Socialism is a 'luxury opinion', a high status consumer good (which is why the London Review of Books is so full of it)

The London Review of Books is an elite publication, a product produces by and for the richest, most powerful and most influential in our society (this is obviously why I'm a subscriber). It is also, far more than the Guardian or the increasingly left wing Financial Times, symbolic of the bien pensant, the folk 'Capel Lofft' on Twitter described as those who "...can no longer distinguish themselves from the working class in material terms, so they do so by adopting 'luxury opinions' (open borders, cosmopolitanism, anti-patriotism, legalising drugs etc etc) and looking down on those working class people who reject those opinions."

It is increasingly evident that a sort of intellectually exclusive "far-leftism" is far more of a problem than the "middle class liberals" that Tweet from Capel Lofft targeted. It is seen as sort of cute and clever for one of the great minds who the LRB gets to write (and boy can some of them write) to expound on awful rich people, terrible capitalism and to present a sort of 'oh-we-are-so-smart-look-at-the-words-we-use' socialism. It's really no surprise to see, as Kristian Niemitz from the IEA reminds his Twitter followers most days, how socialism is hugely popular among those "middle class liberals" - a high status consumer good.

Heres a classic bit of LRB socialism from Eli Zaretsky (who teaches some of those "middle class liberal" graduate students at a high status institution in New York City) about the current virus epidemic:

"Under slavery, the masters had an interest in maintaining the health and even longevity of the slaves, who were their main form of property. After abolition, however, maintaining the health of free workers turned into a burden, especially as the cost of medicine rose. Understanding these simple facts of modern political economy may help explain how the United States, the self-proclaimed ‘greatest country in the world’, ended up with one-third of all Covid-19 cases.The large-scale slaughter now unfolding in America was not set in motion overnight. The herd had to be prepared..."

The article continues in this vein explaining how the "masters" killed all the black people, forced drugs and consumer goodies on an unwilling herd, and made them all "fatter, more submissive and less curious". At the centre of all this is the great lie of socialism, at least as presented by the elites Zaretsky represents, that "the herd" are in some way worse off than they were at the time of emancipation from slavery, servitude and feudalism. We see this from Zaretsky as he describes how the task of "...managing a herd is to destroy all forms of critical thinking, in particular anything that challenges the supremacy of private property".

How dare the plebs and peons, the liberated slaves and emancipated serfs, aspire to property ownership, to a real tangible stake in the society the inhabit. How dare they. And the sage heads of the elite will nod, peer at you down their patrician noses, and explain that it's just a polemic y'know, we don't agree with it obviously (ha ha), but Eli has a point don't you think?

Well I don't think Eli has a point. I think he is wrong and that these ideas, trickled out in elite journals, valorise the persistence of the failed ideology of "the left" - call it Marxism or Socialism or Communism or Communitarianism. The reason we live longer, happier healthier lives with more choice amongst a bewildering range of consumer goods is down to the things these people, mistakenly dubbed 'liberals', try to paint as the tools of oppresion and control.

Liberalism wasn't about the masters, liberalism was about pulling down the masters and their world - it ended slavery, serfdom, the draft and the subjugation of women and it gave to everyone the chance to enjoy the fruits of innovation, choice and opportunity. It's mad to smash this up because you saw someone begging in the street, because some people on the other side of the world have learned how to make cheaper steel or farm cheaper beef. Or worse because you've bought the lie that somehow our wealthy consumer society is simply the same old "masters" carrying on the same old slavery.

In the end, as Tim Worstall puts it, there is a point and it's not hard to grasp:

The aim and point of our having an economy in the first place is so that we humans get more of what we desire. This is the purpose of trying to get richer. What it is that we desire is an individual decision - utility is always personal. It is entirely true that many things are possible the question is instead which of the possible things meets our desires best? 

The problem is that we've become so rich as a society that we have created, as a sort of masochism, a high-status consumer good called "going to a graduate school in New York to learn how to be a socialist". It may be that communists and socialists claim capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, but I'm sure that they didn't think that socialism becoming the plaything of nice, rich middle class kids was that seed.


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