Addressing 3 Common Objections to Socialism
How to respond to things like “but you own an iPhone!”
While there may be a number of educated critiques of socialism, the majority of what a leftist may encounter amount to common, logically flawed talking points which may work as confirmation bias for conservatives but lack any true substance. I will cover three such talking points here.
“You claim to be a socialist, but you own an iPhone!”
This is a kind of is-ought fallacy; fundamentally, just because someone exists within the current state of affairs, it does not prohibit them from having normative disagreements with the current state of affairs. Not only does one not have control over the situation or place in which they were born, to escape the influence of capitalism today would be near impossible. Furthermore, being a critic of capitalism does not necessarily entail being a critic of everything which has emerged from it — it merely entails being a critic of the exploitative conditions in which products such as the iPhone are manufactured, and changing those conditions does not necessarily entail abolishing the iPhone.
“But the USSR!”
Perhaps more common than the previous talking point is “Look at x, y, or z self-professed socialist state!” Usually this objection involves throwing out numbers regarding how many people have died under self-professed socialist regimes throughout history. To this, one should ask: “Why is it we should count certain deaths under self-professed socialist regimes as deaths because of socialism, yet this is not applied to certain deaths within free market systems?” This is not to say, as a tu quoque argument, that both are the same; rather, both are unique in how their material conditions can increase mortality rates, and yet the discussion on this topic is mostly one-sided. There are many causes of death which can be reasonably attributed to the material conditions which capitalism creates. The US, for example, with their incredibly privatized healthcare system is #29 in terms of Healthcare Access and Quality (HAQ), whereas nations with strong social safety nets and universal healthcare score much higher, e.g. Norway is #2, Canada is #13.
Why should we not attribute, for example, the death of a lower-class individual who couldn’t afford to continue taking life-saving heart medication as a death because of capitalism, insofar as privatized healthcare is a free market capitalist policy? Deaths from conditions like these aren’t uncommon; tens of thousands of people are estimated to die in the US every year because they cannot afford healthcare. According to one study, the number of Americans who died between 2000 and 2006 because they couldn’t afford healthcare is roughly 162,700 — between 18,000 and 27,000 per year. On average, then, roughly 112,500 people die every five years in the US due to the expense of private healthcare.
If we also consider mercantile colonialism, such as that which took place in colonial India, an estimated 35,000,000 people died as a direct result of colonialism. This figure is daunting, and that’s without even mentioning the ways in which economic colonialism still exists today through practices such as outsourcing labour to third world countries in order to save money for the top 1%. Anybody who would suggest that such practices aren’t capitalism working as intended has no clue what they’re talking about.
Oh, and this is if we accept the assumption that the self-professed socialist states which people refer to in such cases are in fact actually socialist states. There are in fact many academics who provide credible arguments which assert that certain self-professed socialist states, such as the USSR, practiced “state capitalism” instead of communism. This is, however, a topic for another article.
“But self-interest is human nature!”
This is another is-ought fallacy, asserting that because there is some natural tendency to pursue self-interest, we therefore ought to pursue self-interest. I won’t make such an is-ought argument myself by suggesting that cooperation is actually human nature and that we ought to pursue that; instead, I will assert that human nature is much more complex than the lay advocate for free market capitalism suggests.
- In a review by Hilbe et al. which covers the relationship between partnership and rivalry in social dilemmas, it is argued that rivalry tends to develop in smaller populations with limited resources and less interaction, whereas frequent interactions encourage cooperation as a stable evolutionary strategy.
- Based on experiments by Grossman et al., cooperation emerges when one prioritizes ‘wise reasoning’ over selfish impulse.
- According to Fotouhi et al., the largest barrier to cooperation is a simple lack of communication.
Although the selfish impulse is one facet of human nature, it by no means is the dominant one. Cooperation is instead the better angel of our nature, which flourishes under conditions of (1) frequent social interaction, (2) the prioritization of wise reasoning over impulse, and (3) the lack of communicative barriers. To advocate for the anthropology of the selfish animal is to engage in a blatant and indefensible form of reductionism.
