On Socialism: my opening comments at the THINK conference

I’m going to begin my remarks with a shocking admission. My name’s Rebecca Lowe, I work at the world’s greatest free-market think tank, and I have some sympathy for socialism..

Let me clarify what I mean by this. I don’t mean that I’m a socialist. I don’t mean I want socialism imposed on me or anyone else. And I don’t mean I’m sympathetic to state ownership of the means of production, or any of the central planning atrocities of the twentieth century, which led to the avoidable and tragic deaths of millions.

Rather, I mean that socialism is not reducible to those atrocities. To claim so is, as ever, to give far too much power — a nice leftist word — to Karl Marx. Or, largely, to those who have acted in his name.

Marx famously took his ideas from three sources: utopian French socialists, sensible British political economists, and crazy German philosophers. Lenin pointed this out, though probably using different adjectives..

Those French socialists predated Marx. As did many other people throughout the history of mankind — in believing in certain ideals, which we can find at the heart of what has become known as socialism. Again, these ideals are not reducible to the economic disasters of central planning or state ownership.

Rather, socialism is a set of ethical ideals, which the Marxist-Leninist obsession with economic determinism distracts us from. My favourite socialist writer, the great twentieth-century political philosopher, G.A. Cohen, uses the example of the kind of cooperative behaviour that arises happily and efficiently on a camping trip to try to pin these ethical ideals down, in his final — very short — book, Why Not Socialism?. (The question mark is important!)

It starts in characteristically readable fashion: ‘You and I and a bunch of other people go on a camping trip’. He then talks of equality, reciprocity, community, virtue, and individual flourishing.

Now, Cohen doesn’t manage to convince me to socialism. Indeed, his discussion of the deep problems of its feasibility is strikingly strong. Cohen says socialism suffers from a perhaps ‘insoluble design problem’ — the problem that ‘we do not know how to design the machinery that would make it run’. And while his writings reassure me that socialism is not necessarily inimical either to concerns about individual freedom or to democracy — in principle — I remain afraid that any socialist system would insufficiently respect the political rights I am so strongly committed to.

But Cohen does help me to understand socialism’s human appeal — an ethical appeal to justice and fundamental equality, and to wanting to recognise those who are less fortunate than us simply through the luck of the the draw.

Central planning atrocities are appealing to few people, today or ever. Those of us who fear socialism’s economic — or political — consequences give it far too easy a pass by reducing it to the murderous followers of Marx.