TODAY I STARTED LOVING YOU AGAIN?

An informal, experiential reflection on capitalism and capitalists, socialism and socialists.

I’ve never read former-leftist-turned-leading-neoconservative Irving Kristol’s essay, “Two Cheers for Capitalism,” but some recent, very wrenching, bouts with left sectarianism and dogmatism have made me wonder seriously about left efficacy. And when I think about it, much as I really am committed to the socialist ideal as offering a positive alternative to the quagmire of global economic and social crises, and as much as I really am at heart opposed to capitalism in its present form, I have to admit that in many ways capitalism has been better to me, better for me, than many a leftist group, and many a leftist “comrade.” Considering the results of my interactions both with capitalism and with socialism I have to say “One-and-a-half cheers for capitalism.”

These recent bouts with left sectarianism and dogmatism aren’t much worth going into; just suffice it to say they involved Marxist groups acting out that “revolutionary” ersatz that renders contemporary activist-group “Marxism” as something scripted by another type of Marxist, Groucho, in collaboration with Franz Kafka! But they have made me reflect not only on socialism and capitalism as abstract entities, but also on my life with real capitalism and real capitalists, and with real socialists of my acquaintance, and see that my real life experiences with capitalism haven’t always been negative, and my real life experience with socialists and other leftists haven’t always been positive.

After all, even though capitalism and the present recession it’s caused have resulted in my being seriously underemployed, it’s also that very capitalism that’s offered and given me employment—which I have to contrast to the great majority of my leftist “comrades” who, when I’ve been really down and out, wouldn’t even give me the time of day. My apolitical friends have been far more generous to me than my left political ones, and that’s simply a fact. It’s my apolitical friend John who pledged that “George, I’ll never let you starve or go homeless,” and he’s followed through on it with his limited funds, funds far more limited than those of many a left “comrade.” All too well do I remember the leading leftist here in Indianapolis saying to me back in 2009, when I was at a nadir of employment and desperate for funds to live on, “I wish I had your time for reading.” Somehow not noticing that the “time for reading” was more taken up with concerns about how I was to meet the rent and put food on the table, not to mention taking from that “time for reading” essential time to somehow find a nonexistent job. Hell, this leading leftist couldn’t even bring himself to buy me a cup of coffee as I outlined my economic difficulties to him!

But back to capitalist perks. While I make it a point to shop for groceries at a particular large chain that is unionized, I do so equally because I find its prices reasonable, even in this time of grocery price surges. Moreover—and this is important—also because I can get a 10¢ a gallon discount off the gasoline I buy at that same chain’s gas outlets. But I also shop at a certain convenience store/filling station chain, even though it’s owned by a vehemently anti-union oil company which treats its employees badly; something I know firsthand because I once worked for it myself. (In fact, even wrote and posted an article on my mistreatment: http://politicalaffairs.net/a-worker-s-vignette-suspended-for-being-sick/.) Not that I have a whole lot of choice in where I fill up my car’s gas tank, but generally this convenience store outlet has lower prices than others; also I get points for purchases both of gas and other items that add up for perks, and one of them, the one I regularly use, enables me to get 10¢ a gallon off my gas purchases there as well. Who doesn’t want 10¢ a gallon off their gas at today’s prices? Further, the office supply chain store I regularly buy my computer printer ink cartridges from gives me both discount coupons plus a points program that also leads to monthly discounts on purchases. So, despite my regular capitalist exploitation as a consumer, something I readily admit, I get some of that money back—on a tight budget, as almost all of us are now on, who doesn’t relish that?

Like most workers I have credit cards, and yes, those payments can indeed be onerous. But despite that, I’ve regularly made them, which has resulted in my being rewarded with increased credit lines on several of them. Not only that; because of my improved credit rating due to those payments, for the past two years I’ve also been rewarded with new lower monthly premiums for my state-required auto insurance. Not a whole lot, but it adds up.

Contrast that to the local leftists often denying me any financial assistance, even when it’s really urgent, because at the time I’m considered “politically incorrect.” But these same leftists will provide such assistance when I’m viewed as “politically correct.” Like so many other personal relationships on the left, it becomes a water faucet: sometimes turned on, sometimes not; sometimes with what comes out being scalding hot, other times icy cold, and sometimes comfortably warm, depending on the “comrade’s” judgment of my “political correctness” at that particular time. Then there are those “comrades” who provide me with long-term financial assistance due to my lack of steady employment (the vicissitudes of the job market here in Indiana have made me a permanent temp for the past ten years), but with a high rate of psychological interest charged. I wish I were kidding, but I’m not. One particular example comes to mind of a rather sanctimonious Quaker woman, now deceased, who gave me a monthly stipend of over $200 a month, but expected in return I not criticize her, even though she’d actively blacklisted me and backbit me to all her local “progressive” friends here in Indianapolis for the previous 26 years, but had a moderate change of heart the last three years of her life. For which she wanted total forgiveness, even for her only half-hearted attempts to make amends—which she was willing to make as long as she didn’t have to go so far as to admit to the fellow “progressives” she’d severely misjudged me, something which would’ve damaged her aura of goodness and infallibility. As my friend John mentioned above said to me, “She thought she owned you.” Her monthly stipend had supposedly paid for me and my silence as though I were a slave, and here I now irritated her by deserved criticism; in her eyes I was acting like an “uppity
n—r”!

So there really is something positive, something to give one-and-a-half cheers for, in what Adam Smith expressed in the Wealth of Nations: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” A similar thought was expressed succinctly in a left magazine: “As a pragmatist, I frankly don’t care about Edison’s politics, or Bill Gates’ economic theories. I want to know if the electricity works and if my computer program will run.” (Michael Hogan, “Green Revolution or Scorched Earth? Mexican and Cuban Responses,” Political Affairs, February 2006)

Milton Fisk, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Indiana University-Bloomington, titles a section in his book Toward a Healthy Society: the Morality and Politics of American Health Care Reform (University Press of Kansas, 2000), “The Decline of Compassion and Solidarity.”
While I think few of us on the left (and I regard myself as on the left) would dispute that’s the prevailing reality in our society as a whole, it’s a reality that’s also prevailing on the left today, and has been for a long time. Again, the old water faucet. And also, the notion that friendship, compassion for others simply because they are human in and of itself, is suspect, is a form of “right opportunism,” “liberalism” (as in Mao Zedong’s essay, “Combat Liberalism”), or “bourgeois sentimentality.” Because when “correct” politics are everything, there’s no room for anything else—certainly not something that might be perceived as “wavering” or “weakness.” After all, as Bukharin infamously wrote, there’s the “the necessity of breaking an egg to obtain an omlette.” And as so many of us on the left ruefully know, some of the least considerate, least compassionate people on the left will speak fulsomely of their love and devotion to persons of color, and in the Third World; the “good Quaker” mentioned above was one to these, which drew the cynical observation on my part, “The oppressed who are geographically and culturally distant from oneself are truly oppressed; the oppressed who are geographically and culturally ‘in one’s backyard’ are merely pests.” But as I’ve also expressed, “Cynicism is often the beginning of wisdom.”

This ugly reality was especially brought home to me back in 2005, when my very employability was at stake. At the time I was a long-term outpatient at a local mental health center, one of those “liberal, helping, social-safety-net agencies” that so many “socialists” and “progressives” have uncritical high regard for as “problem solvers” for the troubled and dispossessed—not realizing just how illiberal and unhelpful the actual “help” is (because they’ve rarely had to use them; or when they did seek psychological/psychiatric counseling, their wealth and insurance enabled them to utilize the private sector, rather than the classist “services” set aside for the indigent). Further, they tend to be blind to the fact that bigotry toward those who aren’t “quite right” expresses itself not just in hostility, but in condescension as well.

But at that time I was eligible for SSDI [Social Security Disability Income] as a “disabled” person (even though I was actually working, albeit only as an irregularly-employed temp, at a job I not only loved, but one that required my college degree); but in order to get it, I had to go through my dumb, computer-illiterate case manager who wasn’t getting it right, even after four months of supposedly trying. He would say he was trying but, “It’s not working. I don’t know why.” Needless to say, he would never tell me what he was doing or not doing that wasn’t working. After all, as a genuine “nutto/wacko/fruitcake” I had to be stupid as well. As this progressed, I became more and more anxious, as I really needed that SSDI income, and it was showing at work; not only causing me anxiety, but also absenteeism. Finally, after being prematurely “liberated” from my work project, I went to my case manager’s office to see just what was going on that wasn’t working. He went through his usual process, and I stood there dumbfounded. The case manager didn’t even know how to properly enter the mental health center’s name onto a website! (Instead of entering the full, official name, he entered only part of it, which naturally the completely literalist computer would reject, and had been doing for the last four months.) So I correctly entered the name and address as he stood there uncomprehending, as though he were an eight-year-old boy watching Daddy do what he couldn’t figure out, and voila! it all went through, and the whole process of applying for SSDI was now completed within the next 24 hours, and on the phone at that—so that, had I known what was going on, I could’ve corrected him over the phone, and not lost my job. (This case manager, named Bell, obviously didn’t have intelligence ringing clear as a bell; so I gave him the moniker, “Dull Thud.” Later, he would say with the usual condescending chutzpah so common among the “helping professionals,” “If I hadn’t messed up, would it have made any difference?”)

Needless to say, the local left wasn’t concerned about this problem. The “good Quaker” woman above had assured everybody that I was “blowup George,” hopelessly unstable, someone to be shunned; and that my anxiety and anger at what I was going through was just further confirmation. But this “instability” was somehow “overlooked” by my apolitical co-workers and supervisors, as they not only liked me, they also respected me as a highly intelligent, capable person! This especially came into play when the company that hired us temps through the temp agency on-site wanted me permanently removed from employment for my alleged disruption of the work environment. But my “capitalist pig” bosses knew that my behavior caused by all this was highly atypical, was not my usual excellent work performance—so the general manager of the temp agency, along with two of my immediate floor supervisors, voluntarily, on their own initiative, went to bat for me and saved my job!—a job I loved, where I had friends, and was respected. It should be added that the loss of this job would’ve not only rendered me unemployable, it would’ve absolutely destroyed my mental health altogether. But the mental health center literally didn’t care. (I’ve written and posted on the realities of psychiatric treatment, especially as available for those without money; see “Once a Nut, always a Nut?” at www.transformation-center.org/resources/recoverystories.shtml.)

“Alas, we/Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness/Could not ourselves be kind,” wrote Brecht in his 1938 poem “To Posterity”—a rather telling indictment of the left from a leftist, but one all too true all too many times. Even though he qualifies it in the lines preceding, “Even the hatred of squalor/Makes the brow grow stern./Even anger against injustice/Makes the voice grow harsh” and ends with the plea, “But you, when at last it comes to pass/That man can help his fellow man,/Do not judge us/Too harshly,” there’s something disingenuous, something that smacks of special pleading, in this. For if we of the left “Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness/Could not ourselves be kind,” who else is going to be kind in our stead? And isn’t kindness, compassion and solidarity part of what’s going to make socialism better than capitalism, something that’s going to provide that necessary equality and self-determination that removes those capitalist shackles that bind us, those shackles of profit-oriented, bottom-line, subordination in the name of “economic-efficiency”? That makes for a better, more humane world as well as one where the wealth created that’s shared by all provides a greater material abundance for all as well? Isn’t it correct to state that such humane and humanistic goals require not only humane and humanistic means, those means need to be carried out by humane and humanistic persons as well if they are to be effective? Such persons as are not all that prevalent on the left as we’d like to believe? (I’ve written and posted something that expands positively on this, “Alas, we who wished to lay the foundations of kindness . . .,” http://newpol.org/node/493)

In conclusion, in stating what I’ve directly experienced from both socialists and capitalists as leading me to give one-and-a-half cheers for capitalism, am I perhaps echoing Merle Haggard, “Today I Started Loving You Again”? Not entirely. I still dislike and distrust capitalism, but I also like getting good things from what’s possible at the moment. And my socialist temperament leads me to truly believe that “An injury to one is an injury to all,” with “all” defined in an all-embracing, humanity-affirming way, not in a “politically correct” Orwellian way, where all are equal, but some are more equal than others. Capitalism is something we socialists have to improve on; but it’s not going to come from osmosis. It’s going to come from our being actively humane and liberatory ourselves.