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WHY NOT SOCIALISM?

C. A. Cohen

CONTENTS

I The Camping Trip

II The Principles Realized on the Camping Trip

III Is the Ideal Desirable?

IV Is the Ideal Feasible? Are

the Obstacles to It Human

Selfishness, or Poor Social Technology?

V Coda

Acknowledgment

WHY NOT SOCIALISM?

THE QUESTION that forms the title of this short book is not intended rhetori­cally. I begin by presenting what I believe to be a compelling preliminary case for socialism, and I then ask why that case might be thought to be merely prelimi­nary, why, that is, it might, in the end, be defeated: I try to see how well the prelimi­nary case stacks up on further reflection.

To summarize more specifically: In Part I, I describe a context, called "the camping trip," in which most people would, I think, strongly favor a socialist form of life over feasible alternatives. Part U specifies two principles, one of equality and one of community, that are realized on the camping trip, and whose realiza­tion explains, so I believe, why the camp­ing trip mode of organization is attractive. In Part III, I ask whether those principles also make (society-wide) social­ism desirable. But I also ask, in Part IV, whether socialism is feasible, by dis­cussing difficulties that face the project of promoting socialism's principles not in the mere small, within the confined time and space of a camping trip, but through­out society as a whole, in a permanent way. Part V is a short coda.

THE CAMPING TRIP

You and I and a whole bunch of other people go on a camping trip. There is no hierarchy among us; our common aim is that each of us should have a good lime, doing, so far as possible, the things that he or she likes best (some of those things we do together; others we do separately). We have facilities with which to carry out our enterprise: we have, for example, pots and pans, oil, coffee, fishing rods, canoes, a soccer ball, decks of cards, and so forth. And, as is usual on camping trips, we avail ourselves of those facilities collectively: even if they arc privately owned things, they and under collectivecontrol for the duration of the trip, and we have shared understandings about who is going to use them when, and under what circumstances, and why. Somebody fishes, somebody else prepares the food, and another person cooks it. People who hate cooking but enjoy wash­ing up may do all the washing up, and so on. There are plenty of differences, but our mutual understandings, and the spirit of the enterprise, ensure that there are no inequalities to which anyone could mount a principled objection.

It is commonly true on camping trips, and, for that matter, in many other non-massive contexts, that people cooperate within a common concern that, so far as is possible, everybody has a roughly simi­lar opportunity to flourish, and also to relax, on condition that she contributes, appropriately to her capacity, to the flour­ishing and relaxing of others. In these con­texts most people, even most egalitarians, accept, indeed, take for granted, norms of equality and reciprocity. So deeply do most people take those norms for granted that no one on such trips questions them: to question them would contradict the spirit of the trip.

You could imagine a camping trip where everybody asserts her rights over the pieces of equipment, and the talents, that she brings, and where bargaining pro­ceeds with respect to who is going to pay what to whom to be allowed, for exam­ple, to use a knife to peel the potatoes, and how much he is going to charge oth­ers for those now-peeled potatoes that he

bought in an unpeeled condition from an­other camper, and so on. You could base a camping trip on the principles of mar­ket exchange and strictly private owner­ship of the required facilities.

Now, most people would hate that. Most people would be more drawn to the first kind of camping trip than to the sec­ond, primarily on grounds of fellowship, but also, be it noted, on grounds of effi­ciency. (I have in mind the inordinate transaction costs that would attend a market-style camping trip. Too much time would be spent bargaining, and look­ing over one's shoulder for more lucra­tive possibilities.) And this means that most people are drawn to the socialist ideal, at least in certain restricted settings.

To reinforce this point, here are some conjectures about how most people would react in various imaginable camp­ing scenarios:

a. Harry loves fishing, and Ham* is very good at fishing. Consequently, he catches, and provides, more fish than oth­ers do. Harry says: "It's unfair, how we're running things. I should have better fish when we dine. I should have only perch, not the mix of perch and catfish that we've all been having." But his fellow campers say: "Oh, for heaven's sake, Harry, don't be such a shmuck. You sweat and strain no more than the rest of us do. So, you're very good at fishing. We don't begrudge you that special endow­ment, which is, quite properly, a source of satisfaction to you, but why should we re­ward your good fortune?"

b.              Following a three-hour time-off-for-personal-exploration period, an excited
Sylvia returns to the campsite and announces; 'I've stumbled upon a huge apple tree, full of perfect apples." 'Great/' others exclaim, "now we can all have applesauce, and apple pie, and apple strudel!" "Provided, of course," so Sylvia rejoins, "that you reduce my labor burden, and/or furnish me with more room in the tent, and/or with more bacon at breakfast." Her claim to (a kind of) ownership of the tree revolts the others.

c.              The trippers are walking along a bridle path on which they discover a cache
of nuts that some squirrel has abandoned.

Only Leslie, who has been endowed from birth with many knacks and talents, knows how to crack them, but she wants to charge for sharing that information. The campers see no important difference between her demand and Sylvia's.

d. Morgan recognizes the campsite. "Hey, this is where my father camped thirty years ago. This is where he dug a special little pond on the other side of that hill, and stocked it with specially-good fish. Dad knew I might come camp­ing here one day, and he did all that so that I could eat better when I'm here. Great. Now I can have better food than you guys have." The rest frown, or smile, at Morgan's greed.

Of course, not everybody likes camp­ing trips. I do not myself enjoy them much, because I'm not outdoorsy, or, at any rate, I'm not outdoorsy overnight-without-a-mattress-wise. There's a limit to the outdoorsiness to which some aca­demics can be expected to submit: I'd rather have my socialism in the warmth of All Souls College than in the wet of the Catskills, and I love modem plumb­ing. But the question I'm asking is not wouldn't you like to go on a camping trip? but: isn't this, the socialist way, with collective property and planned mutual giving, rather obviously the best way to run a camping trip, whether or not you actually like camping?

The circumstances of the camping trip are multiply special: many features distin­guish it from the circumstances of life in a modern society. One may therefore not infer, from the fact that camping trips of the sort that I have described are feasible and desirable, that society-wide socialism is equally feasible and equally desirable. There are too many major differences be­tween the contexts for that inference to carry any conviction. What we urgently need to know is precisely what are the dif­ferences that matter, and how can social­ists address them? Because of its contrasts with life in the large, the camping trip model serves well as a reference point for purported demonstrations that socialism across society is not feasible and/or desir­able, since it seems eminently feasible and desirable on the trip.

THE PRINCIPLES REALIZED ON THE CAMPING TRIP

Two principles are realized on the camp­ing trip, an egalitarian principle, and a principle of community. The community principle constrains the operation of the egalitarian principle by forbidding certain inequalities that the egalitarian principle permits. (The egalitarian principle in ques­tion is, as I shall explain, one of radical equality of opportunity: it is therefore consistent with certain inequalities of outcome.)

There are, in fact, a number of poten­tially competing egalitarian principles with which the camping trip, as I have described it, complies, because the simple circumstances of the trip, unlike more complex ones, do not force a choice among them. But the only egalitarian principle realized on the trip that I shall bring into focus is the one that I regard as the correct egalitarian principle, the egali­tarian principle that justice endorses, and that is a radical principle of equality of opportunity, which I shall call "socialist equality of opportunity."

Now, equality of opportunity, whether moderate or radical, removes obstacles to opportunity from which some people suf­fer and others don't, obstacles that are sometimes due to the enhanced opportu­nities that the more privileged people enjoy. Importantly, the removal of blocks to the opportunity of some people does not always leave the opportunities of the initially better placed intact: sometimes it reduces the opportunities of those who benefit from inequality of opportunity. I underline this point because it means that promoting equality of opportunity is not only an equalizing, but also a redistribut­ing* policy. Promoting equality of opportu­nity, in all of its forms, is not merely giving to some what others had and continue to enjoy.

We can distinguish three forms of equality of opportunity and three corre­sponding obstacles to opportunity: the first form removes one obstacle, the sec­ond form removes that one and a second, and the third form removes all three.

First, there is what might be called bourgeois equality of opportunity, by which I mean the equality of opportunity that characterizes (at least in aspiration) the liberal age. Bourgeois equality of op­portunity removes socially constructed status restrictions, both formal and infor­mal, on life chances. An example of a formal status restriction is that under which a serf labors in a feudal society; an example of an informal status restriction is that from which a person whose skin is the wrong color may suffer in a society that is free of racist law but that neverthe­less possesses a racist consciousness that generates racial disadvantage. This first form of equality of opportunity widens people's opportunities by removing con­straints on opportunity caused by rights assignments and by bigoted and other prejudicial social perceptions.

Left-liberal equality of opportunity goes beyond bourgeois equality of opportu­nity. For it also sets itself against the con­straining effect of social circumstances by which bourgeois equality of opportunity is undisturbed, the constraining effect, that is, of those circumstances of birth and upbringing that constrain not by as­signing an inferior status to their victims, but by nevertheless causing them to labor and live under substantial disadvantages. The disadvantage targeted by left-liberal equality of opportunity derives immedi­ately from a person's circumstances and does not depend for its constraining power on social perceptions or on assign­ments of superior and inferior rights. Poli­cies promoting left-liberal equality of op­portunity include head-start education for children from deprived backgrounds. When left-liberal equality of opportunity is fully achieved, people's fates are deter­mined by their native talent and their choices, and, therefore, not at all by their social backgrounds.

Left-liberal equality of opportunity cor­rects for social disadvantage, but not for native, or inborn, disadvantage. What I would call socialist equality of opportu­nity treats the inequality that arises out of native differences as a further source of injustice, beyond that imposed by unchosen social backgrounds, since native dif­ferences are equally unchosen. (Hence the similarity of the campers' attitudes to Syl­via's good luck and Leslie's, in scenarios b. and c. on pp. 8-9 above.) Socialist equality of opportunity seeks to correct for all unchosen disadvantages, disadvan­tages, that is, for which the agent cannot herself reasonably be held responsible, whether they be disadvantages that reflect social misfortune or disadvantages that reflect natural misfortune. When socialist equality of opportunity prevails, differ­ences of outcome reflect nothing but differ­ence of taste and choice, not differences in natural and social capacities and powers.

So, for example, under socialist equal­ity of opportunity income differences obtain when they reflect nothing but dif­ferent individual preferences, including income /leisure preferences. People differ in their tastes, not only across consumer items, but also between working only a few hours and consuming rather little on the one hand, and working long hours and consuming rather more on the other. Preferences across income and leisure are not in principle different from preferences across apples and oranges, and there can be no objection to differences in people's benefits and burdens that reflect nothing but different preferences, when (which is not always) their satisfaction leads to a comparable aggregate enjoyment of life. Such differences in benefits and burdens do not constitute inequalities of benefits and burdens.

Let me spell out the analogy at which I have just gestured. A table is before us, laden with apples and oranges. Each of us is entitled to take six pieces of fruit, with apples and oranges appearing in any combination to make up that six. Sup­pose, now, I complain that Sheila has five apples whereas I have only three. Then it should extinguish my sense of grievance, a sense of grievance that is here totally inappropriate, when you point out that Sheila has only one orange whereas I have three, and that I could have had a bundle just like Sheila's had I forgone a couple of oranges. So, similarly, under a system where each gets the same income per hour, but can choose how many hours she works, it is not an intelligible complaint that some people have more take-home pay than others. The income/ leisure trade-off is relevantly like the apples/oranges trade-off: that I have more income than you do no more shows, just as such, that we are un­equally placed than my having four apples from the table when you have two represents, just as such, an objectionable inequality. (Of course, some people love working, and some hate it, and that could be thought to [and I think it does] induce an injustice in the contemplated scheme, since those who love work will, ceteris paribus, relish their lives more than those who hate work do. But the same goes for some people enjoying each of apples and oranges more than others do; y...