I have a problem with socialism.
I can discuss it intellectually and rationally, and see why it appeals to others. But, like a lot of core political things, I conclude that most of us have emotional instincts, and one of mine struggles with the concept of taking things from some people and giving them to others, no matter how well-intentioned and for everyone’s good.
So, while I do accept redistribution is necessary to some extent, and am open to discussion about what that extent might be, fundamentally those who believe in equality of resources are always going to have an uphill struggle persuading me. I know I’m not alone in that, too.
Some of us frame “fairness” in a different way, and claiming the high ground, from either side, doesn’t get us very far.
Lately, though, I have been thinking about this from a different angle.
One which, for all I know, may annoy a far greater proportion of people than my distaste for socialist ideas.
Wealth is not all that matters
The core assumption behind a lot of political theory, and socialism particularly, is that “resources” are key to how society works. Amassing or monopolising resources is the root of inequality and therefore every problem that matters, and the task of managing society well depends mostly on controlling what is done with those resources.
Suppose that’s not the case, and resources are secondary? That wealth, as such, is not unimportant but a symptom?
What if the actual problem is power?
What would a version of socialism that focused on power rather than wealth look like? Because that appeals to me instinctively in a way that socialism as normally understood just doesn’t.
But what do we mean by power?
I define this quite simply: the right to make decisions, and have others go along with them. The more someone can make decisions, affect other people, and they accept them, the more power they have.
Historically, we appear to have assumed that power follows wealth – that if someone gains more than their fair share of resources, that gives them more decision-making power. And so we focus our efforts (or envy) on those with more than their fair share of wealth. But to judge by the leaders of largest groups of people of any size, the reverse seems to be true at least as often.
Decision-making power seems to lead to wealth just as much as wealth leads to power. Either way, it’s only rare individuals who resist using one to get the other.
So why is it always wealth that gets the attention?
What would the alternative look like?
In general terms, socialism is about controlling the distribution of things with the aim of balancing fairness and overall effectiveness. And that implies compulsory redistribution – where someone has more than is fair for them to use, they must surrender the excess to be allocated to those who have most need of it.
We assume this is always resources.
Because, though, anyone with resources is likely to resist the idea that any of what they have is “excess”, this only works if others can decide what an excess is. And therefore conventional socialism on anything other than a scale that can be achieved by voluntary agreement requires very strong decision-making powers to be allocated somewhere. We assume that the only way of counteracting the power of wealth is by political power that’s even stronger.
Suppose, though, we had a system that cared more about excess of decision-making power?
Would it be possible to redistribute power rather than resources? If someone, or some entity, has more ability to decide things that affect others than is collectively effective, could we require them to surrender some and allocate it to those who need more power than they have?
This is where it gets tricky to imagine, because we aren’t used to thinking this way, are we?
How, exactly, do we reduce the power of the powerful and increase the power of the powerless? There’s no tax on the ability to affect others’ lives, and input into decisions doesn’t really work as a benefit.
If we suppose for a minute that we could, though, the results (to me) feel appealing. If we think of the people who are able to get things done – the ones who know people, or have the funds to pay for things to happen, or are part of the management structure of anything from a country to an organisation – and magically dial down that ability, while requiring them to get permission from those they’d be affecting …
Well, for one thing, that solves the resources problem, doesn’t it? Everybody would have to agree that it was best for them to have more, so they could only amass as much as everybody else was happy with. If that’s what everybody cares about. And if it isn’t, well, we all get to have as much say as anyone else in what we do care about. So it feels to me as though it’s addressing the core problem of society in a way that an obsession with wealth and resources never can.
But isn’t that what [something] is meant to do?
Democracy?
Unions?
Constitutions?
Human rights?
There are a lot of things we do that are kind of, sort of, in a way, intended to work in this way, agreed. Democracy being the big one.
Each of them, though, has lost its way, I’d argue, and become mostly about something else, or neutered.
Take unions, which appear to be designed to address the power of owners and managers in business. In reality they don’t disperse the decision-making power, they introduce an adversarial relationship between those original decision-makers and a few unrepresentative people with other interests. The average person affected by whatever disagreement there may be has no more power or influence than before, even before we consider the wider idea of affected stakeholders.
And democracy is as bad, because almost everywhere it’s practiced, it is in the form of representative democracy, where we don’t get a say on what affects us at all, only on the selection of who gets to make those decisions. The decisions themselves are still out of our hands.
Constitutions and human rights are terrible, as far as I’m concerned, because they’ve taken ideals and put them in the hands of deciders who aren’t answerable to anybody at all, for the most part.
As far as I can see, there are only a few visible things that work anything like this, and most of them are more token than anything: like UK members of the House of Lords not being able to vote in elections.
OK, so what’s the proposition instead?
Honestly? I don’t have one.
I like the idea of a system where we stop anyone getting too powerful, and automatically give more power to all the many underdogs, but I have no clue what might do that, as a systematic design of society. Nor do I have any confidence that if I did have a political design, it could be implemented and would work as I hoped. Political ideas tend not to.
Being pragmatic, I think of things like this as directional guides, like the North Star. You don’t get to the North Star, but there it is to tell you which way you’re heading.
So I would like, in all discussions about laws, and rules, and systems that apply to us all, for us to ask whether it puts more or less power in the hands of … well, just “others”. Does a change mean someone more able to decide things instead of the rest of us? Does it put more power into the hands of someone who already has power? Or does it diffuse decision-making out wider and down to those who will be directly affected? Concentration of power should be assumed to be a bad thing, and in need of strong justification.
Maybe somebody will one day turn this into a political philosophy, but I doubt it.
As I said at the start, I expect people from all conventional political persuasions to hate the whole concept. I seem to be in a sadly small minority in believing that the average person is better at deciding what happens to them than anyone else.