Is Robin Hood a Socialist?





There's was a piece the other day on the New York Times' website about the growing movement - particularly in Europe - in favor of a so-called "Robin Hood tax".  These are tiny taxes on certain financial transactions, particularly the risky ones that generate large sums of money, seemingly out of thin air.  The proceeds of the taxes, as the name suggests, are then used to support social programs.  The idea has some high-profile supporters, such as Bill Gates and Angela Merkel, and not surprisingly, some powerful opponents in the US and UK.

I made the decision not to talk too much about current events on this blog, because every post would quickly become an incoherent rant, but this presents an opportunity to talk about a Disney movie, which is one of the things I said I was going to do (check out my read on The Little Mermaid here).  It raised the question in my mind: is the Robin Hood we were presented as children, the fox in the green hat, a Socialist?

Let's get one thing out of the way first: in the last three years "socialist" has climbed the charts to be the third most abused word in the English language (the first is your/you're, second goes to there/they're/their).  So we better establish what we're talking about.

Not all socialists follow him.

Socialism has more flavors than Baskin-Robbins, but the fundamental belief is in collective ownership of the means of production.  That can take on a rigidly statist approach, as in the Soviet Union or today's Venezuela, or a more grassroots approach, exemplified by such arrangements as industrial trade unions or experiments in communal living.  Socialists, to one degree or another, reject the idea of hierarchical ownership of the means of production, which tends to produce class division and unfairly concentrate wealth in the hands of an aristocracy or oligarchy.  Some watered-down forms of Socialism - such as the so-called Nordic model - allow private property and enterprise, but reserve certain sectors of the economy for state control, like health care and to a lesser extent, housing, on the theory that these are too important to the well-being of society as a whole to be allowed to float unprotected on the wine-dark sea of the open market.

Things that are not socialist include cap-and-trade, the Kyoto protocols, the department of education, Barack Obama, or Obamacare (if it were really socialist, it wouldn't force people to buy insurance from private insurers, the government would just take over the whole mess and allow private insurers to go belly-up - which is what some of us hoped for at the outset).  Questioning whether all those Goldman Sachs guys really need bonuses that big - tax sheltered - and why GE managed to not pay any taxes whatever, is also not, in itself, socialist, unless you're willing to call Thomas Paine a pinko:

All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.

So, what does all this have to do with Robin Hood?  More specifically, what does all this have to do with Robin Hood, which was released by Disney in theaters in 1973, and on video in 1986, thereafter becoming one of my favorite childhood movies ever. I was a sucker for anything with swords.

Do I really need to summarize the story?  Robin Hood robs from the rich and gives to the poor, though the only rich person we ever actually see him rob is Prince John, there are no other wealthy people in evidence.  The source of the Prince's wealth, it is made clear, is heavy taxation of the people of Nottingham, who are universally cute, kind and, understandably, a little down.  Robin, by contrast, is chipper and an advocate of British chin-up-itude as he distributes little bags of coin around town, which never seem to actually do anybody any good.

Coming as it did just a few years after the Great Society and the general expansion of the social safety net, it's hard not to see the whole enterprise as an indictment of government as a bunch of incompetent kleptocrats.  Prince John is a barely functional neurotic who regresses to thumb sucking at every setback, and the corpulent Sheriff of Nottingham proves his villainous bona fides by stealing a child's birthday money.  No mention is made of the taxes being used for any purpose other than enriching the Prince, he's certainly not building roads or endowing hospitals.  The anti-tax, anti-government message is simple, easy to understand, and clear even to the seven and eight year-olds at which the movie is targeted.

Granted, the Prince's self-enrichment would be historically accurate, medieval aristocrats thought nothing of using the wealth they extorted from the peasantry on wild personal extravagance, but the target audience wouldn't know that.  Kids also wouldn't understand the difference between taxes used by a corrupt government to line the pockets of bureaucrats and taxes used to build schools, roads, and keep grandpa out of the workhouse.  The connection between the money the mean old sheriff steals from the cute bunny and the money that mommy and daddy pay to Uncle Sam is the takeaway.  Disney was indoctrinating a whole new generation of Libertarians with this movie.

But... What about Robin?  He's out there redistributing wealth, right?  That's pretty much the definition of a socialist, right?  Well...sort of.

The interesting thing about the money that Robin redistributes is that no one ever seems to spend it.  It's symbolic, rather than actual, capital.  Robin is humiliating the Prince by stealing from him, but the economic lot of the people he is supposedly helping is not changed one jot over the course of the film.  In spite of the fact that this Robin actually has a British accent, he's a very American type of hero.  He's a trickster who takes the air out of a corrupt power structure, who provides token, though on the basis of the Disney Robin Hood, not very effective resistance.  (In the film it is the return of King Richard, and not any direct action on the part of Robin, that puts an end to Prince John's tyranny.)  More than anything, he makes me think of the Bostonians who dumped tea into the harbor: it was a great symbolic gesture, and made a clear point, but had little real direct impact, even on the importers of the tea.  He may seem to stand for the populist cause , but he's clear about his allegiance to the "rightful" king Richard, just as undemocratic and elitist as his crafty brother John.

Even Robin and Little John are ambivalent about their role; just take a look at this dialogue from early in the movie:

Little John:  You know Robin, I've been thinking: are we good guys or bad guys?  I mean, our robbing the rich to feed the poor...
Robin: Rob? That's a naughty word, we never rob.  We just sort of borrow a bit from those who can afford it.
Little John: Borrow?  Boy are we in debt.

Put that dialogue into the mouths of a pair of congressmen...not very flattering, is it?

Still the best.

On re-watching this Robin Hood as an adult, I find it disappointing.  I'm not crazy about the message, and after a strong first act, it kind of devolves into a bunch of animals in medieval costumes, running back and forth across the screen.  The best film version of the Robin Hood legend remains the 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynne and Olivia deHavilland.  It contains a joyful Robin, beautiful Maid Marian, and a villain whose villainy extends beyond raising the income bracket too high.  It also contains one of the best sword fights ever committed to film.

So, at bottom, is Robin Hood a socialist?  No, he's not, but the legend raises questions about income inequality, taxation, and the nature of power that we still haven't answered satisfactorily to this day.

Note: I need to give a shout-out to Charlie Pierce at Esquire for using that Tom Paine quote earlier this week, which I never would have found on my own.  Actually, shout-out to Charlie Pierce for writing so eloquently what I'm often thinking.

Also note: I have not seen the newest Robin Hood movie with Russel Crowe, or the BBC series, so my perspective filmic versions of the legend is not complete.