Could we mix socialism with capitalism?

(This is a chapter in a 23-part essay, starting with Limits )

Photo by Karolina Grabowska

We have already acquired enough food and material to have the entire world lead a prosperous life. What we haven’t done yet, is create a global economic infrastructure that ensures that everyone gets what he or she needs. Many people still fear for their survival and security on a daily basis. But we have the resources to solve this.

In a world that is guided by ideals of liberty and brotherhood, it would make sense to carry the risks of life as a collective. This would mean that if a disaster strikes on place x, the world would automatically help the people there to get back on their feet. And if someone gets sick, everyone automatically pays the doctor. This is partially already happening. What wouldn’t make sense, is if all people would have to pay if somebody has their Lamborghini burned to the ground. In my view, there should be an insurance for all basic necessities, that comes with citizenship. Global citizenship. And I do consider free and open internet to be a basic necessity.

Let me propose the following, three-layered system, just as a thought experiment of something we could roll out globally, or with an alliance of participating countries. It’s a mixture of socialism and capitalism, and a little bit like this concept of the Doughnut economy, which I find an abominable term.

We create a socialist base of minimum resource rights and allocation to all people. A base layer where people get housing, food, internet, some educational tools and so on. No questions asked. Then, there is a layer in which people are encouraged to compete with each other for more wealth and ownership, learning and innovating as long as they aren’t harming the environment. A capitalist middle layer, to stimulate development. People are encouraged to try new things, and if they fail, they never fall deeper than the socialist baseline. But then, once a certain degree of wealth is acquired, there is a cut-off, where all further income and ownership go to taxes. Destination reached. Mission accomplished. End of the rat race. Further struggles of the individual who has reached this point, will concern truth, love and virtue only. The cut-off should be high enough for a single person to be able to live comfortably for the rest of his or her life, but not so high that he or she can afford to overtake public decision-making without losing a significant part of their power. Would something like that be a start?

I am not concerned by the question how to organise this, nor by the calculation where such cut-off points should lie exactly. It would be a system that challenges everyone. It would look at humans as beings with potential, rather than with duty. With such a system, the workplace would be a playground rather than a battle arena. Very successful companies would be stimulated to invest rather than cashing out and CEOs would naturally be more willing to pay their employees a good wage or pay in shares of the company, since they will never be able to use all the company money for themselves. It would definitely lead to more fraternity than we have now, and it would create a more diverse economy with lots of different, smaller enterprises, carried by the employees.

The idea to combine socialism with capitalism may seem radical, but you could argue that all systems are a mix to a certain degree. Workers’ rights are in their way a socialist idea, as are guaranteed pensions and healthcare, all part of the European welfare state. I believe that taxation of high incomes and property will play a role there, as well as will a certain baseline security.

The way we organise our system says much about how we look at our brothers and sisters. A system that envisions a more even distribution of its benefits while still providing opportunities to flourish matches the idea that humans are both individual and interdependent. I think such an approach would benefit a mature democracy because it expresses both trust in the people, as well as care for them. I think it would be beautiful if we could implement such ideas globally.

On Saturday, Part IV: What societal dilemmas are we facing? And: A broader need for self-limitation

Part II: Our enlightened morals and beliefs are put to the test

(This is a chapter in a longer essay, starting with Limits )

Photo by Jacob Prose

With the founding of the UN, the Nato and the European Union after the second world war, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, came a period of hope, prosperity, innovation and liberation. Guided by values, rooted in the Age of Enlightenment and the French Revolution, we were supposed to be ruled by freedom, equality and reason. And our law was supposed to protect all people equally. As a society, we banned slavery, working hard to reduce injustice to its minimum.

People born in the West after the second world war have largely seen their lives improve permanently. But while many could rise from the dust, much of the dirty work was gradually outsourced to the less lucky ones in the invisible corners of the world, and the environment was getting its fair share of the blows. Many people did not see this, even fewer could believe it.

While the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has inspired many countries to create laws in their own countries, legally binding them to follow these rights, and a UN court was established to enforce these rights further, it has become clear throughout the decades that we don’t always succeed. We don’t always protect our fellow humans, and the environment even less. The declaration has undeniably improved the lives of many, but opportunistic and morally dubious leaders today are finding increasingly effective ways to bypass them. Through good and mediocre journalism, citizens of the West are witnesses of the drama. We see that too little is being done. The hope we once had for a better world sometimes seems to erode in our hearts. But what is your own prosperity really worth, if it comes at the expense of innocent others?

How societal trust started disintegrating

The Western middle class has been a trusting people for decades. Sure, we knew that not all leaders are perfect. But we went to elect the ones we liked most and trusted that they would follow up their promises, using their power responsibly and in a morally sound way. Problems existed outside of our societies, in faraway dictatorial regimes. And there were rumours. But who believed the rumours in the roaring ‘90s?

Then came Wikileaks and Edward Snowden, proving that many people who work in government institutions are involved in complicated schemes that betray our trust and hide the evidence. They are using the face of institutional authority to make us feel safe. Since then, it seems as if the frequency of revelations has grown, and the deliberate crimes that are being revealed are getting worse, including state-authorized torture of prisoners by the CIA, presented as an enhanced interrogation technique.

Other revelations showed that deliberate harming of people is not limited to governments. Purdue Pharma’s aggressively marketed high doses of the addictive drug oxycodone while the multinational’s owners were aware of deaths caused by the drug. We saw that Exxon and Shell already had evidence of climate change in their hands by the end of the ‘90’s, but deliberately started a disinformation campaign to be able to keep their profitable business going. As I write this now, you probably think: “Well of course, who trusts multinationals?”. But the sentiment very different 15 years ago. For a long time, such companies could plausibly deny that they were aware of the damage they caused. They could present problems as accidents. Several leaders and CEOs do this in a cold, calculating way. A system that was once presented as the way toward global peace, wealth and stability, is now visibly being abused. We are collectively mourning our broken trust.

Revelations of sexual abuse shattered our faith in cultural icons as well. Be it by the Church, super stars like Michael Jackson, movie magnates like Weinstein, major spiritual gurus, or one of the many other powerful figures in all layers of society. And it isn’t just about the act of rape itself. The problem is that the system as a whole enables abuse on many levels, as if power grants you the freedom to breach other people’s space and bodies. Some prominent cases were ambiguous, meaning different people looked at these experiences in different ways. To some, little has changed, but to others, these examples revealed the innate threat of the society we built. That we live in a predatory culture where men constantly seek ways to abuse women. Society has turned more cautious when it comes to sex, proposing, for example, sex contracts. Sexual mistrust has taken a leap, because as it turned out, a part of our trust in the men leading us was misplaced. Another reason for mourning.

Then there were the terrorist threats following 9/11 and the rise of ISIS. Murder wielded an Islamic mask. The constant reminder of it by the extensive security protocols, when taking the plane and some trains. Mistrust quickly got directed towards our Arab brothers and sisters as an ethnicity. It became normal to speak about innocent groups in racist, sometimes violent terms. These people, already underprivileged, came under close scrutiny by the authorities. Divisions grew, and with it, reciprocal misunderstandings and loss of trust. Later, xenophobia also increased with non-capitalist people such as Russians and Chinese. 

I’d like to nuance my points a bit by acknowledging that societal trust as a whole is not completely gone. On the contrary. Every time we take a bus, we trust the driver, when we buy a bread, we trust the baker, when we enter the internet, we trust our provider, when we buy medicine, we trust the doctor, when we vote, we still trust the politicians. Trust is deeply embedded in our societal fabric. Our societal ground tone, perhaps. As long as we can empathise with others, familiarize ourselves with them, we are very able to trust each other. But the developments mentioned above are real, and they feed our daily anxieties. They risk to eat away at our trust, if we don’t adequately deal with them.

Tomorrow: The virtual becomes the real, the real a mere whisper of conscience.

The Metaphor of Geert Wilders

For a long time, I have avoided writing about the Dutch politician of this era. The guy pissed me off whenever I saw him. I didn´t think he deserved my attention or that of my readers. Pollute my blog with him. Yet for the past ten years, he has kept his status as a nagging presence in Dutch society. It makes us wonder: what has given this childman his power? How has he managed to become so persistently annoying that he convinced me to write about him? Where has our society failed to ignore him to death? Which lessons does he throw in our midst?

A brief history for those who´ve missed it. Around the year 2000, Pim Fortuyn was the first politician whose party got big because he addressed the problem of integration in the Netherlands. He got killed (by an educated Dutch guy who thought he was saving the country) and left a gap in the political offer while the demand remained. Wilders filled that gap. When, after some years, he managed to enter the government, he dismantled it after a year. Today, no politician wants to govern with him. He yells bombastic language from the sideline and crosses some ethical lines for which he is then punished.

Some people admire Wilders´ rethorics. They see quality in his capacity to frame things simply, in a language that people with little education can follow. He called other politicians mental, has framed their plans as garbage, and has insulted cultural groups, delaying big decisions in the process. Even if he can make me laugh, I don´t think his intelligence is the reason for our fascination, because if you look at him closely, he acts like a little boy.

Wilders is the personification of his own incapacity to cause productive change. He does not dare to go into dialogue with strangers because he is afraid it might threaten his worldview. He has translated his unwillingness to listen to others into a program that reveals his identity as a sissy who calls his daddy when he gets into a conflict. The daddy, here, are the cops that do the dirty work for him.

What intrigues us in Wilders, is his reminder of our own cowardly attitude to change. Our laziness in the search for truth. Dutch politicians cannot call him to order because of their fear for the points he addresses. They too lack the creativity to solve them, so they pretend there is nothing going on. WIlders is our collective lack of interest in our neighbour, and our incapacity to move ourselves towards a happy life.

What this man has sublimed will keep tormenting our subconscious until we solve the fragmentation in our communities. He exists among us until most of us learn how to be peacefully curious about the realities of the other. He´ll be here until we perceive understanding as an action instead of a state of mind. He will reflect our fears until we gather the courage to look them in the eyes.

Europe in times of anti-ism

The EU countries are voting for the future of the continent. In the Netherlands, one of the dominating questions in the matter is: are you pro or contra Europe? I was raised as a European and I my life is marked by transborder friendships. Regardless, I have recently started to doubt. Not because I actually doubt, but because the black and white question echoes in society and it has invaded my mind. Yet if I take some time to contemplate it, anti-Europeanism appears to me as one of the most ridiculous ideas of this time.

Some talks on this matter led me to believe that when a person says he is anti Europe, he usually doesn’t mean it that way. The person could mean that he or she is anti-capitalist or anti political power accumulation or anti politics in general, or maybe that he just hates some French guy he once met during holidays. Because of that, I’m sad to see that the pro or against debate rules so much of the political propaganda. It is an easy way to draw votes, no doubt. The concept of a European union brings forth a spectrum of collective emotion.

And does that not say enough? Doesn’t that show we have little other choice than to deal with each other the way family does? Europe has grown into a network of entangled stakes. The very parties we vote for could not operate if the European Union did not exist. They cannot interrupt its existence either. That would be comparable to a liver saying goodbye to a body because of all the crap it gives it. It would die. We need our neighbours as much as we need ourselves. Our union is a given of this time and we should be grateful for its vitality. That’s fragile.

I won’t advocate that everything is going smoothly. There have been bumps and mistakes. What I’m saying is that anti-Europeanism is a waste of thought. A fake debate. The more such virtual constructs occupy the public opinion, the less power people have.

Go vote one of these days and please do it because you believe in something better, not because you want the borders back.