to try socialism and failed to try it. Still, they didn’t try to try socialism and end up trying multi-party democracies with thriving free-market economies. A bit like trying to catch a bullet someone shot at you with your teeth or riding a unicycle over a rope stretched across the grand canyon, failure has a pretty high cost.

So we must ask the person suggesting that we give real socialism a try because it’s never been tried before—how does he know that he’ll actually be able to try it, unlike all of the other people who have tried to try it and plunged their nations into misery when they accidentally tried something else instead? Has the world simply been waiting around for someone as great as this kindly intentioned person, that finally the human race has produced the pinnacle of evolution, with all of the multitude of powers required to actually try real socialism?

Now, supposing that the answer is yes, a further question arises—and I don’t mean how can we find out if this lovely soul is correct that they can do what so many others failed to without giving them the power necessary to try to try real socialism—supposing this wonderful fellow is right and has that rare combination of qualities necessary to try real socialsm, what happens if trying real socialism doesn’t work? The human race has finally produced a member great enough to succeed at trying real socialism—what if he really tries it, but fails to achieve it? I can really try to throw a three-point shot in basketball, but most of the time this very real attempt fails to succeed in actually putting the ball in the net. What if really trying socialism and failing is even worse than trying to try real socialism and failing to try it?

Let us, however, assume that this greatest human being ever is sufficiently great not only to try real socialism, but even to succeed at real socialism. What if real socialism is awful? Remember that, by hypothesis, real socialism is completely untested. What happens to the millions of souls who would live under the result if it turns out that, say, real socialism is even worse in practice than fake socialism, or whatever you get when you try to try real socialism but fail? No one’s ever tried real socialism, so how on earth do we know what will happen if that attempt were to actually take place?

Another curious problem is introduced by the fact that it requires the pinnacle of human evolution to succeed in trying to try real socialism—in order for this attempt at an attempt to work, we’re going to have to put this most magnificent achievement of our species in charge. If they shared responsibility with anyone, they, being inferior, would drag them down, and then how would we possible succeed at trying to try real socialism? I suppose that the magnificent one could be so great that even as one among a large group of his inferiors he would lift them up to the heights required to succeed at trying to try real socialism. That seems like asking a lot of evolution, though. We so far haven’t produced one human who can bring about real socialism and all of a sudden we have one that can turn a group of people who can’t try real socialism into a group that can? How could that much incomparable magnificence possibly be achieved in just one generation?

There is a further problem, though, even if we just assume for some reason that real socialism, if attempted, will be good instead of even worse than fake socialism—and I, for one, would much rather drink fake poison than real poison—and that this pinnacle of evolution is so magnificent he doesn’t need to be a dictator but can, by his magnificence, make an entire parliament of people who cannot, on their own, succeed even at trying to try real socialism not only succeed at trying to try real socialism but actually achieve real socialism, too. If we assume all this, what happens when this pinnacle of evolution comes to die? It happens to all of the descendants of men, after all. How are we to replace the greatest human being the world has ever produced? And if we can’t, what will happen to this real socialism now that it is run by people who, left to themselves as they now are, could not succeed even in trying to try it? Are we to suppose that this thing which is so difficult that no one has hitherto succeeded even in trying to try it will go along merrily when run by ordinary people who, in the whole course of history, have never gotten anything right until now?

And, if so—if we are to suppose that real socialism is so difficult to get going that no one has yet succeeded in trying to try it but so easy to keep going that anyone can do it—can I interest the person claiming this in buying a bridge? It’s a real nice bridge. Very popular. Tons of people drive over it. I hate to part with it.

He doesn’t even need to keep the tolls for himself. He can use the money he’ll get from it in order to fund his local socialist party.