Am I a socialist?

Zoe Williams in The Guardian


Every day millions of internet users ask Google life’s most difficult questions, big and small. Our writers answer some of the commonest queries

 

‘There is nothing unsocialist – indeed, nothing more socialist – than to have been involved in the miners’ strike.’ Photograph: Steve Eason/Getty Images
 

This question has gained extra piquancy this week, with two investigations – one, Dispatches, undercover and rather underhand – into Momentum, the grassroots organisation that sprang up in support of Jeremy Corbyn. The question put, insistently, is: are Corbyn’s supporters real socialists or hard-left entryists? If we accept that some of them are real socialists, are they having their arms twisted by Trotskyists?

I know from the ferocity of the debate that it will be taken for insincerity when I say this, but nevertheless, I mean it: I find it difficult to identify the concrete principles that separate the acceptable socialist from the unacceptable outrider. Often the criteria are quite loose and temporally free range: you are no longer a socialist if you’ve shared a platform with a revolutionary, or been involved with Stop the War (the jury is still out as to whether going on a Stop the War march counts), or ever espoused anything other than parliamentary democracy, even if it was the 90s and you were drunk.

Proxy issues – usually Trident and Palestine – are used as tests of the boundary between socialism and radicalism, even though neither issue could be rationally situated on the left or right, one being fundamentally a techno-military question of what modern warfare will look like, the other a foreign policy matter in which the supposedly “lefter” side has plenty of support among conservatives. There is nothing unsocialist – indeed, nothing more socialist – than to have been involved in the miners’ strike, yet if it put you in contact with the Alliance for Worker’s Liberty, which it probably did, that made you a communist.

  ‘In the early part of this decade, Ed Miliband called himself a socialist.’ Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images

There is a school of thought that says, just as George Osborne would never call himself a free-market fundamentalist, rather, a man of good sense, so a socialist shouldn’t wrestle too much with self-definition. Yet I have the feeling, in the absence of clarity, of a taboo closing in, so that one day soon we will wake up unable to remember whether socialism is an acceptable position at all, or whether it opens you up for some abstruse historical reason to the accusation of “palling around with terrorists”. 

It is helpful to return to the pre-Corbyn consensus, by which I mean, any time up to last September; how could you describe yourself, before you made Andrew Neil even redder, or Evan Davis’s eyebrows shoot up, or in some other way put yourself beyond the pale of common sense?

You were a socialist if you believed in nationalising industries and/or utilities, if you believed in raising wages through collective pay bargaining rather than post-hoc redistribution, if you cleaved to a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work – a living wage. Free healthcare at the point of use is properly understood as a socialist principle, and is described as such by American commentators, but has never counted because British opinion is united in support of it: a tacit understanding of our politics is that once something has majority support, it ceases to be socialistic – it’s an OK position so long as it remains niche, and it is easier to turn a blind eye to the socialism inherent in a popular position than it is to admit that socialism is often popular.

Likewise, a belief in equality has now reached the status of platitude, with politicians from every party espousing it, whereas in fact, it remains socialist rather than capitalist: only a creed that considers equality an actionable goal, rather than a utopian idea you scramble towards by giving extra nursery hours to insufficiently aspirational toddlers, can realistically claim to believe in it.

In the early part of this decade, Ed Miliband called himself a socialist, without much catcalling.

‘If you wanted to sound like a West Wing leftie you would call yourself a liberal egalitarian.’ Photograph: NBCUPhotobank/Rex Features

Those who wanted to signal their discontinuity with the Blair years, while not sounding too radical, would call themselves democratic socialists – that is, they believed in socialism but were happy to trust a sensible, non-socialist majority to democratically overrule them.

If you wanted to sound like a West Wing leftie – like a British leftie, only better looking, wearing cashmere, more likely to win, and even losing, less likely to be a crank – you would call yourself a liberal egalitarian.

There were questions to which Miliband-style socialism had no answers: it was not against private property, indeed, socialism has never been rigid on this point. So if you saw the growth of a landlord class and the return to a rentier society as the inevitable result of housing being priced as an asset (exchange value) rather than a necessity (use value), that would put you in Marxist territory, whereupon you would have to park a perfectly demonstrable economic theory while you quickly apologised for gulags.

It is fascinating, to me at least, to see a younger generation on the left reclaim “communism” – now in the shape of fully-automated luxury communism, which fuses the aims of egalitarianism with the inevitability of a robotised future. Lefties over 40 will never call themselves communists because the inevitable conversation about whether or not Stalin was evil is just too tedious. It is a glimpse of what it feels like to be seen, if a Muslim, as an apologist for Isis, but only a glimpse.

To get to the fundamental distinctions between socialism and communism, without going via Stalin, Mao and Kim Jong-un, it is useful to return to the source of both terms – Paris in the 1830s – when secret political societies sprang up to finish what the revolution had left undone. These groups were mainly discursive, though occasionally spilled out into street protest, dismissed at the time – this will be familiar – as mainly middle-class intellectuals. It’s a bizarre and, even more bizarrely, effective rightwing accusation: “Your movement is stupid because its proponents are too clever.”

It was often hard to disentangle one belief from the other since the words waxed and waned in popularity, were often used interchangeably, and both believed in revolution. However, very broadly, the socialists wanted central direction of industry but weren’t opposed to markets, while communists wanted to see an end of markets and money, with all endeavour freely chosen and paid for by coupon. Socialists weren’t against private property, though they were in favour of the common ownership of goods, and obviously there’s space in there to quibble about what can and can’t be legitimately held in common.

Communists believed in universal free education, and so did some socialists. There were societies fusing socialism and communism that preached class war, on the basis that the aristocracy was a cancer on the body politic and as dangerous to man as was the tiger to other animals; and thought, furthermore, the aristocracy of money was as bad as the aristocracy of blood.

However, by a process of self-sorting and vigorous infighting, the communists ended up the more trenchant on this killing-enemies point, while socialism by the mid-1800s was shot through with a much softer vision, in which science and the best of humanity would unite to create paradise on Earth through peaceful means. The Comtean Positivist Religion of Humanity, resting on the twin blessings of brotherly love and the natural goodness of mankind, was probably what finally did it for the socialists’ allegiance with the communists, who found them saccharine.

‘Karl Marx would roll in his grave.’ Photograph: Popperfoto

To put that in perspective, even by 1846, the first two items on the agenda of the Communist Correspondence Committee were: “1. An examination must be made of the Communist party. 2. This can be achieved by criticising the incompetent and separating them from the sources of money.” If you know you’re a socialist because it takes a lot of evenings, you know you’re communist when you hate the other people at your meeting worse than the devil (this is no longer the case with fully automated luxury communists, FYI).

Just as a new technological context has allowed a generation to re-imagine communism, so the tectonic movements in democracy, energy, climate, land, finance, money and work throw up questions to which the socialism of the 1830s, 1930s or 1980s could not possibly have the answers. How do you reconnect a socialist party to a grassroots movement in the absence of mass trade union membership? How do you bring energy back into common ownership? Is there any point in nationalising fossil fuels, or is the right to a common stake in a viable future more important? (In that case, only renewables are socialist). How do you arrest the concentration of land into the hands of the few, when it’s moving so fast? Is profit un-socialist by definition, or is it the legitimate result of a good decision, so long as the investment is accessible and pro-social? Indeed, is finance inherently capitalistic or can it be democratised and thereby socialised? (Mark Davis at the Bauman Institute releases a report on this on Thursday).

Come to that, now we understand money as a social resource – a marker of trust between people and institutions, with no innate value – should we socialise its creation? How do you build solidarity that doesn’t rely on work or a workplace? Probably the only solid socialist answer to any of these questions is that it’s within the wit of science and the innate goodness of the species to figure them all out. There are certainly no fixed lines, here, no spaces where a classic socialist could not possibly be flexible to the demands of the future, where a would-be socialist finds him or herself confronted with an idée fixe. Marx would roll in his grave.

You could question the value in using old principles to solve new problems: I would counter that those principles – common ownership, equality, fellowship, innovation, a belief that everyone’s welfare is everyone else’s business and that a better future for the next generation is the sine qua non – are universal and need no updating, for all that they don’t point in one obvious direction.

Finally, you could argue about the wisdom of returning to an old term when it risks derailing the quest for new answers. Yet the stigma around it is lifting. In the 90s and noughties, it was a shorthand for a person who didn’t understand modernity and couldn’t find political energy with a canary and a pit helmet. The fact that it’s being reclaimed, with pride, is probably the beginning of a very short answer: if you can ask, “Am I a socialist?” and not mind getting a “Yes”, then you probably are one, or at the very least, know some.

Chapter 11 comes to India

Pritish Nandy in the Times of India

One of the best things in last week’s Union Budget, which has gone largely unnoticed, is the finance minister’s pledge to bring in a comprehensive Bankruptcy Code. Bankruptcy law reform is now a priority for improving the ease of doing business, said Arun Jaitley, thus telling us for the first time that the government has finally come to accept the fact that shit happens. And it’s time that we, as a nation, realized this and found ways and means to deal with it.

Till now, every failure was chased by a lynch mob hardwired to believe that failure is deliberate and must be punished. Not only countless lives and careers have been destroyed by this attitude but it has also fostered a business climate where people either stay away from taking the kind of crucial risks businessmen ought to take or, worse, it has brought risk taking and failure (which are at the heart of all serious entrepreneurship) into unnecessary disrepute. We, as a people, actually believe that every business that fails is a deliberate deep-rooted conspiracy, a plan to loot others. In this perverse worldview, we ignore the simple fact that most bankruptcies owe their origins to Black Swan events that have become increasingly commonplace. Not the greed and wickedness of businessmen.

History shows that the best businessmen go through many failures. They may not always talk about them but these failures teach them the lessons that eventually make them successful. The very failures we despise are the bedrock on which shining empires are built. Bankruptcy, or Chapter 11 as the Americans love to call it, is hardly a dirty word in today’s business scenario, where everything changes all the time, abruptly and without any notice. In fact, failure is a badge of honour that many successful entrepreneurs openly wear. For who will ever risk investing in a business where the promoter claims he has never known failure?

Hiding failure, in fact, is the worst thing one can do. It causes all round damage. Acknowledging it and then finding ways and means to mitigate it and move on is the way all civilised societies deal with failure. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb, my favourite economist recently said, failure is the only real asset of a nation and knowing how to fail is its biggest talent. Taleb also added that failure may be the best mantra for India’s success. For a nation that has not experienced failure and learnt from it is hugely handicapped in today’s world where everything changes at short notice, including the nature of risks. A nation that turns away from risk is not a nation yet ready for success.

He cites the examples of France and Japan. Their economies are doing poorly, Taleb argues, because the failure rate is so low. In the US, on the other hand, the highest fail rate is in California which also has the most inspiring success stories. Walt Disney is an example. He was fired by his editor because he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas”. He went bankrupt several times before he built Disneyland. In fact, even the proposal for Disneyland was rejected by the city of Anaheim on the ground that it would attract only riffraff. Henry Ford went bankrupt before he could steer Ford Motors to its huge success. So did HJ Heinz, founder of Heinz. And William Durant who created General Motors. And Milton Hershey, founder of Hershey Chocolates. The day Trump Towers was being announced with huge fanfare in Mumbai I read that Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City had gone belly up.

Business is not about not taking risks. It’s about riding the right risks to build institutions and create wealth. Sports, media, entertainment have had its share of bankrupts. From Larry King to Francis Ford Coppola to rapper MC Hammer to Stan Lee, founder of Marvel Comics, to blogger Perez Hilton to Mick Fleetwood, and Bob Guccione, founder of Penthouse, all have faced bankruptcy. Even famous US Presidents have. Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S Grant, William McKinley, Thomas Jefferson. In recent years, Steve Jobs went almost bankrupt. So did Apple. Today it’s the world’s richest, strongest brand, seemingly indestructible.

Restaurants improve every time they fail. So do cars, trains, planes. They become safer because we always over-compensate after a disaster. Every shock strengthens us, readies us better for the future. Businesses too are like that and I am glad the Finance Minister has realised it and removed the stigma.

Have I ever gone bankrupt? No, but I have teetered on the edge often enough and never been embarrassed to admit it.

Funnily, as Taleb points out, the only business that never learns from failure is banks. When a bank crashes today, the probability of a bank crashing tomorrow actually increases. Banking is clearly not a business that learns from its mistakes. History proves that too.

Why don’t abused women just leave their partners? Why don’t poor people just spend less? Why do people in positions of power ask so many stupid questions?

Lucy Mangan in The Guardian

Last week, I took part in a comedy night to raise money for the charity Refuge, which supports women and children who have experienced domestic violence. It was a great night: partly because it raised several thousands of pounds for the cause; partly because it was sponsored by Benefit cosmetics, and the idea of a benefit being sponsored by Benefit pleased me greatly; and partly because standup comedian Bridget Christie finished her act with a plea for all laydeez to stop waxing, spraying, deodorising, strimming and surgically trimming their – well, let’s call it “that part of ourselves historically judged to be the seat of all our femininity and womanly powers” – and instead celebrate our individuality by thinking of those parts as “unique, special – like snowflakes. Made of gammon”, which was both a new thought and a new image, neither of which has left my mind since.

Less uplifting, however, was the number of times I heard, when I mentioned Refuge to people, some variant of: “But what I don’t understand is – why don’t these women just leave?”

We don’t need, I think – I hope – to detail too extensively here the exact answer to that question. Bullet points: an immediate fear of being punched, kicked, bitten, gouged or killed, and of the same happening to your children, preceded by months or years of exploitation of the weakest points in your psyche by a master of the art; an erosion of your self-confidence, liberty, agency and financial independence (if you had any to begin with), coupled with a sense of shame and stigma and a lack of practical options; no money, no supportive family or friends, nowhere to run.

So, let’s concentrate instead on the lack of imagination, the lack of empathy inherent in that question. Because it shapes a lot of questions, and particularly those that animate government policy and the political discourse that will start filling the airwaves more and more as we move towards the election.

Politicians, for example, are apparently completely baffled by Poor People’s propensity to do harmful things, often expensively, to themselves. (That’s politicians of all stripes – it’s just that the left wing wrings its hands and feels helplessly sorry for Them, while Tories are pretty sure They are just animals in need of better training.) The underclass eats fast food, drinks and smokes, and some of its more unruly members even take drugs. Why? Why?

Listen, I always want to say, if you’re genuinely mystified, answer me this: have you never had a really bad day and really wanted – nay, needed – an extra glass of Montrachet on the roof terrace in the evening? Or such a chaotic, miserable week that you’ve ended up with a takeaway five nights out of seven instead of delving into Nigella’s latest?

You have? Why, splendid. Now imagine if your whole life were not just like that one bad day, but even worse. All the time. No let-up. No end in sight. No, you can’t go on holiday. No, you can’t cash anything in and retire. No. How would you react? No, you’ve not got a marketable skills set. You don’t know anyone who can give you a job. No. No.

And on we’d go. “Why do the poor not always take the very cheapest option – in food, travel, rent, utilities or a hundred other things you can find if you or an obliging Spad or unpaid intern trawl and filter case studies for long enough – and stop being so, y’know, poor that way?” someone will ask. And some kind soul – not me, I’d be off for a lie down and some pills by this time – would ask if the questioner had ever been under so much pressure that he’d had to throw money at a problem to secure an immediate answer, to get something rather than nothing, even if it meant paying over the odds, perhaps because someone was exploiting your desperation?

Oh, you have? Well, that bond issue you missed because you had a cashflow crisis after buying the villa in Amalfi, and that box at Glyndebourne for your parents’ wedding anniversary you forgot about till almost too late, have their parallels with furniture for a council flat or with a child’s present bought on punitively interest-rated credit … and so on, until somewhere along the line our boy would have to admit that he shared the same irrational impulses as people all along the socioeconomic scale, differing only in degree of consequences, not in kind.

I don’t understand how the people in charge of us all don’t understand. If you are genuinely unable to apply your imagination and extend your empathy far enough – and you don’t have to do it all at once; little by little will suffice, but you must get there – then you are a sociopath, and we should all be protected from your actions. If you are in fact able and choose not to, then you’re something quite a lot worse.

So, these are the questions I’d like to see pursued once the televised prime ministerial debates begin (if enough speakers agree to turn up, natch): have you ever had a bad day? Have you ever been really, really tired? Have you ever been alone, or frightened, or not had a choice about something? If yes, was your response unique among man? If no, are you a madman or a liar? Do tell. Do tell.

Divorce cases in Mumbai soar 86% in less than 10 years

Viju B, TNN | Jul 27, 2011, 01.09AM IST

MUMBAI: As the stigma around divorce dissolves steadily, an increasing number of couples in the city are choosing to end their marriage, sometimes soon after exchanging their wedding vows. Between 2009 and 2010, the number of divorces in Mumbai rose from 4,624 to 5,245, a spike of over 13%. Last year's figure is even more startling when compared to 2002's statistic of 2,805 - this means that the number of divorces has climbed by more than 86% in less than a decade.

Social scientists and psychiatrists explain this as a sign that the till-death-do-us-apart class of marriage is under strain. "Young couples marry impulsively and separate equally spontaneously. Divorce is now seen more as a corrective mechanism and a way to move forward in life," says psychiatrist Harish Shetty. Shetty states financial independence, multiplicity of relationships and ample career opportunities as some of the reasons for the increase.

"Gone are the days when the mother-in-law was the villain. Now you alone can save or break a relationship," he says. 'For today's women, divorce no longer carries a stigma'

As the number of divorce cases in the city rise, psychiatrist Harish Shetty cites financial independence and more career opportunities as some of the reasons behind this trend. There are enough instances to back Shetty's assertion.

Varsha Bhosle, who is in her late 20s, decided to end her two-year marriage after she realized that she and her husband "did not have any time for each other". Both of them worked in an IT firm at Malad. What proved the catalyst for the divorce was the husband's choice to move cities. "He wanted me to shift to Pune too. But I felt I had better career choices here. We were both ambitious anyway," Varsha says.

Kusum Singh, a financial consultant, got separated from her husband in January. "It was not that my husband was a bad person. But somehow we just drifted apart and I began seeing someone else. I felt bad for my husband, but after the initial heartburn even he understood ours was a loveless relationship," Singh says.

Lawyers say a major reason for the rise in divorces is that women have become more independent, financially and emotionally. They do not feel that ending their marriage would bring upon them a lifelong stigma. A majority of young couples these days, in fact, separate by mutual consent. "This saves them from the headache of going to court many times. One can get a divorce within six months and maybe two hearings," says Sajal Chacha, a family court lawyer.

Chacha adds there have been cases where young couples have divorced within six months or a year of marriage. "Elders in the family have become more accommodating and do not force their children into a second marriage if the first one fails," she says.