Socialism Maybe?
This has been a difficult entry for me to write. I’ve been working on it for a month or so, and it just blows my mind how quickly things I wrote are being rendered obsolete. It just serves as a great reminder that I don’t always know what I’m talking about. Okay, let’s get started, this is gonna be a long one!
Over the past few years, I’ve been drawn to reading a lot more books of political analysis than I had in the past. While it’s true that I would never have called myself un-political, having been the type of person to have voted for Ralph Nader in both the 2000 and 2004 elections, I was definitely a very Minnesotan type of political, unconfrontational, just taking it for granted that any other reasonable person would share most of my beliefs. In a word, complacent. Why bother with books that would just annoy me or were only preaching to the choir?
Like many American liberals, the result of the 2016 US election caught me off guard. I mean, it’s not like I didn’t consider the possibility of a Trump administration (especially after the issue of Brexit over in the UK) but the very idea of Donald Trump being elected president seemed so outlandish, it was downright apocalyptic. As we’ve established in earlier blog entries, I’m a little drawn to post-apocalyptic literature. So, when the unthinkable happened, right here in reality, I was left shocked and horrified, but, as recent weeks have proven, I would continue to be shocked and horrified at how quickly things are developing into what previously would have been mere speculative fiction.
Even before the shelter in place orders and deaths of COVID-19, the likes of which we haven’t seen during my lifetime, I’d been unsettled, feeling the tensions of a world on the brink, the late capitalist hellscape we find ourselves seeming ready to burst at the seams. With fierce online battles between supporters of various candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, seeming to conclude with the most lackluster choice, I found myself lost, confused. I’ve always strongly considered myself on the left, a “liberal,” or, as the US pollsters would have termed it, “very” or “extremely” liberal, more liberal, in fact, than the Democratic party itself. Perhaps “progressive” would be the more palatable term, these days. Lurking on depressing, frightening, or perplexing online message boards, I began to see a little of the contradictions of my own “liberalism” as I deepened my readings of anarchism, socialism, and other more radical leftist positions, in spite of thinking of myself already as sympathetic to socialism years before I’d ever even heard of Bernie Sanders.
For this entry, I decided to start with some of the more hopeful takes I’ve read so far, books that illustrate that, in spite of the many things that are wrong with our contemporary society, this “second gilded age” of unfettered capitalism, things could get better. In fact, many argue, things are poised politically now to move many of our societies towards a more just and equal world. Of course, we first have to look at how things are going wrong.
Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America by Randy Shaw and Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond both offer sobering and informational accounts of the broken state of the state of housing in the United States, where prices are squeezing out working and middle class people. Shaw, director of the Tenderloin Housing Committee in San Francisco, compiles a pretty comprehensive account of how US cities are working, and failing, to combat the rampant housing crisis, especially for the younger generations and especially in the places where jobs are being created and people desire to live. Shaw discusses gentrification, race, homelessness, and neighborhood opposition to “development,” along with policies that encourage displacement, using cities including his own San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Austin, Seattle, Denver, and my own Minneapolis to illustrate how these “progessive” urban areas are following policies that lead to a great disparity. In the end, Shaw also provides some concrete political and infrastructural steps cities can take to combat the problem.
In Evicted, by contrast, journalist Matthew Desmond focuses on one specific city for his upsetting and eye opening examination of the housing crisis of the last decade, the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Desmond spares nothing in exposing the sheer magnitude of the problem, interviewing renters from both Milwaukee’s predominantly African American North side and its mostly white south side, a city where lack of regulations have led to rents in the poorest neighborhoods being comparable to those in its most desirable. Through the eyes of the people Desmond profiles, we see the human effects of these policies, how with little security or safety nets, any minor problem threatens to put tenants too far into the hole to prevent eviction.
Moving from the housing crisis to the question of labor in our unstable and changing economic environment, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials by Malcolm Harris and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber delve into how labor is exploited. Kids These Days is an engaging work that critiques the ongoing complaints about “Millennials” and how they/we are upsetting social mores through the lens of the neoliberal policies that reduce them/us to mere “human capital” who can be leveraged to generate profits, prioritizing present capital gains over the future itself. In Harris’ argument, from grade school onward people born during the ’80s and ’90s became the first cohort to be entirely subsumed into the social and economic changes in the US that promised prosperity for all only to deliver roadblocks in the form of under or unemployment, rising housing costs, and exorbitant debt. While not quite as in depth as I had hoped for, it was a pretty relatable description of some systematic, complex, and worrying problems in our society, with some funny nostalgic references.
Bullshit Jobs was a much more in depth work, which came as a bit of a surprise to me. I checked it out as an audiobook expecting kind of a funny account of ridiculous jobs in the 21st century, but was impressed by one of the most coherent and broad treatments of the limitations of late stage capitalism throughout the world I’ve read so far. Graeber, using profiles of workers laboring in a variety of pointless jobs manufactured for a variety of reasons as well as some meticulous research really paints a vivid and worrying picture, one that I would love to revisit. I feel like, in spite of absorbing a lot of information via audio, much of the specifics left me, which I have discovered is typical for my listening to nonfiction audiobooks. Most interestingly, Graeber ends with a compelling argument for a universal income.
This leads me to discuss a couple of recently published works attempting to proselytize the perks of socialism to people interested in a more equitable, just form of government, or even change the minds of those who have their doubts. I feel that in the current moment, we have the best chance we’ve seen in decades for a leftist movement to make real headway in the United States. Bhaskar Sunkara’s The Socialist Manifesto: A Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality and Nathan J. Robinson’s Why You Should Be a Socialist express this change and each make the case for a better, more humane governing system. Both works come from the young founders of two of the most prominent leftist journals in current publication, Sunkara’s Jacobin and Robinson’s Current Affairs, and each had some very interesting points to make as well as some weaknesses.
The Socialist Manifesto was a little less of a “manifesto” than I was expecting, in particular after Bhaskar Sunkara’s compelling and readable introduction, which imagines a United States hewing to a more “social democratic” Scandinavian style of governing through the eyes of a worker, which made some of the changes proposed by Jacobin seem relatable, desirable, and not too difficult to achieve. The bulk of the material is a condensed history of socialism throughout the world, discussing what things succeeded and what led to tragedy, a useful, if a little dry introduction packed with lots of names and dates up to the 2016 election and the campaign of Bernie Sanders. His main argument is that many of the failures of socialism came from attempting a “top down” authoritarian implementation of socialist ideas, rather than one stemming from a more grass roots origin that aims to change society from the bottom up.
I found Why You Should Be a Socialist quite a persuasive book with a lot of good arguments. Robinson writes a refreshingly optimistic, passionate account, even as he details just how broken our current system is in the United States. Admittedly self-righteous, Robinson does not spare Democrats for their role in embracing conservative economic theory, acting as though government is “best run like a business,” an argument I’ve always seen as spurious and damaging. The “neoliberal” consensus that rules both parties sets the rules, with Republicans arguing that, say, public schools don’t produce a return on investment while Democrats arguing that they do, with no one discussing that perhaps they may serve a role that is not economic.
This is a stance that both Robinson and Sunkara share and, as a progressive sympathetic to their arguments, it has given me a lot to think about. They make a lot of good points about the failures of the “liberals” of the Democratic and other mainstream liberal parties, their implicit culpability for the extreme inequality of the world, but I also found them on occasion a little class reductionist. While each does an admirable job in addressing “intersectionality” in their arguments for economic justice, they both also, I feel, express some hostility to the idea of “identity politics,” or the idea that some marginalized people may hold concerns not related to those of class. For instance, I’m certainly not convinced that, however more economically just a socialist world might be, it would necessarily solve problems of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or ableism in the population. It is an interesting, and not unrelated fact that all of the authors I’ve discussed so far are men, I think.
On the other hand, this imagining of a better world in both Sunkara’s and Robinson’s writing was one of the things I found most interesting in their work. Robinson, in particular, writes much of how our current neoliberal world deadens our imaginations, with no one able to imagine a better, more utopian world but instead can only see the collapse of our current dystopian one into further dystopia. It may be that, with the current global crisis stemming from a horrifying pandemic, some of their hopes may be closer than ever, though it’s also true that each book is more or less out of date just months after publication. After what seems to be the disappointing result of the US democratic primary, for instance, both Sunkara and Robinson’s enthusiasm for a Bernie revolution feels all the more depressing.
The last work I’ll discuss was my favorite I read in this entry, Socialist Realism by Trisha Low. In contrast to Sunkara and Robinson’s works of analysis, her writing is personal but also deals with many of the same themes in a much more present way. In Socialist Realism, Low writes an introspective, energizing, yet unsettling work of memoir, dense with ideas and insights into the state of our world today. Low details her childhood growing up in Singapore, heading west to London, New York, and finally, Oakland, interspaced with thoughts, feelings, references, and impressions ranging from pop culture, to the art world, to the end of the world. Whether writing about French new wave films or boy bands, identity or Singaporean politics and horror movies in equally erudite terms, her writing ranges from flippant to poignant, but always engaging. Meandering through ideas, Low flows from topic to topic seemingly at will, but circles her writing back in really cool ways to establish novel connections that let the reader see it in a new light.
The heart of Low’s work is the idea of “home” and how this relates both to the immigrant experience and to the idea of utopia and the end of the world. The idea of “socialist realism” as she discusses involves the Soviet term for works of art that celebrate the “reality” of the great advances of the communist system, in spite of whatever reality that people are actually living. Not that I think we should give up seeking a better world. As Low writes about utopia, “I don’t know where it is these days. But I want to feel free in our searching for it. However it is we’re moving. However it is I’m coming to it, especially if it won’t ever arrive.”
Low’s work is definitely a more troubling, less optimistic take than that of Sunkara or Robinson’s, but one that I found more thoughtful, and one that I can really relate with in our uncertain world, the last couple weeks in particular. It is important that we continue to strive for a better world, no matter how unlikely and I hope to continue to learn more. As Low writes, “I don’t believe any utopia we imagine can ever come into being. Such perfection is, by definition, beyond what our reality is capable of. Maybe Utopia is imagining life beyond what we know is possible.”
In the end, after reading these works, I would definitely consider myself still broadly a “liberal,” (in the United States usage of the term at least), or more precisely, perhaps, a social liberal, progressive, or even social democrat or democratic socialist. I would fall more into the reformist branch of the left rather than a more revolutionary vein, seeking to shift our current system into one that is more equitable rather than scrap it all and start over. I understand that this may make me naive. As I continue to follow more radical stances on the left, among libertarian socialists and anarchists, I can see the cracks present all throughout the system that threaten to take it all down regardless of the revolution. As the state and economy buckles under the pressures of an unprecedented (in our lifetimes) pandemic, we must be ready for anything. I’m not sure that I am.
In my future entries, I’ll delve into more about how we got here, and delve into the darker threads that are rising up in the wake of the Trump administration.
This entry’s thematic musical companion is “People,” by AJJ, from their 2007 album People Who Can Eat People Are the Luckiest People in the World.