202 Comments

User's avatar
Freddie deBoer's avatar

This is yet another post where commenters think I'm talking about Twitter when I'm actually talking about New York.

Expand full comment
drosophilist's avatar

"More and more often I complain that people have no idea what socialism entails. (Decommodification, in a word, if you’re curious.)"

Freddie, I don't know if I can say it without coming across as a sanctimonious pain in the ass, but I'll try.

What exactly do you mean by decommodification, and how will it make things better?

On one level, I understand what "commodification" is. It's going from "child frolics happily in meadow, picking wild flowers for free" to "greedy for-profit company buys meadow, charges child's parents $20 to enter meadow and pick no more than 2 flowers per visit." Which seems bad! "Decommodification" is presumably the opposite of that, and hence sounds wholesome and good.

My problem is that socialists/Marxists seem to commit a category error: the evils of the world (which are real! Starvation, people dying of curable diseases, alienation, workers trapped in shitty jobs, etc. etc. etc.) are caused by evil capitalists, and if only we could get rid of the evil capitalists and decommodify the economy, a new day will dawn and all will be well.

In reality, the evils of the world are largely caused by fairly intractable causes such as "human nature" and "entropy" and "not enough stuff for everyone who wants some (this applies specifically to positional goods, by definition)" and "someone still needs to spend their day cleaning dirty toilets in order for there to be clean toilets." Go ahead with your decommodification, but how is it going to solve these problems?

Example: I once asked you, on an Ask Me Anything thread, how you envision housing being allocated in a post-capitalist economy. And you replied, "Whatever the democratically elected local council of housing decides." Which is an honest answer, but also... not helpful? Once you've overthrown the greedy landlords and implemented your democratically elected People's Soviet for Housing Allocation, how will you make sure said People's Soviet allocates the housing wisely and fairly? How will it prevent nepotism or favoritism from taking over, or solve the problem of "half the population of Detroit wants to move to Orange County, which doesn't have enough housing as it is"? What to do about the perverse incentive of "I'm free to trash my house or be a d*ck to my neighbors, because housing is a human right, so I can't be deprived of it no matter how I behave"?

I genuinely would like to know.

Expand full comment
200 more comments...

No posts