Why I'm a Socialist

In reading a lot of the nonsense by right wingers the past few years, I feel it is necessary to point out several of the major flaws in their thinking and to likewise state what I believe in and what I assume many others actually believe in. 

I refer to myself as either a democratic socialist or a libertarian socialist. 

By these terms I mean that I believe quite profoundly in the intimate connection between liberalism and socialism.  I tend to see that socialism is the logical development on liberal/libertarian ideological principles. 

There is a great deal of talk by the right wing about the principles of libertarianism, limited government, and individual liberty.  There is often the claim that these principles are what this country was founded on and that they are the true form of liberalism.  I say let’s go back to the writings of the father of liberalism, John Locke, and really examine what he was talking about.

When one does this, one can see that there are at least two major flaws in the ideology of right wing libertarianism. 

The first of these is a flaw of Locke’s thinking in general, in that his notion that society and government are formed by the free association of individual property owners.  This is incorrect for two reasons. 

The first is that given contemporary historical and anthropological understandings of human development, there is no instance that I’m aware of where individuals actually existed purely as individuals absent of any form of societal context.  

The second is that likewise given our contemporary anthropological understanding of human development, we know that the idea of private property is actually a relatively new concept in human history and originates with the development ‘the State’.  Thus exclusive private property does not exist naturally, but instead requires the coercive power of the State to recognize and enforce the claim by an individual to property.  In this sense the Lockean understanding, and thus the right wing understanding, of human development isn’t factually correct.

The second of these major flaws on the part of the right is the radical misinterpretation and misunderstanding of the profundity of the Lockean notion of ownership.  In his Second Treatise on Government, John Locke describes ownership as deriving from human labor.  In this sense, when someone works something the product of that labor becomes an extension of their-self; thus they own it. 

Locke talked originally about this in regards to basic subsistence functions like hunting, gathering, and farming.  The idea being that in hunting, the labor involved gave you the legitimate claim to ownership of the dead animal; in gathering, labor gives you legitimate claim to ownership of the berries; and that in farming, working the fields gives you legitimate claim to the products of the harvest. 

While right wing libertarians tend to accept this principle in its basic form, they tend to lose it when it is extrapolated to the modern context.  They accept the principle that individual labor means individual ownership, but they fail to see that labor by more than one person must logically produce collective ownership by those persons.  The failure to recognize collective ownership when there is collective labor is a fundamental failure to recognize the profundity of liberal/libertarian principles and is perhaps a base rejection of those principles.

It is for those reasons why I tend to understand contemporary right wing libertarians as being half genius and half moron.  They are great on understanding the individual liberty components of liberal/libertarian thought, but terrible when there is the complexity of more than one person in society.

In returning to my original objective of describing why I’m a socialist, in following these principles of Lockean Liberalism as it relates to labor and ownership, I do not see many instances where there is only individual labor in society.  There are myriad examples of individual ownership, but most of these derive from collective labor. 

For example, many people might work at a company, but only a small number of people actually own it.  And in instances where there is the trading of stocks, the people who ‘own’ the company and make money off of its products don’t even work there. 

I tend to see that our entire wage based economy where a person ‘sells’ their labor to an employer is fundamentally unjust given this Lockean understanding of the connection between labor and ownership. 

Thomas Jefferson, as a true liberal, correctly referred to this unjust manner of economic organization as “wage slavery”.  When a person does not own what they produce, that constitutes theft, and they are thus not free! 

It is for that reason that I embrace (at least in the short term) unionization, so that workers can receive more remuneration for their labor.  But it is also why, in the long term, I know that we have to move to an economic system based on a combination of cooperative worker owned and operated enterprises as well as some government involvement in the areas that affect all citizens.

This lack of an understanding of the relationship between the individual and society, on the part of right wingers, extends into all areas of society but particularly into how they view and understand government, how they understand corporations, as well as the connection between the individual and community in society. 

In regards to government, they tend to see a concentration of power in the hands of government officials that are unaccountable to the people as being a possible threat to liberty. 

Broadly speaking, I do tend to agree with that view.  However, only having that type of an understanding of government is very limited and very problematic given our contemporary situation.

That way of thinking about government sees it in the sense of a monarchy or some other authoritarian rule as being an arbitrary and unjustly coercive influence.  That manner of thinking though is not consistent with a society that is based on the principles of a democratic republic. 

My point is that when your type of government changes, your thinking about government must also change. 

It is very problematic to use the same objection to government that one uses against a tyrant to object to a democratic republican government trying to fulfill the obligations of its social contract (in the case of the United States, this would be the U.S. Constitution), but yet that is exactly what so many right wingers do! 

It is correct to object to an authoritarian but potentially wrong to object to the decisions made democratically by the government on the same grounds.  It is for that reason that right wingers talk about how they want to reduce government or outright end government. 

I tend to see such views as being not only radically antidemocratic but also unjust, selfish, and in some cases, sociopathic when they exist in the context of a democracy or a democratic republic. 

As a libertarian socialist and a democratic socialist, I do not want to end government, rather I want to make the government work for the people and be accountable to the people. 

That is what is important.  If a government becomes authoritarian then it is the right of a people to overthrow it. 

Government, in itself, is not an arbitrary influence on society but is in fact a very natural component of all human societies.  Wherever more than one person exists in a community there is government. 

Government is only the creation of the people to serve as the guiding or steering influence in society.  That is in fact what “to govern” actually means in the original Greek; to steer.  Thus all legitimate government must be accountable to the citizens, and it must work in the interests of all citizens.  In a democratic republican society, government is only what the people make it, for better or worse.

While right wingers decry (real and imagined) governmental tyranny, they also fail to recognize any other possible form of tyranny.  Libertarians (of the left and right) oppose the concentration of power because the concentration of coercive authority is a fundamental threat to liberty. 

As I said before, this is true of government when it becomes too centralized and unaccountable to the people.  However, what right wingers often times fail to recognize is the tyranny of our current socioeconomic system. 

As I touched on earlier, our economic system dominated by large corporations using a system of wage slavery is incredibly tyrannical. 

Corporations are private tyrannies. 

Just because something is private sector tyranny doesn’t make it any less tyrannical than that of the public sector.  Corporations, as organizations, are centralized, hierarchical, and undemocratic entities. 

All of them are. 

It’s not a matter of good corporations versus bad corporations; they are all unjust simply by their organizational model (to say nothing of their business practices).  In fact, the governmentally supported monopoly of the British East India Company (a corporation) was one of the main reasons for the original Boston Tea Party. 

Many of the founders recognized the threat of corporations, and Thomas Jefferson even tried to amend the Constitution to have protections from corporations and monopolies included in the Bill of Rights. 

What we need to do is eradicate all concentrations of coercive authority in society. 

Coercive authority, where it exists in the public and private sectors, must be broken up and made accountable to the people.  The transition to a community-based cooperative economic model, as I mentioned before, will resolve this issue in the private sector.

Lastly, I want to talk more broadly about the general relationship between the individual and the community. 

Right wing people usually try to phrase this as though the individual and the community are inherently antagonistic to each other, and that in order to maintain individual liberty, individualism must triumph over communalism. 

However, when we examine actual human history and the anthropological development of human societies, we see that humans have never actually existed as individuals outside of a community context.  Thus, this discussion needs to not be one of the individual against the community, but understanding how individuals exist in community and how we can make more just and open communities that both function as communities and respect individual differences. 

Also, we need to seek to develop humans in these communities on the levels of both the community and the individual as holistic beings.  We cannot separate the myriad aspects of society (economic issues, social issues, religious/spiritual issues, etc) and the myriad people in society. 

This connection between the individual and community is seen by the founders of some of our religious traditions.  For instance, Christians believe in the idea of the collective Body of Christ, which symbolically represents the worldwide Christian community.  Likewise, Muslims tend to believe in the idea of the Ummah as the worldwide community of Muslims. 

Believing in individualism as antagonistic to communalism runs contrary to our world religions and is a very selfish and dangerous ideological position and is very damaging to human society. 

We have to have a society that is mutually supportive and promotes the full development of human potential for all persons.

So, why am I a democratic and libertarian socialist? 

I am because I recognize that freedom and democracy go hand in hand.  I am because I know that collective labor necessitates collective ownership.  I am because I know that all forms of tyranny need to be abolished, not simply the ones in the public sector. 

I am because I know that ‘the State’ (the centralized coercive authority that supports the interests of the upper classes), not the government (as the guiding organization in a society), is the problem. 

I am because I know that in order for democracy to survive and to thrive, and in order for people to be truly free, all aspects of society must be fully democratized. 

I am because I know that humans have always existed in community and that we must continue to do so.  I am because I know that an individualist society is an inherently anti-human society.  I am because I abhor greed, racism, sexism, and classism in all of their forms; and because I abhor the commodification of life and of society. 

I am a socialist because I’m an actual liberal. 

And finally, I am a socialist because I actually believe in freedom in all of its forms.