Why You Should Be a Socialist

A short/easy introduction into modern socialism in the United States. I always somewhat self identified as a socialist but this book helped me to clarify and codify my beliefs and fundamentally changed the way I view wealth.

Why You Should be a Socialist by Nathan J. Robinson

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Nathan J. Robinson is a Socialist and thinks you should be one also.

Why?

Because other people have nicer things, things that in Robinson's estimation are sins of luxury and should be banned by post-modern sumptuary laws. Robinson spends the first part of the book trying to engender a sense of envy and outrage at luxurious McMansions that have whole rooms devoted to making pizzas in pizza ovens. Because of this opulence, he asserts on the next page, children in Third World countries don't get vaccinated.

Huh?

Robinson does not explain how money earned by someone in America and spent by someone in America deprives anyone anywhere of goods. He also doesn't tell us exactly what he suggests, e.g., does he forbid the sale of a private pizza oven? Does he confiscate all money above a certain income level? He implies something like that but never comes out directly with the negative features of Socialism that must exist if Robinson's self-avowed utopian dreams are to come alive.

Robinson seems to think that “capitalists” - a label he applies like “kulak” to an undefined other - put their money into a swimming pool to lay upon like Scrooge McDuck. It doesn't occur to him that capitalists are people and actually spend their money, which creates jobs for other people who own businesses, we might call them capitalists. The Clinton administration played with a luxury tax with the result that it raised not a nickel for the destitute but destroyed yacht builders, putting their employees onto welfare.

Elsewhere Robinson assures us that leftists hate borders and want unlimited immigration. On the next page, he points out that American wages have stagnated and that Americans are dying younger and more often of drugs. It never dawns on him that the two things might be related. If he knew some history, he would know that the last time this happened was a prior period of unrestrained immigration in the 1840s, which saw American health, life expectancy and prosperity drop dramatically. (See Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract.)

But who cares about results when Socialism is about solving that envy problem and dreaming utopian dreams.

Robinson provides a chapter on dreaming about utopia, which he feels distinguishes socialism from social democracy. Social Democrats just want to improve and reform things, while Socialists want utopia. He provides some long lists of what utopia would entail, and, frankly, it is quotidian and prosaic in the extreme. Ultimately, he concedes that utopia is about the following:

“My friends and our Current Affairs readers are obviously disproportionately young lefties. But I think their dream worlds are very appealing. There are some common themes: They want to be free of the stress of having to think about money all the time. They want to be abIe to choose what they do with their time. They want a vibrant culture, where art, music, and literature flourish. They want people to be able to satisfy their intellectual curiosities and understand science and the natural world, but also have plenty of time for play and leisure.”

In other words, they want family and community. That makes sense, particularly since those things have been exsanguinated over the course of the last several decades.

On the other hand, they sound like children who want to hold onto their childhood. Some people want the responsibility or take on responsibility because they feel the call of duty. Such people join the military, for example. Other people get married and have children. Anyone who has raised children learns that the ability to choose what they want to do becomes less likely. They also want their children to do better and have better things than they had. This is so common that it constitutes a natural drive of human beings that will have to be eradicated before Robinson's plans to confiscate all of a person's property on their death because their children are not in Robsinson's opinion “deserving” of what their parents' delayed gratification has created.

Robinson dances around a definition of Socialism. While he offers some reforms - some of which might make sense, others of which are totalitarian nightmares - he refuses to be bogged down by “labels,” notwithstanding how he loves labeling his enemies. Thus, conservatives are “mean,” he says, offering the example of William F. Buckley calling Gore Vidal a “queer” and saying he would punch Vidal in the nose. However, Robinson omits that Vidal had immediately prior to those statements called Buckley a Nazi, something that Buckley had been drafted into the military to fight did not appreciate.

Robinson strains to avoid the connection of Socialism with Communism in the Soviet Union. But Robinson endorses Marx as having good ideas, although he was a bit too technical at times. Robinson doesn't mention Marx's flat-out racism and nastiness, apparently there are no bigots to the left either. Robinson also can't resist trying to defend the economic results of the Soviet Union relying on a 1988 study. The fact that it was a study one year before Communism fell, and while it was still bamboozling the world by claiming a non-existent domestic product, is a telling sign of Robinson's either being a dupe or trying to dupe the dupes.

I would be a lot less suspicious of Socialism if its adherents would finally admit that Communism was an inhuman failure.

When pressed on the totalitarian dimensions of Socialism, Robinson brings “libertarian” Socialists like Emma Goldmann and Bakunin into the mix. Bakunin in no way represents historic Socialism. Goldmann departed from Socialism to the extent that she recognized that the Soviet Union was a police state, something that other Socialists have managed to do, while the great bulk of them never quite managed that trick, choosing to apologize for atrocities rather than leave their friends.

I read Max Eastman's “The Failures of Socialism” after this book. Eastman was a longtime socialist in the period from 1910 to 1930. He knew Lenin and Trotsky. If anyone has any doubt that Communism was not Socialist, read Eastman's book. His description of the utopian hopes and dreams of the Russian Revolution could be mapped directly onto this book, including the outrage and envy.

For example, Robinson touts “[t]he great socialist writer A!exander Cockburn, when he worked at he Nation, used to ask all of his interns the same question: “Is your hate pure?”“

Ah, how cute.

Except it's not Hate is an essential feature of the totalitarian tendencies of Socialism. Cockburn was talking about what Max Eastman called the “propaganda of class hate.” The preaching of hate against the bourgeoisie was the well-spring of Socialism. The problem is that hate can change its target as we saw in the Soviet Union, as Old Bolsheviks and Kulaks were made the object of hate campaigns and, then, murdered. Eventually, as Eugene Lyons depicted in “Assignment in Utopia,” the hate moved on to consume the proletarians who didn't manage to live up to the bright new utopia that the Socialists in power thought they were in the process of providing.

Utopian visions are the worst. There can be no utopia in this world. Utopian promises always fail. When they fail, those in power look for scapegoats.

Accordingly, the answer is to find a social equilibrium in opposition of forces. Government and free market should both exist. Robinson's vision eliminates the latter, leaving us to what he admits will be a dictatorship of bureaucrats. Robinson is coy in stating his goal, but since one of his dreams is an international taxing authority so that capitalists can't hide their money in other countries rather than being taxed for the common good, it seems clear that he intends to inject steroids into state power. (Also, we tend to call such “hiding” money, foreign investment, and governments compete for such investments by providing favorable tax investments. What Robinson is actually arguing for is preventing countries from competing for such investment.)

When you cut through the happy-clappy pep talk, you end up with a vision of envy, hatred, an alienated party base, and nebulous utopian promises through ideological fulfillment. Given Robinson's age and education, he probably has never been exposed to Eric Hoffer's exploration of totalitarianism in “The True Believer.” These factors are precisely the factors that made for the rise of the Nazis and the Communists.

Robinson has all the elements: he just needs the moment.