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Reading group: G. A. Cohen’s Why Not Socialism?, a short book for a long argument

Hugo Marchetti Fellow
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JusticeAnalyticMarxismG. A. CohenJohn Rawls#camping-trip#community-principle#reading-group#why-not-socialism
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The port doesn't leave me time for long books during the season, so I was glad to find this one: G. A. Cohen's Why Not Socialism? (2009), well under a hundred pages.

Cohen asks us to imagine a camping trip. A group of friends shares equipment, divides the work, and nobody would think of charging the others for the use of their fishing rod or demanding a bigger share of fish because they happen to be a better fisher. Most people, he says, would find that kind of trip attractive, and the market way of running it, with prices and bargaining, repellent. If socialism is desirable on the trip, why not in society?

Plan for three weeks, a few pages a week:

  1. The camping trip and the two principles Cohen draws from it: a socialist equality of opportunity, and a principle of community.
  2. The principles in detail. How much inequality is compatible with them, and why.
  3. Is it feasible? Cohen is honest that we don't know how to design a society on these principles, and that human selfishness may be the obstacle. This is the part I most want to argue about.

Anyone can join, including people who think the whole thing is a fairy tale. Especially them.

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5 replies

  1. Johanna Reinhardt

    Fellow

    Week 1. The community principle is the bit I love: Cohen contrasts serving others because they need it with the market's motives, which he describes, without euphemism, as greed and fear. Greed because you want what you can get; fear because you dread what happens if you don't. Even people who defend markets usually defend them as the best use of motives they admit are not admirable. Cohen asks why we've stopped imagining anything better.

  2. Javier Ferrandis

    Fellow

    Week 1, the economist's objection, put as fairly as I can. The camping trip works because there are ten people who can see each other. Information is cheap; everyone knows who fished and who sat by the fire. Prices are a way of coordinating millions of strangers who can't see each other. Cohen knows this; he says the problem is design, not desirability. But I think the scale problem is not an engineering detail. It might be the whole question.

    Helpful · 1
  3. Pieter van Dijkhuizen

    Fellow

    Week 2. I was surprised how much Cohen's equality of opportunity allows. Inequalities that come from genuine choice, say, preferring more leisure to more income, are not unjust on his view. So he is a luck egalitarian: he wants to neutralise unchosen disadvantage, not all difference. Then the community principle steps in to say that even choice-based inequalities can become so large that they destroy the sense of sharing a life. Two principles, pulling in slightly different directions.

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  4. Rohan Desai

    Fellow

    Week 3. For the first year my team of eight really was a camping trip: everyone did everything, nobody counted, we shared the wins. At around thirty people it broke. Not because anyone became greedy, but because nobody could see what anyone else was doing anymore, and trust needs sight. Javier's point, but felt in the stomach.

    Helpful · 3
    1. Hugo Marchetti

      Fellow

      Rohan, that's what our crews look like too. A gang of eight on a ship is a camping trip; the port authority is not. But the union is a strange middle thing: thousands of people who can't see each other, held together by rules and by stories about the times we stood together. Maybe that's what Cohen's feasibility question needs: not a design, but institutions that make strangers act a little like campers.