I had a conversation with a student of mine about a month ago that really set me thinking. I am fairly open, when I teach, about tending towards socialism in my beliefs--I don't apologize for it, although I do say that many people don't feel the way I do. (I feel like telling my students, who have gone to the least funded public schools in the most policed neighborhoods and now work minimum wage jobs without benefits, about the glories of capitalism is a level of hypocrisy I just can't stomach perpetuating). One of my students, who is quite well read in history despite having left school around the 6th grade, is a staunch capitalist. He has said that he can see that capitalism is problematic in some ways, but that since he grew up in this society, he wants it all, he wants to make a million bucks and have fancy cars.The last time we had this discussion I said that in a socialist country, the government would or should make sure that everyone is employed at something that paid them a living wage, and he said, well, but competition has to come in somewhere.  The conversation stopped around there, but later on I spent some time considering what my answer should have been--I know that competition as a way of life and governing really gets my back up, but what can I SAY about it? Why do I feel the way I feel? And after a while, here's what I came to:

In a competition, there are always winners and losers-that's what competition is about. And that's OK in some areas-for example, I would rather be served by a doctor who has "won," in the sense that he or she is skilled, than one who has "lost" the competition to graduate from med school with a sufficient amount of medical knowledge to treat people. I think this is the obvious level that people who are really pro-capitalism think about competition, and I think this is how they expect the rest of us to think too. Or maybe that's how they hope we'll think. But that's just one small part of economic and civic life in a country; the competition to become a doctor. Someone who "loses" that fight could potentially "win" a fight to become something else that he or she might be better at or like more. That's not a competition that has to leave a "loser" behind, just a non doctor. BUT if, as it currently is in this country (and it's getting worse by the minute), the "competition" applies to every single aspect of human life, then that country needs to give some long, hard, thought to what will happen to the "losers;" to children born to poor or dysfunctional or ill parents without social support, to immigrants, to the disabled, to the elderly, to people who are prevented from "winning" by their color or their sexual preferences or their religion, to the non-wealthy. I feel like socialism says that society has a responsibility to make sure that even those who are unable to "compete" in particular arenas are able to live lives of dignity and safety--and that is exactly what the US does not do. The point is that if everything's a competition, A LARGE GROUP OF PEOPLE WILL LOSE. Most due to personal characteristics beyond their control. And if that competition is so pervasive that it is really a competition to live with dignity and be accorded human rights, then that is completely immoral. Not only is it immoral, it's also bad for us as a society.

Think about it--we're so trained to think in terms of competition, in terms of "we'd better get ours," that we don't even see it half the time. In a society where inequities are as big as they are in the US, there's a lot of crime, right? At its most basic level, that happens because people who know, usually from birth, that they have "lost" the race, a-can't get what they need any other way, and b-don't have much hope for a good life.
 So what do the rest of us do? We in the middle class try not to live in "bad" (read: dangerous) neighborhoods. We protest when the government tries to build low income housing near us. We get better alarms and locks for everything we own. We try to send our kids to "good" schools (which means, in part, schools with middle class students)--and everyone knows how hard parents fight for that. And often, we look down on the people who we see as having made these measures necessary, and we spend a lot of time and money trying to make sure that we stay "winners" (an increasingly precarious thing for anyone who isn't wealthy in this country). But really? What if we allowed ourselves to stop thinking that way, and started thinking--it doesn't have to be like this? Instead of thinking that if those people get more, then it takes away from me and mine, what if we thought--in a country that ensures the rights of everyone to a living wage, I wouldn't have to lock my car door, or put an alarm on my house? What if we thought--in a country that ensures that every school is fully funded and has what it needs, where we allocated the resources to make sure that EVERY kid gets a good education, I wouldn't have to worry about whether my kid will get in to this or that school, or whether I can afford to pay for private school? What if, instead of going on the offensive because some families in our neighborhoods have "indoor" couches on their porches (yes, this is actually a real battle coming up in the city where I live) and that will make the property values go down, we thought, in a country where everyone is provided for and has housing, I'd have to worry a whole lot less about other people's yards (which should be their business anyway)?

I was reminded that I had meant to write about this when I was driving home today and heard a program on NPR about how Margaret Thatcher essentially decimated the working class of England by shutting down the industries that employed them, like coal mining. These were people who had had strong communities and good paying, productive jobs, who had had enough money to pay into common funds for things like cricket grounds and community centers in their villages--and who did. (I suspect, btw, that these villages were also "good" neighborhoods, in the sense of being both safe and well-kept). Their crime? Being blue collar, apparently. Now, the announcer said, the working class (who are now really the working poor), have lost their strong sense of community with one another, have had to leave their villages, and are widely portrayed by the British media as stupid, lazy, promiscuous, uneducated, without family values, and over-entitled. As people who live in and create "bad neighborhoods." Even the labor party is no longer interested in their votes. And I'm left thinking, whose fault is that, that those are bad neighborhoods? Who ensured that those people lost the "good neighborhoods" they had, the ones they had created themselves? Who ensured that those people would be constantly stressed due to lack of money, would confront negative stereotypes of themselves every day, would have to send their kids to substandard schools? Wouldn't be able to send their kids to college (as one woman interviewed for the program said)? Who took the miners, the working class heroes, and made them into "losers"? I don't think it was the miners themselves.....some of them are still the same people who used to live in those mining towns and pay for those community halls and cricket grounds. Do you think they suddenly became lazy and bad?

We desperately need a paradigm shift in the US (it sounds like things may be changing a tiny bit in Britain, although I question how optimistic that seems). And if we keep fighting primarily to acquire the benefits of a competition that cuts millions of people out of the running at birth, and then denies them dignity, whose fault is it that the benefits we're trying to latch onto  are so scarce and hard to get? If we fought for making the resources less scarce for everyone, wouldn't our children live in a better, more secure country, no matter where they could afford to live?