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THESE Are the Most Telling Failures of Socialism

Lee Edwards, Ph.D.

Former Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought

Some  conservatives may be discouraged  by the latest surveys confirming that nearly one-half of millennials are receptive to  living under socialism  and regard capitalism as a captive of greed. In fact, they present us with a golden opportunity to educate all Americans about the manifold failures of socialism and the miraculous advances the world has made under free enterprise.

For example, the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson revealed at a Heritage Foundation event that between 2000 and 2012, “the rate of absolute poverty in the world fell by 50 percent.” That is, “the poor in the world are getting rich at a rate that is absolutely unparalleled in all of human history.” Heritage’s 2019 Index of Economic Freedom reported that the greatest advances came in African and Asian countries (such as Botswana and Taiwan) that limited rather than expanded the role of government. More than 100 countries, many of them with less developed or emerging economies, showed marked advances in  economic growth  and individual prosperity.

Such good news is seldom reported by the mainstream media, Dr. Peterson said, because of the  technological revolution  that’s occurring in every form of media. All the broadcast networks, leading newspapers and magazines exist in a shrinking market with dwindling margins of profit. To attract attention they are turning to an old journalism axiom: “If it bleeds, it leads.”

The news media obsess over the latest school shooting and bloody street riot. And yet, Dr. Peterson pointed out, the rates of violent crime in the United States and in most places “have plummeted in the last 50 years.” The U.S. is now safer than it has been since the early 1960s, but the reporting of violent crime in America has materially increased as the mainstream media, in pursuit of ratings and revenue, have highlighted the dark side of society.

Conservatives must step forward to tell the truth about capitalism: the better life it has brought to billions of people, the diversity and freedom of choice it celebrates, the individual responsibility it encourages, the continuing miracle of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” its rejection of government planning that always leads to dictatorship.

Which brings us to the urgent task of exposing the chimera that socialism is just another political system. Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and their fellow socialists carefully omit any mention of the principles laid down by Karl Marx, the founding father of Socialism, such as the abolition of private property and the centralization of the means of production and of decision-making. But make no mistake: there are radical socialists waiting in the wings to promote these extreme initiatives.

It’s up to us to tell the truth. Socialists promise a classless society but create the prison camps of the Gulag and the Isle of Pines. They assure peace but engage in wars of national liberation. They abolish private property but depend upon the underground economy. They stamp out religion but worship Big Brother. They bring down corrupt dictators but institute a dictatorship of the Party.

Here are some of the most telling failures of socialism.

One, socialism has never succeeded anywhere, including the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union, the National Socialism of Nazi Germany, the Maoism of Communist China, the Chavez-Maduro socialism of Venezuela. It has never come close anywhere to Marx’s ideal of a classless society.

Two, Karl Marx has been wrong about nearly everything he predicted. The nation-state has not withered away. Capitalism didn’t break down as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Workers haven’t become revolutionaries but capitalists. The middle class hasn’t disappeared; indeed, it has expanded exponentially around the world (see the above about the sharp decline in global poverty). Marx’s attempt to use Hegel to create a “scientific socialism” has been an abject failure.

Three, socialism denies the existence of an essential human trait – human nature. Marx borrowed from the Enlightenment to declare that human nature was malleable, not constant. Christian theology with its idea of a fixed God-given nature infuriated Marx. The socialist state established by Lenin tried for seven decades to create an entirely new human being – Soviet Man. In December 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev gave up trying and dissolved the world’s most spectacular failure in human engineering.

Four, socialism depends not upon the will of the people but on the dictatorship of the Party to remain in power. In “The God That Failed,” six famous Western intellectuals describe their journey into socialism and their exit when they encountered the gigantic gap between their vision of a socialist utopia and the totalitarian reality of the socialist state.

After visiting the Soviet Union, the French Nobel Laureate writer Andre Gide said: “I doubt where in any country in the world – not even in Hitler’s Germany – have the mind and spirit ever been less free, more bent, more terrorized and indeed vassalized than in the Soviet Union.”

What price socialism? The Chinese philosopher Lin Yutang listed the “little terrors” that prevailed in China – making children of 12 subject to capital punishment, sending women to work in underground coal mines, harassing workers during their lunchtime with threats of prison if they were late returning to work. A Soviet defector said of the perpetual surveillance: “We lived in a world swarming with invisible eyes and ears.”

Given the ignorance of so many of our fellow especially young Americans, telling the truth about socialism has become an imperative. If we do not, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and their fellow travelers will fill the vacuum with their misleading rhetoric. This is the truth about socialism: It is a pseudo-religion founded in pseudo-science and enforced by political tyranny.

This piece originally appeared in Fox News

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Yes, Real Socialism Has Been Tried—And It Has Failed Every Time

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"Karl Marx Monument in Chemnitz," August 30, 2018 (Wikimedia Commons/Velvet)

Over the past 100 years or so, socialist experiments around the world unleashed a vast tide of tyranny, starvation, and mass murder on a scale never seen before in human history. Socialism was implemented in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, Maoist China, Chavez-Maduro’s Venezuela, and other places. In every one of these places, it has failed. As American writer Joshua Muravchik observes in his 2019 Wall Street Journal article on socialism, “It’s hard to think of another idea that has been tried and failed as many times in as many ways or at a steeper price in human suffering.” 

Despite its demonstrated record of producing evils, however, the spirit of socialism is very much alive today even in the United States. According to a 2019 Gallup poll , as many as 49% of millennials and members of Gen Z (ages 18 to 39 in 2019) hold a favorable view of socialism. Socialists are fond of saying that socialism has not failed because real socialism has never been tried. In the eyes of today’s democratic socialists , the earlier socialist leaders failed because they were “authoritarian socialists” who believed in a strictly hierarchical, top-down bureaucracy and “perverted” socialism’s noble ideals—if, instead, our socialist government is led by public-spirited people whose beliefs are rooted in democratic principles, then we will achieve real socialism and all will be well. The problem, they argue, has never been the socialist horse, but the jockeys who rode it and led it astray.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. When today’s socialists talk about building a non-authoritarian socialist government rooted in democratic and humanitarian principles, they are far from original. In fact, that has always been what the earlier socialists said they would achieve. Aimed at improving the lot of the common people and creating a more egalitarian society, the early socialist movements emerged primarily as a reaction to the inhumane working conditions and yawning wealth disparities in industrialized Europe. Empowering working-class people, dismantling societal hierarchies, and ensuring a more equitable distribution of goods and services have always been among the many honorable objectives of socialist leaders. Socialist regimes have all ended in varying degrees of totalitarianism, to be sure, but there is no denying that earlier socialist leaders, just like today’s, generally started with good intentions.  

Lenin’s seminal book The State and Revolution , presumably the closest thing ever to a Leninist manifesto, does not read at all like a master plan for creating some sort of a totalitarian society. Instead, we see Lenin’s sheer authenticity in trying to salvage his nation and envisioning a brighter future for the masses. Hugo Chávez, architect of Venezuela’s socialist experiment, was constantly praised for his noble intentions by mainstream intellectuals such as Cornel West, Naomi Klein, and Noam Chomsky. President Carter claimed that he “never doubted Hugo Chavez’s commitment to improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen.” Not even Stalin and Mao set out with the intention of creating a totalitarian state and turning their countries into a living hell. It was always in practice, however, that socialist regimes turned out to be totalitarian. As German economist Kristian Niemietz put it, “Socialism is always democratic and emancipatory in its aspirations, but oppressive and authoritarian in its actual practice.”

The problem, therefore, has not been bad jockeys, but the socialist horse itself. Real socialism has been tried many, many times and it has ended in dismal failure without exception. By the time it collapsed in 1991, the USSR had left humanity with what German historian Tarik Cyril Amar called “a legacy of tyranny and oppression, at first manically bloodthirsty and then (mostly) depressingly drab.” Its economy had been stagnating for two decades with farms and factories producing far short of the demand. Soviet satellite states, independent in name only, were held under tight rein by the USSR and replicated most of the brutal methods the Soviets used to suppress opposing voices. Their economies were even more enfeebled than the Soviet economy, with the New York Times in 1987 calling Eastern Europe “increasingly a museum of the early industrial age.” Singapore, a city-state that had only two million residents at the time, was exporting 20 percent more machinery to the West than all of Eastern European nations combined. 

In Asia, Mao’s Soviet-style socialism plunged China into two of its most catastrophic historical periods ever: the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The former was a bold, comprehensive campaign to industrialize China’s agrarian economy that went horribly wrong and resulted in more than 30 million Chinese starving to death. The latter was Mao’s attempt to purge political opposition and reassert his authority after the failure of the Great Leap Forward. Notwithstanding the benign-sounding name, the Cultural Revolution was notoriously vicious. It crippled the Chinese economy, obliterated much of China’s social fabric, and caused yet another two million deaths. It wasn’t until the late seventies when Deng Xiaoping steered China away from socialist planning and incorporated elements of the free-enterprise system that the country’s well-known economic miracle started gaining momentum. 

More recently, Chavez’s and Maduro’s socialist regimes have turned Venezuela, once the wealthiest nation in South America, into utter ruin. Its economy is now marked by hyperinflation, oppression, and starvation, with nearly one-fifth of the population having already fled the country since 2014. Socialism has also been tried in Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Somalia, and many other countries. The end result has always been the same: tyranny and mass suffering. Ordinary citizens, the very people whom the socialists claimed to champion, were shot dead on the streets, thrown in prison camps, and deprived of the most basic human rights. What started as a well-meaning commitment to improve life for the masses brought about economic collapse, political oppression, and more than 100 million deaths across socialist societies. 

German philosopher G.W. F. Hegel famously said, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” The enduring appeal of socialism attests to Hegel’s insight. However, the underlying problem is not that we are unable or unwilling to learn from history. Rather, we have so often found ourselves repeating the mistakes of previous generations because we have taken the wrong lessons from those mistakes. The conclusion we should draw from our socialist experiments is not that we need a different jockey to achieve real socialism, but that real socialism has been the problem all along. Unless we truly take this lesson to heart, it won’t be long before we find ourselves stuck in a living hell once again.  

Matthew Xiao is a senior studying economics and mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences . The Cornell Review publishes guest submissions and Letters to the Editor.

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It is widely known that the early Pilgrims came to the New World to escape religious persecution. What is lesser known is that their spiritual adventure was also a commercial enterprise. Today’s self-identified democratic socialists like to claim real socialism has never been tried in America, but they need to brush up on their history. The Pilgrims did try it — and it failed.

In the early 17th century, King James I chartered a joint-stock company with private investors, the Virginia Company of London , to manage the establishment of future colonial settlements in North America. Any English settlers who wanted to leave England for the New World were required to obtain a license from the government and a land patent from the Virginia Company. They also had to raise money from investors to fund their voyage and the establishment of a new colony. Investors expected to receive produce from the future colony to cover their investment and generate a handsome return.

When one group of Puritans from the Separatist Church , led by Rev. John Robinson, decided to migrate to the New World, where they could establish a new place to adhere to God’s teachings, they sent two representatives, Robert Cushman and John Carver, to London to secure a land patent in the existing Virginia colony. A London merchant, Thomas Weston, probably one of the earliest venture capitalists, led a group of investors and offered the Puritans a deal they couldn’t refuse.

The deal stipulated that everything the colonists produced would belong to a “commonwealth,” and at the end of seven years, everything would be equally divided between investors and colonists. To make sure the investors would get their money back, this deal forbade colonists from having any personal time to work on any private business during the seven-year contract term.

The terms of this deal seem harsh today but are understandable if we put ourselves in the investors’ shoes. Lending money to a group of people traveling to a faraway land was a risky business. There was no guarantee the travelers would make it, and even if they did, the investors would have no control over what happened next.

The representatives of the Separatist Church accepted the deal without telling their congregation all the details. On Sept. 6, 1620, the Mayflower departed from England with 102 passengers, including members of the Separatist Church and nonbelievers. After a 66-day-long journey, the settlers arrived in Provincetown Harbor, Plymouth Colony, which is now Massachusetts.

Squanto Came to the Rescue

The early settlers’ life was arduous. During the winter of 1620, only 44 out of the original 102 passengers survived, including their first elected governor of the colony, John Carver. The survivors probably wondered whether it had been wise to come to the New World — and how long the rest of them would survive. Fortunately, an Indian named Squanto came to their rescue.

Squanto was no ordinary native. Early settlers in 1610 had captured him and sold him into slavery. A group of Catholic friars freed him and brought him to England, where he learned to speak English. In 1618, serving as an interpreter on an English ship, he was brought back to the New World.

Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to plant and fish, even brokering a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and other Indian tribes. Many Pilgrims thought God had sent Squanto to help them, and without him, they never would have survived and thrived. The fall of 1621 brought a great harvest, and the native tribes and Pilgrims joined together for a festival, which later evolved into our Thanksgiving holiday.

Plymouth Barely Survived Under Socialism

Even with the help of the Indians, the colonists had a hard time surviving. Although the word “socialism” hadn’t been invented yet, the Plymouth colony bore many resemblances to a socialist society. Since investors back in England demanded that the colony operate communally, everything was owned by every colonist jointly. No one was allowed to own private land or to work on his private business.

The communal social and economic structure proved disastrous. Not all colonists were willing to work hard or at all for the “commonwealth.” William Bradford, one of the signers of the Mayflower Compact, who was later unanimously voted the second governor of the Plymouth settlement, admitted , “[S]ome [settlers] doe it not willingly, & other not honestly.”

Many settlers resented that whatever they produced went into a common pot and was divided among them equally. In addition, knowing that at the end of the seven-year term they were required to surrender half the wealth they’d accumulated to investors in England offered no incentive to work hard.

Since not everyone was pulling the same weight, the colony was constantly running out of food, a typical problem in all the socialist countries, from China to Venezuela. As French philosopher Jean Bodin wisely pointed out, that communal property was “the mother of contention and discord” because “for nothing could properly be regarded as public if there were nothing at all to distinguish it from what was private. Nothing can be thought of as shared in common, except by contrast with what is privately owned.”

The Pilgrims Ditched Socialism and Thrived

By 1626, the Plymouth settlers couldn’t return sufficient profits that the investors in England had demanded, and they were forced to restructure the debt they borrowed from investors. Conceding the problem, Bradford wisely recognized that a change had to take place, and he gathered the settlers to a brainstorming session. He recorded in his book “Of Plymouth Plantation”:

So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length, after much debate of things, the Governor (with the advice of the chiefest amongst them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves; in all other things to go on in the general way as before. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end, only for present use (but made no division for inheritance) and ranged all boys and youth under some family.

After turning the communal property into private property, letting everyone be responsible for themselves and their own families’ wellbeing, Bradford noted drastic changes in all the colonists’ behaviors:

[I]t made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.

These hardworking and motivated colonists turned Plymouth colony into one of the most successful colonies in North America.

Today’s self-identified democratic socialists might need to pick up a copy of Bradford’s book if they think real socialism has never been tried in America. One of the most important legacies of early settlers is that they experimented with socialism in the 1620s, and it didn’t work. Private property rights and personal responsibility, two pillars of a free market economy, saved the Plymouth colony from extinction and laid the economic foundation for he free and prosperous nation that we all enjoy today.

Rather than repeating always failed socialist experiments, Americans ought to remember the powerful lessons early settlers learned in the 1620s: Socialism is incompatible with free people. It always leads to failure and misery. The United States of America must never become a socialist country.

• Plymouth Colony
• William Bradford

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