If this book ever finds its way to Bookshare, I'll read it. It sounds much
easier than plowing through traditional Marxist literature.
Miriam
How Could Socialism Be Boring? It's a System Run By and For People
Sunday, 20 December 2015 00:00 By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
Just as social-ism is about the needs of society, capital-ism is about the
needs of capital. (Image: Hands together via Shutterstock)
Is there an alternative to capitalism's great injustices? Activist and
journalist Danny Katch has written an introduction to socialism that manages
to be not just accessible, but hilariously funny. Socialism ... Seriously is
essential reading for the budding socialist in your life, and maybe even a
few skeptics. Make a donation to Truthout to order your copy today!
The following is an interview with Danny Katch, author of Socialism ...
Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation.
Mark Karlin: You have entitled your new book: Socialism ... Seriously: A
Brief Guide to Human Liberation. How do you feel socialism, in its purest
form, facilitates human liberation?
Danny Katch: I meant the subtitle to be both humorous and earnest - like the
rest of the book. Presenting a "brief guide to human liberation" is ...
ambitious, to put it mildly. But it's important to bring back words like
"liberation" that have faded from our vocabulary. As our energies have
shifted almost entirely to defensive struggles to preserve our rights and
standard of living, our expectations about the possibility of a
fundamentally better world have been relentlessly lowered.
Danny Katch. (Photo: Liza Herschel)The incredible potential of human beings
has always been limited by the need for most of us to spend all of our
waking hours struggling to survive - either because of our limited tools and
technology, or in more recent times because of social structures that
concentrate wealth and power among small minorities of people. By
redistributing that wealth and power to be democratically controlled by all
of us, socialism could both liberate billions of individuals currently
chained by poverty and exhaustion, and liberate our entire species from the
need to restrict our cultural and ecological aspirations to whatever can
make a profit for a tiny handful of jerks.
Let's go to a timely question bearing upon the presidential primaries that
is the subject of much progressive analysis. Briefly, how does Bernie
Sanders' concept of democratic socialism differ from your vision of
socialism?
Bernie's socialism is based on the model of Scandinavian social welfare
states. I'm thrilled that Sanders is using the platform of the presidential
election to educate millions of Americans about their universal health care
and paid family leave policies - those are exactly some of the higher
expectations that we need! Unfortunately, Sanders is running inside the
Democratic Party, which is not a Scandinavian social democratic party but in
fact is one of the pillars of our two-party oligarchy. The party hopes to
use Sanders' exciting campaign to pull his left-wing supporters into
eventually supporting the far-less exciting campaign of Hillary Clinton.
"JUST AS SOCIAL-ISM IS ABOUT THE NEEDS OF SOCIETY, CAPITAL-ISM IS ABOUT THE
NEEDS OF CAPITAL."
Beyond that, the difference between "Scandinavian socialism" and the Marxist
vision that I put forward isn't that the former is more "democratic" but
actually that it is less so. Power and wealth is still concentrated among
Scandinavian elites - they have just been forced to hoard less of it than
their counterparts here in the US. On the international level, meanwhile,
their support for US wars in the Middle East and the growing hostility to
the refugees (among some Scandinavian nations) that those wars have created
demonstrate that they don't offer any type of significant alternative -
which unfortunately is also true of Bernie Sanders when it comes to foreign
policy. The revolution, in short, won't be funded by IKEA.
Chapter 7 of your book is entitled, "Worker's Power." You state in that
section: "The workers would do a much better job, not the class as it exists
right now but the one that can come into being through future struggles."
Let me offer just three of a multitude of examples of current loosely
categorized demographic groups of workers in the US: unions, workers with a
high school education or below, and the primarily young people who have
conducted actions to raise the minimum wage to $15. To draw some broad
generalizations, many members of the declining union base are very loyal to
the capitalist system, many of the individuals with a high school education
or below are perceived to be supporters of the capitalist demagogue Donald
Trump, and the movement toward a $15 minimum wage is an implicit
acknowledgement of the capitalist system, with an incremental tweak, not a
rejection of it. In short, in the US, where would you see a transformation
of workers into the kind of socialist force that has propelled radical
transformation in other nations?
The transformation can come among workers in all the categories you mention,
as well as others: undocumented immigrants, young people bouncing back and
forth between college and low-wage work and tech workers who think they're
upper-middle class until the next bubble bursts. All types of workers are
more likely to support the status quo or reactionary ideas when we are being
cowed by our bosses and divided against each other. It's when they start
figuring out how to come together and resist that many of them become more
politically open to radical politics.
There is currently a historically low level of strikes in the US - which is
one reason an anti-union billionaire like Donald Trump is getting a hearing
among some workers. At some point that is going to change, but it's
difficult to say where or when. Not many of us could have predicted a few
years ago, for example, that two of the most militant sections of the
working class would be fast-food workers fighting for $15 an hour and public
school teachers rebelling against corporate education "reform" schemes.
These days when conservatives rail about striking "union thugs" they're
often talking about you're old second grade teacher.
What is the inherent flaw of the assertion that capitalism equals democracy?
In my book, I talk about the fairy tale we learn in grade school about the
dashing economic system named capitalism who meets democracy, the fairest
political system of them all, and how together they lived happily every
after. Meanwhile in the real world, capitalism hooks up with any government
that protects its investments - from military dictatorships to Islamic
republics to whatever you want to call that thing we have in Washington, DC.
Far from promoting democracy, capitalism limits it, both by greatly
restricting our basic rights to expression and assembly while we're at work
(imagine what that would look like!) and by creating monstrous economic
inequality that inevitably flows into political inequality. Socialism is
about extending democracy - by extending popular decision-making into arenas
currently controlled by unelected institutions like corporations and police
departments and by creating many new democratic institutions such as
neighborhood assemblies and workplace committees.
Would it be fair to assert that there is a direct correlation in the
relationship between the mythical narrative of the rugged individualist and
capitalism, and that since the nation's foundation we have seen a tension
between that concept and the relationship between the public good and
government?
I think there's some truth to that but I'm also wary of automatically
equating government as it currently exists with the public good. I
understand the good intentions but disagree with those who try to defend
socialism by reducing it to any government program so that they can say,
"Don't be afraid of socialism; it's just highways and public schools!"
Actually, the highways were built so that the military could quickly move
around the country and most public schools are designed to instill literacy,
obedience and limited critical thinking in future employees. We have to
fight for more support for many government institutions, but also fight
within those institutions for community control. And we also should learn
and benefit from the best aspects of our country's individualist traditions:
the freethinkers and rebels like Margaret Fuller, "Big Bill" Haywood and
Muhammad Ali.
You mention the impact of Citizens United in your book and that "capital
outranks humans" in many nations, including our own. You then assert that
capital is "a parasite that uses humanity as a host body to multiply itself
even as it weakens" that which makes us distinct as humans, including love
and compassion. In this world, have many people become commodities as the
corporations and entities that amass and control money assume the rights
belonging to people?
The most stunning example of this is of course our failure to reduce carbon
emissions to stop global warming. Many news outlets are reporting that the
recent climate negotiations in Paris are a turning point because the lower
costs of renewables and drop in oil profits are finally creating "market
incentives" to switch to a less destructive form of energy production -
because you know, the mere continuation of human existence beyond this
century hadn't really been much of an incentive for these guys.
Just as social-ism is about the needs of society, capital-ism is about the
needs of capital. The US Supreme Court has made this quite explicit, both
with Citizens United declaring that corporations have the rights of people
and its decisions allowing unjustified police searches and government
spying, which basically means that people don't have the rights of people.
We then internalize this logic: We root for property value to rise in our
neighborhoods even if that forces longtime neighbors to move, and judge our
kids by standardized test scores designed in the interests of future
employers to measure their ability to follow whatever instructions they're
given.
How does your chapter entitled "Imagine" reflect the late 1960s protest
slogan, "Be realistic, demand the impossible"?
My version of that fabulous paradoxical slogan is that I imagine a lousy day
in a better world. I take the reader through a day under socialism in which
everything goes wrong: You get in trouble at work because you don't get
payment from one of your customers - it's easy to forget now that everyone
has plenty, but money is still the way society keeps track of its resources.
You argue with your mother because you belong to generations that have very
different understandings of family: You don't feel an obligation to visit a
despised uncle who was active in the counterrevolution and she thinks you're
being a bad nephew. My intention - beyond demonstrating my neurotic
inability to imagine simple joy - is to counter the idea that socialism is
some type of utopia, which of course would mean that it's impossible. I find
comfort in that because, like most people, I think utopias are creepy.
On page 134, you make the argument that liberalism implies incremental
reform that if followed by supporters of socialism ends up embracing
capitalism. Can you expand on that?
I think it's important to push for incremental reforms - from raising the
minimum wage to winning full spectrum equality for all - both because we
desperately need them and because it's in those protest movements that
people learn how to fight in their own interests. That's what creates the
potential for socialism - but only if there are already socialists out
there. The problem is when socialists drop the S-word and try to water down
our ideas to make them more appealing. That's when we ourselves end up
adapting ourselves to capitalism. It's true that the socialist label has
been greatly damaged both by anti-socialist propaganda and by the many
dictatorships that have called themselves socialist. But it's also true that
capitalism keeps pushing new generations to look to an alternative. We have
to be willing to be in the minority most of the time so that we can be there
when opportunities arise.
Why won't a socialist world be boring, as you explain in chapter 10?
I begin the chapter by invoking some of the dystopian visions of socialism
from science fiction, in which equality is interpreted to mean everyone
being exactly the same, which of course is horrifying. But socialism isn't
based on the premise that people are the same, only that they have the same
rights and resources. Socialism wouldn't be boring because it's a society
run by and for people, and people are fascinating.
Sure, many of us become a little drab after decades of spending most of our
waking hours in dull jobs before plopping down in front a screen to watch
supposedly more interesting people play superheroes or score touchdowns. But
when ordinary people are able to enter the public arena - think Black Lives
Matter or the Arab Spring - they are anything but boring. Socialism is about
expanding social movements like these into a full participatory democracy.
It might be hectic and full of challenges - remember we're not about utopias
here - but it definitely won't be boring.
You employ a lot of humor throughout your book. Many dedicated political
advocates are quite uncompromisingly serious about social justice; why do
you think evoking laughter occasionally adds to your explanation of
socialism?
When I first started hanging around socialists and activists, I was
surprised at how many of them were really funny. I had fully accepted the
cultural stereotype of protesters being humorless downers who believed that
nobody should laugh until everybody in the world has food, water and
shelter. And I'm not saying you'll never find that type at a demonstration,
but you'll also find them in the next cubicle or family gathering.
One of the points of this book's humor is obviously to make it appealing to
a wider audience. I've had a number of people tell me that they've given it
to their friend or cousin that won't read "serious" things - and that's part
of the idea. But laughter isn't just sugar to help the political medicine go
down. It's a tool to demonstrate that capitalism is not only destructive and
dangerous but also irrational and silly. And sometimes adopting the stance
of a comedian instead of a radical gives me a different way of approaching
or explaining an issue that can connect with people in a unique way.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
MARK KARLIN
Mark Karlin is the editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout. He served as editor and
publisher of BuzzFlash for ten years before joining Truthout in 2010.
BuzzFlash has won four Project Censored Awards. Karlin writes a commentary
five days a week for BuzzFlash, as well as articles (ranging from the failed
"war on drugs" to reviews relating to political art) for Truthout. He also
interviews authors and filmmakers whose works are featured in Truthout's
Progressive Picks of the Week. Before linking with Truthout, Karlin
conducted interviews with cultural figures, political progressives and
innovative advocates on a weekly basis for ten years. He authored many
columns about the lies propagated to launch the Iraq War.
RELATED STORIES
Socialist Discussion - Visions of a New World
By Bill Fletcher, Jr., Jacobin Magazine | Book Review
Socialist Faces in High Places: Syriza's Fall From Grace and the Elusive
Electoral Road
By Adam Weaver, Enrique Guerrero-López, Truthout | Op-Ed
Bernie Sanders and the Limits of Electoral Politics
By Michael Corcoran, Truthout | News Analysis
________________________________________
Show Comments
Hide Comments
<a href="http://truthout.disqus.com/?url=ref";>View the discussion
thread.</a>
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
How Could Socialism Be Boring? It's a System Run By and For People
Sunday, 20 December 2015 00:00 By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
font size Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.
Just as social-ism is about the needs of society, capital-ism is
about the needs of capital. (Image: Hands together via Shutterstock)
Is there an alternative to capitalism's great injustices? Activist
and journalist Danny Katch has written an introduction to socialism that
manages to be not just accessible, but hilariously funny. Socialism ...
Seriously is essential reading for the budding socialist in your life, and
maybe even a few skeptics. Make a donation to Truthout to order your copy
today!
The following is an interview with Danny Katch, author of Socialism ...
Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation.
Mark Karlin: You have entitled your new book: Socialism ... Seriously: A
Brief Guide to Human Liberation. How do you feel socialism, in its purest
form, facilitates human liberation?
Danny Katch: I meant the subtitle to be both humorous and earnest - like the
rest of the book. Presenting a "brief guide to human liberation" is ...
ambitious, to put it mildly. But it's important to bring back words like
"liberation" that have faded from our vocabulary. As our energies have
shifted almost entirely to defensive struggles to preserve our rights and
standard of living, our expectations about the possibility of a
fundamentally better world have been relentlessly lowered.
Danny Katch. (Photo: Liza Herschel)The incredible potential of human beings
has always been limited by the need for most of us to spend all of our
waking hours struggling to survive - either because of our limited tools and
technology, or in more recent times because of social structures that
concentrate wealth and power among small minorities of people. By
redistributing that wealth and power to be democratically controlled by all
of us, socialism could both liberate billions of individuals currently
chained by poverty and exhaustion, and liberate our entire species from the
need to restrict our cultural and ecological aspirations to whatever can
make a profit for a tiny handful of jerks.
Let's go to a timely question bearing upon the presidential primaries that
is the subject of much progressive analysis. Briefly, how does Bernie
Sanders' concept of democratic socialism differ from your vision of
socialism?
Bernie's socialism is based on the model of Scandinavian social welfare
states. I'm thrilled that Sanders is using the platform of the presidential
election to educate millions of Americans about their universal health care
and paid family leave policies - those are exactly some of the higher
expectations that we need! Unfortunately, Sanders is running inside the
Democratic Party, which is not a Scandinavian social democratic party but in
fact is one of the pillars of our two-party oligarchy. The party hopes to
use Sanders' exciting campaign to pull his left-wing supporters into
eventually supporting the far-less exciting campaign of Hillary Clinton.
"Just as social-ism is about the needs of society, capital-ism is about the
needs of capital."
Beyond that, the difference between "Scandinavian socialism" and the Marxist
vision that I put forward isn't that the former is more "democratic" but
actually that it is less so. Power and wealth is still concentrated among
Scandinavian elites - they have just been forced to hoard less of it than
their counterparts here in the US. On the international level, meanwhile,
their support for US wars in the Middle East and the growing hostility to
the refugees (among some Scandinavian nations) that those wars have created
demonstrate that they don't offer any type of significant alternative -
which unfortunately is also true of Bernie Sanders when it comes to foreign
policy. The revolution, in short, won't be funded by IKEA.
Chapter 7 of your book is entitled, "Worker's Power." You state in that
section: "The workers would do a much better job, not the class as it exists
right now but the one that can come into being through future struggles."
Let me offer just three of a multitude of examples of current loosely
categorized demographic groups of workers in the US: unions, workers with a
high school education or below, and the primarily young people who have
conducted actions to raise the minimum wage to $15. To draw some broad
generalizations, many members of the declining union base are very loyal to
the capitalist system, many of the individuals with a high school education
or below are perceived to be supporters of the capitalist demagogue Donald
Trump, and the movement toward a $15 minimum wage is an implicit
acknowledgement of the capitalist system, with an incremental tweak, not a
rejection of it. In short, in the US, where would you see a transformation
of workers into the kind of socialist force that has propelled radical
transformation in other nations?
The transformation can come among workers in all the categories you mention,
as well as others: undocumented immigrants, young people bouncing back and
forth between college and low-wage work and tech workers who think they're
upper-middle class until the next bubble bursts. All types of workers are
more likely to support the status quo or reactionary ideas when we are being
cowed by our bosses and divided against each other. It's when they start
figuring out how to come together and resist that many of them become more
politically open to radical politics.
There is currently a historically low level of strikes in the US - which is
one reason an anti-union billionaire like Donald Trump is getting a hearing
among some workers. At some point that is going to change, but it's
difficult to say where or when. Not many of us could have predicted a few
years ago, for example, that two of the most militant sections of the
working class would be fast-food workers fighting for $15 an hour and public
school teachers rebelling against corporate education "reform" schemes.
These days when conservatives rail about striking "union thugs" they're
often talking about you're old second grade teacher.
What is the inherent flaw of the assertion that capitalism equals democracy?
In my book, I talk about the fairy tale we learn in grade school about the
dashing economic system named capitalism who meets democracy, the fairest
political system of them all, and how together they lived happily every
after. Meanwhile in the real world, capitalism hooks up with any government
that protects its investments - from military dictatorships to Islamic
republics to whatever you want to call that thing we have in Washington, DC.
Far from promoting democracy, capitalism limits it, both by greatly
restricting our basic rights to expression and assembly while we're at work
(imagine what that would look like!) and by creating monstrous economic
inequality that inevitably flows into political inequality. Socialism is
about extending democracy - by extending popular decision-making into arenas
currently controlled by unelected institutions like corporations and police
departments and by creating many new democratic institutions such as
neighborhood assemblies and workplace committees.
Would it be fair to assert that there is a direct correlation in the
relationship between the mythical narrative of the rugged individualist and
capitalism, and that since the nation's foundation we have seen a tension
between that concept and the relationship between the public good and
government?
I think there's some truth to that but I'm also wary of automatically
equating government as it currently exists with the public good. I
understand the good intentions but disagree with those who try to defend
socialism by reducing it to any government program so that they can say,
"Don't be afraid of socialism; it's just highways and public schools!"
Actually, the highways were built so that the military could quickly move
around the country and most public schools are designed to instill literacy,
obedience and limited critical thinking in future employees. We have to
fight for more support for many government institutions, but also fight
within those institutions for community control. And we also should learn
and benefit from the best aspects of our country's individualist traditions:
the freethinkers and rebels like Margaret Fuller, "Big Bill" Haywood and
Muhammad Ali.
You mention the impact of Citizens United in your book and that "capital
outranks humans" in many nations, including our own. You then assert that
capital is "a parasite that uses humanity as a host body to multiply itself
even as it weakens" that which makes us distinct as humans, including love
and compassion. In this world, have many people become commodities as the
corporations and entities that amass and control money assume the rights
belonging to people?
The most stunning example of this is of course our failure to reduce carbon
emissions to stop global warming. Many news outlets are reporting that the
recent climate negotiations in Paris are a turning point because the lower
costs of renewables and drop in oil profits are finally creating "market
incentives" to switch to a less destructive form of energy production -
because you know, the mere continuation of human existence beyond this
century hadn't really been much of an incentive for these guys.
Just as social-ism is about the needs of society, capital-ism is about the
needs of capital. The US Supreme Court has made this quite explicit, both
with Citizens United declaring that corporations have the rights of people
and its decisions allowing unjustified police searches and government
spying, which basically means that people don't have the rights of people.
We then internalize this logic: We root for property value to rise in our
neighborhoods even if that forces longtime neighbors to move, and judge our
kids by standardized test scores designed in the interests of future
employers to measure their ability to follow whatever instructions they're
given.
How does your chapter entitled "Imagine" reflect the late 1960s protest
slogan, "Be realistic, demand the impossible"?
My version of that fabulous paradoxical slogan is that I imagine a lousy day
in a better world. I take the reader through a day under socialism in which
everything goes wrong: You get in trouble at work because you don't get
payment from one of your customers - it's easy to forget now that everyone
has plenty, but money is still the way society keeps track of its resources.
You argue with your mother because you belong to generations that have very
different understandings of family: You don't feel an obligation to visit a
despised uncle who was active in the counterrevolution and she thinks you're
being a bad nephew. My intention - beyond demonstrating my neurotic
inability to imagine simple joy - is to counter the idea that socialism is
some type of utopia, which of course would mean that it's impossible. I find
comfort in that because, like most people, I think utopias are creepy.
On page 134, you make the argument that liberalism implies incremental
reform that if followed by supporters of socialism ends up embracing
capitalism. Can you expand on that?
I think it's important to push for incremental reforms - from raising the
minimum wage to winning full spectrum equality for all - both because we
desperately need them and because it's in those protest movements that
people learn how to fight in their own interests. That's what creates the
potential for socialism - but only if there are already socialists out
there. The problem is when socialists drop the S-word and try to water down
our ideas to make them more appealing. That's when we ourselves end up
adapting ourselves to capitalism. It's true that the socialist label has
been greatly damaged both by anti-socialist propaganda and by the many
dictatorships that have called themselves socialist. But it's also true that
capitalism keeps pushing new generations to look to an alternative. We have
to be willing to be in the minority most of the time so that we can be there
when opportunities arise.
Why won't a socialist world be boring, as you explain in chapter 10?
I begin the chapter by invoking some of the dystopian visions of socialism
from science fiction, in which equality is interpreted to mean everyone
being exactly the same, which of course is horrifying. But socialism isn't
based on the premise that people are the same, only that they have the same
rights and resources. Socialism wouldn't be boring because it's a society
run by and for people, and people are fascinating.
Sure, many of us become a little drab after decades of spending most of our
waking hours in dull jobs before plopping down in front a screen to watch
supposedly more interesting people play superheroes or score touchdowns. But
when ordinary people are able to enter the public arena - think Black Lives
Matter or the Arab Spring - they are anything but boring. Socialism is about
expanding social movements like these into a full participatory democracy.
It might be hectic and full of challenges - remember we're not about utopias
here - but it definitely won't be boring.
You employ a lot of humor throughout your book. Many dedicated political
advocates are quite uncompromisingly serious about social justice; why do
you think evoking laughter occasionally adds to your explanation of
socialism?
When I first started hanging around socialists and activists, I was
surprised at how many of them were really funny. I had fully accepted the
cultural stereotype of protesters being humorless downers who believed that
nobody should laugh until everybody in the world has food, water and
shelter. And I'm not saying you'll never find that type at a demonstration,
but you'll also find them in the next cubicle or family gathering.
One of the points of this book's humor is obviously to make it appealing to
a wider audience. I've had a number of people tell me that they've given it
to their friend or cousin that won't read "serious" things - and that's part
of the idea. But laughter isn't just sugar to help the political medicine go
down. It's a tool to demonstrate that capitalism is not only destructive and
dangerous but also irrational and silly. And sometimes adopting the stance
of a comedian instead of a radical gives me a different way of approaching
or explaining an issue that can connect with people in a unique way.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Mark Karlin
Mark Karlin is the editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout. He served as editor and
publisher of BuzzFlash for ten years before joining Truthout in 2010.
BuzzFlash has won four Project Censored Awards. Karlin writes a commentary
five days a week for BuzzFlash, as well as articles (ranging from the failed
"war on drugs" to reviews relating to political art) for Truthout. He also
interviews authors and filmmakers whose works are featured in Truthout's
Progressive Picks of the Week. Before linking with Truthout, Karlin
conducted interviews with cultural figures, political progressives and
innovative advocates on a weekly basis for ten years. He authored many
columns about the lies propagated to launch the Iraq War.
Related Stories
Socialist Discussion - Visions of a New World
By Bill Fletcher, Jr., Jacobin Magazine | Book ReviewSocialist Faces in High
Places: Syriza's Fall From Grace and the Elusive Electoral Road
By Adam Weaver, Enrique Guerrero-López, Truthout | Op-EdBernie Sanders and
the Limits of Electoral Politics
By Michael Corcoran, Truthout | News Analysis
Show Comments
