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Socialism

5 min read

Part of Markets and money.

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Every episode (7)

Who argued it

Clifton Ross ×2 · John Judis · Benjamin Powell · Joshua Muravchik · John McGinnis · Fergus Hodgson

Venezuela · Marxism · Economic Freedom · Capitalism · Free Markets · Donald Trump · Property Rights

Background

Socialism as substitute religion

Bob Zadek opened the episode by arguing that no “economic FDA” or “economic SEC” exists to protect Americans from “unsafe and ineffective economic policies,” leaving them vulnerable to socialism and democratic socialism, which he said was being sold to Americans by the Democratic Socialists of America, AOC and Bernie Sanders Socialism Reincarnated (2019). Guest Joshua Muravchik, author of Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism, said the title was partly tongue-in-cheek: socialism’s advocates believed it was the key to making life perfect, and Karl Marx said that once socialism arrived everyone would do just what they felt like, giving as an example hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon and writing literary criticism in the evening. Muravchik added that socialists expected socialism to create a “new man,” and that Trotsky once said every human being would have the creative powers of a Beethoven or a Goethe. He described socialism not merely as a political idea but as a substitute religion, noting that Marx and Engels began as two young men who hated religion and wanted to bring it down before arriving at communism.

Utopian failure and “scientific socialism”

Muravchik said the early communes were of two kinds: religious communes, sometimes sharing property but existing for worship, some of which did quite well, and roughly 40 to 50 communes created by socialists to experience or prove socialism, such as New Harmony, which all broke down quickly. Historians, he said, put the median lifespan of a socialist commune at two years, making them a uniform disaster. He called it one of the great intellectual con jobs that Marx and Engels, knowing these experiments had already failed, labeled their predecessors “utopian socialists” and claimed to have discovered “scientific socialism,” which Muravchik characterized as prophecy rather than science, since the soul of science is experimentation and the experiments had clear results. Zadek compared this to the Democratic Socialists, AOC and Bernie Sanders treating the question of how to pay for their Utopia as a detail to be dealt with later.

Coercion and the welfare-state compromise

Zadek argued that because voluntary socialism always failed, socialism needed force to have any shot, and that longer-lived socialist countries existed only through the use of force. Muravchik answered that Lenin and those who emulated him, like Mao, Fidel and Ho Chi Minh, understood people would not surrender their freedom, so they had to make them surrender at the point of a gun. Democratic socialists who came into government, such as the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party, and the German or Scandinavian Social Democratic parties, nationalized industries and took away elements of private property, and in each case the economies started sinking; they then settled for a compromise of welfare states financed by taxes, leaving wealth production in the private sector. Zadek described Sweden as a capitalist country with a vigorous free market and substantial private property, using the free market as the golden goose to drive the welfare system, and asked whether the democratic socialists had declared war on that system; Muravchik said they certainly do not embrace it and that Ocasio-Cortez is even more strident than Sanders in talking about the 1% and billionaires as evil people whose money should be taken away.

Muravchik’s own socialism and the modern movement

Muravchik said that more than 50 years earlier he became leader of the Young People’s Socialist League, a group Bernie Sanders also belonged to briefly, and that he was then a democratic socialist who took the democratic part seriously and hated violent, dictatorial movements that called themselves socialist. He said Sanders and AOC do not draw that line: Sanders visited the Soviet Union and praised its cultural programs and subway system, visited Nicaragua under the Sandinistas and called their work magnificent, praised Castro after his death, and Sanders and AOC have refused to criticize Maduro in Venezuela, whose predecessor Hugo Chavez destroyed democracy and then the economy. He noted that the Democratic Socialists of America, which AOC and Rashida Tlaib belong to, has the slogan “Solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution,” meaning Maduro’s regime, and that when put on the defensive its members say they are only talking about Sweden.

The kibbutz exception

Asked whether full socialism requires total surrender of personal autonomy, Muravchik said yes, with one counter-example: the Israeli kibbutzim, socialist communes that really did work. He said they accommodated different needs and wishes, were an important part of Israel, and were voluntary rather than government-imposed; there were about 200 of them, and they succeeded for a time but after a couple of generations or several decades almost all voted to transform themselves to a free-market basis. They worked, he said, because the settlers were passionate Zionists, part of rescuing the Jewish people after 2,000 years of exile and the Holocaust, and once Israel felt secure they chose normal community life with their own property and jobs.

Across episodes

Only one episode is represented on the show, so the sources show no development across episodes; the topic is treated in a single 2019 discussion between Bob Zadek and Joshua Muravchik.

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