The Rise of Antisocialism
From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.
An inspiring ideal
But it is also inherently unfair; some people's labor is naturally worth more than others, and rich parents can pass unearned generational wealth onto their children. People with severe mental or physical disabilities are left out in the cold, and even those of average skill are left behind by the wealth centralization of the Matthew effect. While most socialist, communist, and anarchist movements in the past have failed due to poor planning and the realities of human selfishness, they were fundamentally well-intentioned, and as technology progresses to the point where more and more human labor can be automated, systems to more equitably distribute the fruits of that automation are a moral necessary.
Unfortunately, anti-capitalism has become something of a joke in contemporary Western society. It's been largely co-opted by the upper-middle-class, for aesthetics and as cover for fundamentally selfish behavior.
Consider public transit. Not everyone can afford a car, and in heavily populated areas, the space required for individual transportation is inefficient and imposes significant negative externalities on everyone else. Everyone benefits from having a robust public transit system, and the poor benefit more than the rich. This is a classic case where publicly-funded state intervention makes sense, since private companies can't redesign roads to include bus lanes, and don't have much of an incentive to serve poor areas.
Instead, we get stuff like this:
Yes we should https://t.co/7DmgrYfPQu pic.twitter.com/2nXP92dwLV
— Krime (@krime_1) January 12, 2024
It's unclear how stealing from the public transit system is supposed to be leftist, and indeed, no justification for it is provided. The guy in the drawing just looks cool. Look at the confidence and agility with which he's jumping over that turnstile! Look at the elegant hood he's wearing; straight out of Assassin's Creed! Who wouldn't want to date that guy‽
In addition to the argument from aesthetics, it also has that classic quality that any popular political position has: it gives people an excuse to do the selfish thing they always wanted to do anyway. Nobody likes paying for things, especially when some of that payment goes to benefit people other than themselves. Most people do it anyway out of a sense of general obligation to their community, but there are always some people looking for ways to get out of it.
This isn't just an online phenomenon; a while back I stayed with someone who liked to brag about not paying for public transit, despute supposedly supporting it.
New Yorkers remain undefeated https://t.co/ccAJvKKWDu pic.twitter.com/TJwPbYmh47
— Read Let This Radicalize You (@JoshuaPHilll) January 11, 2024
Note, again, the general "coolness" of what's going on here. The guy is walking with a gangster swagger, wearing expensive shoes and jewelry, and not giving a fuck about the fact that he's being filmed. Anarchy is pretending to be a character in Grand Theft Auto, apparently.
One of the only defenses of the behavior I could find was that the city was wasting money on expensive anti-theft devices that are easily circumvented. That may be true, but I think it's more likely they did the cost-benefit analysis and determined that the gates would be worth the rare jumper. Not everyone has the physical abilities to hop over gates like these, and most people don't want to incur the social disapproval that comes from engaging in blatantly unethical behaviors in public. But more importantly, ANTI-THEFT DEVICES WOULDN'T BE NECESSARY IF PEOPLE DON'T STEAL THINGS BUDDY. "Wow, look at how poorly the government stops me from murdering other people; I could do it with ease" is not an argument in favor of murdering people. This line of reasoning doesn't start making any more sense when applied to theft.
A slightly better argument is that public transit should simply be "free", i.e. taxpayer-funded, eliminating the need for all fare-collection costs entirely. Whether this is actually cheaper would depend on the amount of labor it takes to maintain the system and the amount of use it gets; at present it's usually not worth it, but as labor costs continue to go down and things like drivers and mechanics can be automated away, free transit will start making more and more sense. This still has little to do with fare evasion however. Free transit is beneficial only as a general policy that applies to everyone. When the "free" transit is restricted to only those individuals with the physical agility and lack of concern for social norms to partake in it, that just comes at the expense of everyone else.
This is perhaps the most literal example of the free rider problem. When people can partake in a public good and don't have to pay for it, they'll tend not to, making others shoulder the burden. This is not always a huge problem; most people don't complain about having to pay for roads even if they work from home; but when the differential payment is highly salient, it tends to cause a breakdown of societal trust and cooperation. The Soviet Union knew this, hence their crime of social parasitism levied against anyone who accepted government resources while not contributing enough to society themselves. Other cultures have taken... other approaches.
One extreme example is the Maori story about a notorious glutton who used to irritate fishermen up and down the coast near where he lived by constantly asking for the best portions of their catch. Since to refuse a direct request for food was effectively impossible [due to social norms about politeness], they would dutifully turn it over; until one day, people decided enough was enough and killed him.
-Debt: The First 5000 Years
We see similar dynamics around theft. Self-described anarchists/socialists/communists frequently "encourage" (i.e. threaten) people to not prosecute shoplifting, such as with this viral image:
Note again the complete lack of any reasoning provided for how allowing shoplifting benefits society, and the total absence of empathy, understanding, or sense of community in the messaging. It's simply a condescending, vaguely threatening order, levied from on high by an unseen person in a cool jacket.
The intended implication seems to be that people are stealing necessities like food and medicine that they were unable to acquire legally. If that were true, it would indeed be reasonable not to punish the behavior.
This is not a crime of necessity. There is no reason why expensive designer clothes need to be free. The only reason people want them is as a class symbol to signal how much richer than other people they are. The only altruistic framing of this behavior I can think of is the robin hood one, where people steal valuable items, sell them, and donate the proceeds to charity. I think I can safely say that none of the people in this video did that.
Even at the highest levels of the American "socialist" movement, this sort of behavior is defended, usually with completely inane arguments.
The real looting in America is 644 billionaires becoming $931 billion richer during a pandemic, while Republicans continue to deny 25 million+ unemployed Americans the $600/week they need to pay for rent & put food on the table. We need an economy that works for all, not the 1%.
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) October 20, 2020
Yes, billionaires buying expensive yachts rather than donating that money to the needy is immoral. What does that have to do with looting department stores? It's a complete non-sequitur. "How can you complain about me abusing my dog in a world where the Armenian genocide occurred‽"
A movement to get the government to distribute essential goods to those in need would be a leftist movement. A movement to allow indiscriminate burglary and vandalism is not in any way leftist; it seems most reminiscent of anarcho-primitivism, where the strong are always considered justified in taking from the weak, and there is no social safety net for those unable to defend themselves. Socialism is about contributing to society, not destroying it!
This pattern occurs over and over. You'd think this would be an uncontroversial statement among those in favor of public transit and protecting the health of vulnerable community members:
i would like to be able to ride the subway with my 4 month old baby and not be in a car with people smoking
— mindy🌷 (@mindyisser) February 9, 2023
Not so. It was widely criticized by the "socialist" left, because apparently enforcing any rules at all is being a cop. (Never mind how many "anarchist" behaviors seem to be trying to recreate policing via vigilante justice. The poster with an impersonal hand forcefully covering someone's mouth for trying to speak up about theft is one of the most blatantly authoritarian things I've ever seen.)
This sort of behavior is not actually leftist in any way. It doesn't help the local community, it doesn't benefit the poor and weak, it doesn't reduce power differentials or increase equality, and its proponents largely don't even claim that it does. It's just edginess for the sake of edginess, making society worse in exchange for viral posts on Twitter and the heady feeling of power of over others.
why is the ability to smoke inside an enclosed train car more important than the health of me and my baby and all the other riders? it makes literally no sense. public should not mean bad, harmful, unusable. leftists especially should want it to mean the opposite??
— mindy🌷 (@mindyisser) February 10, 2023
everyone wants to live in a society of communal care until there’s an expectation of all of us taking care of each other !!!!
— mindy🌷 (@mindyisser) February 10, 2023
There's also a distinct element of self-serving-ness going on. Consider the "socialist" opposition to layoffs. Any time a big company like Amazon announces a reduction in its workforce, it gets criticized as billionaires harming the poor. But this makes no sense at all. If a company has determined that a certain position is not providing value to the company and also wants to do the ethical, society-benefitting thing, it has two options:
- Fire the employee and donate their salary to charity.
- Keep the employee hired and performing useless work.
In both cases, the money is sent to the needy. But in the first case, the employee is free to put their labor to use elsewhere, by getting a different job or taking care of their family. In the second case, their labor is simply wasted, accomplishing nothing at all.
And indeed, it's rare to see a leftist movement pushing for companies to hire more people just to do busywork, since there are clearly far more effective ways to benefit society. Instead these sorts of arguments are only used to preserve the status quo. When someone is unhappy about being fired, they try to frame this as a social justice issue, claiming that companies have an obligation to financially assist them in particular. An explanation of why a temporarily jobless member of the professional-managerial class is more deserving of charity than a homeless person is never forthcoming.
Same pattern with student debt. A free college movement would be great! Education is a public good, benefitting not only that person, but also the society that they can use their skills to contribute to.
The net result of such a one-time student debt cancellation would be to take money from the working class, (who have mostly not been to college and therefore do not have debt to cancel), give some fraction of it to students, and the rest of it to college administrators. And if there's an expectation that this will continue happening for future students, the colleges will see that they can afford to charge even higher tuitions, and raise prices even further for the next crop of students, exacerbating the problem.
A regressive policy that taxes the working class in order to give government subsidies to members of the upper middle class is not remotely leftist. It's astounding to me that modern American society treats it as though it were.
In general, what I'm calling "antisocialism" has a number of defining characteristics:
- A hatred for empiricism, analysis, and planning. Socialism in the early and mid 19th century was an intellectual movement; Karl Marx pioneered entire new theories of economics, and socialist theories on how states could be made more efficient were intriguing to many scholars. Especially after the soviet union experienced immense economic growth during its first few decades, central planning was a promising avenue to solving collective action problems and other market inefficiencies, and economists worldwide were intrigued. In contrast, today's antisocialism is a strongly anti-intellectual movement. Members aggressively assert that economics, game theory, and psychology are tools of the bourgeois, to be derided and ignored. We're not supposed to understand society, we're just supposed to destroy it, and out of the ashes a better one will magically appear.
- Policies that benefit the Western middle class. Antisocialism exists largely to allow relatively affluent people to justify all the selfish things they always wanted to do - theft, bullying, smoking in a public train car - while pretending to be fighting on behalf of the oppressed. Rarely will their proposed policies come with a clear benefit to the worst-off members of society; the homeless, the starving, the billion people living on less than $3 a day. Instead we're supposed to believe that someone making "only" $40,000 a year, someone who's in the top 5% wealthiest individuals, is the class that the government needs to be sending subsidies too.
- Aesthetics above all else. What matters isn't whether it works, whether it benefits people, whether it makes logical sense. What matters is whether it allows people to feel like the vanguard of an important movement, to go viral on Twitter, to get respect from their peers and condemnation from their enemies.
Not everyone who claims to be a socialist nowadays has these traits. Many still adhere to the ideal of working together to overcome human failings and build a better world. But they're a minority compared to those who believe The Joker is a positive role model. And I think it's about time we acknowledge that these are two entirely different mindsets. If we can recognize that naming your political party "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" doesn't actually make it socialist, we can recognize that someone putting "socialist" in their Twitter bio doesn't actually make them socialist either.