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glennarochelle's review against another edition
5.0
A quick read, and an excellent primer on what socialism really is. Highly accessible and punctuated by fantastically vibrant art, I'd recommend this to anyone who rightly believes there has to be a better way. ✊🏻
lucasmiller's review against another edition
4.0
Really welcoming and easy to read. Pretty opened end and big tent, the authors do not seem interested in the internecine struggles of the left. Really dug the question and answer format. Makes concepts in ready to use in discussion. Sort of feels like an extended commercial for Jacobin.
politizer's review against another edition
2.0
For a book that's meant to be an introductory primer, most of it is very dense and abstract. And most of the chapters never actually get around to suggesting clear answers for the questions raised in the chapter titles. It's not necessarily bad, just very much not what it presented itself as being.
gaybf's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
medium-paced
5.0
quotes:
At the core of these values is self-determination: the belief that people should be able to decide the conditions of their own lives to the fullest extent possible. When an action by a person affects only that person, then he or she ought to be able to engage in that activity without asking permission from anyone else. This is the context of freedom. But when an action affects the lives of others, then these other people should have a say in the activity. This is the context of democracy. In both, the paramount concern is that people retain as much control as possible over the shape their lives will take.
...What we need, therefore, is a set of rules to distinguish between questions of freedom and those of democracy. In our society, such a distinction is usually made with reference to the boundary between the private and public spheres. There is nothing natural or spontaneous about this line between the private and the public; it is forged and maintained by social processes. The tasks entailed by these processes are complex and often contested. The state vigorously enforces some public/private boundaries and leaves others to be upheld or dissolved as social norms. In a fully democratic society, the boundary itself is subject to democratic delibration.
Captalism constructs the boundary between the public and private spheres in a way that constrains the realization of true individual freedom and reduces the scope of meaningful democracy. There are five ways in which this is readily apparent.
1. "Work or Starve" Isn't Freedom
2. Capitalists Decide (Perhaps the most fundamental right that accompanies private ownership of capital is the right to decide to invest and disinvest strictly on the basis of self-interest)
3. Nine to Five is Tyranny (&No robust conception of self-determination would allow autonomy to depend on the private preferences of elites)
4. Governments Have to Serve the Interests of Private Capitalists (Private control over major investment decisions creates a constant pressure on public authorities to enact rules favorable to the interests of capitalists. The threat of disinvestment and capital mobility is always in the background of public policy; politicians of any ideological orientation are forced to worry about "good business climate")
5. Elites Control the Political System
This does not mean that we’re plastic — that there is no such thing as human nature. Progressives do sometimes make this claim, often arguing with those who see people as walking, talking utility-maximizers.
The socialist view of redistribution within a capitalist society must reject an important premise at play in nearly all tax policy debates: that pre-tax income is something earned solely by individual effort and possessed privately before the state intervenes to take a part of it. Once we break from this libertarian fantasy, it’s easy to see that individual and corporate income is made possible only through tax-financed state action.
The capitalist economy is not selfregulating.
1. The first precondition for firms to earn profits is state-enforced property rights, which give some people ownership and control over productive resources while excluding others.
2. Second, governments have to manage labor markets to help ensure that the skill needs of firms are met. States do this through setting immigration and education policies. All capitalist states also try to mitigate labor market risks, whether it be the risk of labor scarcity for firms or unemployment for workers.
3. Third, most capitalists want states to enforce anti-trust, contract, criminal, property, and tort laws, as it makes market interactions more predictable and reliable.
4. And finally, the capitalist economy needs a working infrastructure. Even most libertarians argue that state control over the money supply and interest rates is necessary to spur or slow growth when the economy needs it.
All of this is done with taxes. The notion of a pre-tax income is a bookkeeping trick. A person's income or a corporation's profits are in part the result of governments collecting taxes and actively creating the conditions under which they were able to make money in the first place. "Tax the rich" isn't merely a cry of spite or a demand for fairness.
...the basic structure of capitalism, in which a small number own most of the productive assets, guarantees that the vast majority of people will (at best) spend their lives earning wages, but never profits. Taxation provides a partial remedy to that essential, structural inequality of capitalist society.
Positive freedom is the “ability to” — the capacity to do things, and the possibility of selecting goals and making efforts to realize them. Such freedom requires resources. In capitalist societies with low levels of redistribution, positive freedom is a zero-sum game in which a few enjoy a great deal of such abilities at the expense of many others.
Most would agree that we all deserve to live in a society where we are given what we deserve, are free, and have the capacity to be creative and reach our potential. As unglamorous as it may seem, redistributive taxation is a step in this direction. The rich didn’t earn their wealth— they’re just holding on to it for us
That’s the socialist vision: abolishing private ownership of the things we all need and use — factories, banks, offices, natural resources, utilities, communication and transportation infrastructure — and replacing it with social ownership, thereby undercutting the power of elites to hoard wealth and power. And that’s also the ethical appeal of socialism: a world where people don’t try to control others for personal gain, but instead cooperate so that everyone can flourish.
The cia and British intelligence overthrew the democratically-elected Mohammad Mosaddegh government in Iran in 1954 when it nationalized British oil. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank cut off credit to Chile and the CIA actively aided Augusto Pinochet’s brutal military coup in that country. The United States likewise colluded with the imf to squeeze the Manley-era Jamaican economy. Capitalist hostility to even moderate reformist governments in the developing world knows no bounds. The US forcibly overthrew both the Jacobo Árbenz government in Guatemala in 1954 and the Juan Bosch presidency in the Dominican Republic in 1965 because they favored modest land reform. For students of history, the question should be not whether socialism necessarily leads to dictatorship, but whether a revived socialist movement can overcome the oligarchic and anti-democratic nature of capitalism.
It’s no surprise, then, that the idea of socialism also faces heavy counterattack—and not only from the Right. Within the Left itself, there is suspicion of an ideal many view as single-mindedly focused on economic issues and distant from other everyday sufferings, especially those of black and brown people. ...Marxism and many of its descendants (are seen) as hopelessly Eurocentric.
... Socialism is not Eurocentric because the logic of capital is universal — and so is resistance against it. Cultural specificities may shape some details of capital’s operation differently in the United States and in Bangladesh, in France and in Nicaragua, but they do not alter its fundamental prioritization of profits over people. This is why, for more than a hundred years, many of the most powerful and sweeping social
movements in the Global South have been inspired by the socialist ideal.
On the fateful morning of the Rana Plaza collapse, workers were reluctant to go into the building. Large cracks had appeared on the walls of the factory and inspectors had declared the building a hazard. But management forced them to start working. A devastated mother later recalled that her eighteen-year-old daughter, who perished in the collapse, had been threatened with loss of pay for the entire month if she chose not to work that day. This is a specific kind of dehumanization, born of deprivation and powerlessness and familiar to workers in every part of the world, who are forced to choose between their livelihood and their safety. Socialism identifies the source of such dehumanization--private ownership and exploitation--and rejects it.
By every barometer in American society — health care, education, employment, poverty —African Americans are worse off. Elected
officials from across the political spectrum often blame these disparities on an absence of “personal responsibility” or view them as a cultural phenomenon particular to African Americans. In reality, racial inequality has been largely produced by government policy and private institutions that not only impoverish African Americans but also demonize and criminalize them.
... The debasement of black people also made African Americans more vulnerable to economic coercion and manipulation —not just “anti-blackness.” Coercion and manipulation were rooted in the evolving
economic demands of capital, but their impact rippled far beyond the economic realm. Black people were stripped of their right to vote, subjected to wanton violence, and locked into menial and poorly paid
labor. This was the political economy of American racism.
But within the socialist tradition, many have also argued that because African Americans and most other nonwhites are disproportionately poor and working class, campaigns aimed at ending economic inequality alone would stop their oppression. This stance ignores how racism constitutes its own basis for oppression for nonwhite people.Ordinary blacks and other nonwhite minorities are oppressed not only because of their poverty but also because of their racial or ethnic identities.
There is also no direct correlation between economic expansion or improved economic conditions and a decrease in racial inequality. In reality, racial discrimination often prevents African Americans and others from fully accessing the fruits of economic expansion. ....Looking
at racism as only a byproduct of economic inequality ignores the ways that racism exists as an independent force that wreaks havoc in the lives of all African Americans.
The struggle against racism regularly intersects with struggles for economic equality, but racism does not only express itself over economic questions. Antiracist struggles also take place in response to the social crises black communities experience, including struggles against racial profiling; police brutality; housing, health care, and educational inequality; and mass incarceration and other aspects of the “criminal justice” system.
In a 1966 presentation to a gathering of his organization the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King commented:
"We must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy …
“Who owns the oil?” You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” You begin to ask the question, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water?” These are questions that must be asked."
... socialists accuse mainstream feminists of focusing too much on individual rights rather than collective struggle and ignoring the structural divides between women. They accuse mainstream feminists of aligning themselves with bourgeois political projects that diminish the agency of working women or pushing middle-class demands that ignore the needs and desires of poor women, both in the global north and south.
These are old debates that date back to the mid-nineteenth century and the First International, and revolve around deeply political questions of power and the contradictions of capitalist society.
Disproportionate numbers of caring jobs are low-paying, contingent gigs in which humiliation, harassment, assault, and wage theft are common. In addition to these clear differences between the experiences of men and women in the us there are more insidious, long-range effects of sexism. Feminists like bell hooks argue that sexism and racism pervade all corners of society and that dominant narratives of power glorify white, heteronormative visions of life.
Socialist feminist Johanna Brenner:
"We can generously characterize as ambivalent the relationships between
working-class women/poor women and the middle-class professional women whose jobs it is to uplift and regulate those who come to be defined as problematic — the poor, the unhealthy, the culturally unfit, the sexually deviant, the ill-educated. These class tensions bleed into feminist politics, as middle-class feminist advocates claim to represent working-class women."
So while it is certainly necessary to recognize how gendered contemporary society remains, it is also necessary to be clear-eyed about how to overcome these divides and, equally important, to recognize the limitations of a feminism that doesn’t challenge capitalism.
How can we achieve a just society without relying on fossil fuels or exacerbating other forms of environmental destruction? .... Socialist-feminists have long called attention to the labor of social reproduction—the activities necessary to replenish wage laborers both individually and across generations, such as education, childcare, housework, and food preparation. Struggles over social reproduction have focused on the demands and possibilities of life outside the factory, and they have much to teach us about organizing new ways of living. We also need to value the work of ecological reproduction— to recognize that the activity of ecosystems keeps the earth viable for human life, and care for them accordingly.
Inexpensive goods aren’t necessarily bad, but they shouldn’t come at the cost of working people and ecosystems. The goal of a socialist society is not to clamp down on popular consumption, but to create a society that emphasizes quality of life over quantity of things. ... Instead of an endless cycle of working and shopping, life in a low-carbon socialist future would be oriented around activities that make life beautiful and fulfilling but require less intensive resource consumption: reading books, teaching,
learning, making music, seeing shows, dancing, playing sports, going to the park, hiking, spending time with one another.
Capitalists promise that technology will solve environmental problems. Technological solutions aren’t a panacea, but we can’t surrender technology to venture capitalists either: utopian socialist projects have long imagined a better world built from the combined abilities of humans, nature, and technology. And a host of current technologies, from clean energy sources to biotechnologies, promise to be part of a more sustainable future. But as long as they’re privately controlled, produced only when profitable, and accessible only to those who can pay, their potential will be exploited only as it serves capitalists. A socialist society would support research into problems whose solutions aren’t profitable and ensure that resulting technologies are put to use for public benefit.
...deregulation and privatization of electric utilities in the neoliberal era has crippled the public’s ability to build the new interconnected electric infrastructure that would make a major clean-energy transition possible. A socialist society could choose which energy sources to use and how quickly a transition should occur on the basis of knowledge about environmental and health benefits and social needs, rather than profit margins. We could produce clean energy on a large scale and build the infrastrucure necessary to make it available to and affordable for all.
Socialists have always seen capitalism’s propensity for wars of conquest and plunder as the ultimate expression of the system’s brutality. In the organization of state violence on an unprecedented scale, we see capitalism’s tendency to subordinate human need to the logic of profit and power. In the gap between the promise of democratic equality and the reality of class oppression that war expresses, we see the fundamental injustice that defines our social order.
...Against this state of affairs, socialists support the organization of mass movements against the wars waged by our government. We participate in the struggle against restrictions on free speech and other democratic rights which inevitably accompany these wars. Against calls for “national unity,” we fight for international solidarity and stronger class organization to fight for workers’ interests. In the longer run, we aim to translate these movements into a broader struggle for a radical transformation of society along democratic lines.
US policy-makers covertly organized the overthrow of popular and democratic governments all over the globe—from Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran to Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and Salvador Allende in Chile.
To justify these campaigns, American officials have often resorted to vicious racism. General William Westmoreland once justified the brutality of the forces he led in Vietnam by saying that “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner ... We value life and human dignity. They don’t care about life and human dignity.”
At every turn, the American government has shown its commitment to democracy and freedom abroad to be as shallow as its commitment to equality at home. Again and again, it has proven that its fear of democratic control over the world’s resources ran deeper than its pro-democratic rhetoric. ...Given the scope and scale of American imperial violence, it's crucial that socialists in the United States oppose their government's military interventions. ...Why should workers in other countries ally themselves with those in the United States, in whose name they are bombed and occupied? To the extent that Americans buy into the nationalism that inevitably goes along with their government's machinations abroad, they make the emergence of a class-based movement against oppression and exploitation impossible.
The socialist movement wants to eradicate war because it is brutal and
irrational— a waste of human life and social resources that produces enormous devastation. But in a world filled with exploitation and oppression, one has to differentiate between the violence of those fighting to maintain injustice, and those fighting against injustice.
...what the example of Eugene Debs shows us is that there is a long history of radical opposition to imperialism from which we can draw hope and inspiration.... Although he is often depicted as an anodyne moralist, a precursor to multicultural liberalism, King was actually a visionary whose politics became increasingly radical in tandem with the movement he led. Nothing expressed that growing radicalism better than his decision to publicly oppose the Vietnam War--a movie which even his closest advisors recommended against becuase of its potental political consequences.
...Decrying the "madness" of the Democratic administration's policy, King focused on the incredible brutality that ordinary people in Vietnam faced at the hands of the American military. "They must see Americans as strange liberators," he concluded, when that supposed liberation involved propping up corrupt, undemocratic governments, destroying entire villages, defoliating the countryside with napalm and Agent Orange, and killing women, children, and the elderly. ... Noting the disproportionate number of African Americans who had been sent to kill and die in the swamps of Vietnam, King castigated the administration for “taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”
... King described his realization “that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”
What King came to understand was that racism and inequality at home, and war abroad, were interlinked. This recognition put him at odds with his erstwhile liberal supporters, whose willingness to challenge the status quo ended— as it so often has for the liberal establishment— when America’s position as the world’s strongest imperial power came into question.
Why single out workers? Why not just say that every marginal and oppressed group ought to be at the heart of socialist strategy?...the reason socialists believe that class organizing has to be at the center of a viable political strategy also has to do with two other practical factors: a diagnosis of what the sources of injustice are in modern society, and a prognosis of what are the best levers for change in a more progressive direction.
...two items are absolutely essential. The first is some guarantee of material security— things like having an income, housing, and basic health care. The second is being free of social domination —if you are under someone else’s control, if they make many of the key decisions for you, then you are constantly vulnerable to abuse. ...Capitalism is an economic system that depends on depriving the vast majority of people of these essential preconditions for a decent life.
Economic and political power is in the hands of capitalists, whose only goal is to maximize profits, which means that the condition of workers is, at best, a secondary concern to them. And that means that the system is, at its very core, unjust.
...progressive reform efforts have to find a source of leverage, a source of power that will enable them to overcome the resistance of the capitalist class and its political functionaries. The working class has this power, for a simple reason — capitalists can only make their profits if workers show up to work every day, and if they refuse to play along, the profits dry up overnight. And if there is one thing that catches employers’ attention, it’s when the money stops flowing.
Actions like strikes don’t just have the potential to bring particular capitalists to their knees, they can have an impact far beyond, on layer after layer of other institutions that directly or indirectly depend on them— including the government.
...Workers are therefore not only a social group that is systematically oppressed and exploited in modern society, they are also the group that is best positioned to enact real change and extract concessions from
the major center of power — the bankers and industrialists who run the system. They are the group that comes into contact with capitalists every day and are tied in a perennial conflict with them as a part of their very existence.
Socialism has often been portrayed in science fiction in these types of gray dystopian terms, which reflect the ambivalence that many artists have toward capitalism. Artists are often repulsed by the anti-human values and commercialized culture of their society, but they are also aware that they have a unique status within it that allows them to express their creative individuality — as long as it sells. They fear that socialism would strip them of that status and reduce them to the level of mere workers, because they are unable to imagine a world that values and encourages the artistic expression of all of its members.
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the capitalist epoch from all earlier ones.” While earlier class societies desperately tried to maintain the status quo, capitalism thrives on overturning it.
The result is a world in constant motion. Yesterday’s factory district is today’s slum is tomorrow’s hipster neighborhood. All that is solid melts into air. ...when we do get to directly touch the excitement, it’s usually because we’re on the business end of it. It’s our jobs being replaced by that incredible new robot, our rent becoming too expensive ever since the beautiful luxury tower was built across the street. Adding insult to injury, we are then told if we complain that we are standing in the way of progress.
The sacrifice of individuals in the name of societal progress is said to be one of the horrors of socialism, a world run by faceless bureaucrats supposedly acting for the common good. But there are plenty of invisible and unelected decision-makers under capitalism, from health insurance
officials who don’t know us but can determine whether our surgery is “necessary” to billionaire-funded foundations that declare schools they have never visited to be “failures.”
...Socialism didn’t find talented artists to be a threat to “equality” or find a contradiction between appreciating individual artists and opening up the previously elitist art world to the masses of workers and peasants.
I want to live in a democratic society with conflicts and arguments, where people aren’t afraid to stand up for what they believe in and don’t feel pressured to soften their opinions so that, when a compromise is reached, we can pretend that we all agreed in the first place. If your case for socialism rests on the idea that people will stop getting into arguments and even occasionally acting like jerks, you should probably find another cause. ...To be an effective socialist, it is extremely helpful to like human beings.
Marx said, “I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to
me.” I find it hard to see how a world run by the majority of human beings, with all of our gloriously and infuriatingly different talents, personalities, madnesses, and passions, could possibly be boring.
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mirandacactusreads's review against another edition
4.0
Good, concise essays covering basic questions/objections that people who are unsure if they want to identify with the socialist movement might have.
pierreikonnikov's review against another edition
5.0
Clear, concise, and convincing. An excellent introduction.
gmzzn's review
5.0
really good intro book!
deals w/ many questions and misconceptions, about different topics related to socialism (workers, democracy, feminism, antiracism etc). it doesn't go very deep in each question but it's good and easy to understand so in my opinion a must read if you'd like to learn about socialism and have no idea where to start.
deals w/ many questions and misconceptions, about different topics related to socialism (workers, democracy, feminism, antiracism etc). it doesn't go very deep in each question but it's good and easy to understand so in my opinion a must read if you'd like to learn about socialism and have no idea where to start.