I finally got to read the first two chapters of G. A. Cohen’s book Why Not Socialism? It was one of the readings for the colloquium on socialism that I attended this last weekend.
Cohen starts with an analogy to a camping trip, pointing out that people often go on camping trips and share the responsibilities. At the end of the chapter, he writes:
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.
Well, yes. In particular, one of the distinguishing features of camping trips, at least for adults, is that everyone on the trip wanted to go camping. One of the distinguishing features of socialism is that people are forced into it and have no choice except to leave the country, often leaving much of their wealth behind and sometimes not even being allowed to leave.
Yet when he gets to his Chapter 2, titled “The Principles Realized on the Camping Trip,” he doesn’t get to those two major differences. Amazing.
READER COMMENTS
Jon Murphy
May 3 2021 at 8:14pm
This reminds me of a joke by Jim Gaffigan:
Socialism is the same way. Socialism was a tradition in everyone’s life. Until we invented markets
Mark Brady
May 5 2021 at 12:43am
“Socialism is the same way. Socialism was a tradition in everyone’s life. Until we invented markets.”
We didn’t “invent” markets. Markets are spontaneous orders. Or do GMU students learn something different now? 🙂
Jon Murphy
May 5 2021 at 9:11am
Lol fair point. I was just using “invented” to keep with the structure of the joke.
Jon Murphy
May 5 2021 at 9:14am
Although, now that I think about it, “invention” doesn’t preclude spontaneous orders. The market process is a spontaneous order, but some (at least 2) people had to first say “hey, rather than fighting, let’s exchange goods.” They invented the market right then and there.
robc
May 5 2021 at 10:02am
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOMIiEv4xIM
Joe Denver
May 3 2021 at 8:14pm
If you’re not already aware of it, I would recommend Jason Brennan’s “Why Not Capitalism?”, which is a direct response to Cohen’s “Why Not Socialism?”
David Henderson
May 4 2021 at 5:19pm
Thanks.
CSK
May 3 2021 at 8:46pm
Another important feature of camping trips is that you do it for a little while, then go back home. Rather than revealing the most important rules of how we want to live our lives, they are a short break from those rules.
Kevin Dick
May 3 2021 at 10:55pm
This seems like a pretty classic misapplication of hunter/gatherer, sub-Dunbar thinking.
Much socialist reasoning stems from primitive, evolved instincts about how to operate in sub-Dubar groups. Ironically, much of the appeal to camping seems to be the comfort of operating in a sub-Dunbar group. So he really couldn’t have picked a more cherry-picked example.
I think I learned this from Robin Hanson and Arnold Kling.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
May 4 2021 at 6:26am
And another difference is that it doe not take long for everyone to want the camping trip is over. 🙂
Steve Fritzinger
May 4 2021 at 7:21am
For me, the most striking thing about Cohen’s book is that he almost completely ignores production. The camping gear already exists and is in the hands of the right people. No mention of who created it or how the campers acquired it. Same for the camp ground, the food, the roads from the city to the wilderness, the cars, the fuel, etc. The closest Cohen gets to production is when he talks about two particular campers. One likes to fish and might challenge the socialist order by claiming rights to fish he caught. The other camper had an ancestor who worked to improve some part of the campground (Maybe a father or grandfather who planted apple trees? I forget). That camper might claim rights to the ancestor’s work, again upsetting the socialist order.
For Cohen, like most Leftists, wealth just is. No one has to work to create it. No one has to work to maintain it. There are no decisions to make about what to make or how much of it. No risks from picking the wrong things. No exploration. Nothing new.
There’s just a big pile of stuff and the only problem is how to divvy it up.
David Henderson
May 4 2021 at 5:20pm
You wrote:
Good point.
AlexR
May 5 2021 at 1:11am
David Hume, Of Refinement in the Arts:
“Can we expect that a government will be well modelled by a people who know not how to make a spinning-wheel, or to employ a loom to advantage?”
(excessive commas omitted)
Henri Hein
May 4 2021 at 11:53pm
I have noticed the same thing. I have heard this goes all the way back to Marx – from what I understand, he focused on consumption and production was something that would just take care of itself.
In a way, it’s a testament to the resounding success of the Enlightenment revolution. People can’t now imagine a world without progress and wealth creation, despite the fact that this was the natural state for most of human history.
Eric M Mack
May 4 2021 at 1:03pm
As a bit of self-promotion, I’ll mention that readers of Econlib might find interest my podcast on Cohen on Why Not Socialism? recorded for the Institute for Liberal Studies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5NBDfh34PA&feature=youtu.be
David Henderson
May 4 2021 at 5:21pm
Thanks, Eric.
Roger McKinney
May 4 2021 at 3:17pm
Dont forget Hayek’s insight that families must operate on socialist principles; capitalist principles would destroy families. But socialist principles dont scale to any group where most people are strangers. Capitalist principles are necessary among strangers and socialist principles destroy such societies.
Henri Hein
May 4 2021 at 11:57pm
Thanks for making that point. In my opinion, this is a huge disconnect in the socialism debate. The problem isn’t so much that socialism doesn’t work, it is that it doesn’t scale. It works on small scale, which is what people experience. They then draw the wrong conclusions from those experiences, without thinking about the scaling problem.
robc
May 5 2021 at 10:07am
I think this connects to Kevin’s dunbar number point above.
It is why a kibbutz can (sort-of) work.
Yaakov Schatz
May 10 2021 at 4:53am
The Kibbutz can “sort of” work for several reasons. One of them is heavy gornment subsidies (for example, they pay income taxes based on average income and not actual income of each member; that is a huge tax break and probably simply a complete exemption from income tax) and the other is that kibbutz members are not considered workers and therefore are exempt from worker protection laws.
Matthias
May 5 2021 at 10:25pm
Most companies are internally run as command economies, too, not as markets.
The argument about scale applies here, too.
Patrick
May 5 2021 at 2:32am
I think that one of the most important differences between a camping trip and running a nation is simply the scales involved. This might sound kind of obvious but I think it’s an underrated point. A major problem with socialism is that it fails to solve coordination and communication problems (prices are more efficient at both than central planning). But on small scales like a single family or a camping trip, this mostly reverses. Coordination and communication among a small number of people who know each other well is easy and the “market” in that case is often too small for efficient price discovery.
Yaakov Schatz
May 10 2021 at 4:41am
This article made me look at a 2018 update about the Kibbutz in Israel. Out of 265 Kibbutzim (plural of kibbutz) in Israel, only 45 remained cooperative in the sense that pay and services are not mainly linked to work (some privatize kibbutzim still have minimal wage rules for members). 11 of the 45 cooperative kibbutzim are on their way to privitazation. 26 of the 45 cooperative kibbutzim charge their members for electicity according to actual consumption. 2 of them charge for water according to consumption. 27 charge for meals in the central dining room according to consumption. 25 of the cooperative kibbutzim allow private car ownership.
The cooperative kibbutzim are mainly successful kibbutzim that ca allow themselves the luxury of living by the rule of “each person provides according to his ability and receives according to his needs”.
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