Socialism and Consumerism

It is an odd fact that most socialists I have known opposed the consumer ethos.  They want something deep, something profound.  They want everyone to have stuff, but they want everyone to know that they read edgy poetry, listen to music that is searching, and have more than once stayed up all night discussing “ideas”.  Maybe some weed was involved too.

Socialism is at root an emotional search for a community which the very intellectualism and following unprocessed emotion that gave rise to the idea, make impossible.  No connections are made.  Whenever and wherever Communists succeed, people become objects.  The objectification of humanity, the reduction of every person to a 1) price in Capitalism or 2) use in Socialism, is simultaneously precisely what they claim to want to avoid, and the necessary consequence of their perceptual failures, their unrecognized and unchallenged manias and delusions.

What would appeal to you more: 1) living in a hut with a dirt floor with people with whom you are deeply emotionally connected, doing work which has intrinsic meaning and feeling to you, and surrounded in a small village with like-minded people who share some sort of belief and ritual system that allows the regular expression of emotion, of joy, of celebration; 2) living in an efficiently designed, energy conserving gray home, by yourself, and plugging yourself daily into a slot in a machine?  Can there be a debate?

I read once on a bathroom stall that “Socialism is the opiate of the intellectuals”.  If I take that at face value, what I find is that the IDEA serves to deaden emotional pain.  It places the eventual release of primitive emotions some time in the future, where there is this ill defined–because laughably unrealistic–place and way of being in which that person can be free, where they can freely exchange love and affection, where there is no large scale grief and pain, where living is easy.

All the actual things socialists want can be had within Capitalism.  In fact, that is the ONLY way they can get them.  But the entire project of actually improving humanity, of improving society, depends upon the individual work of learning to see things as they are, of knowing ourselves, of deciphering our true needs and desires, and of understanding that nothing worthwhile is built overnight, and that what is built overnight–particularly using the violence which is the default mode of utopians–is not worthwhile.

I might summarize this by noting that no one can run forever.