Not to be confused with chosisme.

SIAW links to a previous post, Anti-Globalization, with mild interest and some reservations. In their attempt to properly label me they make this assertion:

Jones makes it very clear very early on that his perspective is not one that could be called leftist. He characterises socialism, for example, as “a primitive idea formed during the early years of industrialisation, harking back to an earlier time rather than usefully anticipating probable futures”, and says that “its central tenet [is] world domination” (when we all know that our ultimate aim is domination of the entire Milky Way, eh, Cde Posadas?).

Is socialism all there is to leftism? What is socialism? There are a wide variety of answers and the smaller the distinction the more virulent the dispute. At a high level it is political control of economic life, a seemingly horrible notion justified by an even more horrible history of lack of control. It hasn't worked out in practice so far, it was just a different and often worse kind of horrible, but there is hope for some sort of solution, a hybrid perhaps.

Many socialist sects share an idea of abolishing private ownership, and so markets, and substituting some other political decision making method (usually unspecified) for deciding whether to get up, shave and go to work as well as what to work on. Some think that people are like insects and will follow pheromone trails or mind meld with society to magically know what is needed. Others imagine external control by machine intelligences, the "black planner" trope, and some used to imagine a state bureaucracy controlling all behavior though that idea has lost much of its earlier charm. The hybrid idea of market socialism seems the current favorite though it suffers from too close an association with capitalism for old timers.

It's a steam age idea, a cast iron idea from a time when the value of things seemed to consist of the stuff things were made of and the sweat equity of those who made them. The idea was to prevent anyone getting more things than others since there weren't enough things to go around and it squicked them out anybody would have "too many" things. It's understandable how this would happen since they didn't know much, didn't have enough things, and would do all sorts of dangerous dull things to get a few things, all of which amply justified the dark emotions of envy and the core primate urge to take uppity monkeys down a peg or two.

They missed the important parts of things because they were abstract. The value of a thing is less the stuff it is made of and the sweat used to make it than the knowledge of what to make and how to make it. It's no surprise that planned economies failed since planning is a very important part, far too important to trust to bureaucrats or politicians. How can they know what to do?

This failing has grown in significance as the knowledge content of things has gone up while the material (stuff) and energy (sweat) content has gone down. A day will come when things are essentially free since they are so easy and quick to make. A thingist world view has no future. Political control of economic life will then mean political control of knowledge... a death worse than fate.

But people may still be people, or at least cousins of people, and if they have not so evolved and hacked themselves in becoming the new lemony fresh H. sap II that they no longer enjoy the ancient primate games of social and political dominance then nothing important will have changed. They'll still squabble, just not about things. A forward looking person concerned with humanistic ideas, suffrage, would still have work to do. Though things would be irrelevant membership would still be important since primates are social animals. Domination, exploitation, and exclusion of a non-consensual sort would still be worth opposing. It's an argument that can be made on some sort of moral or ethical basis, assuming that you are a believer of some sort, and it can be made on pragmatic grounds since it degrades the social mind and diminishes aggregate social accomplishment. Wonderful insights or performances might never happen.

Here and now most people don't have enough things or enough suffrage. It's a worthy act to help them. It's important to not eat our children though, to warp society so much due to thingist obsession that we lose sight of the territory ahead. Every hungry day and every day living in oppression is a tragedy but we have to be able to hold our mud, not come unglued and screw up the future, or we will increase those awful facts in our zeal to reduce them. Good intentions are not enough, as the history of actually existing socialism makes clear.

So what about the proper label? I don't know... other perhaps.

» Just Ducky from Crumb Trail
A new M&M rant, Quack Science, whinges about the way misinformation from environmental advocacy distorts society and leads to poor decision making. A main factor contributing to doubt about dire predictions of ecological doom is that the claims are so......[read more]
Tracked: October 21, 2004 02:58 PM