Again: redistribution, socialization, and scale
A couple of days ago Caitlin Johnstone tweeted: “Landlords don’t provide a ‘service,’ they exploit a system. There would be no homeless if we would simply redistribute existing housing.”
A left-leaning person can sympathize with this sentiment.
The left says we should just provide as a right. There are basics: Food, housing, medical care, education. There is plenty to go around. There should be no deprivation.
Sounds justifiable.
What’s the problem? The idea has been advocated for many generations now. Either it fails to get traction or it’s tried and found to be less than satisfactory.
The British socialized their healthcare system in 1948, 73 years ago. If it was clearly great and superior it surely would have been emulated by other countries by now. (Socialization of healthcare is not the same as single-payer health insurance coverage.) The British system works, but it has its issues.
The issues re: redistribution policies and socialization policies have to do with scale.
“We should just provide as a right.” What the left fails to consider in that sentiment is: “Who is WE?”
The left is supposedly internationalist. Can WE eight billion people worldwide take care of each other, assure provision for each other, redistribute our incomes to provide for everyone? Ridiculous.
Well, can WE three hundred million people of the United States take care of each other, assure provision for each other, redistribute our incomes to provide for everyone? When that’s tried what you get are dumb centralized governmental bureaucratic programs that feel remote and impersonal and less than satisfactory. You get contention for the provision because we really can’t relate to so many as WE.
The left must get real about reality and come to recognize the importance of the issue of scale.
From the 1973 Introduction to E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful by Theodore Roszak:
Schumacher’s work belongs to that subterranean tradition of organic and decentralist economics whose major spokesmen include Prince Kropotkin, William Morris, Gandhi, Lewis Mumford, Paul Goodman, Murray Bookchin. It is the tradition we might call anarchism, if we mean by that much abused word a libertarian political economy that distinguishes itself from orthodox socialism and capitalism by insisting that the scale of organization must be treated as an independent and primary problem. The tradition, while closely affiliated with socialist values, nonetheless prefers mixed to “pure” economic systems. It is therefore hospitable to many forms of free enterprise and private ownership, provided always that the size of private enterprise is not so large as to divorce ownership from personal involvement [and community oversight], which is, of course, now the rule in most of the world’s administered capitalisms. Bigness is the nemesis, whether it’s that of public or private bureaucracies, because from bigness comes impersonality, insensitivity, and a lust to concentrate abstract power. Hence, Schumacher’s title, Small Is Beautiful.
Reaching backward, this tradition embraces communal, handicraft, tribal, gild, and village lifestyles as old as the neolithic cultures. In that sense, it is not an ideology at all, but a wisdom gathered from historical experience. In our own time, it has reemerged spontaneously in the communitarian experiments and honest craftsmanship of the counterculture, where we find so many desperate and often resourceful efforts among young dropouts to make do in simple, free, and self respecting ways amid the criminal waste and managerial congestion. How strange that this renewed interest in ancient ways of livelihood and community should reappear even as our operations researchers begin to conceive their most ambitious dreams of cybernated glory. And yet how appropriate. For if there is to be a humanly tolerable world on this dark side of the emergent technocratic world system, it will surely have to flower from this still-fragile renaissance of organic husbandry, communal households, and do-it-yourself technics. And if that renaissance is to have an economist to make its case before the world, E. F. Schumacher is the man. Already his brilliant essay “Buddhist Economics” has become a much read and often reprinted staple of the underground press. It would be no exaggeration to call him the Keynes of postindustrial society, by which I mean (and Schumacher means) a society that has left behind its lethal obsession with those very megasystems of production and distribution which Keynes tried so hard to make manageable.
