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Even the Pentagon seems to be in quiet panic, as it announced the invoking of the Defense Production Act to boost the domestic mining and processing capacity of gallium and germanium. This is because gallium is one of the key elements used in the production of advanced AESA (active electronically scanned array) radars.
If we were angels, replacing capitalist institutions with socialist ones would be unnecessary. (Pornyot Palilai / Getty Images)
Capitalism leads to tremendous amounts of poverty, economic inequality, and financial stress. It disempowers the vast majority of the working-age population, who have no realistic choice except to spend half of their waking hours at workplaces where they take orders from unelected bosses. Outside of the workplace, decisions with major impact on society as a whole are made by CEOs only accountable to shareholders. And wild divergences in wealth turn the idea that all citizens will exert the same level of influence on the political process into a bad joke.
Surely we can do better. Why can’t we collectively own society’s productive resources, meet everyone’s material needs, and create a more meaningful kind of democracy? In other words, as the late Marxist philosopher G. A. Cohen once put it, “Why not socialism?”
A popular answer is that it would go against human nature. It’s so popular, in fact, that many people unthinkingly accept this idea as “common sense.” On closer inspection, though, the Human Nature Objection gets things exactly backward.
Some critics of socialism think that redistributing the private property owned by wealthy capitalists would be theft — let’s call this the Moral Objection. Others raise technical concerns about whether society-wide economic planning would be feasible. How would planners gather enough information to know what to produce to meet the preferences of consumers? Let’s call this the Technical Objection.
Socialists counter the Moral Objection with an obvious argument about the comparative immorality of allowing wealthy capitalists to continue exploiting the vast majority of the global population. The Technical Objection is taken under more serious consideration, leading some socialists, for example, to leave room for markets in their vision of socialism. Perhaps we could nationalize the “commanding heights” of the economy while retaining a market sector of competing worker cooperatives.
But whatever you make of these debates, the objection that seems to give some people otherwise sympathetic to left politics the most pause is neither moral nor technical but psychological.
Socialism might be fine if we were angels, these critics think, but we aren’t. Our nature isn’t altruistic and cooperative. It’s selfish and cruel. Trying to make us what we would need to be for a cooperative economy to work is like trying to keep a tiger in your house and feed it a vegan diet. It won’t end well.
The Human Nature Objection has more rhetorical force than the Moral Objection or the Technical Objection. Rather than screeching that the rich have a right to their hoarded wealth or raising logistical problems that socialists think we can solve, critics who press the psychological case against socialism can posture as would-be socialists who’ve outgrown their naivete. “Hey,” they can say, “I wish we could have socialism too. It’s tragic that we can’t. But that’s life.”
It doesn’t help that many socialists have seemed unsure about how to respond to this objection. Some spend a lot of time insisting that humans really are kind and cooperative by their nature. There’s surely some truth to this. The problem is that it’s implausible that it’s the whole truth.
Human psychology is far too messy and complicated for simple generalizations to capture the complete picture. The Enlightenment philosopher David Hume objected to the idea that everyone goes to either heaven or hell when they die, on the grounds that most of us “float between vice and virtue”:
Suppose you went all over the place with the intention of giving a good supper to the righteous, and a thorough beating to the wicked: you would often be at a loss how to choose, finding that the merits and the demerits of most men and women scarcely add up to righteousness or to wickedness.
Some socialists have thought that the balance of selfishness or altruism in our nature is historically contingent — that what comes to the fore is largely a result of what social circumstances we find ourselves in. Create better social circumstances, and you’ll get a better version of human nature.
There’s probably something to this idea. People fighting over a small number of lifeboats might be willing to treat each other better in happier circumstances. It’s plausible that meeting everyone’s material needs and giving everyone an equal say will lead to better results than a world of dog-eat-dog competition.
But how far does this stretch? The Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, for example, confidently predicted that a “new socialist man” would emerge as society transformed. That’s not what happened in Cuba or other state socialist experiments in the twentieth century. Maybe a better version of socialism would produce better results. But what if it doesn’t?
As socialists, we’re trying to convince people to take a leap into a new set of social arrangements — as different from capitalism as capitalism is from feudalism. That can be a scary proposition. It’s harder to make our case if we’re asking people to bet the farm on hypothetical changes to human psychology that we can’t prove will happen.
Fortunately, we don’t have to.
The exact degree to which human nature is inherently selfish or selfless, and how much that depends on our circumstances, is a complicated empirical question that touches on fields ranging from sociology to evolutionary psychology. It can’t be answered from the armchair.
But whatever our degree of selfishness, it’s not a reason to throw up our hands and accept capitalism as the best humanity can do. Instead, it’s a reason to oppose capitalism and strive for collective and democratic institutions that can limit the damage that cruel people are in a position to do to one another.
The core of socialism is economic democracy. Whether we’re talking about decision-making in an individual workplace or bigger decisions with a broad impact on the course of society, socialists think that everyone who’s impacted should have a say.
One of the reasons that’s so important is precisely that giving anyone too much power over their fellow human beings creates the danger that their power will be abused. No system is perfect, of course, but the best recipe for minimizing the possibility of abuse as much as possible is to spread around power — political and economic — as much as possible.
That’s part of why democratic socialists reject the idea that an authoritarian one-party state can be trusted to act on behalf of the people. And it’s an excellent reason to reject capitalism — a system where there’s no pretense that economic power is in the hands of the people rather than whoever happens to have enough money to buy up the means of production.
If humans were all selfless angels, we wouldn’t need to worry about them treating each other the way Jeff Bezos treats the workers at his warehouses or the way Harvey Weinstein treated aspiring actresses. We wouldn’t need to worry about what will become of families who fall into poverty, because we’d trust that people who have more will always act individually to offer a helping hand. We wouldn’t need to worry about the wealthy abusing their political influence, because we’d trust them to take everyone’s interests into account.
If we were angels, in other words, replacing capitalist institutions with socialist ones would be unnecessary. But we’re deeply flawed human beings — capable of moral greatness, to be sure, but also capable of all kinds of cruelty. And that’s exactly why we need socialism.
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We Believe in Israel and B’nai B’rith organizations demanded to know whether U.K. taxpayers are contributing to Ramallah’s “pay-for-slay” policy.
By JNS
The U.K. Foreign Office has declined to disclose how British development aid to the Palestinian Authority is audited, claiming it would “not be in the public interest” to do so, Jewish groups claimed on Monday.
In a statement first reported by the Jewish News website, We Believe in Israel and B’nai B’rith U.K. accused London’s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) of attempting to dodge a May 2023 freedom of information request that sought to make public audit reports related to the so-called “Palestinian Recovery and Development Program.”
Established in 2008 by the World Bank, the donor scheme seeks to combine donations from multiple countries, including the United Kingdom, to provide a persistent cash flow to the PA. Notably, as pointed out by Palestinian Media Watch in 2019, funds are provided to the PA. “untied and unearmarked.”
Accordingly, following the April 7, 2023 terror attack that killed three members of the British-Israeli Dee family, We Believe in Israel and B’nai B’rith demanded to know whether U.K. taxpayers are contributing to Ramallah’s “pay-for-slay” policy, under which it pays monthly stipends to terrorists and to the families of slain terrorists.
The two organizations said that Foreign Office initially ignored the request, in breach of the law, leading the Information Commissioner’s Office, the authority which enforces the Freedom of Information Act, to order a response.
“The disclosure of information detailing the audit reports of the Palestinian Recovery and Development Programme could potentially damage the bilateral relationship between the U.K. and Palestine,” the FCDO subsequently replied, adding that this would harm the government’s ability to “protect and promote” U.K. interests through its relations with “Palestine.”
London furthermore argued that the presence of “third-party personal data” prevented publication.
“Our FOI request was submitted in good faith as part of an attempt to ensure that British aid to the Palestinian Authority is not being used to support, facilitate, or incentivise terrorism, be that directly or indirectly,” stated Luke Akehurst, director of We Believe in Israel. “By initially failing to lawfully respond and now refusing to provide the disclosure, the FCDO raises questions about the integrity of its foreign aid distribution,” he continued.
B’nai B’rith U.K. International Affairs Director Jeremy Havardi said, “While the FCDO may not want to answer as to whether or not they are aware the aid it disburses to the PA incentivizes terrorism, we do not accept their position. Our work continues, and we are confident that we will succeed in securing this disclosure.”
The British Consulate in eastern Jerusalem last week expressed deep concerns over Israel’s counterterrorism operation in the Samaria city of Jenin. “We call on Israel to adhere to the principles of necessity and proportionality when defending its legitimate security interest,” the July 3 statement read.
The PLO’s envoy to London, for his part, on Saturday commemorated a Palestinian terrorist linked to an attack that killed over two dozen people. Ghassan Kanafani stands accused of orchestrating a May 1972 PFLP massacre in which terrorists recruited by the group gunned down 26 travelers at Israel’s international airport, including American citizens from Puerto Rico.
The post UK refuses to release documents on aid to Palestinians appeared first on World Israel News.
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