Imagine No Possessions

“Imagine no possessions” is the one part of John Lennon’s song Imagine that should resonate with everyone, because it’s so simple to imagine.

Very literally, there were times in my life — and I think most of us 80s children can agree with this — when we struggled to have the clothes we needed and the food to put on our table. I’m guessing a lot of millennials and Gen-Zers are in the same situation today, and more by the second, given the Republican Congress’s decisions not to rein in the devastating, failed tax and tariff policies that we already attempted just before the Great Depression. Great job, idiots (speaking to Republican Congress, not you, reader).

But this isn’t, I believe, what Lennon was referring to in this song.

I’m going to get weird and a bit educational, all at the same time, because it’s this phrase, mentality, and advocacy that I believe got John Lennon shot. And honestly, I think it was the misinterpretation and deliberate maligning of his message that got him killed. It’s about time we have a grown-up conversation about this, and I’m hoping that the more recent generations no longer fear the socialist bogeyman. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I guess views and shares will reveal a lot about current beliefs, so let’s get started.

Let’s talk Socialism!

I have a copy of The Social Contract by Rousseau on my shelf as I type this, the opening salvo to socialist thinking. I also own a copy of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Friedrich Engels. I’ve read the Communist Manifesto, wherein Marx and Engels discuss Communism at length about the plight of the workers, and another book called Communism that discusses the rise and fall of Communism around the world, and points out the corruptions that happened along the way to promote the downfall of these efforts.

Don’t worry, though. I’m not a socialist, just a philosophy and economy geek. These are next to my books on Greek Philosophy, the Politics of Aristotle, and Sun Tzu’s Art of War. My point is not to brag, but only to establish my credentials as someone who has spent a great deal of time examining the issue over the course of my lifetime. So I’m going to set some concepts straight that seem to keep getting misrepresented.

For so many years, I believed that socialism was concisely summarized by the poster in my sixth-grade classroom of the different systems of government. You may have seen it; it shows cartoon frames of a farmer and cows representing different types of economic systems. The capitalism block shows a farmer selling milk to another person, and says that in capitalism, you obtain a cow, milk it, then sell the milk to someone else. This gives you continual income. In the communist frame, it says that you obtain a cow, the government takes the cow, and then sells you the milk. It’s obvious which of these two systems is preferable, given that straw-man comparison. But in this example, they leave out an important fact. (Aside from that Communism and Socialism are two distinctly different things; both talk about the workers controlling the means of production, but communism is brought about through violent revolution and requires a certain amount of deception to achieve.) And that fact is that the cow in this image is personal property, in general, and this framing leads unambiguously to the conclusion that under socialism, the government owns everything.

That’s simply not the case. And “no belongings” doesn’t mean absolutely, one-hundred percent, no belongings either. It doesn’t mean, for example, that your government owns your toothbrush. That would be ludicrous on its face. In fact, most household goods don’t count as the type of property that would require common ownership. Very strictly, the means of production means the means of production. And you can see why that’s so once I describe what the means of production means. (Intentionally playing around with the word “means” there, hope it’s not too irritating. I am an author after all.)

The means of production, translated, I interpret as “the infrastructure in place to package, distribute, and sell the goods produced.” Why would this need to be owned by the workers?

Well, look around.

In our society, we have the capitalists (like 8 of them) who technically own most of America. Important distinction here: you are likely not a capitalist. You are a worker.

This means that capitalists can do things like pay starvation wages to people who are working for them. Why would they do that? Because they are not the workers. Why would they care if they are paying starvation wages when it doesn’t impact them? Kind of like expecting the Republicans in Congress to care about taking away healthcare for others, right? They don’t care. It doesn’t impact them. Imagine asking the question before the workers whether they should get starvation wages. How many workers would vote for themselves not to be able to feed their children?

This is why it matters whether the workers control the means of production. What does this have to do with “no possessions”? Simple. Instead of one person owning stuff (stuff being the means of production) outright, who is not invested in the workers other than giving them as little as possible to get them to show up for work (capitalism), the workers would own the stuff and collectively decide how they are compensated for themselves (socialism).

That’s it.

And if you think about it that way, socialism feels a lot like democracy, right? Whereas, alternative systems like capitalism that we live in have driven a wedge between the rich and the poor so wide that many poor have lost hope, which is leading to our current bout of civil unrest, and led to the unfortunate election of Donald Josephine Trump to the presidency, on promises of “fixing it.”

We all see how well that’s going.

Maybe it’s time to give, perhaps not 100% socialism, but perhaps social democracy, a try? Maybe it’s time to support a system of government and economy that helps the many, and not the few? Trust me, the Broligarchs don’t need your money, but boy do they crave it…