A while back a reader sent a link to an interview with avid socialist Nathan Robinson on Jacobin entitled “Socialists Identify With Humanity as a Whole”. I read it and responded diffidently:
I dunno. Long live the glorious socialist revolution? Judging an interview is a somewhat nebulous affair; judging an ideology based on a short interview with a fervent ideologist seems a dodgy affair.
He does remind me of your typical REASON Magazine columnist – the know-it-all type who has all the answers and believes the world is against him. Which may be true, but after a while I find the paranoia a trifle grating.
My reader’s response was a bit surprising, so I’m going to interject commentary in his response, below.
I only read the interview, so I didn’t get that feeling at all. Young, smart, idealistic, yes, but I agree with him on some major points: capitalism squashes out other ideas, and one can have an incredibly miserable life for a majority of one’s population while still getting gold stars on all the usual capitalist measures.
Which is true of most political systems; those in control, be they capitalistic, monarchs, or socialists, believe passionately in their system for the most part, and see little reason to encourage other systems. I see little reason to condemn capitalism for a sin embedded in virtually all competing systems.
The part concerning ‘miserable life’ is also part of the following paragraph, so I’ll respond below.
Today’s so-called “record low unemployment” is a perfect example; the number and the claim completely ignores several very important features: (1) the majority of those jobs do not pay a living wage, (2) large numbers of people are working multiples of those jobs just to get by, (3) it does not measure a significant number of people who are considered officially to not be in the job market, but who would be if economic/social/employment/health conditions were not so horribly poor, and (4) that “full” employment is not making things better for most people, for society and for humanity.
And I agree: Lies, damned lies, and statistics[1]. A statistic is inherently founded on metric selection, and metric selection, usage, and interpretation is a far more difficult subject than is generally recognized outside of the communities of technical people involved. My reader’s complaints intimately involve metric selection, and I completely agree that the unemployment numbers are misleading.
Statistics are often used as a proxy for measuring the success of a society; by hiding behind the faux-objectivity of numbers, the politicians seek to use them to make themselves look good, rather than the more engineering approach, where you measure and improve, wash, rinse, repeat.
And when I say politicians, I don’t mean capitalist politicians or democracy politicians, I mean politicians of all systems: Monarchical, socialistic, communist, name it and it’ll contain politicians. And all politicians protect their turf using all the tools they can think of, and statistics can certainly be one of those tools. So, once again, I see this as a of being part of a social species in which our instincts are individualistic, not as it being capitalism’s sin.
I liked his definition of socialism as having concern for all of humanity. Contrary to what many ignoratti on the right think socialism is an economic system, not a political system.
Given that the political system necessarily dictates the economic system, it’s not entirely clear to me that this is a true statement. But I do like the word ignoratti.
1 Anonymous, but often erroneously attributed to Mark Twain, according to Wikipedia.
