Lost Highway Times...Paths in Oblivion

Socialism gets a lot of flack because things like universal healthcare would be compulsory, but what about capitalist society?

In socialist society, people can vote on what things they want to be compulsory, but in capitalism, the supposed realm of freedom, you have no choice.

Compulsion in capitalism comes from the threat of being reduced to destitution if you don't tow the line. People have complete freedom to believe, think, and act in any way they want. Employers also have the right not to hire those folks. If you want to eat, to have shelter, to have clothes, it helps to act in ways that are consonant with what businesses want. That's quite an incentive. Businesses as a whole can reduce people to nothing, but the same thing cannot be said about people, unless they organize. There's a structural inequality and power relationship between business and employees that defeats the supposed freedom and introduces compulsion into the mix.

Folks sometimes talk about people being free agents, about the ability of workers to independently bargain with employers to get a truly just deal, but in practice that only really applies to people who have particular skills that are valuable enough that they can use them in that way. For a great many people, this isn't realistic, because the skills they have are fairly replaceable, everything being said and done, and there are plenty of other folks waiting at the door if the deal  presented isn't acceptable.

Compulsion in capitalist society is a reality. A certain kind of compulsion is present in socialist society, but the difference is that instead of hiding behind an illusion of absolute freedom, socialism presents what's happening outright, and lets people democratically decide whether they want it or not.

 

We have our village again. People get sick, no one really knows how to treat them. So, the people of the village call a meeting. They say they know of a doctor who makes a circuit around the area who will come once a month, or every two months, provided they give him a place to stay and compensation. The people agree that this is a good thing, one person figures out where the doctor can stay, and they take up a collection to pay for his services. The doctor comes, stays, treats people, gets compensated.

Government health care.

You have two villages. There's a very badly maintained trail between them, and it's hard to get from one village to the other. Somebody in one of the villages thinks that it would be good if there was a road between them. A village council is called, people discuss it, and come to the conclusion, yes, it would be a good idea. They arrange for a couple of people in the village to work on the road in together in their spare time, and take up a collection to compensate them for their work.

They do the work, the road gets built, it's easier to travel between the villages. Voila. 

I think that the future of socialism in the United States, at least, lies in the fusion of working class lead revolutionary socialism with a national as opposed to international focus. "Socialism in one country", annunciated unfortunately by Stalin, makes sense in our condition as a soon-to-be-post empire. Once the American empire has truly gone by the wayside, due to our own ineptitude, it will be time to go inward once more and set our own house in order. On top of demoting the rich, and promoting the working class, the United States needs a national program of economic development that will build and restructure the economy so that it can viably compete in the world arena.

"Proletarian Internationalism" has always been more of a dream, a myth, rather than a reality, and the Soviet Union even rejected the pure notion of a one culture, one state, socialism as opposed to one that honored regional differences and the individual ways of life of particular countries.

What that means for the United States is complex. I'm in favor of honoring the actual cultural fabric of the United States, which is multi-cultural and includes people of all racial, ethnic, and religious groups as opposed to praising some sort of idealized, and non-representative, notion of what the United States is.

If a nation-centric socialism comes into being in the United States, it should reflect this diversity as well, as opposed to playing the politics of internal domination by one group over the other.

*and to add, on edit: Despite becoming one of the worst mass murderers in history, Stalin wasn't all bad. A lot of his ideas that he had before he started killing mass amounts of people weren't completely off the mark. "Foundations of Leninism", written before he seized power, remains a positive book.

I don't want to overstate my involvement. I was an intern for a men's shelter in Olympia, handled some case work there, and then volunteered at the connected drop in center for a summer, working the front desk a couple of days a week, then I remained a friend of the organization. I won't name it, but you can find it pretty easily on the web. I still have a great many friends who were connected to it.

Anyways, what I learned was that the radical, liberal, and conservative takes on homelessness are all both simultaneously right and wrong.

First the radical. My experience was that there were few people who were homeless who had simply been exploited by capitalism. Class formed a general background to homelessness, but few in number were the people who had simply been dealt a bad hand and nothing else. This was several years before the economic collapse. The folks who were homeless because of something like that tended to not stay homeless for an extended period of time, but instead get their stuff together and get back on track.

Next the liberal. Surprisingly, for my radical sensibilities, the liberal notion of what caused homelessness was much more correct than I thought--although not completely. That is to say, in the liberal as opposed to radical model, society is basically fine and just except for incidental things like family background and other non-economic factors that cause people to do self destructive and outright destructive things.

Most, if not all, of the people who were chronically homeless came from backgrounds where their family situations and community situations were seriously fucked up. I say that as a fact. This background directly contributed to the problems that they picked up that lead to them becoming homeless and staying homeless. Those problems were frequently addiction, or simply chronic bad choices due to psychological factors.

However, people across the board, across all backgrounds, have experiences like this. What made the difference between folks who had bad family backgrounds and became homeless and those that didn't was usually money, class. Folks who became homeless didn't have the financial or social support necessary to help them negotiate their problems without having everything collapse. That was how the radical informed the liberal.

Now for the conservative. It wasn't simply family background and class position that predisposed people to becoming homeless, it was often folks own choices that they made that were not good as well. Personal choice had a great deal to do with it--but personal choice often made on the background of severely fucked up family situations and community situations. Nevertheless, there was a continuum of amount of personal responsibility that contributed to people becoming homeless, with some folks basically being fucked from the start and others fucking up their lives more than others.

So all three positions had elements of truth to them, although none was the whole story. People weren't simply directly victimized by capitalism, they weren't only victims of their family backgrounds, and they weren't all in the situation because of personal choices.