Kristian Niemitz, Head of Political Economy at the IEA, wrote a book last year in which he explores the reasons why the idea of socialism persists as a viable economic system. In “Socialism: the Failed Idea that Never Dies” Niemitz notes that whenever real-life events demonstrate, yet again, that socialism, in all its guises as an economic system, simply doesn’t work, its ever-faithful adherents in the West declare that what failed wasn’t “real socialism”.
We should note that the “fake socialism” epithet is only ever attached to a project after the event; when a socialist project is still under way, or in its early stages, no one ever claims “what we are doing isn’t real socialism”. As Niemitz shows, every socialist project goes through a honeymoon phase during which prominent Western intellectual liberals praise it enthusiastically. Only when the project’s grandiose ideas are seen to founder “in shallows and in miseries” does it get reclassified as “not real socialism”.
Led by personal reflections
I have pondered this conundrum long and hard for many years. As I have explained in earlier essays, both my parents were lifelong communists, and when the South African Nationalist government made life intolerable for them, as anti-apartheid activists rather than mere communists, our family emigrated to England.
It was then, as a teenager, that I took the trouble to read the texts that underpinned my parents’ Marxist beliefs. This was a revelation. At that point, for me, those beliefs lost all credibility. In fairness to my parents, I believe that their detestation of apartheid had developed into a fully-fledged embrace of communist principles. I, by contrast, had no difficulty in distinguishing between the utterly abhorrent apartheid regime and equally abhorrent, albeit different, tenets of communism. Consequently there was no risk that, as happened with my parents, these ideas might elide into a single belief system. I also had the advantage of learning the full import of Khrushchev’s 20th Congress revelations about Stalinism, which my parents and their closest “comrades” simply couldn’t countenance.
The distinction between communism and socialism isn’t usefully pertinent to this debate. Whether the former is an extreme form of the latter, or the latter a milder form of the former, is merely a question of degree, not of destination: the trajectory of both finishes up in varying degrees of societal impoverishment or worse.
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