Obama : Socialism as Apples : Oranges

It’s no secret that I’m pumped that Barack Obama is the new president. I acknowledge and respect, however, the opinions of those who consider themselves Republican. A couple days ago, I read something attempting to explain the Republican opposition to the allegedly Socialist policies of Barack Obama. The writer used the following analogy: A student who gets a 4.0 GPA shouldn’t have to give up some of their grade to boost the GPA of a 2.0 student so that they both end up with a 3.0, so why should hard-working Americans be forced to give up their hard-earned money to help those who are lazy and unmotivated? This type of analogy, while superficially convincing, is based on a faulty parallelism between the example of the students and the reality of American society, and makes a few key assumptions about the capitalist system and the “freeloaders” who unfairly take advantage of the hard work of others. Here is a brief explanation of those oversights.

1. Social government is not Socialism:

If Barack Obama is Socialist, I’ll eat my shoe. Obama is a left-leaning politician who supports increased government intervention into those areas of the social system that require attention form a less volatile institution than the market. Socialism, on the other hand, is a political ideology fundamentally rooted in issues of class conflict, fetishization of the commodity and the abuse and devaluation of human labour. Granted, one of the creeds of Socialism is “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” However, this is not the policy adopted by Barack Obama. To call Obama a Socialist is to demonstrate ignorance of both Democratic Party policy and Socialist ideology. It is a faulty comparison, at best, and one that I feel is indicative of the remnants of irrational Cold War fears.

2. Not all people who believe in social government are the lazy, hard-partying free loaders that reductive analogies make them out to be:

Many of those that depend on the programs of social governments such as accessible health care, governmentally regulated health insurance practices and quality public education are, contrary to popular iconography, capable, educated, employed and contributing members of society. The problem is, it’s really hard to say to your opponents “get a job you lazy bum” when your opponents are working professionals. So the hard-line Republican has latched on to the image of the low-income, frequently unemployed citizen as a way of making people believe that social programs are just a big money grab, meant to give more purchasing power to those who couldn’t give a shit about whether they fail or succeed. There are people in the United States who make money, who have families, who own homes, who buy cars, who carry briefcases, who go to meetings, that cannot get health insurance because their welfare and safety has been left to the vicissitudes of an unregulated market. As a caveat, this is not to say that I am against market economies. On the contrary, I believe that the market can be used to both corporate and social ends, if properly regulated. However, allowing physical well being to become a tradable commodity has effectively barred millions of Americans from being guaranteed adequate health care. The problem with deregulated health insurance is that the sickest people, those who require the most assistance from insurance companies, are the people that are least likely to be covered. If someone is in danger of dying, or if they have a condition that requires any sort of intensive, long-term treatment, they’re left to fend for themselves. Helping these people costs too much money. And when money is the sole determining factor in who is valuable as a human being and who is not, the demands of the market will always win: cut your losses, invest in strong futures. To say that social government punishes those who work hard to the benefit of lazy, unmotivated freeloaders, then, overlooks the barriers and stonewalling that are built into the social structure of American capitalist ideology. This oversight ultimately amounts to an ignorance of one of the most fundamental aspects of power relations and cultural studies: Hegemony.

3. Ignorance of the Nature of Hegemony:

Nicholson (1997) provides us with a productive definition and discussion of hegemony that is worth quoting at length:

“Hegemony is a form of consensual control... a sort of society-wide agreement which attempts to maintain a social order among the various members of that society. This may sound like a harmonious situation, but a problem arises in that most nonfictional societies continue a degree of oppression against certain members of the population…the subordinate group. Subordinate groups are deemed ‘subordinate' because they are subject to the various and sometimes seemingly invisible, forms of power the dominant group possesses...Hegemony occurs when the subordinate group acquiesces and accepts the ‘reality’ produced and then maintained by a dominant group. That is to say, the subordinate group has an understanding that their position within society and culture is for the most part, preordained- that is, it is common sense that things are the way they are, given the information we have to work with.”

What Nicholson has touched on here is the crux of understanding the way in which social relations function, particularly in (to borrow Jamieson’s term) a late capitalist society. Those who have been vilified by Republican rhetoric as the lazy, the freeloading, the non-contributing, can be said to belong to the subordinate group described above. While their unemployment, generational cycles of poverty, and other economic shortcomings have been constructed as self-inflicted wounds by those who oppose social government, Nicholson provides us the tools to discuss these “failures” as the consequence of restrictions, boundaries and limits that are built into the very system that we call “reality.” As mentioned in my last point, if someone has trouble getting health insurance, it is not necessarily because they are naturally or inherently subordinate, but likely because there are features of their reality, characteristics of the dominant social paradigm that prevent them from doing so. If any true apathy or ‘laziness’ occurs on the part of those contributing members of society who are barred from certain social institutions, it is not because they are bad people, but because of an “acquiescence” to the “seemingly invisible forms of power the dominant group possesses.” The negotiation of hegemonic power, in this way, silently, but without fail, grants the cultural and economic capital necessary for access to certain services and institutions to some, and seeks to normalize the will of this dominant group among others. To criticize those without health care, those without stable employment or those without the means to an education is to criticize those that have been made subordinate through the very policies of those who criticize them.

The student with a 2.0 GPA has a low GPA because he/she did not make an effort to succeed once given an opportunity, not because he/she was never even given an opportunity in the first place. The lazy freeloaders so often mocked and derided in Republican rhetoric have been shut out of certain institutions through the negotiation of hegemony, and through the establishment of hidden, but universally enforced limits to advancement and growth.

E.T. Bell said “‘Obvious’ is the most dangerous word in mathematics.” Turns out that the same can be said of cultural studies. The equivalencies implied between social government, Socialism and redistribution of wealth by reductive analogies are false, and based on the social construction of a group of subordinate people that has little or nothing to do with their actual nature. I am not a Socialist, I am not a Marxist, I am not a Republican. I believe in questioning truths, and helping people because it’s the right thing to do, not because it’s the first stage of a proletarian revolution, or because it will generate more money. It’s just something that should be done. I think that’s fair.

***

"Poor wanderer," said the leaden sky,

"I fain would lighten thee,

But there are laws in force on high

Which say it must not be."

--"I would not freeze thee, shorn one," cried

The North, "knew I but how

To warm my breath, to slack my stride;

But I am ruled as thou."

--"To-morrow I attack thee, wight,"

Said Sickness. "Yet I swear

I bear thy little ark no spite,

But am bid enter there."

--"Come hither, Son," I heard Death say;

"I did not will a grave

Should end thy pilgrimage to-day,

But I, too, am a slave!"

We smiled upon each other then,

And life to me had less

Of that fell look it wore ere when 

They owned their passiveness.

~Thomas Hardy

Note:

I think that I should probably clarify my own political views a bit. I do not support just throwing money at those in need. Without the necessary infrastructure to make sure this money is used in the areas where it's most needed, the money itself is useless. A lot of countries have run into the same kind of problem in trying to get more of their citizens online. When programs are launched to "wire" more homes, governments often buy a whole bunch of computers, and give them to people without any understanding of how to use them- the physical and mental infrastructure has to exist before you can expect people to use services effectively. In its purest sense, then, I don't support "redistribution of wealth." I do, however, feel that taxation provides an effective means of distributing wealth in the interest of establishing the physical and institutional infrastructure necessary to provide essential social services. Okay. That was a lot of writing. I'll call it a day.