A specter is haunting America—the specter of socialism. Suddenly, almost out of nowhere, we encounter a mélange of strange socialist characters—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sanders—and a whole political party that seems magnetically drawn toward the socialist camp. This development by itself is surpassingly strange, because socialism is arguably the most discredited idea in history.
True, many big ideas, and their corresponding ways of organizing society, have ended up on the ash heap of history. Monarchy, for instance, is gone, surviving today only in cosmetic—which is to say, constitutional—form. Feudalism exists in some form in backward countries, but for us in the West it can only be seen in history’s rearview mirror.
Even so, monarchy and feudalism have never been fully discredited. From the beginning of time, there have been good kings and bad kings. At some point in history—dating to around the time of the American Revolution—most people in the West decided that they didn’t want to live under kings, not even under good kings. They wanted to govern themselves, through some form of representative government. And so monarchy was transcended without ever being completely refuted. Similarly, the feudal system was basically transcended by the capitalist system, as Marx himself recognized. Feudalism couldn’t compete with capitalism, so feudalism was defeated without being discredited on its own terms. Feudal societies, like monarchies, “worked” for many centuries before their eventual demise.
None of this can be said about socialism. It is an utterly discredited system of ideas, like slavery, and it was discredited in a much shorter period. Slavery lasted for centuries—even millennia—before it was recognized as a thoroughly wicked and tyrannical regime of human exploitation. Socialism, which dates back to 1917, when Lenin founded the world’s first socialist state, has had a much shorter shelf life. It too collapsed across the world because the people who lived under it considered it to be a form of slavery.
We see the connection between socialism and slavery in all the important works on socialism. Friedrich Hayek’s critique of socialism is appropriately titled The Road to Serfdom. George Orwell depicted the tyrannical dimension of socialism in his two immortal novels, Animal Farm and 1984. Using the techniques of both fiction and nonfiction, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in a series of works—The Gulag Archipelago, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—depicted Soviet socialism as a vast network of slave camps stretching from Europe to the farthest reaches of Asia.
Slavery in its classic form has been abolished worldwide, although enslavement in other forms—sex trafficking for instance—continues as a gruesome relic of this barbaric practice. Even so, no serious person today could advocate the return of slavery. How ridiculous it would be to hear someone say, “The failures of slavery were all failures of implementation. This time we’re really gonna make it work!” Yet here we have socialism in America attempting a comeback, and on precisely those terms: this time we’re gonna get it right. Serious people advocate it; there is a sustained cultural push to apotheosize it; a major political party is pushing aggressively toward it. How is this possible? Apparently socialism means never having to say you’re sorry.
Socialism has made everyday existence a living hell nearly everywhere it has been tried, all over the world. Let’s not forget that within about a century since Marx wrote, and less than half a century since the Bolshevik Revolution, some 60 percent of the world’s people were living under governments that embraced some form of socialism. At one time, Joshua Muravchik writes, “it was the most popular political idea ever invented, arguably the most popular idea of any kind about how life should be lived or society organized.”2
The biggest socialist experiment was the Soviet bloc, an orbit of countries including the Soviet Union, Poland, Yugoslavia, Albania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and East Germany. Prior to the Soviet occupation of its eastern region, Germany imposed its own distinct version of socialism, National Socialism or Nazism, from 1933 to 1945. In Asia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, North Korea and China experimented with socialism. In South America, the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Venezuela tried it. Most of Africa went socialist in the aftermath of colonialism: Angola, Ghana, Tanzania, Benin, Mali, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe. I count here 25 experiments in socialism, all ending in unmitigated disaster.
The worst forms of socialism proved not only totalitarian but also murderous to an unprecedented degree. In the Soviet Union alone, socialist regimes killed some 20 million of their own citizens and enslaved tens of millions of others. The Chinese socialists, in the period known as Mao’s Cultural Revolution, killed another 20–25 million. The Nazis murdered in comparable numbers, including Jews and gypsies and other occupied peoples, Poles, Russians, Eastern Europeans and others. Orwell’s description of the future from 1984 seems appropriate to apply to socialism here: “A boot stamping on a human face.”3
Socialists today disavow this historical record, insisting that these were authoritarian forms of socialism that they have no intention of copying. While socialism may have been the economic program of Communism and early fascism, modern socialists seek to dispense with the tyranny and merely keep the economic program. I’ll examine the legitimacy of this selective borrowing later, but here it’s worth stressing that socialism wasn’t merely a political failure; it was also an economic failure.
Orwell somehow missed this. Interestingly, neither of his two novels offers an economic critique of socialism. There is no economic problem in Animal Farm; the only problem is that the pigs seize power. In 1984, the ruling party creates poverty and scarcity to keep people in line. Great as he is, Orwell confines himself to a political critique; he exposes the totalitarian tendency of socialism. But he never shows how socialism creates this totalitarianism, and he leaves open the possibility of a more benign socialism that avoids it.4
In the real world, the political collapse of socialism was brought about by its economic failure. This was certainly true in the Soviet Union, where Gorbachev’s rescue efforts—glasnost and perestroika—failed spectacularly, first bringing down the Soviet empire, then the Communist ruling party, and finally the socialist system itself. China too abandoned socialism due to its economic shortcomings. And look how poorly socialism is faring in Zimbabwe, Cuba and Venezuela today. So how can one adopt socialist ideas once again without considering the economic track record of socialist regimes?
TWO TEST CASES
Rarely in history is there a chance to actually compare social systems to see which one works better. One might compare the Plantagenet kings of England with the Tang Dynasty in China, but even if we line up the dates, we are talking about two completely different societies: different people, different cultures. Consequently, England’s superiority and China’s inferiority—or the other way around—can hardly be attributed to their rival systems of government, since so many other factors could be involved.
In the case of socialism, however, we have two perfect test cases: North and South Korea, and East and West Germany. The perfection of these examples comes from the fact that in each case we are dealing with the same people, same background, same culture, merely two rival economic systems. North Korea was socialist; South Korea, capitalist. East Germany was socialist; West Germany, capitalist.
When the results came in, they were decisive. At reunification, the per capita gross domestic product in socialist East Germany was just about one-third that of the capitalist West Germany, with other measures of economic performance displaying a similar chasm. Even the poorest part of West Germany, Schleswig-Holstein, was two and a half times as wealthy as the richest East German region, Saxony. Even now, the eastern part of Germany gets nearly 15 percent of its gross domestic product in net transfers from the western part of Germany.
The Korean example is even more telling, in part because the separation of the two societies has lasted longer and continues to this day. South Korea now is more than 20 times richer than North Korea, a difference manifested in virtually all indicators of human welfare. South Koreans are obviously freer than North Koreans; South Koreans are also taller, healthier and live about 12 years longer than North Koreans. Every year many thousands of North Koreans risk their lives seeking to escape to South Korea.5
I have my own lived experience to draw on to compare socialism and capitalism, both of which have been tried in my lifetime in my native country of India. The Indian leaders, some of whom studied Fabian socialism in England, adopted socialism complete with Soviet-style five-year plans when India became independent in 1947. I grew up under Indian socialism—which I remind you was democratic socialism—and experienced its signature institutions. One was everyday corruption; literally nothing could be done without paying some petty bureaucrat under the table. Another was the ration card, which specified the paltry amount of sugar or cooking oil that a family was permitted to purchase each month. A third was a seven-year waiting period to get a phone.
During this era, India was widely known as the begging bowl of the world. Americans told their children, “Eat your food because there are millions of starving people in India.” Gandhi spoke wistfully about “wiping a tear from every Indian face.” A whole generation of young Indians in the 1960s and 1970s saw no future for themselves and fled to work at sea, like my brother, or to Dubai to do manual labor, like some of my cousins, or to Australia, Canada and America, like me.
Today’s young Indians plan no such mass exit, because there are now opportunities for them at home. I go back to India and see Indian families who used to endure the sweltering summer heat and wash their clothes in the sea now enjoying the full benefits of modern technology, including air conditioning and washing machines. India is doing measurably better, and there is a large and newly prosperous middle class. Even the country’s global reputation has changed. Today Americans tell their children, “Study hard because there are millions of Indians waiting to take your jobs.”
How did the change come about? It came about through economic liberalization, otherwise known as free market capitalism. And how did India decide to move in that direction? It was not inspired by the Indians reading Adam Smith. Rather, Indians looked across the Chinese border and saw that millions of once-impoverished peasants now lived in clean homes and nice apartments. The Chinese now shopped in well-stocked grocery stores. They drove new cars.
There was no question how the Chinese did it. The People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949. Under Mao, the government nationalized factories and expropriated peasants’ land. Mao targeted traders and businessmen—the “bourgeoisie”—attempting in his own words to “destroy the property-owning class by killing at least one landlord in every village via public execution.”6 Mao’s Great Leap Forward, announced in 1958, accelerated the collectivization of farms; in fact, he banned all private farming. The result was the greatest man-made famine in history.
Then, in 1966, Mao launched his Cultural Revolution, an attempt to erase all remaining capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society. The Communist Red Guard enforced a purge of all dissidents. Mao issued his famous book of quotations, The Little Red Book, that became a central part of the curriculum of every school. Chinese citizens were expected to have a copy of Mao’s writings with them at all times. (This by the way is unobjectionable: I have similar expectations of my readers.) Even so, Maoist socialism represented a disastrous alloy of deprivation, starvation and tyranny.
The change came in the late 1970s, when China, under Deng Xiaoping, abandoned the socialism of Mao for its own brand of capitalism. In doing so, the Chinese inaugurated a new experiment in social organization: call it totalitarian capitalism. No one had attempted it before; as far as I can see, no one else is attempting it now, although President Trump seems to be urging North Korea to give it a try. The Chinese did not relinquish their Communist dictatorship; rather, they married dictatorial political control to free market liberalization. Some say it was an awkward marriage, but it worked in economic terms.
So the Indians decided to follow the economic path the Chinese had marked out. While preserving a democratic political system, India largely jettisoned socialism and embraced technological capitalism. Large parts of the Indian economy are still regulated by the government, but the trend for three decades now has been moving away from that, toward privatization, deregulation and economic liberalization. And India too has seen spectacular results. Technological capitalism has realized Gandhi’s dream by wiping millions of Indian tears. As for Indian socialism, the leftist writer Pankaj Mishra frets that it shows “no signs of revival.”7
If socialism has produced a worldwide record of misery and tears, and if countries must flee socialism to experience prosperity, what then are American socialists up to? Why would they want to import misery and tears? They insist that they are not doing this. In a sense, they disavow history, both the political and the economic legacy of all professed socialist regimes. They insist that everyone else got it wrong. They emphasize that at least some of those depressing examples, maybe all of them, were not “real socialism.”
How coherent is this idea of “real socialism”? If an economic idea fails once or twice or even three times, one can still assert it was a fine idea that was merely implemented poorly. But if an idea fails 25 times, all over the world, everywhere it has been tried, without even one counterexample of it working well, it strains credulity to think that there is still some undiscovered form of socialism, heretofore unattempted, that will finally prove its viability. Yet another go at socialism now feels like Elizabeth Taylor’s eighth marriage, a triumph of hope over experience.
So why doesn’t the failed track record of socialist regimes deter today’s socialists? What keeps socialism alive for them? The answer is: the socialist dream! Yes, there is a socialist dream just as there is an American dream. And evidently, the socialist dream is one that survives all empirical refutation. No purely experiential argument—and no set of economic arguments—is sufficient to send socialism to its grave.
This is why conservative and libertarian critiques of socialism have gotten nowhere. The conservatives and libertarians keep chanting, “Socialism doesn’t work,” and they produce charts and tables to prove it. The socialists glance over the charts and tables, and then they clamor for more socialism. They don’t care about data, because no amount of data can refute a dream. The socialist mantra is, “We don’t care if it hasn’t worked. We will figure out a way to make it work.” The critics are focused on yesterday, while the socialists are all about tomorrow. Owen Jones expresses this futuristic hope: “A socialist society … doesn’t exist yet, but one day it must.”8
I’m reminded of the early scene in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress where the pilgrim, Christian, is warned by the evangelist to pursue eternal life and “flee from the wrath to come.” But how, Christian asks, do I do this? The evangelist points to a wide field. “Do you see yonder wicket gate?” No. “Do you see yonder shining light?” Christian looks hard; he can barely see it. He thinks he sees something. The evangelist is undeterred; he urges Christian to follow the light, and he will reach his desired destination.
When Christian’s wife and children discover that he is about to leave on a quest, having no idea when, if ever, he will return, they summon the neighbors, and together the whole group rails against Christian, mocking and threatening him. They tell him that he is a fool, and that he is neglecting his responsibilities and pursuing an illusion. But none of this deters Christian, who, in Bunyan’s words, “put his fingers in his ears and ran on, crying Life! Life! Eternal life!”9
So it is with the socialists. They are on a grand quest, and they refuse to look back. They insist that they are the champions of a moral ideal. The only way to refute them is to refute their moral ideal, to expose their dream as a nightmare, to pop their utopian balloon. Usually people try to defeat utopia by showing that it is a fantasy. But this approach is inadequate, because a fantasy continues to hold its appeal even when it is exposed as a fantasy. So my refutation is quite different. I will expose the socialist utopia not as an illusion but rather as a racket.
Sure, socialism presents a temptation, the same temptation that some cult leaders and TV evangelists hold out to their gullible audiences. They offer their followers the temptation of paradise, freedom from the normal drudgery and travails of life, with manna from heaven dropping into their laps. This is pretty much what the socialists promise too. The main difference is that the televangelist promises these wonders in the next life; the socialist promises them in this one. The only thing you are expected to give up is your ownership of yourself, including your right to keep what is yours, your personal autonomy and dignity and your independence of mind.
In both cases, the enterprise is driven by lust for money and lust for power, the libido dominandi that Augustine warns about. In principle, no less than in practice, socialism is the ideology of thieves and tyrants. As for the people who fall for the temptation, they are connivers attracted by the rip-off scheme. But they end up as suckers, because the scheme is not designed to benefit them. This book is written not to persuade the thieves and tyrants but to show the conniving suckers a better way to get ahead and to demonstrate how the rest of us can finally defeat the socialists.
