Self-described socialists know they have a PR problem on their hands.
The gadflies at the most aptly named journal in America gave us a good laugh over the weekend:
That’s quite the supposition. Oddly enough, the three authors who wrote the piece Jacobin promotes above find support for it in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s best seller, Abundance.
If you squint at the book — the central thesis of which is that progressive legal proceduralism, profligate constituent maintenance, and emphasis on stimulating economic demand at the expense of supply (which contributes to, you know, abundance) — you can find a Marxian argument against the degree to which capitalism “eventually stifles the very productive forces it unleashed.”
That’s clever. Indeed, the authors proceed from that contestable claim to similar hypotheses about the degree to which American industry is hindered by limited “state capacity” and “corruption atop society.” Progressives are not immune from critique, either. Having shifted away from the ethos that gave way to the New Deal, the left retreated into “a technocratic, highly undemocratic form of governance that cedes power to unaccountable bureaucracies,” the authors note.
Ultimately, the book review concludes that, despite a few nuggets of wisdom here and there, Abundance is a reactionary tract:
Socialists have good reason to be wary of the narrative of pendulums and striking balances. Not only does the logic of balance invariably cast left politics as the pendulum swinging “too far,” it also fails to explain anything. It’s the analytical equivalent of a shrug. It says humans will always tend to go too far with things and that’s just the way things go. It doesn’t tell us anything at all about why something has happened, who drove it, or whose interests it served.
Classic socialist thought does not occupy itself with abundance. If plenitude follows, that is a byproduct of socialism’s primary goal: the redistribution of existing resources. “Under capitalism, the distribution of the ownership of the ultimate productive resources is a very unequal one, a large part of the population owning only their labor power,” the Polish economist Oscar Lange theorized in 1937. “Only a socialist economy can distribute incomes so as to attain the maximum social welfare.”
Indeed, as Friedrich Hayek once told William F. Buckley Jr., socialism’s emphasis on the redistribution of other people’s money and the fruits of their labor ensures that it must eventually make itself an enemy of abundance; specifically, the public’s expectations for abundance. Socialistic prescriptions for a robust “industrial policy,” which Jacobin’s authors laudably refer to as “economic planning” (we should all dispense with this antiseptic euphemism for command economics), will forever encounter Hayek’s knowledge problem. That’s when the socialist enterprise breaks down.
Utopians forever promise that abundance will be the invariable, albeit corollary, outgrowth of socialist economics. And when abundance fails to materialize, the utopians pivot from promising wealth and comfort to moral and emotional blackmail. Maybe socialism has its challenges, but it is a fundamentally more ethical social compact than that which is prescribed by avaricious capitalists. In fact, Jacobin itself did just that amid a misguided effort to defend East Germany from posterity’s inevitable verdict.
“The [Berlin] Wall was ugly, menacing, and, for many citizens, no doubt heartbreaking,” the magazine’s Loren Balhorn wrote. “But the economic and geopolitical stability it ensured also gave the GDR the chance to build a society that was broadly characterized by modest prosperity and social equality between classes and genders.”
It continued:
Though wages were only half of what they were in the West, adjusted for prices in relation to earnings, GDR workers’ actual purchasing power was more or less the same. This fact, combined with the chronic lack of certain consumer goods, taught citizens to rely on each other and help each other out in times of need — a reality that still resonates today in polls showing that Easterners are considerably more sensitive to social inequality and the importance of solidarity.
Thus, socialism’s stakeholders are compelled to temper the public’s expectations. Those who anticipated imminent material prosperity are told that they’ll have to settle for the “solidarity” that accompanies universal hardship.
Jacobin’s review of Abundance, and the authors’ observation that even progressives like Zohran Mamdani have started introducing the word into their vocabularies (even if that happy condition is to be denied the left’s class enemies), does indicate that self-described socialists know they have a PR problem on their hands. They’re not doing much to address it, but even acknowledging the contours of our shared reality is a welcome development. Baby steps.