Nothing New Under the Sun
A case for resurrecting history.
Hi, welcome to my writings here on Medium. If you somehow came across this blog and this is still the only post here, I can only assume one of two things have happened: One, I got intimidated by this project and abandoned it before really committing to it, or Two, you’re near the bottom of an especially deep Internet rabbit hole and came across my blog before I managed to post anything other than this introduction. Here’s hoping it’s option two.
Well whether there’s more than a single post here, or if I’ve written dozens of articles at this point, let this serve as a starting point for what to expect from this blog. Welcome, and thanks for stopping by.
If you’re like me, if you sit with your thoughts too long you might start to feel queasy at the state of the world. You — like me — may feel overwhelmed at the myriad existential threats humanity faces, and feel anxiety over either the incompetency or malice our leaders have with facing these problems head on. The re-emergence of fascism as fashionable politics, the threat of climate change and ecological crises in general, the cancerous growth of inequality, the constant backdrop of war, the disenfranchisement of the population, and how little our world leaders actually seem to care at addressing these problems at all.
These issues in society seem so entrenched, and so insurmountable, that untangling this mess seems impossible. It’s easy to fall into a hopeless or apathetic attitude in the face of it all. But if you’re like me, you recognize that however tempting it may be to fall into apathy, apathy will only allow these crises to go unchecked.
Maybe though you’re not like me. Maybe you may be concerned about these issues, but feel society in general is moving on a trajectory towards progress. It’s a slow and sometimes scary path, but you feel confident in the “moral arc of the universe bending towards justice.” Love wins. These are concerns you share sure, but the mechanisms in place — while imperfect — are sufficient to handle these problems.
If you’re like me, I think you may enjoy a lot of what I have to say here. If I’m successful at this, maybe I’ll cover an angle of an issue you hadn’t considered before. Put up your feet and stay a while, enjoy your stay. If you aren’t like me though, you are who I most want to talk to. You may not like my analysis of our present situation. You may disagree with every word I write, but I encourage you to at least engage with these ideas. You may find in time we agree on more than you think, and if I’m successful, I may just persuade you that our system cannot course correct on its own, and your voice is essential in building what comes next.
There’ll be invoking a whole lot of bogeymen and scare words here. I’ll get to the specifics in just a minute here, but first a guarantee: my perspective is informed by an opposition to domination, oppression, and authoritarianism in all its forms. I wholeheartedly believe we can overcome these existential threats to humanity, and we’ll do it by expanding democracy in every sphere of life. This writer is opposed to racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, classism, ableism, and every structure that oppresses and disenfranchises. To my readers who aren’t quite like me, but share this perspective, where there is a critical difference between us is how we go about fighting these.
Over the last few years there have been more and more ideas for how we may change the world for the better. There was The Venus Project, Gross Domestic Happiness, a Green New Deal, and the continuous promises that we can simply technology our way out of our problems. I think these projects have noble goals, and the people involved with these movements and I share many of the same values. My divergence from these projects is twofold: either their proposal for how we get ourselves out of these messes does not adequately solve the problem, or they try to build a political framework from the ground up. I’ll be addressing my first criticism in future articles, but I want to end this article by addressing the second.
Almost none of the ideas I write here will be new. I don’t claim to be an original thinker. I write because I think I can do a better job articulating these ideas than I see elsewhere. Time will tell.
Many of these movements are remaking the wheel of building a better society by glossing over the historic movement that’s been underway for at least the last two-hundred fifty years. The movement dedicated to universal human emancipation. It’s socialism. It’s communism. It’s anarchism. All three of these can fall under the umbrella of the “Socialist Movement” — but to the uninitiated know they are notorious for bickering and disagreeing with one another. Sometimes politely, sometimes with bullets.
Socialism seems close to being able to once again enjoy its time in the sun. Self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders came second in the US primaries twice. At the beginning of 2020, many believed him to be the front runner. According to a 2018 YouGov poll, 22% of all Americans would be “comfortable” with a socialist candidate for president, and 7% would be “enthusiastic”. A 2019 Gallup poll shows a whopping 43% of Americans believe “some form of socialism would be a good thing for the country.”
Good. I hope that number continues to grow. Still though, and not without merit, many people bristle at the thought of socialism gaining in popularity. That’s to speak nothing of the still very much taboo words communism or anarchism. For many of us, especially after the dot-com crash, the crash of 2008, the coronavirus crash of 2020, and the ever-steeper growing inequality between the rich and poor, it seems that at the very least, maybe we’re doing capitalism wrong. Maybe the answer isn’t socialism or communism, but a major overhaul of capitalism. We need some drastic reforms.
I disagree. While I’m certainly not opposed to reforms that will materially benefit people, they will not be enough to contend with the major issues facing human civilization. So why socialism? and what kind? The reason I take issue with trying to remake the wheel of bettering society is because the socialist movement has been attempting to do exactly that for two-hundred fifty years. It means we have a record to refer back to. There have been projects and experiments with socialism around the world we can learn from. Some that are promising, others disastrous.
Socialist political theory has been evolving for centuries, and has been tweaked, modified, and modernized depending on the times and region. There are arguments we have today that have been had over and over and over again that we should finally be able to put to rest. There are whole frameworks for understanding sociology, economics, race, ecology, war, debt, media, and government. I don’t claim to have read them all. But I have read some of the best, and it isn’t assigned in classrooms.
The United States in particular has an especially thorny relationship with socialism. In the States, it’s nigh impossible to say “communism” without mental images of starvation, labor camps, and dreary crushing conformity to the state cropping up in people’s minds. This is the outcome of some exceptionally effective anti-communist scares. But this attitude is relatively new. The United States had for a long time a lively socialist movement, and socialist sentiments were considered normal if not dissident. You might say, “ah, but this was before the Communist experiments of the 20th century. We did not yet know that communism in practice would be as tyrannical as it turned out to be. To be a Communist these days would be to deny the atrocities committed by Stalin and his ilk.”
This seems like a good argument on first glance. But upon further inspection, it doesn’t hold water. Marx, the great revolutionary economist, took his inspiration of a communist society from the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871. As many as two million people participated in the Spanish Revolution of 1936, largely anarchist in character. The Black Panthers, founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, with only 5000 members at its peak in 1969 left an indelible mark on the political landscape and consciousness of all who have learned from their history.
Socialism, communism, anti-capitalism is not a silver bullet to solve the crises we face today. I would be lying to you to say socialists have never made missteps. The political right doesn’t have the monopoly on authoritarian tendencies. But if we’re serious about solving the crises we face today, we would be making a suicidal mistake not to learn from the socialist movement. We have the struggle of socialists, communists, and anarchists to thank for the eight-hour workday, for social security, for school breakfast and lunch programs, for your weekend. That’s largely what you can expect to see from this blog. If you feel uneasy about discussions about communism, that’s understandable. It has a reputation it does not deserve. I hope to convince you of that.
