It’s easy to understand Socialism’s emotional appeal. It’s undiminished, even now, despite it all, because it touches something deep — something good — in the human soul. Read Oliver Twist and you’ll see it right away. Or if Dickens isn’t your thing, do an image search for Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives. It’ll break your heart. No matter if their parents are gutter drunks […] no child deserves to live like that.
And the material side of Socialism is technically feasible. Obviously so, and indeed it was obvious by 1865. Consider what the Union Army had to do to keep one million men in the field, simultaneously, spread over hundreds of thousands of square miles. This was not without its problems, of course — soldiers finally receiving their back pay spurred a minor economic boom in 1865-6 — but it was not just possible, but an everyday occurrence, for hundreds of thousands of men, dispersed over a huge geographic area, to receive their entire subsistence from the government. Clothes, shoes, food — the stuff Riis’s “street Arabs” would’ve killed for — all at public expense, delivered with clockwork efficiency.
If Socialism were just that, then indeed we could’ve “built Socialism”, as the Bolsheviks would have it, by the end of the 19th century. And cheaply, too — by the late 1880s, the US Treasury’s massive surplus was a major campaign issue for both parties. The “Yankee Leviathan“, as political historian Richard Bensel put it, was as close to actual Fascism as has ever been put into practice (alas, the term hadn’t been invented yet), and it was just aces at delivering the material goods. (It’s Alanis-level ironic that the Confederacy was even more actual capital-F Fascistic than the Union, given the whole “states’ rights” thing, but that’s what happens in totaler Krieg — win first, sort the theory out later).
Severian, “Purpose”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-06.
June 20, 2025
QotD: The innate appeal of socialism
Filed under: Economics, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: CivilWar, Poverty, Severian, Socialism — Nicholas @ 01:00
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