"One problem with the charge that the Left is driven by envy is that one person’s envy is another’s justified resentment. That is, to say that someone is envious generally implies that they have a misplaced anger about something that rightly belongs to someone else...
But not every case of being angry about what someone else has is a case of envy. When women felt outrage about being denied the voting rights given to men, or when black Americans were resentful of being excluded from job opportunities and public spaces granted to whites, they weren’t succumbing to envy. These were instances of the oppressed groups feeling warranted indignation at being unjustly excluded from opportunities to which they were entitled.
Socialists argue that, under capitalism, the working class is systematically deprived of the fruits of its labor. Capitalists, by virtue of their monopoly over the means of production, assert ownership over the goods and services that their employees produce, and pay workers less than the value of what they create, keeping the remainder as profit. As the classic labor anthem 'Solidarity Forever' puts it, 'It is we who plowed the prairies, built the cities where they trade / Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid,' while the owners take 'untold millions that they never toiled to earn.'
The socialist response is to demand collective, democratic ownership of society’s productive resources so that the ultrarich are no longer able to hoard the wealth generated by the working class. This will allow society to ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met, and to make more rational decisions about investment and production — prioritizing ecological sustainability, for instance, over the destructive pursuit of profit at all costs.
This vision is not an expression of covetousness or 'hate' of the better off. It is a demand for a world where basic principles of justice and decency prevail. By chalking up the socialist desire for a redistribution of wealth and power to envy, the Right dodges the fundamental moral question at issue between socialists and their opponents: Who deserves what? Are the 'idle drones' entitled to the wealth the working class produces, or does the world belong to the workers?"
- Nick French, from "No, Socialism Isn’t About Envying the Rich." Jacobin, 14 April 2023.
"It’s easy to take the city’s parks for granted. But when more and more social interaction takes place from behind computer and phone screens; when fewer and fewer people meet their romantic partners through real-world social networks; when fewer Americans report having close friends than ever and more say they’re spending less time with those they do have and feeling increasingly lonely — the very existence of public spaces for leisure, open for all to enjoy free of charge, is something to cherish.
Those spaces haven’t always existed. In the United States and elsewhere, public parks, recreation centers, and swimming pools were the product of social turmoil and political struggle, with socialists often playing key roles in creating and defending such spaces. Nobody’s thinking about class struggle as they flip hotdogs on the public grill. But because they serve the collective good rather than private profits, public parks are a challenge to the logic of capitalism...
Because public parks and recreational venues are publicly owned, operated for the common good rather than private profit, and generally open to all without regard for ability to pay, they do not obey the logic of for-profit capitalist enterprises or commodities. And as socialists from Milwaukee to Malmö have recognized, they provide rare spaces for collective enjoyment, discussion, and education of the kind we’ll need to build a better world. Green spaces where we can toss frisbees or soak up the sun, it turns out, have political value too.
My first spring park excursion this year was an evening a couple months ago, when the air was still brisk but didn’t require a coat. I picked up a tall boy from a corner store and made my way past the food trucks in front of the Brooklyn Museum and the pedestrians and bikers crunching together near Grand Army Plaza, eventually getting onto the walking path that leads into Prospect Park from the north side.
After wending onto a small trail that led me to the main lawn, I found my friends drinking beers in a small circle, listening to music on a small speaker; similar groups were scattered around the grass, along with dogs and people playing catch and flying kites. It was a totally ordinary scene, but being there — enjoying the park’s respite from the atomized concrete chaos of the city — filled me with a sense of relief and gratitude. You only need a few moments like that on a warm spring evening to know that socialists have been right to care so much about public parks."
- Nick French, from "Socialists Love Public Parks Because They Belong to Everyone." Jacobin, 24 June 2023.
"The most basic problem is that the terms on which we meet our [online dating] partners, serious or otherwise, are increasingly being dictated arbitrarily and opaquely by corporate actors whose motivation is very different from that of users. We want love, they want money.
Don’t we want to understand how this crucial aspect of our experience is being shaped? And shouldn’t we have some say in how it’s shaped? If you think so, then we should work toward socializing the dating apps: bringing them under collective, democratic ownership.
What might that look like?
It doesn’t necessarily mean establishing a government-run National Dating Service or taking Tinder under state control. Digital platform scholar James Muldoon has argued that many digital platforms ought to be democratized and liberated from the profit motive, but what exactly this 'platform socialism' looks like will differ from platform to platform.
We could democratize dating through the creation of online dating co-ops, in which users and workers would collectively own and control their platforms. This approach would allow users to take control back from unaccountable investors and CEOs, while preserving the diversity of the dating-app ecosystem and avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy.
An app’s users and developers could become the app’s co-owners as well, with the size of one’s ownership share being adjusted, for example, to the length of time one has been a user or developer. These shares would entitle users to votes of a certain weight in making decisions about the app’s function and management. That would include important choices about what sort of information users provide in their profiles, for instance, and how the algorithm deals with ethically fraught preferences. Users could collectively deliberate about the possible impacts of different choices, from the perspectives of social justice as well as users’ individual well-being.
Each user-owner could pay a subscription fee to fund the app and pay its employees; users and developers could democratically decide how high to set the subscription fee, with the goal being not to maximize profits but to raise enough revenue to invest in creating the best possible dating experience.
Freed from the imperative to deliver value for shareholders, cooperatively run apps could do away with premium subscriptions, add-on purchases (like paying to 'boost' your profile’s visibility or paying for extra 'likes'), and annoying in-app advertisements. The co-ops could also institute collectively agreed-upon policies around privacy and data sharing; they would no longer need to exploit user data to sell to third-party companies.
But without the lure of lucrative profits drawing large investments, these dating cooperatives may find it hard to raise adequate funds from subscriptions alone. Here’s where the state would have an important role to play: in providing public funding for the development of cooperatively owned dating apps.
This idea isn’t as outlandish as it might seem: after all, even in the United States, governments already fund many cultural institutions for the benefit of their citizens’ quality of life: museums, the arts, research in the humanities, public parks, even nightlife. Dating apps are an increasingly important avenue for a central experience of being human. It makes sense for the government to devote public resources to them.
In fact, some countries are already paying to set up their own dating services. The Singaporean government’s Ministry of Social and Family Development has a webpage devoted to helping the uncoupled find partners; it advertises a government-run online dating portal, officially accredited dating agencies, and a 'Partnership Fund' which 'supports ideas and initiatives that you are passionate about to create opportunities to bring singles together.'
These government initiatives admittedly do have an ulterior motive — they’re trying to reverse sharply declining birth rates. Still, these programs show that there is nothing particularly strange or novel about publicly funded dating.
Corey Robin once wrote that 'the point of socialism is to convert hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness.' That goes for socializing online dating, too. It wouldn’t do away with the frustration or disappointment that many people experience on the apps or in dating more generally. But it could be an important step toward making a dating experience that’s about people instead of profit. Then we could swipe, not to create wealth for the capitalist class, but for the simple and essential purpose of finding a date."
- Nick French, from "Tinder Wants Money. We Want Love. The Solution: Socialize Dating Apps." Jacobin, 10 June 2022.
Rich people love to give away money for charitable causes to convince you that they’re not so bad after all. Don’t be fooled: we need to dispossess the benevolent rich of their ill-gotten gains, too.
Thanks in large part to democratic socialists, hating on the rich is becoming mainstream in US politics. Sen. Bernie Sanders regularly denounces the “millionaires and billionaires” who have bought the country’s political system and rigged the economy to work in their favor, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently made waves for proposing a 70 percent top marginal tax rate and declaring that a society where billionaires exist alongside extreme poverty is immoral. In the recent presidential primary debates, many candidates echoed Sanders’s calls for wealth redistribution and taking on the power of corporations.
Attacks on the rich by socialists and progressives have been met with predictable hysteria by the Right. But many Democrats also reject Sanders / AOC–style class-struggle rhetoric.
Case in point: in a meeting with wealthy donors, former vice president Joe Biden recently said, “We may not want to demonize anybody who has made money.” He went on to assure the donors that, under a Biden presidency, “No one’s standard of living would change, nothing would fundamentally change,” before pleading with them: “I need you very badly.”
While Biden is a caricature of a corporate Democrat, his comments raise an interesting question: Is it right to demonize all rich people?
After all, some of them are good people, and some of them give large sums of money to support good causes. Even AOC has said that not all billionaires are immoral, praising ultrarich philanthropists Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in particular. One doesn’t need to look far to find impressive examples of generosity by the wealthy: billionaire Robert F. Smith just agreed to pay off the student loans of Morehouse College’s entire graduating class.
Since many rich people are kind souls who give back to society in big ways, maybe it’s wrong to demonize them. Perhaps, you might think, even if most of the ultrarich are rapacious sociopaths, we should thank the rich who donate to noble causes for their generosity, or (as some have argued) look to them to solve more of society’s problems through philanthropy.
This would be a mistake. We shouldn’t cut the benevolent rich any slack — not least because, upon closer examination, they usually aren’t so benevolent after all.
