The ideas from my last post grew out of a line of thought I’ve been running for a couple of weeks and alluded to a few times before.
The gist is that capitalism and socialism/communism share a few core assumptions. They’re two varieties of industrialism. They came of age at the same time, with reference to the same circumstances, and to a significant degree, they developed in order to deliberately contravene one another across the same conceptual axis.
For the purposes of this very sketchy, multi-post outline I’m referring specifically to the ideas held on either extreme from roughly the period from the Communist Manifesto in the middle of the 19th century until the last decade or so (climaxing with the Cold War in the middle of the 20th century) — the ideas connotated by the terms “communism” and “capitalism” when heard by the ordinary man and woman on the street (no doubt both ideologies have far more rich and extensive histories but I’ll look at those once I get this general sketch out of the way).
(I’m using the word “communism” instead of socialism because I want to focus on the abstract ideals of the past, not live hypotheses that are still evolving and hard to nail down. Besides, it seems to me that capitalists still think “communism” when they hear “socialism.” Likewise, it seems that socialists still think of some older form of capitalism when they hear “capitalism”…)
It’s no coincidence that this range of communist and capitalist ideologies — and the debate between them — emerged and evolved with the rise of industrialization. They are philosophies born and living in the factory mindset and dominated (now misled) by machine metaphors. (E.g. communists talk a lot about “force” and capitalists talk a lot about “efficiency.”)
Things have changed a lot since Marx. Work is moving from factories into more creative and entrepreneurial settings just as work moved from farms to factories in the 18th century. The change is highlighted by this insight I read the other day on the political philosophy blog, Public Reason: “what are the ‘means of production’ supposed to be?“:
The claim that the means of production ought to be owned publicly, rather than privately, seems to be one of if not the defining characteristics of socialism. So it seems pretty important to be clear on what it refers to.
On the most natural reading, a “means of production” would be anything that’s used to produce. But that seems very, very broad. Sure, factories are means of production, but so are muffin trays. So is my brain, and my muscles.
Do socialists hold that even these things should be publicly owned? Does it depend on how we use them? Nielsen says that a socialist will allow for personal private property – and muffin trays seem about as personal as one could get. Does this mean that we’re allowed to bake muffins for ourselves? For our neighbors? For our neighbors in exchange for wine?
How, in other words, does a socialist (Marxist or otherwise) demarcate legitimate personal property from means of production? Or can the two be reconciled in a principled way? If public ownership of the means of production can be reconciled with private personal property, can it also be reconciled with some notion of self-ownership?
Clearly we need new ideas… But I’ll cut it off here for now. In the mean time I’m on the lookout for Daniel Bell‘s books if you know where I might find some…
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