Socialism

Kristian Niemietz

• Publisher: London Publishing Partnership
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9780255367721
• Edition: 1
• Subtopic: Business General

Socialism is strangely impervious to refutation by real-world experience. Over the past hundred years, there have been more than two dozen attempts to build a socialist society, from the Soviet Union to Maoist China to Venezuela. All of them have ended in varying degrees of failure. But, according to socialism's adherents, that is only because none of these experiments were "real socialism". This book documents the history of this, by now, standard response. It shows how the claim of fake socialism is only ever made after the event. As long as a socialist project is in its prime, almost nobody claims that it is not real socialism. On the contrary, virtually every socialist project in history has gone through a honeymoon period, during which it was enthusiastically praised by prominent Western intellectuals. It was only when their failures became too obvious to deny that they got retroactively reclassified as "not real socialism".

Chapter 1. The enduring appeal of socialism

Introduction: socialism is popular

Support for socialism in the abstract

Socialism is popular in Britain. Not just among millennials, but also among people in their 30s and 40s. According to a YouGov (2016a) survey, two in five British people aged between 18 and 50 years have a favourable opinion of socialism. Another two in five are not sure, leaving only one in five with an unfavourable opinion. Capitalism, meanwhile, has far more critics than supporters in the same age group; in fact, it has more critics than supporters across all age groups.1

In a similar survey, 43 per cent of respondents said that having ‘a genuinely socialist government’ would make the UK ‘a better place to live’ (YouGov 2017a). One in five respondents were indifferent or unsure, leaving only 36 per cent who thought that it would make the UK ‘a worse place to live’.

In a complementary survey, only 29 per cent of people between the ages of 18 and 50 agreed with the statement ‘Competition among private-sector companies increases living standards for the great majority of people, as it leads to new and better goods and services, creates extra jobs and keeps down prices’ (YouGov 2017b). But as many as 37 per cent agreed with the opposite statement, namely ‘Competition among private-sector companies reduces the living standards of millions of people, because it helps mainly the rich, leads to poverty wages for many workers, and often results in shoddy goods and services.’ (The remainder answered ‘Don’t know’.)

Those findings are corroborated by a recent Populus survey, which asked respondents about their main associations with capitalism, socialism and various other -isms. Common associations with capitalism include ‘greedy’, ‘selfish’, ‘corrupt’ and ‘divisive’ (but also ‘innovative’). Common associations with socialism include ‘For the greater good’, ‘Delivers most for most people’ and ‘Fair’, terms that almost nobody in Britain associates with capitalism (Legatum Institute 2017). The most common negative association with socialism is ‘naïve’, a trait which is not really all that negative, and which some may actually find endearing.2

Support for socialist policies

Terms like ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism’ may mean different things to different people. But support for socialism in the abstract is also matched by support for individual policies that could reasonably be described as ‘socialist’, perhaps not on their own, but at least as a bundle.

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1 Disapproval of one system does not automatically mean approval of the other. It is possible to be opposed to both, either as a form of nihilism (‘all systems are bad’), or combined with advocacy of something else entirely. Among those over the age of 65, there is net disapproval of both socialism and capitalism.

2 Curiously, while the survey shows positive associations with the term ‘socialism’, it also shows negative associations with the term ‘communism’. If we take the dictionary meaning of those terms at face value, this makes no sense: you cannot logically combine a positive view of socialism with a negative view of communism. In Marxist theory, ‘communism’ is simply the hypothetical final stage of socialism, the stage that is reached when socialism is so advanced that it no longer requires a state apparatus. Presumably, most survey participants associate the term ‘communism’ with the kind of socialism that actually existed in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, and the term ‘socialism’ with the ideal, which, in the minds of many, has not been tainted by its messy real-world applications.

Figure 4 Support for a larger state (in %)

Source: NatCen Social Research (2017).

But what such results do show is that the often-heard claim that Britain is in the grip of a ‘neoliberal hegemony’ is the exact opposite of the truth. In the economic sphere, the zeitgeist is statist and interventionist. Support for free markets is an exotic and unpopular fringe opinion. As Allister Heath, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph, puts it (2017):

Spend more, regulate more, tax more: it’s UK politics’ stultifying new orthodoxy. Its proponents […] set the parameters of our increasingly narrow national conversation. […] There is no longer a debate: merely a relentless assault on capitalism […] amplified by ‘centrists’ who keep conceding to the Left.

The anti-capitalist mainstream

Surveys provide a glimpse into the mood among the general population. Among the politically most active sections of society, socialist – or at least anti-capitalist – ideas have long been predominant, and highly fashionable. For example, all high-profile protest movements in recent decades – be it anti-austerity, Occupy or anti-globalisation – were explicitly anti-capitalist.5 In 2011, a small ‘Rally Against Debt’ in Westminster attracted considerable media coverage, although it was, according to the New Statesman, only attended by about 200 people.6 This was because it was so counterintuitive. We are so used to the idea that protest must be left-wing and anti-capitalist that the idea of a protest against government largesse feels jarring.

Last but not least, the politics/economics sections of high street book stores are also invariably dominated by anti-capitalist literature. The books of Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Žižek, Yanis Varoufakis, Owen Jones, Ha-Joon Chang, Paul Mason, Russell Brand, etc., are bestsellers within their genre; pro-market books are a rarity. Writers such as Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman or Thomas Piketty are clearly politically on the centre-left, but in relative terms their books are often the most ‘neoliberal’ ones one can find in a typical high street bookstore. If this constitutes a ‘neoliberal hegemony’, one wonders what a left-wing hegemony would look like.

After the 2017 General Election, the Financial Times claimed that ‘Jeremy Corbyn has staged an unprecedented socialist revival’.7 He has done no such thing. One cannot revive what has never been dead. Socialism has never been away; it has just not always been at the immediate forefront of day-to-day politics. It may have returned there with ‘Corbyn-mania’, but the appeal of socialism was never about any one particular political candidate, party or movement.

Some readers will probably find it odd that although this book is partly about socialism in Britain, it has next to nothing to say on ‘Corbyn-mania’, Corbynomics, Momentum, etc. But this follows logically from the recognition that ‘Corbynistas’ are not the radical insurgents they think themselves to be. They do not, and indeed could not, challenge ‘the p...

Table of contents

• About the author
• Summary
• Chapter 1. The enduring appeal of socialism
• Chapter 2. The Soviet Union under Stalin: ‘A whole nation marched behind a vision’
• Chapter 3. China under Mao Tse-Tung: ‘A revolutionary regime must get rid of a certain number of individuals that threaten it’
• Chapter 4. Cuba under Fidel Castro: ‘The beginning of building the new man’
• Chapter 5. North Korea under Kim Il Sung: ‘A messiah rather than a dictator’
• Chapter 6. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge: ‘The kingdom of justice’
• Chapter 7. Albania under Enver Hoxha: ‘The working class is in power’
• Chapter 8. East Germany under the SED: ‘The organised might of the working class’
• Chapter 9. Venezuela under Hugo Chávez: ‘A different, and a better way of doing things. It’s called socialism’
• Chapter 10. Why socialist ideas persist
• Epilogue: An alternative history: real socialism is being tried
• References
• About the IEA