So, I’m a pretty huge nerd, and I’m utterly addicted to listening to NPR’s Planet Money podcast, where people report fascinating (to me) stories about economics. In their latest episode, they interviewed a real live socialist theorist, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, about whether the United States was actually becoming a socialist nation under President Obama, as republicans are fond of saying. Crazily enough, he didn’t think so.
During the course of the interview, he laid out the basic guiding principles of socialism. These, according to him, are in short that instead of all decisions coming from a small group of CEO types directing thousands of workers, the thousands of workers all get a democratic say in what work is done, how much, when, where, and what is done with the profits. The reporters asked this guy if in a hypothetical universe socialists won huge at the ballot box, and controlled a majority of seats in congress and elected him president, how would he go about implementing socialism in the U.S.? He responded that he would in the near term create a new Works Progress Administration (WPA) as FDR did to try to alleviate the Great Depression, where the government would sponsor various groups to do things that were beneficial to society to put people back to work (build roads/infrastructure, take care of/create national parks, bring arts and theatre to the masses, etc.), and create them using the socialist model, where the people doing the tasks would have input as to what kind of work would be done, and use these as a model that could compete with the capitalist model. He was confident that people would work harder and be more committed to the projects in the socialist model, where they have a real stake in the work they’re doing.
I couldn’t help but think two things listening to his description of this imaginary future WPA:
1) The Peace Corps is sorta already fulfilling his vision, in a way. Some decisions are made by a few technocrats and managers above the volunteers, of course: the decision to create programs in a country, and the broad goals of those programs. But to paraphrase Emily, the only member of my group who came into Nicaragua having already done two years of PC service in Africa, our service is what we make of it. We decide, to a large degree, how much we work, where we work, what kind of work we do, and who we work with. We’re generally expected to do 15 hours per week in the institutos, but that’s a really general guideline. I’m free to do double that (and did, for awhile). We decide when we plan, teach, and make materials. We’re all free to take on other projects outside of the schools we work in, or recruit new counterpart teachers near us we think would be good to work with, or drop teachers who aren’t working well with us. English teachers can work with women’s groups to educate them about HIV/AIDS, or paint world maps for their schools, or work with hammock-weavers to better market their hammocks (miss you, Claire). It’s up to us what we do specifically to fulfill the general goal of helping the Nicaraguan community, and the more specifically enumerated goals we have in building better Nica English teachers.
We also have some really awesome bosses who take our feedback seriously, and change things for the future based on our suggestions (about where to put new volunteers, how to train them, and what we need from future training sessions, to name a few cool things they rely on us for). They support us in almost any secondary project we can think up, and give us direction to see them to fruition. Contrast this with working in a public school, where everything you do is much more tightly controlled and prescribed, and hard to change.
2) I can’t help but think this might have something to do with the satisfaction I feel doing my work here (I wrote a whole entry about this last semester). Because I have more say in how I do my work, I am, just like the socialist professor suggested I would be, more invested in it. I feel a lot less like a replaceable cog in this enormous machine, and more like I can break out of the mold and do things that I think are awesome, like run an English song competition, supervise and plan for two English summer camps, and turn a wall of my school into a world map (all pending projects of mine). I wrote at the time that the stress I felt in the states melted away down here; I didn’t pick up so much at the time that I’m also a lot more empowered down here, but I am. To be sure, there’s a huge volume difference in what I did in the States and what I do in Nicaragua, which certainly helps make my secondary projects possible and makes my life more enjoyable (as I noted), but the collective camaraderie we have down here, and the control we have over how we spend our time are important as well.
I’d like to take this opportunity to reiterate what’s in the disclaimer of my blog, which is that I do not speak for the U.S. government or any other organization or people, who would probably not appreciate the characterization of themselves as “socialists,” especially at the present moment in our political discourse, when that word is so negatively charged. It is, like Jay-Z said, “just my thoughts, right or wrong, just what I was feeling at the time.” And I think that thinking of socialism in this way, as meaning workers are empowered (to an extent) to decide what kind of work they do, where, when, how and who with, is much more useful and positive than thinking of it as Stalinism, where millions of people get killed and thrown in gulags, and the government rations food and censors the media and centrally plans agriculture and all these outmoded ideas and concepts. I also think it makes it a completely inoffensive and sensible ideology. So color me red, but from now on, I’m going to look to work for organizations where the workers have more control over the means of production.
*EDIT* See, David Brooks knows exactly what I'm talking about: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/opinion/24brooks.html?ref=davidbrooks
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