Getting Socialism Straight
socialism doesn't scale, but barter and exchange do
When did humans start acting like humans? Margaret Mead says it started when humans started fixing broken bones. Says she on X:
A broken thighbone that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery.
I think that is what a neighbor was communicating with her “Reject Fascism” sign that adds “Care for Each Other.”
Is that socialism? I think that is what our liberal friends understand when they think “socialism.”
Only thing is that I think it only applies for face-to-face caring with the people living under the same roof.
When self-described “socialists” began describing socialism in the early 19th century, they meant, according to Grok,
social reorganization based on cooperation rather than pure individualism or laissez-faire.
Notice that they think that individualism and laissez-faire isn’t really cooperation.
But when we get to Henri Saint-Simon,
He favored centralized planning to anticipate needs and direct resources, with the goal of improving the condition of the poorest and most numerous class.
But the problem with “centralized planning” is that it means that the planners get to enforce their plans on the community. When the planners enforce their centralized plan they are no longer talking about cooperation. We are talking about subjection.
And that centralized planning didn’t work well for the Pilgrims arriving in Massachusetts in the early 1600s. Here’s how the rules were set out, initially.
There was no such thing as private property; all property and all business activities belonged to the collective with none of it belonging to individuals or individual families.
But Governor William Bradford said that it didn’t work:
“...[C]ommunity of property was found to breed much confusion and discontent; and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit...
“For the young men who were most able and fit for service objected to being forced to spend their time and strength in working for other men’s wives and children, without any recompense...
“The strong man or the resourceful man had no more share of food, clothes, etc., than the weak man who was not able to do a quarter the other could. This was thought injustice.
“The aged and graver men, who were ranked and equalized in labor, food, clothes, etc., with the humbler and younger ones, thought it some indignity and disrespect to them.
“As for men’s wives who were obliged to do service for other men, such as cooking, washing their clothes, etc., they considered it a kind of slavery, and many husbands would not brook it...”
In other words, humans have all kinds of ideas about what constitutes fairness and justice. But socialism requires force. Not just the enforcement of contracts but forcing people to do work for other people because the rulers say so.
A lot of people, I think, believe that cooperation is the natural instinct of humans, and then scale up that belief from the family to the village to the clan to the nation. But, I think, as soon as you scale up from the family you require force to make people do their share. That’s no longer cooperation, but subjection.
But still: a lot of people believe that the market and its prices is artificial and oppressive. And they have a point. There is no argument with the market price.
Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, didn’t agree.
“the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals.”
Or let us say that the way that humans cooperate and work together is through the organic web of exchange and prices and buying and selling. It’s in the jeans, but it wasn’t obvious until recently. And the remarkable thing about exchange and prices is that it scales up from individual exchanges between individuals to mega exchanges between corporate persons and businesses. Who knew?
Naturally, what people hate about prices and markets is when it all breaks down for them in a crisis, whether financial or weather or war-related. The market has failed!
The instinct in such cases is for the men to go out as a war party and steal it. This is the accepted practice, according to Wilfred Thesiger in Arabian Sands where everyone herds sheep in a land that only gets precipitation every two years or so. As I wrote ten years ago:
But suppose you are just unlucky and your sheep all die of hunger. What then? Well, southern Arabia has a culture of raiding. So your last resort is to raid your luckier neighbor and take off with some of his animals. But the rules say that you don’t touch the women and children.
Very civilized. It’s in the jeans.
If prices and exchange are in the jeans, and also raiding and looting in an emergency, whatabout the evident yearning for socialism and caring for each other? Is it in the jeans too?
I think so. For women it’s “care for each other;” it’s in the jeans. So why not scale it up from the family to the state? How hard can it be?
For men, it’s “fight for each other.” If people won’t cooperate then we will force them to cooperate. Because it’s the right thing to do.
Both of these instincts are all very well at the family or village level. But at the state level?
To me, the thing that is remarkable even magical, is that the “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” scales up from person to person all the way up to the largest organizations on Earth. Who knew?
I wonder whether the market and its prices scales up to interplanetary? Elon! What do you think?