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Socialism the Failed Idea That Never Dies

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Socialism the Failed Idea That Never Dies SOCIALISM THE FAILED IDEA THAT NEVER DIES KRISTIAN NIEMIETZ Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies SOCIALISM: THE FAILED IDEA THAT NEVER DIES KRISTIAN NIEMIETZ First published in Great Britain in 2019 by The Institute of Economic Affairs 2 Lord North Street Westminster London SW1P 3LB in association with London Publishing Partnership Ltd www.londonpublishingpartnership.co.uk The mission of the Institute of Economic Affairs is to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems. Copyright © The Institute of Economic Affairs 2019 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (elec- tronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-255-36771-4 (interactive PDF) Many IEA publications are translated into languages other than English or are reprinted. Permission to translate or to reprint should be sought from the Director General at the address above. Typeset in Kepler by T&T Productions Ltd www.tandtproductions.com The red flag of international Socialism waves from the palace and from all the public buildings of Berlin. […] [O]ur long years of toil and battling for the righteous cause of the people are now crowned with success. The old rotten regime, with its […] system of plundering the working classes, has crumbled to pieces. And for the benefit of my children, and children's children, I intend to set down, in a humble way, some little account of the beginning of this new reign of brotherhood and universal philanthropy. Eugen Richter Pictures of the Socialistic Future (1893: Chapter 1) An order has just been issued to reduce the bread rations of the entire population by one half, and to do away with the meat rations altogether. […] I find I shall henceforth be no longer able to give the same full account of events as they happen. The twelve hours day comes into force tomorrow, so I shall then not have much time for writ- ing. […] I notice that I am regarded with such increasing suspicion that a search might be made, and my papers confiscated at any moment. Eugen Richter Pictures of the Socialistic Future (1893: Chapter 32) CONTENTS About the author x Summary xi Tables and figures xviii 1 The enduring appeal of socialism 1 Introduction: socialism is popular 1 The pervasiveness of socialist assumptions 10 Socialism and social democracy 17 A lazy straw man? 21 Not for a lack of trying 34 The straw men that were once alive 54 2 The Soviet Union under Stalin: ‘A whole nation marched behind a vision’ 59 Soviet socialism 59 Stalin’s pilgrims 63 Remnants of Soviet apologetics today 86 Conclusion 94 3 China under Mao Tse-Tung: ‘A revolutionary regime must get rid of a certain number of individuals that threaten it’ 100 Maoist socialism 100 vii Contents Mao’s pilgrims 102 Remnants of Maoist apologetics today 112 Conclusion 114 4 Cuba under Fidel Castro: ‘The beginning of building the new man’ 116 ¡Hasta Siempre, Comandante! 116 Castro’s pilgrims 120 Why is Cuba different? 128 5 North Korea under Kim Il Sung: ‘A messiah rather than a dictator’ 132 North Korean socialism 132 Kim Il Sung’s pilgrims 133 Remnants of North Korea apologetics today 146 6 Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge: ‘The kingdom of justice’ 155 7 Albania under Enver Hoxha: ‘The working class is in power’ 177 8 East Germany under the SED: ‘The organised might of the working class’ 184 East German socialism 184 Western admirers of the GDR: the early years 190 Western admirers of the GDR: the later years 198 Remnants of GDR apologetics today 205 A note on pro-GDR revisionism 212 viii Contents 9 Venezuela under Hugo Chávez: ‘A different, and a better way of doing things. It’s called socialism’ 217 Socialism of the twenty-first century 217 Chávez’s pilgrims 232 After the zenith 240 Coming full circle 247 The aftermath: not real socialism – again 253 10 Why socialist ideas persist 260 Haidt’s social intuitionist model and Caplan’s theory of ‘rational irrationality’ 260 Intuitive anti-capitalism, or anti-capitalism as a default position 278 The Gary Lineker fallacy 287 Conclusion 293 11 Epilogue An alternative history: real socialism is being tried 304 References 360 About the IEA 374 ix ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr Kristian Niemietz is Head of Political Economy at the Institute of Economic Affairs. He studied economics at the Humboldt University Berlin and the University of Sala- manca, and political economy at King’s College London. Kristian previously worked at the Berlin-based Institute for Free Enterprise (IUF) and taught economics at King’s College London. He is the author of the books A New Under- standing of Poverty (2011), Redefining the Poverty Debate (2012) and Universal Healthcare Without the NHS (2016). x SUMMARY Socialism is popular in the UK – not just among students, but also among people in their 30s and 40s. This is con- firmed by survey after survey. Surveys also show that sup- port for socialism in general terms is matched by support for a broad range of individual policies that could reason- ably be described as socialist. Curiously, support for socialism in the abstract is not matched by positive perceptions of any actual example, contemporary or historical, of a socialist system in action. People with a rose-tinted view of, for example, the former Warsaw Pact countries, of Maoist China, of North Vietnam or North Korea are a small minority in Britain today. So- cialists have successfully distanced themselves from the over two dozen failed attempts to build a socialist society. Their claim that these systems were never ‘really’ socialist, but represented a distortion of the socialist ideal, has be- come conventional wisdom. Today, holding the failures of, for example, the former Soviet Union against a contempo- rary socialist is considered crass and boorish. Yet while socialists distance themselves from contem- porary and historical examples of socialism, they usually struggle to explain what exactly they would do differ- ently. Socialists tend to escape into abstraction, and talk about lofty aspirations rather than tangible institutional xi Summary characteristics. Those aspirations (for example, ‘democra- tising the economy’), however, are nothing new. They are the same aspirations that motivated earlier socialist pro- jects. Socialism has never fulfilled those aspirations, but this is not for a lack of trying. The not-real-socialism defence is only ever invoked retrospectively, namely, when a socialist experiment has already been widely discredited. As long as a socialist experiment is in its prime, almost nobody disputes its so- cialist credentials. On the contrary: practically all socialist regimes have gone through honeymoon periods, during which they were enthusiastically praised and held up as role models by plenty of prominent Western intellectuals. It is only after the event (i.e. once they have become an em- barrassment for the socialist cause) that their version of socialism is retroactively redefined as ‘unreal’. This pattern started in the 1930s, when thousands of Western intellectuals went on political pilgrimages to the Soviet Union. Even though the atrocities of that regime were widely known – or at least knowable – in the West, the Soviet Union was widely held up to be a worker-run grassroots democracy in the making. When ‘Stalin-mania’ later fell out of fashion, most of Stalin’s Western admirers did not officially renounce their position, but simply fell silent on the issue. In the 1960s, the same thing happened again, except that this time, Cuba, North Vietnam, and above all, Maoist China, became the utopias du jour. Echoing the earlier wave of pilgrimages to the Soviet Union, Western intellectuals flocked to these places in large numbers and returned full xii Summary of praise. The new utopias were presented as an alternative to Western capitalism on the one hand, but also to the dis- credited socialism of the Soviet Union and its allies on the other hand. The ‘this-time-is-completely-different’ is not remotely new: since the 1960s, Western intellectuals have explicitly defined all new socialist experiments in opposi- tion to earlier, failed attempts. When Cuba, Vietnam and Maoist China fell out of fash- ion in the 1970s, Albania and Cambodia took their place. The scale of the pilgrimages was tiny this time, but the basic pattern was the same: Western admirers claimed that while earlier socialist experiments had been cor- rupted, this time, a genuine workers’ and peasants’ dem- ocracy would emerge. Due to their extreme isolationism, these countries were not tainted by associations with dis- credited versions of socialism. The two most obvious natural experiments of socialism are the splitting of Korea and Germany into a socialist and a broadly capitalist part. It is clear today that these experi- ments have produced conclusive results – but this was not always so clear, and, as long as the jury was out, plenty of Western intellectuals sympathised with the socialist ra- ther than the capitalist parts of these countries. The most recent example of the above-described pat- tern – enthusiastic endorsement, followed by retroactive disowning – is Venezuela. ‘Venezuela-mania’ started around 2005, and once again the central claim was that this time would be completely different: ‘21st century socialism’ would be a democratic bottom-up socialism, which had nothing in common with the authoritarian xiii Summary top-down socialism of yesteryear.
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