I greatly enjoy the writing of the socialist Freddie deBoer, not because we have much in common—we don’t, he’s a committed socialist and I am very much a conservative—but because he is interesting, he speaks about his political beliefs plainly and well, and he communicates his ideas with clarity and with no confounding varnish. He is that rare sort of writer who seemingly just wants to use his writing to share ideas rather than turn it into a showcase of something more self-serving and much more boring.
His recent rundown of his own personal beliefs is helpful in that way. DeBoer’s writing is like that of the archetypal fairy tale as characterized by C.M. Wodehouse: “Life is like that—take it or leave it.” He states his socialist positions clearly, and as such we can easily understand them and engage with them and at least attempt to refute them if we want to.
The following paragraph is both a bulk summary of deBoer’s political views and, I think, those of most socialists in both America and elsewhere:
I believe that achieving a just society cannot happen within a framework of capitalism, which inherently and necessarily increases inequality over time and which depends on exploitation for its basic functions. I believe in the peaceful and democratic replacement of capitalism with some kind of a socialist system. The exact dimensions of that system remain unclear, but they will surely involve removing basic human needs like food, shelter, clothing, medicine, education, and health care from market mechanisms; collectivizing ownership of the productive apparatus of society so that it may be used for the good of all, free from the profit motive; dramatically reducing the amount of inequality in material goods between different people and different groups; the gradual reduction (and perhaps eventual elimination) of what we conventionally consider the state, and bringing an end to the kind of permanent bureaucratic class which is inherently counter-revolutionary; an eventual end to our current rigid concept of paid labor, with guarantees that all people enjoy a certain standard of living so that they may engage in productive work that is not necessarily remunerative in the capitalist sense, thanks to an ever-growing technological abundance; and adopting a truly egalitarian, democratic system that protects the right to unpopular opinions, defends those who disagree with the ruling sentiment of the time, enshrines the will of the majority into tangible public action, and remains responsive to changing public sentiment.
I do not want to address the generalized socialist ambition toward, say, “collectivizing ownership of the productive apparatus of society,” an aspiration which has over the last 120 years or so resulted in genuinely incomprehensible levels of human suffering, torture and death; nor do I want to treat with what deBoer calls the "possible “elimination” of “the state,” which again has historically been a socialist objective wielded by men who curiously always end up shooting and/or starving millions of poor and middle-class people.
Rather I want to look at what we might call socialism’s material ambitions, characterized by deBoer as as desire to “remov[e] basic human needs like food, shelter, clothing, medicine, education, and health care from market mechanisms” and “dramatically reduc[e] the amount of inequality in material goods between different people and different groups.”
Well, you can see the rich philosophical irony at play here, namely: We have been living under a “capitalist framework” for a few centuries now, and we have made tremendous, almost unthinkable strides toward essentially every single one of those goals. In fact the improvements we’ve seen in the material conditions of man under capitalism are hard to quantify on traditional logarithmic scales. At a certain point you just have to gape at it all. Let’s consider:
Food. In developed capitalistic societies we have more food than we know what to do with and we have accomplished that goal in a shockingly short amount of time. It took our species about two million years to go from fighting with chimps over grubs to “a chicken for every pot” being a lofty but somewhat realistic political goal. It subsequently took us fewer than 100 years for chicken—for every meat—to become beyond commonplace, a fixture at most meals, something within the reach of all but the absolute poorest Americans (and even really them too). That’s an unbelievably exponential rate of improvement. More broadly, the availability, quality and variety of food in the diet of people in modern developed societies is almost unfathomable from an historical perspective. It’s really hard to conceive of it. There are most assuredly problems with our food system—we waste too much food, our food system is largely based around lower-quality, nutritionally inferior industrial production, there are obviously many improvements that could be made to the whole thing—but the point is that capitalism over the last century has generated a superabundance of available calories that would be frankly unbelievable to all but the last few generations of human beings. This is, all the flaws notwithstanding, very very good. There are problems to solve here but at the very least we can do it on full bellies, which is a very good thing. Children not starving is a good thing. Having something to eat three times a day is a good thing. If these are the fruits of capitalism, I’ll take them and so should you.
Shelter. We can leave off, for now, the fact that when put in charge of housing, a government—socialist or otherwise—invariably seems to vacillate between low-quality ineptitude (such as modern-day Cuba), unscrupulous cronyism (say, the mid-to-late Soviet Union ) or violent, miserable chaos (think Chicago’s Cabrini Green Homes). Rather it is worth considering that all of the astonishing raw materials that we have at our disposal today—lumber, roofing, plumbing, insulation, wiring, fixtures, appliances, the whole slate—comes from what is again a superabundance of capitalistic activity. You can’t built houses worth living in without those things; nobody would want to live in them. If I were to look at an economic system that produced those products in affordable plenty so that builders could construct millions of stable, clean, safe housing units, I’d break for that one and you would too, unless your ambition was to live in a cave.
Clothing. As with food, it is hard to imagine a consumer good that has exploded in more availability, variety and convenience than clothing. For virtually all of human history people have enjoyed severely limited access to clothing, with most average people for most of the history of civilization owning a very small number of purely utilitarian clothes. Now even the poorest members of society have complete and total access to an astonishing variety of clothes. As with food, there are many improvements we could make to this system—we could all stand to buy better clothing, to spend more money on better-made and more ethically-produced clothes made in responsible factories by better-paid workers. But these are easily solvable problems. After nearly a century of abundant clothing everywhere you look, who can seriously suggest that the capitalist system is somehow not up to the task of producing a ton of affordable clothes? The last century would seem to plainly refute that.
Medicine/healthcare. The modern medical industry quite plainly bears out the fruits of capitalistic enterprise. Essentially every major commonplace malady or ailment that plagued humanity for years—lacerative and puncturable infections, diarrhea, mild to moderate viral illnesses, general pain, fevers, poor eyesight, toothaches, blisters, muscle pains, sprains, mild breaks, fungal infections—have been ameliorated or solved by profit-seeking enterprises. You can solve most of those things today by paying less than $10 at your nearest drugstore. Tetanus has been described since antiquity and its contraction was essentially a death sentence prior to the early 20th century; you can now counteract it by going to a local clinic and obtaining a vaccine that often costs less than $40. These modern miracles should be a sufficient testament to capitalism’s obvious role in tremendously reducing the bodily suffering of humanity over the last hundred years or so. You could point toward much more expensive medical care like cancer treatments and emergency room visits as justification for government intervention in healthcare, but the only real argument you could probably make there is for some sort of public cost-sharing model a lá Western Europe rather than a truly socialistic takeover of the medical industry.
Education. You can see the obvious mistake here: No industry in the United States is more subject to “socialism” than education. The vast majority of students in the United States—about 75% or so—are enrolled in public schools, meaning the vast majority of students in the United States are subject to a fairly comprehensive form of government-run education. Public schools in the U.S. tend to be poorly run, underperforming, low-quality factory models of education that do not do a good job at educating their students and instead function as sort of high-functioning daycare systems. The most dynamic education models in the United States are not, as some advocates would claim, private or charter schools, but rater the vast industry of educational materials that have sprung up organically over the past few decades and have allowed millions of students to break away from rigid, inflexible, Prussian-style models of compulsory and/or classroom education. This is the most exciting frontier of education today: One in which families and students can pick and choose precisely the content and form of learning that best fits their needs. This kind of radically decentralized and highly responsive form of production is of course a hallmark of capitalism and is anathema to the sort of socialistic control that commentators like deBoer advocate.
Those who want to scrap capitalism in favor of more government control should be prepared to explain why we should do away with a system that has so plainly and inarguably raised the standard of living beyond anything any human would have conceived of even 120 years ago. You can make the claim that capitalism has failed humanity in some systemic way, but you will have to figure out why its failure looks like such a smashing success—with the passage of about 250 years we are living much longer, eating more, hurting less, learning more, enjoying more recreation, and
with so many of the great plagues and disasters that had marked the average human life having more or less vanished for billions upon billions of people.
All of that has most assuredly facilitated deBoer’s stated goal of “dramatically reducing the amount of inequality in material goods between different people and different groups.” You can no longer easily tell rich people apart from most poor people in the everyday life of many if not most modern societies: For the most part we’re all eating the same food, using many of the same consumer products, driving many of the same cars, doing the same recreational activities. In centuries past the divisions of wealth were clear, cutting, brutal; today they are not. Indeed, the countries where tiers of wealth are most conspicuous tend to be those that hew most closely to traditionally socialistic ethea—the basket-case warlord states that constitute a fair portion of Africa, say, or arguably the People’s Republic of China.
All of which is to say: If we’re supposed to be persuaded to give up capitalism, those who would have us do so have a considerably difficult row to hoe. The world after a few centuries of capitalism has become a much, much better place to be than it was prior to that development, ever more sharply so when you consider the genuine human rights and economic catastrophes that a great many socialist states have engendered over the last century. The precious inheritance of capitalism, of course, is why we must guard it very jealously, and fight very strongly against the impulse to take us into worse, more destructive directions.
To play the devil’s advocate, how are you sure we haven’t accomplished these things in spite of capitalism, not because of it? You have asserted but not explained how capitalism brought us these things. Maybe it’s the inevitable result of technological progress and technological progress is inevitable, isn’t it?