Socialism … Seriously by Danny Katch:
Review:
”Eisegesis is the process of reading one's own ideas or beliefs into a text, rather than allowing the text to speak for itself.”
Socialism seems like a nebulous pile of ideas that no one can really totally agree on. The author clearly has a pretty radical take on a lot of stuff.
Some stuff I agreed with:
(1) The unfathomably stark level of inequality in the US.
(2) The criticism of capitalism and the idea that capitalism inevitably leads to a capital class and a labor class, which creates strife, disunity, unequal opportunities, unfair outcomes, etc.
(3) The corrupting influence of money in politics and the dreadful consequences of Citizens United.
(4) The US does not have the incentive structures in place to meaningfully address climate change.
Some stuff I didn’t agree with:
(1) Giving land back to indigenous people. Sounds like a noble idea, and I agree we could do a lot to give indigenous communities more input and agency. I don’t agree we should re-title the entire US “back” to indigenous people, as the author suggests. First of all, how? How would you do it? How would you litigate competing claims to the same land? If one tribe has a solid claim, then another tribe comes along and says they occupied that land first, who wins? Second criticism: isn’t their whole thing that land shouldn’t be owned at all?
(2) That socialism requires revolution. The author practically insists that meaningful progress toward socialism requires a once-in-a-century kind of uprising, but then also fully recognizes those uprisings almost never lead to a lasting socialist society (Russian Revolution, Arab Spring, etc.). So I guess he would say revolution is a necessary but not sufficient condition. The prospect of a meaningful “revolution” in the US seems far-fetched. We’re too comfortable. And distracted. I think modern socialism, for US purposes, must be gained via education and reform.
(3) The author’s depiction of a future socialist utopia didn’t even sound that great. They still had to conserve energy and pay extra for air conditioning? And people were switching jobs all the time? That doesn’t sound very optimal.
Notes:
USA has most billionaires but also most bankruptcies from medical bills.
Haiti exists as a country because hundreds of thousands of slaves on the island of Saint-Domingue escaped, formed an army, and defeated France and Spain’s invasions. In 1810.
2021 survey: 84 percent of young people somewhat worried about climate change. Almost half were so anxious that it affected their daily life and functioning.
Communist Manifesto came out in 1848. Within months, there were revolutions breaking out across Europe. (Not necessarily because of the book, but the book came at a particularly opportune time.)
ICE and Homeland Security did not exist before 9/11.
What eventually created capitalism was an internal conflict in the existing feudalist system between landowners and a growing class of merchants and bankers who generated wealth through trade and investment. Europe’s conquest of the Americas and enslavement of Africans created huge opportunities to gain wealth and power for those who weren’t part of the landowning aristocracy.
Thomas Hobbes: life in prehistoric societies that didn’t have rich and powerful kings must have been “nasty, brutish, and short.”
Neolithic Revolution: people stopped being nomadic and set up settlements and later civilizations.
Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776. Britain was still largely feudal, so Smith’s argument that the capitalist class had discovered a better way to run society was pretty radical.
Katch: People with capital exploit those without capital for labor. All profits are based on exploitation.
9/10 members of Congress enjoy “non-competitive” elections due to gerrymandering.
The DOJ has used the Espionage Act against whistleblowers like Snowden and Manning. But espionage is defined as leaking secrets to the government’s enemies, **and Snowden, Manning only leaked to the general public. “What does that say about how the US government regards its people?”
“Most people think socialism is a set of laws that would more equally distribute wealth. That’s part of it, but laws that reduce inequality don’t eliminate bosses, who can elect or overthrow the governments that pass those laws, as we’ve seen many times over. The essence of socialism is that workers can use the collective organization that they have learned under capitalism to create not just cooperative workplaces but a cooperative society geared to meet humanity’s needs instead of a competitive one geared to maximize profit.”
Class consciousness: the more awareness a class has, the more power it has.
Taft-Hartley Act: Makes it illegal for most workers to strike over issues that affect customers, other workers, or the general public. Passed in 1947 by a R Congress. Truman and the Ds campaigned on a promise to overturn the law. Union members turned out, and Truman won, and Ds got both houses. But then some Ds broke ranks, and they didn’t actually repeal it. Truman acted all mad, but he went on to use the law twelve times to break strikes. And many D presidential nominees have promised unions to repeal it. But it’s still law.
Katch: Our culture has a problem with how it sees land. We think it’s a thing to be lived on, rather than something to live with. No amount of nature appreciation can change that.
Ecuador in 2008 approved a new Constitution that gives rivers, mountains, and forests the right to exist, flourish, and evolve. Bolivia did something similar in 2011. Nature has standing.
Revolutionary thinking was very much alive in the 1960s but has since died out for the most part. It’s been replaced by self-help, self-reliance, “stick-to-what-you-can-control” attitudes.
Meddling: Chile in the 70s elected, democratically, a socialist government. Kissinger: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” Then the US supported a coup led by the Chilean military in 1973 that overthrew the Chilean government and killed tens of thousands of supporters.
Russian Revolution: It was actually two revolutions. They overthrew the tsar in February 1917, then they created a new soviet government in October that year. The new soviet government called for an immediate end to Russia’s participation in WWI. It also legalized divorce, abortion, and homosexuality. It also published Russia’s allies’ (England and France) plans to divide up colonial territories of their enemies after the war. This embarrassed England and France.
But after WWI, Russia’s economy was wrecked, and foreign powers were invading it, so the new socialist government had to take bread from peasants in the rural areas to feed workers in the cities. Authority shifted from the soviets (small councils) to the Bolshevik bureaucrats.
Socialism/communism: “In some writings, Marx and Engels used socialism to refer to a transition period after a working-class revolution, and communism to refer to a later era when class inequality had been fully eliminated.”
Chinese Revolution: 1920s. Failed revolution, the CCP got massacred and retreated to the countryside under Mao Zedong and remade themselves into a peasant army. Over the next 20 years, they would resist Japanese occupation and win power from China’s corrupt ruling elites. But then Mao did what Stalin did and famine kinda wiped them out.
In southern Mexico in 1994, there was a Zapatista uprising that created and has maintained government-free autonomous towns.
Jeremy Corbyn in Britain is a socialist akin to Bernie.
Today’s “socialist” countries are not truly socialist. And “socialists who support repressive governments simply because the US opposes them fail to achieve the internationalism they are aiming for. Instead, they are strangely provincial, looking at the world only from the perspective of the US government (so that they can oppose it) rather than that of ordinary people across the globe.”
We already have partial socialism in the form of government-run post offices, fire stations, and highways.
Robert Moses was the famous New York City public planner who flattened entire neighborhoods that stood in the way of his vision for new highways and communities. Moses’s friend once said he “loved the public, but not as people.”
Some (Kautsky) have argued that Christianity is a doctrine of the oppressed inside the Roman Empire. The “good news” is the working class’s historic destiny to overthrow capitalism and create a better world.
May Day: May 1st. A celebration of labor and labor rights around the world. I didn’t really know about it, perhaps unsurprisingly, having grown up in the US.
Quotes:
The future steps we take toward socialism won’t be formed out of the mind’s of today’s socialists but out of the decisions made by tomorrow’s workers in the course of their fight for freedom.
How the hell can we organize a historic fight against ecological collapse using pleasantries like climate change and global warming? The same politicians who casually scapegoat vast numbers of people as terrorists or criminals feel the need to be remarkably polite to the atmospheric elements choking our planet to death.
It’s a healthy instinct to not trust the people in charge of a capitalist society. Where conspiracy theories go wrong is that they give the people at the top way too much credit for actually knowing what the hell they’re doing.
Injustice has always relied on the bitter irony that the less people have, the more afraid they are to lose it.
Just as our placid physical surroundings have been shaped by glaciers crashing through mountains and lava bursting out of flat earth, our seemingly stable landscape of laws and borders is the result of tremendous upheavals, whose successes and failures have shaped the peaks and valleys of our political aspirations.
Now more than ever, socialism can be credibly seen as not just a more democratic and humane society but also as a way of life that’s more in tune with whatever Larger Plan you subscribe to, be it God, Nature, or the well-being of future generations.
Sharp and at times unpleasant debates are a necessary part of any effective political culture—but too often they take place entirely in online spaces owned by corporations that use our outrage and insecurities to keep us locked to our screens. Try whenever possible to debate your comrades in spaces where you are looking at each other and not your number of likes.