Next week I’ll be the discussion leader at a colloquium on socialism. There are pro- and ant-socialist readings. One of the pro-socialist articles is by noted British socialist George Bernard Shaw. The article is his entry in The Encyclopedia Britannica, 13th ed., 1926 and is titled “Socialism: Principles and Outlook.”
I always prepare discussion questions in advance. Here’s one on Shaw:
Shaw writes that “the only real remedy” includes “compulsory national service in civil as in military life for all classes.” Does his proposal surprise you? Do you think he would have been happy if those who chose his form of service assigned him to be, say, a shepherd?
In case you think his idea of compulsory service is a year or two when you’re young, no, that’s not it. He explains later in the page that compulsory national service “would deprive it [labor] of its right to strike.” So he has the long term in mind.
READER COMMENTS
David Seltzer
Apr 25 2021 at 7:08pm
Seems inconsistent. If he demands conscription in the short term which means most would not be able to negotiate from a free position, but labor would be negatively affected in the long term because it couldn’t be free to strike. am I missing something here?
David R. Henderson
Apr 25 2021 at 7:41pm
You wrote:
I think so. He’s advocating long-term conscription, not short-term conscription. I think you read my post quite carelessly.
David Seltzer
Apr 25 2021 at 8:33pm
David,
“He explains later in the page that compulsory national service “would deprive it [labor] of its right to strike.” What am I missing. He say’s compulsory national service hurts labor’s right to strike. Counterfactual argument: without compulsory service, would labor have a right to strike?
Phil H
Apr 25 2021 at 8:47pm
To take your question seriously… Would he be happy in an assigned job? I have a suspicion that the answer might be, on average, yes. Using myself as an example, I’ve had free choice over my own career, and I don’t think I’ve made brilliant choices. I’ve never enjoyed my work that much. And many of the people I know are in a similar position. They don’t find their work deeply fulfilling. If we were assigned work, who knows, we might end up in a better fit. At the least, it’s not obvious to me that it would be worse. (Caveat: there are probably a certain fraction of people for whom choice of work is massively important, and those people may be less happy.)
The fact that I wouldn’t be less happy in a different job is only a relatively small part of whether I’d want to accept it, though. The fact of making your own choices is important; psychologically, it’s easy to become resentful and blame the choosers, if you didn’t get to make your own choice.
So I agree with DH that choice is necessary, but I’m not sure that it’s because choice makes us happier. I think having choice is just a psychological good in itself.
john hare
Apr 26 2021 at 5:36am
Being able to choose is massively important to me. It’s the main reason I’m self employed, though I wouldn’t object to wealth. Having others choose is a recipe for stagnation and disaster. They know less about your situation than you do, and they have no incentive to correct mistakes as you do. When I make a mistake, I can look in the mirror to find the one at fault and have a chance of correcting him. I can often do that at the speed of thought. When some bureaucrat makes a mistake, how do you correct it.
Being unhappy in your job is a mental choice that ties in with your self identification. If you resent being forced to make a living, then you would be right about letting others choose as you will spend your life in resentment in any case. If you are one that takes pride in your efforts, allowing others to choose without recourse is horrifying.
Dylan
Apr 26 2021 at 6:07am
It’s interesting though, because I think the data is at least somewhat mixed on whether an abundance of choices makes us happier. The Paradox of Choice phenomenon is well known these days, but people seem to apply it primarily to decisions that are relatively frivolous, like what kind of jam to buy. Yet, evidence in areas of more consequence like love and marriage, where arranged marriages appear to be just as happy if not more so than their choice counterparts. Of course, in arranged marriages, the choice of partners is made by parents who know their children well and presumably are concerned with their happiness. And, at least in modern Indian arranged marriages, there is a veto option available by both parties.
I think arranged jobs would be much less successful if they were made by some bureaucracy that doesn’t know the person, and that both happiness and productivity would suffer.
Henri Hein
Apr 26 2021 at 1:05pm
If what you are saying is true, then it means it is really hard to find the correct occupation for a person, defining correct as making them happy or fulfilled. If it is hard for an individual to find the correct occupation, surely it is even harder for a third-party.
My experience is different from yours. Most of my friends and myself are happy with our jobs.
Incidentally, I have been in an environment where jobs were assigned. When I was volunteering in a kibbutz, jobs were assigned by the work committee. You could make requests to the members, but they mostly listened to the work leaders. (The leaders were the people running areas like the kitchen, garage, the avocado field, the orange fields, etc). If you were unhappy with your assignment, you would do a lackadaisical job and the leader would ask the committee to rotate you out. So most of us ended up in jobs we were reasonably content with. This only worked somewhat well because of its small scale – you could talk directly to the committee members, and job rotations were quick. I spent as little as a single day in one job I particularly disliked. I would be horrified to think of this system being duplicated on the large scale with the Federal or even State government in charge.
Jon Murphy
Apr 26 2021 at 8:54am
The quote from Shaw and your question reminds me of James Buchanan’s ending line in his 1978 talk Natural and Artifactual Man:
It is probable that one of the reasons socialist countries are so much less happy than liberal countries is for this reason: man cannot become the man he wants to become. He must become the man the Man of System wants him to become.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Apr 26 2021 at 1:20pm
Rather striking the difference between what Shaw meant by “Socialism” and what your garden variety Republican means by “Socialism” when they criticized ACA (or Medicare or Social Security) as “Socialism,” or, as far as that goes, what AOC/Bernie Sanders might mean. [Curious why the Britannica got a playwright to write about “Socialism” rather than an economist.]
With the definitional problems, I would not have high hopes for a colloquium on “Socialism,” but best of luck.
Jon Murphy
Apr 26 2021 at 3:28pm
He was one of the leading socialist intellectuals at the time.
Mark Brady
Apr 27 2021 at 3:30pm
‘[A] brilliant literary man, a useless economist and politician, but honest and no careerist.” Friedrich Engels on Bernard Shaw, Letter of 4 September 1892.
Karl Kautsky, ed., Aus der frühzeit des marxismus: Engels briefwechsel mit Kautsky (Prague: Orbis, 1935), p. 338.
“[Lenin] remembered hearing Shaw speak at some meeting. Shaw, he said, was ‘A good man fallen among Fabians’ and a great deal further left than his company.”
Arthur Ransome, Six Weeks in Russia in 1919 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1919), p. 78.
I found the quotations in E. J. Hobsbawm, “Bernard Shaw’s Socialism,” Science & Society 11, no. 4 (Fall 1947): 305-326, and checked the sources.
If you are interested, you can read Shaw’s 1926 article here: https://www.britannica.com/topic/George-Bernard-Shaw-on-socialism-1985101
Bill Conerly
Apr 27 2021 at 4:29pm
Death to hippies?
More from Shaw: “Socialism means equality or nothing . . . Under Socialism, you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not the character or industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner, but while you were permitted to live, you would have to live well.” (The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, quoted in Martin Bronfenbrenner, Income Distribution Theory.)
David Henderson
Apr 27 2021 at 6:05pm
Thanks to both Mark Brady and Bill Conerly.
Thanks also, Bill, for referencing Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. I seem to recall that there was a free-market-oriented woman at the time who resented Shaw’s talking down to women, especially with that title (is the Intelligent Women’s guide different from the Intelligent Men’s guide?) I think she responded with her own book titled The Socialist Woman’s Guide to Intelligence.
Update: I remembered correctly. Here it is. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Socialist_Woman_s_Guide_to_Intellige.html?id=CjUmAAAAMAAJ
Gene
Apr 28 2021 at 3:09pm
I’m really looking forward to David’s report out on this. When I first learned about socialism I focused mostly on the economic ownership-of-means-of-production aspects of it, but when I think about real life today, I think mostly in terms of the way some people want to make almost every aspect of our lives subject to the political process. I’m curious about the part that concept will play in this discussion.
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