How I Learned To Teach Socialism at Berkeley

Fairness looks different when you’re the one giving things up

"Girls, Come to the Tractor!" by Pál György, c. 1950s. Hungarian National Museum / Europeana, Public Domain.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s appeal to young progressives is as unsurprising as a lecture on intersectionality at Berkeley. Indeed, his plans to offer free public transportation, universal housing, and government grocery stores resonate through college classrooms across the country where equity is routinely invoked in the name of social justice.

For nearly half a century, I’ve been teaching social policy at the University of California, Berkeley to students who arrive with these and other predictable opinions on issues of the day. In 2025, they’re all for forgiving student loans, firmly against privatizing Social Security, and eager to expand rent control. Work requirements for welfare recipients strike them as unjust and welfare benefits for undocumented immigrants as a moral imperative. When it comes to guaranteed incomes, they’re ready to sign on yesterday.

These views are less the product of critical reflection than the expression of youthful idealism nourished in the social sciences and humanities by progressive professors, whose tenure shields them from the destructive consequences of social engineering. Wielding the power of language, many faculty cast capitalism as red in tooth and claw: privileging wealth over need, individualism over solidarity, and the market over social welfare. It doesn’t hurt that such convictions also attract grant funding and publishing opportunities in the softer sciences. The classroom becomes not just a site of learning, but a greenhouse for cultivating the seeds of democratic socialist activism.

Ideals Without Costs

Few of my students give serious consideration to the costs of generous welfare transfers or where the limits of redistribution might lie. Why would they? Most have paid little or nothing in taxes. Many have received student loans, scholarships, health insurance subsidies, and food stamps. The redistributive state has been their benefactor, not their burden.

When they speak of “social justice,” it is from the lived experience of benefits that come without costs. Their faith in the fairness of redistribution derives from the conventional view of equity, which demands that everyone deserves roughly the same share of society’s wealth. Aristotle characterized this egalitarian perspective as “numerical equality,” an attractive but flawed vision that fails to reward individual contributions to the creation of worldly goods. In contrast, he argued that distributive justice was based upon “proportional equality,” which involved differential rewards for merit—in essence, exploiting the language of equality to endorse the justice of inequality.

From Theory to Practice

Recently, I wondered how I might bring the egalitarian and meritarian views of distributive justice down from the clouds of abstraction into the tangible world of consequential experience. After weeks spent analyzing social policies and their underlying assumptions, costs, and benefits, I posed a thought experiment in the final class of the semester: I asked the students to imagine that they were founding members of a small agrarian commune. Each family started with identical resources: 50 acres of fertile farmland, a few animals, seeds, and basic tools. They then had to decide how to distribute the harvest. Three principles were on the table:

1. Egalitarian — Pool everything and divide it equally.

2. Need-based — Allocate according to health and appetite.

3. Meritocratic — Each family keeps the fruits of its labor, contributing a modest tithe for those unable to work because of illness or misfortune.

As one might expect, after some deliberation a consensus emerged in favor of the egalitarian option. It was just, they said. It fostered solidarity. No one should suffer for being weaker or less efficient than their neighbor.

Then came the real test. If theoretically as farmers they would be inclined to redistribute the fruits of their labor so that the community’s members all had an equal share of the harvest, in practice would they be disposed to engage in similar behavior to advance solidarity and social justice in the classroom? Would they be willing to redistribute their grades on the final exam? It was a classroom experiment in applied socialism that offered an opportunity for experiential learning.

I asked if they would like to participate in a communal grading pact, voluntarily, of course. There would be no penalties, no incentives, and full confidentiality. Those who wished to join the “commune” were invited to email me before the exam and would receive the group’s average score. An “A” student might lose a few points; a struggling classmate might gain a few. Together, they would create an egalitarian community—one that traded individual contribution for collective welfare in grade point averages.

Although a simple test with low stakes, the communal grading option highlighted the tangible consequences of redistribution. The opportunity to experience these consequences firsthand offered a meritarian challenge to the egalitarian perspective on social justice, at least as far as marginal academic rewards were concerned. As the emails came in, the egalitarian consensus withered; only about half the class joined the commune.

Grappling with the tension between the principle of communal wellbeing and individual self-interest, with small but still real consequences at stake, proved a sobering experience for many. The point of this experiment wasn’t to expose hypocrisy, but to encourage critical reflection on the normative assumptions about equality and social justice, which are rarely questioned within the intellectual bubble of campus life. These were intelligent, well-meaning students, whose embrace of socialist ideals was sincere though largely theoretical, shaped in an environment where scarcity is abstract and trade-offs are academic. For most, the costs of idealism are safely deferred until after graduation.

The Wider Lesson

In an age when campus culture cultivates moral certainty over intellectual humility, the exercise in experiential learning serves to remind students that policies have trade-offs, social values compete with one another, virtue often comes with personal sacrifice, and that fairness looks different when you’re the one on the giving side of the redistribution.

Welfare generosity can cushion the poor but may also discourage work. Rent control helps low-income tenants but inevitably shrinks the housing supply, ultimately raising prices for many. Forgiving student loans relieves debtors but transfers costs to taxpayers, some of whom could not afford college because they didn’t want to assume the debt. I introduced the egalitarian experiment to test the convictions of social justice warriors who see the world through a Manichaean lens of oppressed vs. oppressor, rich vs. poor—a comforting perspective that allows for no ambiguity.

Which brings us back to Mayor Mamdani. Speaking the language of social justice, equity, free public transportation, rent control, and government groceries, he strikes a chord with this generation of college students. He sounds like their activist professors. Playing on their untested values, he doesn’t talk much about what things cost or who pays for them, beyond making vague references to billionaires—many of whom are already packing their bags for Florida. Making no mention of shared sacrifice, he is the ideal political leader for a generation long on ideals and short on experiential learning.

After all, flirtation with socialism is exciting—as long as someone else picks up the tab. But in the world beyond the gates of Berkeley and other college campuses, ideals meet limits, trade-offs, and unintended effects. A teacher’s job is not to quash their students’ idealism, but to inculcate a respect for evidence and a disposition to question prevailing assumptions.

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