You Already Believe This

Think about the library. The building is publicly funded. The books are publicly owned. Anyone can walk in and borrow them, no means test, no proof that you’ve earned it. The assumption behind the whole thing is that access to knowledge is something the collective provides to its members simply because they’re members. The whole model, right there.

We don’t usually call this socialism. We call it the library.

Because the same logic runs through a lot of what we take for granted. You walk through a public park: land held in common, available to anyone who wants to use it. You call an ambulance: someone comes, and the bill doesn’t follow you home. Your street catches fire: nobody asks whether you can afford the truck. You need to know something: Wikipedia exists, built by thousands of contributors, given away freely, owned by no one.

Each of these is a small argument for the same underlying idea — that some things should be held in common and available to everyone, regardless of what they can pay. That the collective can absorb risk and cost in ways individuals cannot. That there are some questions you shouldn’t have to answer alone.

None of this is radical. It’s the position most people already hold, in practice, every time they use these things. The library card is a socialist document. The park is socialist land.

The word “socialism” has been made to sound extreme. In the United States especially, decades of Cold War framing attached it to authoritarianism, to gulags, to failure. The market became natural; collective provision became suspect. “Socialism” became something you could end a conversation with.

But the word precedes the Soviet Union by a long way. And the practice precedes the theory by longer still. People have always pooled resources, tended commons, and organised mutual support. Before there were libraries, there were lending circles. Before there were public parks, there were village greens. The instinct toward collective provision is not foreign to human society. It’s one of its oldest features.

What happened in the twentieth century is that one particular, authoritarian expression of socialism failed visibly and catastrophically, and the entire tradition got collapsed into it. This was convenient for people who didn’t want the tradition examined too carefully. But it’s not honest.

The NHS is not the Soviet Union. The library is not a gulag. The question “should some things be held in common?” is not the same question as “should the state control everything?” The point is to keep those questions separate.

I’ve been drawn to Buddhism partly because of how it treats interdependence — as a description of how things are, not a political position. There is no separate self. My welfare depends on the welfare of the people around me, on the systems that sustain me, on choices made by people I’ll never meet. This isn’t sentiment. It’s structure.

Buddhist ethics asks these questions at the individual level — does your work cause harm? Are your actions honest? — but the ground they stand on is collective. You can’t answer them honestly while pretending you’re alone.

Mutual aid gets at this in practice. Not charity — charity maintains a hierarchy between giver and recipient. Mutual aid is horizontal: we take care of each other because we’re each other’s context. Because the separation between your wellbeing and mine is less absolute than we’ve been taught to think.

I don’t want to pretend that everything called socialism has worked, or that collective ownership is automatically better than private ownership in every case. It isn’t. The left’s record is complicated enough that anyone who ignores that isn’t arguing honestly. The question isn’t whether collective provision is always right. The question is whether we’re willing to examine our own instincts about when it is.

Because here’s what I keep noticing: when someone proposes cutting the library, or privatising the NHS, or charging for the ambulance, most people resist. They haven’t worked through the political economy of public goods. They just understand, without needing it articulated, that something important would be lost. That these things aren’t just services. They’re a way of saying: you’re not alone in this.

Trust that instinct.

Libraries and parks and emergency services are the easy cases — the places where collective provision already won. But the same logic applies elsewhere: housing, childcare, energy, the digital infrastructure that an increasing part of life runs on. Each of those is a place where the collective-provision question is live and contested and usually losing.

You don’t have to call yourself a socialist to believe that some things belong to all of us. But you might notice that you already do.