Socialism and Slavery

 It's a powerful argument: people who work hard should be able to keep what they have earned. There's a great deal of populist resentment behiind it, and it's pretty remarkable how that emotion gets flopped by some into a justification for the very people that resentment was aimed at. Just a little swipe of the chalkboard eraser and--whoop! the phrase 'who work hard' is no longer there!

But the original argument still has weight, and the arguments are not necessarily proof against it, and the arguers know it. It is a position of strength. The way I see it, there are three major arguments against the force of the original--not to refute it, but to challenge what seems to be the corollary, that taxes are unconscionable, and the socialism is just plain wrong.

The first is an argument from utility that a society which is set up without any common property is not society at all. Public roads, public schools, public police protection, public fire protection, public health all have obvious practical merit. The second one is the argument from Christianity, that greed is condemned and sharing with one's fellows a binding principle. The third argument is that a mix of sharing and keeping  actually increases overall wealth much better than dog-eat-dog competition alone. There's a fourth argument, along the lines of 'sez who?'  that simply challenges the principle and says Nature doesn't provide for the right, no legal system establishes it, and most people don't find it an obscenity when they're sober--so who are you to whine about it?

Any sufficiently thick-headed libertarian will assert, though (with what probability it doesn't matter) that a free society would ultimately work just as well--and be in accord with principle. The fact that libertarianism has never been tried on any scale and for any time, which some might consider a drawback, has kept practical failures out of the argument and kept it all in the realm of theory, where Freedom is hard to argue with. The argument from Christianity is contingent on current politics, currently exploiting the current unholy alliance between radical capitalists and radical fundamentalist christians. It's not, therefore, an argument against the primacy of property but an attack on a right-wing agenda that's without coherence. (The specter of Ron Paul being a libertarian and yet against women's reproductive choice is rather mind-boggling in theory, but part of the pact in practice.) None of these arguments, much as they please us, stands a chance of thwarting either the consequencelss moral theorizing or the deeply ingrained possessive resentment on the other side.

It's that resentment, though, that really interests me.

The resentment is based on two separate strands: the feeling of just reward and the feeling of entitlement. The two are not even close to being the same thing, and in some ways (like their class attachments) they are opposites. The first is "I worked hard and I deserve to be compensated," and the second "I'm entitled to keep what I've got." The first is the good old labor theory of value so crucial to Marxism and populism, while the second is a feeling of privilege that is closely attached to the aristocratic landowner's feeling that their property is inseparable from them.

The first, populist resentment, here is oddly divorced from its political roots, which went on to distinguished earned from unearned income, and pitted the bosses against the workers by establishing the moral superiority of the latter. The flaw in this context is that this emotional appeal, as I've said before, is quickly spread from the sweat of one's brow to the return on one's (ore one's parents') investments. And the second , as an appeal to privilege, becomes problematic when generalized. If everybody is entitled to keep what they've gotten, and nobody should be penalized for there success, where does commonality and government come in? (The privilege becomes blatant when, in arguing against progressive income tax, paean's are raised to 'the successful' as a class who deserve to be lauded instead of penalized.)

Behind simple justice, therefore, the money you get both legitimizes your work and your standing, which makes it a horrible thing to derive you of. And the absolutist position is that taxation says your work is worthless, and you are not entitled to own anything.

Of course, even communism believes that you should get compensated for your work, and that you are an owner. The difference is that the scale of compensation is different, your ownership of the means of production is in common with your fellow workers. The bugaboo socialism is of a system not found in in Soviet Russia but in the American South. It's indeed horrible, and it may be why that fear strikes a nerve in America more than in most places.

But it's also why the vehement denial that you are a slave sounds suspiciously like the assertion that you are a slavemaster. And why a the middle seems to be excluded from the argument. And why keeping your money seems, contrary to expectations and the teaching of the Buddha and the Christ, to be associated with freedom.

Of course, though, money is not like owning slaves or being one. Income tax does not remove your reward--just some of it. It does not change your ownership status--it just takes some of your money. The objectors make the absurd point that increasing taxes will cause the Successful not to invest, not to work and everyone to be poor, ignoring the free-market principle that if there is money to be made, someone will try to make it. It's a very peculiar picture they paint, which makes sense once you sketch Tara in in the background.

Their fear is not that of a Bolshevik Revolution--it's of a slave uprising. And their hysteria is uncannily mirrored by the slaveowners horror of acknowledging that there would be any restrictions on ownership, that these human beings would have any legal standing other than as livestock. The position of the rich in society is not imperiled by a rise in taxes--by an extremely simple process of mathematical calculation, they will still have more money than everybody else.  

I'm not sure why this specter is there--it certainly doesn't seem to clank around the descendants of slaves--probably because they know the difference between bullshit symbolism and the real thing. And of course the collegiate free-marketeers are by no means all from the south. It may be a mysterious subtle process by which, whenever the ghost of aristocracy rears its head, it takes that ugly indigenous form, because it's so woven into our history and memory.

On a less psychological level, the best argument against this fear of socialism is that money is a fuzzy thing. It's value changes from day to day, and its societal value changes even more radically. It's relationship to wealth is slippery and its relationship to social status wildly wobbly. Everybody does work they don't get paid for, directly or indirectly; people and corporations invest, whereby money magically blossoms in value or justas magically disappears; and anybody who uses advertising can no longer legitimately talk about sacred value in exchange. Our world is littered with stupid paper streamers, brightly colored brochures and free samples that are given away at great expense and no more guarantee of effect than that of prayer. Adam Smith pointed out that money invested in the country as a whole tends to pay off, and that sometimes the best thing you can do with your money is give it to the government--or give it to the poor.

But it might be better and more important to ask--why are you so scared?