Why Not Socialism? by G. A. Cohen

Author:G. A. Cohen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Communism, Philosophy, Political, Post-Communism & Socialism, Political Ideologies, Political Science, Ethics & Moral Philosophy
ISBN: 9781400830633
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009-08-23T23:00:00+00:00

III

IS THE IDEAL DESIRABLE?

It is the aspiration of socialists to realize the principles that structure life on the camping trip on a national, or even on an international, scale. Socialists therefore face two distinct questions, which are often not treated as distinctly as they should be. The first is: would socialism, if feasible, be desirable? The second is: is socialism feasible?

Some might say that the camping trip is itself unattractive, that, as a matter of principle, there should be scope for much greater inequality and instrumental treatment of other people, even in small-scale interaction, than the ethos of the camping trip permits. These opponents of the camping trip ethos would not, of course, recommend society-wide equality and community as extensions to the large of what is desirable in the small, and they are unlikely to recommend for the large what they disparage even in the small.

The opponents in question do not say that there should be more inequality and treating of people as mere means on a camping trip, but just that people have a right to make personal choices, even if the result is inequality and/or instrumental treatment of people, and, so they say, that right is not honored on the camping trip. But this criticism seems to me to be misplaced. For there is a right to personal choice on the camping trip, and there are plenty of private choices on it, in leisure, and in labor (where there is more than one reasonable way of distributing it), under the voluntarily accepted constraint that those choices must blend fairly with the personal choices of others. Within market society, too, the choices of others massively confine each individual’s pursuit of her own choices, but that fact is masked in market society, because, unlike what’s true on the camping trip, in market society the unavoidable mutual dependence of human beings is not brought into common consciousness, as a datum for formal and informal planning. A particular person in a market society may face a choice of being a building laborer or a carer or starving, his set of choices being a consequence of everybody else’s choices. But nobody designed things that way, and his restricted options consequently misappear as mere facts of life.

Although few would take the line that I have just opposed, which says that it is all right for camping trips themselves to be run on market lines, many would point to features special to the camping trip that distinguish it from the normal mill of life in a modern society and that consequently cast doubt on the desirability and/or the feasibility of realizing camping trip principles in such a society. Such people might grant that I have displayed the attractiveness, and the feasibility, of socialist values, but only in the course of a substantially recreational activity, in which there are no competing social groups, in which everyone to whom you relate is known to you personally and observed by you daily, and in which an individual’s family ties exert no counter-pull to his sense of social obligation.

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