Interestingly, Upton Sinclair was a socialist before the cold war and the eventual fall of the USSR. This Wikipedia article inspired me to go and find a copy of Upton Sinclair on the Soviet Union and give it a read.
It is interesting and quite a nuanced view that stood up rather well to the test of time. Although, doubly interesting, reasonable and articulate men could understand that Communism wasn't all that wonderful but really didn't grasp the threat posed by it as an ideology. Socialists have a blind spot for how people acting out of self interest is the only foundation for a fair society.
It's a reply to an open letter by Eugene Lyons titled 'The Terror in Russia' written at a time of peak mass terror.
A bit from Sinclair's reply:
This you describe as "apologetics for mass brutality, official sadism and totalitarian suppression of elementary human rights." These are powerful and all-inclusive words, and I think they fail to allow for the opening of hundreds of thousands of schools and the education of a hundred million illiterate people. I could give a long list of improvements in Russia which I think you fail to allow for in your letter to me. You point out the fact that I have not visited Russia, and suggest that this indicates my "panicky fear of facing the facts."
It hasn't stood the test of time at all, Lyons was right on this point and Sinclair was woefully wrong. Sinclair took another decade or two to recognize this.
We could reword it as "a fair society is when incentives exist such that self interest is sufficiently aligned with collective welfare", but what's so funny about it? It's a rather obvious observation.
Hegemony shapes discourse in its image. I believe the issue is not which ideology ‘truly’ affirms some self evident notion of self interest, but which ideology can successfully assert its own notion of self interest as self evident.
> Socialists have a blind spot for how people acting out of self interest is the only foundation for a fair society.
I would phrase this a bit differently. Socialists[] have a blind spot for self interest, but ignoring it does not lead to a fair society. Expecting all people to ignore their self interest is a pipe dream. Any such society will fall prey to people that do act egoistically. Which, indeed, is how communist societies tend to devolve into authoritarianism.
[] Yes, yes, it's perfectly possible to play the No True Scotsman game with this word. If you use a different definition of socialism, that's fine. You know the type of person that is meant, and you can mentally replace the word with whatever you prefer. No need for boring and pointless word games about semantics.
It is interesting and quite a nuanced view that stood up rather well to the test of time. Although, doubly interesting, reasonable and articulate men could understand that Communism wasn't all that wonderful but really didn't grasp the threat posed by it as an ideology. Socialists have a blind spot for how people acting out of self interest is the only foundation for a fair society.