A rchive Date
[ 13-02-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Britain ]
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[http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/colby-cosh-the-problem-of-socialism-with-an-ipad
The problem of ‘socialism with an iPad’
Colby Cosh Thursday, Nov. 26, 2015
And Britain winced. Last Friday, the shadow chancellor of the new Jeremy Corbyn-led, deep-red Labour Party gave a tone-setting speech in which he set out the Corbynite vision for the U.K.’s economic future. John McDonnell is, like his leader, a throwback to the old union-dominated, consciously socialist Labour of the 1980s. The two men have lived somewhat parallel lives, and McDonnell has taken a couple of very short-lived runs at the Labour leadership, but he has a tonier education and experience in making municipal budgets. He is the business suit to Corbyn’s comfortable cardigan.
British Labour is struggling violently to adjust to the nearly universal consensus that Corbyn’s capture of the leadership means a certain general election loss in 2020. So McDonnell’s speech was watched with special interest. How does a socialist who stumbles unexpectedly into a shadow cabinet a quarter-century after the fall of the Berlin Wall go about making a case? What is the sound bite?
The great change of our time, McDonnell argued, will be computers and computer-driven automata performing increasingly complex tasks, bumping low-skilled human workers out of traditional jobs. The benefits, he said, should not be captured exclusively by “those who own robots.” Automation spreading through the economy means a larger role for the state than ever, securing the rights of “gig economy” workers and providing social insurance to the technologically displaced.
“It’s socialism,” McDonnell concluded, “but socialism with an iPad.”
The reaction on the British left to that verbal flourish can be summarized by a quote from one of its important organs, the New Statesman: “In the context of (McDonnell’s) argument, the line isn’t as nonsensical as it sounds.” Ouch.
The Statesman’s Barbara Speed made a fair point: many economists, not all of them heterodox progressives or old-school commies, would actually accept some version of McDonnell’s overall argument. It is not just socialists who think the future involves a world of persistently less stable careers and more freelancing, with state-guaranteed basic income serving as a safety net.
But in general most everyone spotted the problem with the phrase “socialism with an iPad” (and wondered out loud why nobody in Corbyn’s brain trust could): it is the most awkward possible juxtaposition a socialist could make.
Labour is fighting to detach itself from the memory of a period of British socialism, which is remembered for, among other ills, drab, awful British consumer products. The iPad is not just a product of American turbo-capitalism: it is a paramount symbol of it.
No one ever knew they wanted an iPad until they got their hands on one. It is everything that devices made in socialist countries were, for 80 years, egregiously not: whimsical, thoughtfully designed and reasonably durable despite bearing no resemblance to a tank. The man behind it, Steve Jobs, was a single-minded ego-prophet straight from the pages of Ayn Rand.
The consumer-drivenness of capitalism is what killed socialism, as much as anything.
I would be the last to deny the political and moral role of its great world-historic opponents: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the lot. But ultimately it was natural experiments like East vs. West Berlin that destroyed the prestige of socialism. Something as simple as a McDonald’s hamburger was an ir-reproducible luxury for socialist countries, and thus an unanswerable challenge.
This is, anyway, a familiar stock account of the late 20th century, and the ultimate testament to its truth lies in watching progressives try to squirm around it.
In the Guardian, Zoe Williams reacted to “socialism with an iPad” by arguing that the iPad really was created by socialism, if you think about it in a contorted enough way.
“To make the iPad desirable in the first place, the Internet had to exist, which it wouldn’t have without British universities and the American military, both heavily supported by the public purse,” Williams wrote. “Jobs got the idea for the graphical user interface from Xerox, who let him visit in 1979 on the tacit understanding that cooperative networks were a better support for innovators than rigid protectionism and hierarchy.”
Socialism can give us nice things after all! You just have to redefine Oxford University, the U.S. Department of Defense skunk works and the Xerox Corp. as “socialism.”
But this rather implies that we have already arrived in Utopia. If an American corporate behemoth like Xerox somehow represents the socialist spirit, to say nothing of the most secretive and sinister organs of the American military-industrial complex, one wonders what the Guardian exists for, why it’s always fussing about this U.S-dominated world. Against what does the Guardian guard, if not companies like Apple?
Williams’ zaniness serves as a useful reminder that capitalism has been pretty good at addressing many of the concerns that animated 19th-century socialists: it has turned ordinary workers into business shareholders, made women less dependent and created fantastic abundance.
It has even had a secularizing influence that Karl Marx or Robert Owen failed to foresee: they could not imagine a hedonistic bourgeoisie that has largely kicked the opiate of religious observance. When we read the works of these men, their materialistic dreams and critiques of the political order they confronted often strike us as congenial and sensible, compared to their destructive, dumb plans to undo it.
And in that sense Williams, too, is onto something: we are all sorta socialists, only without the socialism.
National Post
ccosh@nationalpost.com
Twitter.com/colbycosh
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