The ideologues on A Christmas Carol…

Merry Christmas everyone, see you all in 2010, the year of the FUTURE! VIRTUAL!

In the meantime, here is a little overview I’ve made for you of the opinions on whether A Christmas Carol is pro-capitalist or pro-socialist (sadly, the best arguments seem to be on the pro-capitalist side).

A.C.C. IS PRO-CAPITALIST/ANTI-SOCIALIST:

A Christmas Carol Revisited, by Richard Harter (socialist):

Scrooge was no gentleman. We may be sure of that. He kept no mistress. He lived modestly. He worked hard. And he helped the poor, helped them as a class, helped them in a way that was meaningful rather than by worthless “feel good” gestures. He was, in short, a good socialist.

People with such sentiments were dangerous to the Victorian Capitalists; they had to be dealt with. That is the covert objective of A Christmas Carol. Scrooge is depicted, of course, in the most unflattering of terms as a miserable human being – it was a necessary part of the real message: Socialists are miserable human beings.

The Freeman (capitalist):

The point of the story is that Ebenezer Scrooge, the archetypal “greedy capitalist,” becomes immeasurably happier when and because he gives up his selfishness and becomes generously involved with those around him. There is no suggestion that he gives up his capitalism; in fact, Dickens tells us that he is at his desk early the day after Christmas. He just broadens his other activities and ends.

Scrooge- Before and After? by Roderick T. Beaman (capitalist)

Scrooge is guilty of greed, one of the Seven Cardinal Sins or vices. Along with wrath, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony, it leads to man’s destruction. Scrooge pursues money and wealth for their own sake, not for any benefit or the enjoyment of other important things for himself or anyone else. That is his failure. He measures the world in shillings, pounds and crowns, just as today’s liberals, Democrats, socialist and communists do. Their’s is the materialist philosophy. Karl Marx even called his philosophy, dialectic materialism. There is no room in his life for anything else including simple pleasures, just as there is none in theirs.

A.C.C. IS PRO-SOCIALIST/ANTI-CAPITALIST:

Capitalism Magazine (capitalist):

You eye enviously the wealth of others when the eye of suspicion must focus only upon yourself. It is not Mr. Scrooge you must blame; if you desire more wealth you must prove yourself of more value to him. Or offer your talents to another employer more in need of your services. Use your mind to improve your condition. This Sir is the state of reality; this Sir is what you must comprehend and act upon! Make haste to correct the suffering you have created. Inflame your sense of self interest and prosper before life passes you and yours!

Financial Post (capitalist):

Dickens’ portrait was in fact a caricature in his own time, when industrialists and businessmen were emerging as the greatest benefactors in history, but he wrote during an economic downturn that provided fertile ground for another much scarier horror story, The Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels were concerned with the grime of Manchester rather than “The palpable brown air” of London, but their “plot” provided a blueprint for mass murder. And yet we still prefer to bash Scrooge, no matter how great the success of capitalism in lifting billions out of poverty and providing them with an increasingly stunning array of options. Indeed, does nobody notice the irony that capitalism has unleashed the consumerist cornucopia and charitable sentiments that were A Christmas Carol’s ideal?

Lew Rockwell (capitalist):

As part of a settlement offer, my client would consider adopting Tiny Tim – should his parents agree – and cut loose the rest of the Cratchett family to continue their mindless, unfocused, dispirited, and passive bottom-feeding in the shallow and stagnant end of the human gene pool. But let us have no more of these “drive-by” specters from the netherworld, who feign their concern for crippled children. Like other opportunistic parasites who tell us that they “feel our pain” even as they are causing us more pain, let us have no more of the self-serving guilt-peddling that keeps men and women subservient to those who threaten to cut off their dependencies.

The way ideas change…

Db0, of the Division by Zero blog, has written an interesting entry about the way people’s political ideas change, positing that both sides of the divide lack something important, and that libertarian socialism is the natural place for freethinkers to end up on.

It is no wonder then that the more someone experiences, the more they start to notice all the aspects of our current existence which limit those expressions and if this is coupled with thinking freely about them, that is, when someone does not have any irrational beliefs which would prevent them from looking at and judging the underlying causes, (eg “Goddidit”) then it is only natural that the truth will be found and lead to some uncomfortable conclusions about all the things we’ve considered normal until now.

This is by no means an easy process and can be as difficult as a deconversion if one is to start from a point of heavy indoctrination[1]. As such, it is a gradual progression, with people slowly discovering the puzzle pieces which just don’t seem to fit right, no matter how you turn them and then discarding them, only to discover that a whole chunk of the puzzle has now become disconnected and can be discarded as well.

From what I’ve observed, it seems that there are generally two paths towards Libertarian Socialism, one from Socialism and one from Libertarianism and which one people start walking depends on their upbringing and general circumstances and experiences. But in broad strokes, I would say that we can talk about two types of human personality which are more susceptible to either pull: Empathetic – which is positive towards Socialism and Individualist which prioritizes Libertarianism. Why? Because the personality one has will define which difficult questions the freethinker will choose to investigate first.

iWatch PSA 78second

We are the Borg. Resistance is futile.

“Hierarchies are natural!”

A common objection given by capitalists to Anarchist theories is that Anarchism is utopian because people will always form hierarchies, as much as we’d like them not to do so. In short, hierarchies are part of human nature.

There are two major problems with this assumption. First, if hierarchies were natural, then they would have been adopted by all societies. And yet we know this is not true, as there have been many societies which actively eschewed hierarchical decision-making (see for instance examples in People without Government: An Anthology of Anarchy, by Harold Barclay).

Second, if hierarchies were part of human nature, then everyone should desire them. And yet few people desire to obey others (who likes to have to work, pay taxes, and so on?). We obey for many reasons, but not out of a desire for the hierarchy itself. No other human instinct works in this way. We seek to have sex because we want to have sex, not because we’re forced to. We eat because we’re hungry. People follow some religion or spirituality, and don’t wish ardently that they were skeptics. In short, if hierarchies are natural, then why don’t we actually like them?

I said that we obey others for many reasons. This obviously needs to be explained before the argument takes its full force. There are three main reasons why we obey:

1. Because we have no other viable options (this is not true in some cases, but certainly true in others).

2. Because we can’t imagine things being any other way. This is especially true of hierarchies which have existed for more than a generation. This would apply to people who didn’t have access to education, despite the fact that we are now more educated, we are not taught about the different kinds of societies that existed before ours (as in the book I already referenced), or the alternatives which exist today (see for instance the examples from Anarchy in Action, by Colin Ward).

Our education system is geared towards turning children into good citizens and good workers, not into informed decision-makers or people with any knowledge of society beyond the tyrannical concepts of our capital-democracies. Decision-making is, of course, to be left to the “experts” and “authorities,” leaving the people as a whole with token choices between pre-approved options. And because we are taught that “it’s always been that way,” we can’t imagine it being any other way.

3. We hope to, one day, be the ones who give the orders, either as an individual or as part of a faction. This is the goal of most hierarchical games conditions, including those of capitalism and democracy, and those that don’t have that goal still give an inbuilt sense of superiority (in Christianity, for instance, one cannot become God, but one can feel superior to others by worshipping God the right way and having the correct beliefs).

In fact, it’s interesting to note how little even true believers in this or that faction support the hierarchy that makes their factions possible, in democracy for example. The staunch Democrat or Republican does not believe in democracy, at least most of the time; he or she praises the democratic process only when their chosen faction wins. They want to impose their values on everyone else, not obey the results of the process as such.

The best argument against the “hierarchies are natural” position is the massive amount of indoctrination, threats and cajoling necessary to make people obey, starting from a young age all through one’s life. And yet, the moment their control weakens, widespread public resistance springs up almost by magic. In his famous work The True Believer, Eric Hoffer pointed out that dictatorships need not fear opposition as long as they maintain their iron grip, but that any relaxing of that grip is inevitably followed by public rebellion. If hierarchies were natural, this is the exact opposite of what we would expect.

To recapitulate, the proposition that hierarchies are part of human nature should entail the following:

* All societies in history should have hierarchies. (they don’t)
* We should all desire to obey. (we don’t)
* It should not be necessary to indoctrinate people to obey. (it is)
* People left to their own devices should naturally form hierarchies. (they don’t: see examples from Anarchy in Action chapter 2, notably the Peckham Experiment)

If hierarchies are not natural, then what is natural? As Kropotkin famously argued, mutual aid permeates the animal kingdom, including humans, and is probably a more important evolutionary factor than warfare between species or competition within a species. The faculties which led the human species to unlock the secrets of nature were social adaptations, not tools of war.

This is, of course, not a total vindication of the mutualist stance, but it’s something to consider. Tennyson’s conception of nature as being “red in tooth and claw” has been dominant in our psyches, Kropotkin notwithstanding, and the delusional Hobbesian conception of primitive anarchies as “nasty, brutish and short” has dominated theoretical politics. The position that mutual aid is the most important factor in nature and natural societies provides a strong counter-point to these assumptions.

The Onion on advertising…

What I like so much about this Onion article is how it makes people say absolutely normal and reasonable things, but which in the capitalist context of profit-seeking sound absolutely demented.

“Look, Coca-Cola is a terrific product,” Nooyi continued. “Millions of people choose it over Pepsi every day. Are those people wrong? Of course not. Concepts like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ shouldn’t even apply. It’s a soft drink.”

Nooyi told reporters the company’s $1.3 billion annual advertising budget would be put into Pepsi’s savings account, spread among various charitable organizations, and divvied up into generous bonuses for the company’s minimum-wage factory employees.

Claiming that “taste is subjective,” Nooyi further stated that those who hadn’t already heard of Pepsi were unlikely to begin drinking it now, and that the company was perfectly content to rely on word of mouth to sell its product.

“You can’t taste an ad, anyway,” Nooyi said. “People are going to make up their own minds regardless of whether we spend millions trying to inform them that Taylor Swift drinks Pepsi. I mean, seriously, does it really matter if Taylor Swift drinks Pepsi? She’s just a human being like everybody else.”

Jan leads Rep. Eliot Engel to a principle (on crime)

More from the inimitable Helfeld interviews…