Why Socialism has never worked

I literally just realized this morning why none of history's socialist revolutions has succeeded. Contrary to what your average capitalist friend will tell you, it's not because there's no incentive for people to work hard under the socialist model. Actually, worker ownership of the means of production is a basic tenet of Socialism, and I don’t think I’m reaching too far for an interpretation when I say that the ideal “socialist company” is one whose workers are also its shareholders. And an equal share in the profits of a company is a pretty respectable incentive to want said company to do well.

(Admittedly, I’ve brought in the idea of profit, which many a Marxist would argue is inherently capitalist. But while the word  “profit” enjoys talismanic status in the capitalist world, and therefore exerts an almost Pavlovian effect on a socialist’s distrust and disgust, the concept of profit, ending up with more than you started with, stems not from Capitalism but from the idea of “production” itself.)

But if Socialism does not enable laziness or incompetence, why have states trying to implement it always ended up poor and bleak and economically gridlocked and oppressed by a tiny ruling class? It’s a fair question, and the answer is in two parts.

Part One: the grim state of affairs I just described is a default in human history. Every political theory we’ve ever tried has led back to it. Some of these theories were little more to begin with than rationalizations, ways of saying it’s actually okay that most people’s lives are thoroughly crappy. And the more benevolent theories have all contained fatal flaws that ensured they would be unworkable outside the abstract. Which leads us to…

Part Two: The fatal flaw of Marxist and Leninist Socialism lies in the method of implementation. There must be a workers’ revolution, they say. But at the same time, the vast majority of workers have no idea that there might be another kind of life for them. Therefore, someone needs to tell them. Someone needs to convince them that this other life is real enough to fight for. Someone needs to incite them to revolution.

In short, the revolution needs leaders.

If it didn’t, if it could occur spontaneously (the construction workers taking off their hard hats in unison, the peons at IBM standing up as one and putting their fists through their computer screens), then it might lead to the kind of state Marx envisioned. But this business of leaders. The kind of leaders capable of organizing a violent overthrow of a corrupt government. These leaders don’t stop being leaders just because the task of the moment is accomplished. The workers still look to them. And the leaders may have remarkable charisma and remarkable grasp of theory, may be intellectual, may even believe what they’re saying, but for all that, they’re thugs. They came to power by violence. And when have we have ever seen someone do this without also proceeding to rule by violence?

Oppressors fear the people they oppress, and so they keep themselves separate from those people. The separation breeds more fear. Fear feeds on itself in isolation, turning into serious paranoia. And the paranoid person naturally seeks every advantage over the people around him. He needs these advantages to protect himself.

And so, before long, you have a tiny ruling class. The rulers hate and fear each other as much as they do the people they rule, but they can work together well enough to hold onto power, at least for a while. The way they do this is by taking away everything they can from the workers to whom they once promised to give everything. The state holds in trust all commodities -- bread, water, truck tires -- and doles them out based on semi-informed notions of what the people “need.”

And yes, in this system, the incentive to work disappears. The thing to remember is that it isn’t really a system at all -- it’s a return to the default setting, after we’ve fallen through the cracks in the system we thought we had.

The day after

We never talk about prevention until the bad thing has already happened. Airport security went from fairly lax to militant and invasive -- the day after 9/11, not the day before. Flaws in the New Orleans hurricane surge protection system prompted a lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers -- after the levees failed at the cost of some 1800 lives, not before. Today, gun control is suddenly a hot topic -- after a gunman shot up a school in Newtown, Connecticut, killing 20 children and 6 adults. Not before.

I doubt I'm the first person to put forth my musings on this topic, but it's been bothering me, so in the blog it goes. Tragedies shouldn't astonish us. We shouldn't act as if they come out of deep left field. We know in a general way that hijackers, and deadly storms, and homicidal maniacs like this Lanza person, all exist. There's a whiff of hypocrisy in our acting surprised when the general becomes specific and actual. Because the surprise is really a way of saying that we couldn't have known, and therefore that we don't share in the responsibility. And neither of those things is really true.

We are all participants in a culture which really doesn't mind violence. Glorifies it, even, in the abstract. We are also a culture that sees nothing wrong with the means of violence being readily available. And anyone with slight common sense can see that that's a bad combination. In fact, I would go so far as to say that in a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all victims of pointless violence, most of the American public would have to be named as defendants. Thank your lucky stars that that's impracticable, folks, because when you condone violence in the abstract, and also condone the ownership and recreational use of weapons, your only way out of culpable negligence is claiming that you didn't know some people can't separate fantasy and reality, and you didn't know some people can't tell right from wrong. And you won't sound very convincing saying that on the witness stand.

A Facebook friend of mine shared the following Ronald Reagan quotation today: "We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions." I see what our former president was getting at, but I don't like the quotation, because buying into this philosophy translates all too easily into opting out of responsibility. Each individual is indeed accountable for his actions, but society bears responsibility for who that individual turned out to be, and for what he was able to do before being stopped. That doesn't mean we stop punishing the guilty; it just means we need to stop feeling so damn superior. Bad things will happen, and we know they will happen, and we could be working harder to prevent them all the time, not just on the day after.

It was nice owning you.

Four years ago in California, a graduate student by the name of Supap Kirtsaeng paid part of his tuition by reselling, at a profit, textbooks he'd bought from overseas. A publisher called Wiley and Sons brought a lawsuit against him, alleging that he was acting as an "unauthorized reseller" and thus breaching copyright law. The ensuing legal case has made its way to the Supreme Court, which will begin hearing arguments on Monday, and though it hasn't attracted much press attention, the hearing has massive implications. Sources as politically disparate as DemandProgress.org and Forbes.com have warned that our right to buy and sell our own property hangs in the balance.

The linchpin of Kirtsaeng's defense is the "first-sale doctrine" (established in 1908 by the Supreme Court's Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus decision, and affirmed in the Copyright Act of 1976), which holds that a person buying a product purchases not only the use of the item, but also the right to dispose of it as he/she sees fit. Whether that means selling the item secondhand or tossing it on a bonfire, the copyright holder has nothing to say about it. In this case, a victory for Wiley would invalidate "first-sale" and require anyone reselling a copyrighted item to get permission from the copyright holder. In other words, you could be sued for selling old DVDs at a garage sale. You could be sued for unloading an iPod on Ebay. And getting rid of textbooks? Impossible, unless you return them to the manufacturer for pennies on the dollar.

Essentially, if Wiley and Sons have their way, any book or movie you buy will no longer be "your copy." It will be the publisher's copy, for which you have purchased the non-transferable right of use. It's worth noting that property rights in Tsarist Russia worked the same way: all land belonged to the Tsar. The most that any citizen could buy was the right to use the land, and even that right reverted to the Tsar as soon as the citizen should die, default, or be arrested.

We're looking at an America where patent and copyright holders have the same property rights that Nicholas II had. And while there's nothing un-Capitalist about that, it does seem slightly un-American. Kirtsaeng v. Wiley has nothing to do with Capitalism vs. Socialism. It is simply the private property claims of copyright holders butting up against those of, well, everyone else. If the copyright holders win, they will be able to limit the right of everyone else to hold private property. And if that kind of power is dangerous in the hands of the government, is it less so in the hands of book publishers, film studios, and tech companies? Regardless of who your masters are, when you're not free, you're not free.

I Have A Question

Who invented the Internet?

If you muttered "Al Gore" and snickered a little to yourself, I'm going to have to ask you to leave.

Now then, let me clarify my question. I'm not too concerned with who first had the idea of uniting people around the globe through some sort of instantaneous higher communication -- obviously, it was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who believed that we could be united not only across great distances but across great spans of time as well. All you had to do was die and become a part of the Oversoul. (Yes, I know: another great system hobbled by a bad user interface. It is a story as old and sad as Michael Dell. But we must press on.)

My question, I suppose, is really about web addresses. Specifically, about that little WWW prefix, which we all know stands for "Wild Wild Web," or something pretty close to that. It is a convention which must surely have been put in place by someone, and I can only assume that this "someone" was the inventor of the Internet. It might not have been; it could have been his girlfriend, or maybe his cat just got up on the keyboard and stood on the "w" key for a while, but there comes a point when one must stop speculating and act. I feel that the inventor of the Internet is my best bet, and so I am trying to find him. I want to ask him a question. I want to ask him why, when he was birthing this technological miracle child, he chose the words "World Wide Web" (there it is) to denote the "location" of the "sites" which would one day "reside" on/in/around...I'd better end this sentence before someone gets hurt.

"World Wide Web." Presumably the internet (whose name I am gosh-darn tired of capitalizing) was in its formative stages at the time. How did the inventor know it would be World Wide? Did he just assume? Was he the victim of delusions of grandeur that happened to come true? Or had a top-secret coalition of world leaders, stepping out from the shadows, enlisted his help to remake the world in their own image, promising him the souls and minds of their children in return? Did this "inventor" fellow know the future because he was writing it?

Basically, my little rant comes down to a single concern. When something takes the world by storm the way the Internet has, there is a sense of inevitability about the whole thing. Who decided that our lives were going to be shaped by a bunch of computers talking to one another? Was there a point where we could have said no? Were there people who did say no, and were never heard? Did anyone stop and think about whose best interests (if anyone's) were being served by this little e-volution?

I suspect that the answer is an old standard: the average person didn't think about anything except the bright shiny thing (It checks your spelling! It plays poker!) that was being dangled in front of his nose; a few philosophers objected, but they were easy to ignore and the ones that weren't were easy to shut up. That's just a guess, of course. I don't really know. But nothing in the world is truly new, no matter what the stickers on the Windows Vista package say.

After a brief pause, he continued.

It has been, by my calculation, one year, five months, and twenty-two days since I last posted anything here. I suppose I should offer some sort of reason or excuse for that, so here it is: I was busy.

With that out of the way, I plan to return to a regimen of once-or-twice monthly postings. Maybe less, maybe more. It all depends.

On that highly precise and specific note, please allow me to shift gears and talk about something else. I thought I would begin with a confession of sorts: I am afraid of the dark. Terrified, really.

Of course I'm not really afraid of the dark, I'm afraid of what might be lurking in it. Any psychologist worth his schadenfruede could tell you that. Darkness hides things, and for all I know it could be hiding a murderer or a decaying corpse or some dread combination of the two. I fear the dark because I fear the unknown, and I fear the unknown because for all I know, it could be plotting to jump out and kill me in a frightening, painful, closed-casket sort of way.

Some people have tried to help me by suggesting other, more tangible things that I could fear instead of the dark. I could be concerned about going deaf at forty, for instance, because of all the ear infections I had as a kid. I could fret that I might open my mailbox one day to find a notice from my bank saying that my account has been empty for six months and didn't I get the last 27 notices and please make immediate payment of $5,000 in overdraft fees. I could worry that a small, undetectable fuel leak in my car might cause it to explode on the way home from the video store. Or I could dread the day that the bird flu finally gets on a plane and kills us all.

These are only a few of the suggestions I have received. My acquaintances have offered me dozens more, and though I know they mean well, I find it hard sometimes to display the proper gratitude. It seems to me that I once heard something about ignorance and bliss, and how they often go hand in hand. I'm not sure they really do, of course. My fear of the dark is the result of ignorance, and I would hardly call it blissful. But at the same time, it's not the worst thing I have to deal with. There might be a slavering beast around the next corner, but then again, there might not; there might even be, instead of the beast, a table with a nice pint of dark beer on it, and possibly a door leading to an evening poker game or a grand piano which I can play to my heart's content. That's the thing about the unknown: you just never know.

Now Meets Then

Here is a good informative article that the good people at fastweb.com were good enough to send me:

Home for the Holidays
Jennifer LeClaire
The holiday season can be a strange time for college students. While it can be refreshing to sleep in your old bed, devour some home cooking, and wash some laundry, some things do change over time. It's not always easy to sleep under your parent's roof in a neighborhood where everyone still sees you as a kid - even though you've clearly achieved independent living status.
Then there's your not-so-favorite uncle with his incessant questions about your major. And let's not forget your old best friend who points out - with disappointment - how much you've changed.
Going home for the holiday doesn't have to be stressful. You just need some strategies for handling confrontations with the maturity that you want everyone to recognize.
"You're probably not going to emulate a Norman Rockwell painting at holiday time. If you're lucky, you'll look like Homer Simpson and his family, and not the South Park gang," says advice columnist April Masini of AskApril.com. "If you expect smooth sailing, you're going to be disappointed."

How boundless was my relief, to discover that I'm not alone in my holiday worries! There's nothing quite like being understood.

Jennifer LeClaire is, quite simply, dead on. I've clearly achieved independent living status in this place where Spanish-speaking women clean up after me; where I eat in a cafeteria and push my dishes through a slot when I'm done; where my bills are paid partly by my parents and grandparents and partly by the Stafford Loan Corporation, whom I'll be repaying until I'm forty-five. I'm free!

And of course, I've changed a lot since leaving home. Some days I'll walk past a mirror and I'll say to myself "Well now! Who was that dapper and distinguished-looking gentleman who just sauntered past?" and it'll take me a moment to realize that it was me! When I came to this place, I was only a child. I leave it a man, dear friends. And I hope that the folks back home will treat me like the mature adult I have become.

One side note about maturity: it really gets my hackles up when older people talk down to us college students. We are adults now, so treat us like adults. Jeez Louise. We know what we're doing. Like that guy who was vomiting all over himself and the dormitory lounge after a party the second weekend I was here. Or the caring, committed "friend-with-benefits" arrangements that have been blowing up all around me like package bombs during the past couple of months.

The bottom line is, fastweb.com knows the issues when it comes to college, but as long as everyone's willing to be reasonable, there should be no problems. We might be able to attain Norman Rockwell status after all; but even if we end up looking more like an Unger cartoon, at least I'll have this little unsupervised corner of the world to come back to.

Try To Stay Awake

Sleep, according to most people, is a very desirable thing. The hardest part of having a baby, I'm told, is that you don't get any sleep for months. One of the worst parts of getting old is apparently that you're unable to get a good night's sleep. In military interrogations, sleep-deprivation is considered very useful for loosening prisoners' (sorry, "detainees'") tongues. Shakespeare liked sleep; he wrote that it "knit[ted] up the ravell'd sleeve of care" (Macbeth 2.2.36). So clearly, sleep is often viewed as a wonderful thing. A lot of my fellow college students seem to want to do nothing else (except at night). But this morning I woke up feeling terrible, and when I thought about it, I realized that I always do. Which forces me to wonder: what is the point of going to sleep if you're more tired when you wake up? Why is it that when you start to sleep, it's so hard to stop? And is this really the hallmark of a healthy activity?

Sleep frightens me, frankly, because nobody knows where you go for those six or eight hours. Sure, you can be called back at any second, but where are you? You go to nowhere, and sometimes you don't get all the way back until 1 p.m. or later. Aside from the bothersome possibility that it's a preview of death, don't you think you would accomplish a lot more if you didn't have to sleep? People are always saying that they wish they could put more hours in the day, but I would be satisfied if we could just make use of the ones we've already got. Not really. But I would like to have those hours. If I did, perhaps I'd be able to worry less about whether I'm using my time in a worthwhile way. But then, time is finite and no matter how much you have, it will one day run out, so I guess we'll always have cause to worry.

I guess what it comes down to is a simple piece of advice: life is short, so make the most of it.

Oh, dear. I believe I've fallen victim to a cliche. Cut off my typing fingers (there are two) and put me in the stocks. I may die of the shame. It's clearly time to end this little discourse.