I’ve easily read a hundred books on the evils of socialism. I was quite surprised, then, by how much I learned from Kristian Niemietz’s Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies, available for free download. Yes, I already knew that socialist regimes go through a popularity sequence, starting at “This socialist regime is a model for the world” and ending with “That’s not real socialism.” Niemietz, however, describes this sequence with great precision and eloquence:
1. The honeymoon period
The first stage is a honeymoon period, during which the experiment has, or at least seems to have, some initial success in some areas. During this period, its international standing is relatively high. Even anti-socialists concede, grudgingly, that the country in question has something to show for it.
During the honeymoon period, very few dispute the experiment’s socialist character; almost nobody claims that the country is not ‘really’ socialist. On the contrary: during the honeymoon period, large numbers of Western intellectuals enthusiastically embrace the experiment. Self-declared socialists claim ownership of it, and parade it as an example of their ideas in action.
2. The excuses-and-whataboutery period
But the honeymoon period never lasts forever. The country’s luck either comes to an end, or its already existing failures become more widely known in the West. As a result, its international standing deteriorates. It ceases to be an example that socialists hold against their opponents, and becomes an example that their opponents hold against them.
During this period, Western intellectuals still support the experiment, but their tone becomes angry and defensive. The focus changes from the experiment’s supposed achievements to the supposed ulterior motives of its critics. There is a frantic search for excuses, with the blame usually placed on imaginary ‘saboteurs’ and unspecified attempts to ‘undermine’ it. There is plenty of whataboutery.
3. The not-real-socialism stage
Eventually, there always comes a point when the experiment has been widely discredited, and is seen as a failure by most of the general public. The experiment becomes a liability for the socialist cause, and an embarrassment for Western socialists.
This is the stage when intellectuals begin to dispute the experiment’s socialist credentials, and, crucially, they do so with retroactive effect. They argue that the country was never socialist in the first place, and that its leaders never even tried to implement socialism. This is the deeper meaning behind the old adage that ‘real’ socialism has never been tried: socialism gets retroactively redefined as ‘unreal’ whenever it fails. So it has never been tried, in the same way in which, in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, the government of Oceania has always been at war with East Asia.
This is not a conscious process, let alone a purposefully orchestrated one. There is no equivalent of an industrial standards body, which awards a ‘real socialism’ certificate of authenticity, and then withdraws it again with retroactive effect. Socialists do not hold clandestine conferences in secret hideouts; they do not deliberately cover up their former support for the regime in question. They simply fall silent on the issue, and move on to the next cause.
At some point, the claim that the country in question was never ‘really’ socialist becomes the conventional wisdom. Since it is only the opponents of socialism who still refer to that example, while socialists themselves no longer do, it is easy to gain the impression that it must be a straw man argument. This book will show that these alleged ‘straw men’ were all once very much alive. They are not straw men at all. They are the failed utopias of yesteryear.
In short:
The not-real-socialism defence is only ever invoked retrospectively, namely, when a socialist experiment has already been widely discredited. As long as a socialist experiment is in its prime, almost nobody disputes its socialist credentials. On the contrary: practically all socialist regimes have gone through honeymoon periods, during which they were enthusiastically praised and held up as role models by plenty of prominent Western intellectuals. It is only after the event (i.e. once they have become an embarrassment for the socialist cause) that their version of socialism is retroactively redefined as ‘unreal’.
Niemietz then provides a long list of case studies of self-labelled socialist regimes. The two biggest examples – Soviet Union and Maoist China – fit his sequence to a tee. So do North Korea, Cambodia, Albania, and Venezuela. The chapter on the latter was especially eye-opening for me. Choice passages:
Chávez defined his version of socialism explicitly in opposition to previous models. This was not empty rhetoric. Under Chavismo, there were genuine attempts to create alternative models of collective ownership
and democratic participation in economic life. In particular, the formation of worker cooperatives and various forms of social enterprises was heavily promoted. Exact figures are hard to come by, but, according to Piñeiro Harnecker (2009: 309), the number of worker-run cooperatives increased from fewer than 1,000 when Chávez was first elected to well over 30,000 in less than a decade. By the end of Chávez’s second term, cooperatives accounted for about 8 per cent of Venezuela’s GDP and 14 per cent of its workforce (ibid.).Venezuelan socialism would later show many of the negative features associated with earlier forms of socialism, but it was never government policy to replicate any of those earlier models. When Western Chavistas insisted that the Venezuelan government was trying to create a different model of socialism, they were not deluding themselves.
At that point, the tone among Western Chavistas changed noticeably. Pro-Venezuela articles, which had so far tended to be hopeful and optimistic, became angry and defensive. The emphasis shifted from the supposed achievements of Chavismo to whataboutery, and to questioning the motives of Chavismo’s critics both in Venezuela and internationally.
In 2014, Owen Jones wrote an article for the Independent entitled ‘Socialism’s critics look at Venezuela and say, “We told you so”. But they are wrong’. Jones acknowledges the existence of ‘recent economic troubles’, but the emphasis of the article is on the problems of the pre-Chávez era (‘let’s have some context’), and on the violence committed by parts of the opposition. It culminated in the claim that ‘[t]hose who relish using Venezuela’s troubles for political point-scoring have no interest in the truth’.
Since this is a high-quality book, Niemietz searches for counter-examples to his own thesis, and identifies two. Cuba doesn’t fit because after decades of tyranny, many socialists still admire it. East Germany doesn’t fit because it never had much of a honeymoon period. Overall, though, these are minor deviations. The socialist big picture is at once bizarre and horrifying, especially as so many young people negligently convert to this once-dying creed.
P.S. This spring I’ll once again be debating “Capitalism vs. Socialism,” this time at the University of Wisconsin versus Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago.
READER COMMENTS
KevinDC
Dec 23 2019 at 10:40am
I’ll check out the book. I had some interest on this topic several years ago when I noticed that libertarians and socialists both seemed to say something along the lines of this narrative about the other. “Those libertarians/socialists are so blind, they refuse to see how obviously absurd their system is and every time it’s tried how it fails horribly, they just insist that it wasn’t ‘real’ libertarianism/socialism and that their system has never been really given a chance! How deluded can you be?” Given how perfectly symmetrical the accusations were, I was curious to see how they cashed out.
I ended up giving the advantage to the libertarians on this one, for reasons similar to what this author notes. I mostly stopped with Venezuela, but I noticed that if you looked at leftist publications (The Nation, Counterpunch, etc) for articles about Venezuela from the mid 2000s, it was full of people saying “Yes, see, Venezuela is exactly how we always wanted socialism to be carried out and it proves socialism does work!” Cut to a decade later, and it the publications were full of these same authors insisting that Venezuela was never true socialism, that it’s horrible conditions are tragic but don’t prove anything about socialism, and that only libertarian ideologues arguing in obviously bad faith could think Venezuela ever had anything to do with socialism.
However, when I looked through articles in libertarian publications during times when capitalist economies were doing well, there were no articles saying “See, this proves that libertarian capitalism is the way to go because these systems are what we mean by libertarian capitalism and look how great they are doing!” Instead, the articles would usually say things like “Yes, this economy is doing very well right now, but it’s very far from being a libertarian ideal, because it’s also riddled with non-libertarian policies like A B and C, and these policies are going to cause crashes and future troubles down the road,” very often accompanied by specific predictions about what these future troubles would be (although a bit vague about the timeline for when these troubles would appear, for sure).
Obviously none of the above demonstrates that libertarian capitalism is the best system as such, but it does give libertarian writers a pretty big advantage over socialist writers in the area of internal consistency.
Eric B Rasmusen
Dec 23 2019 at 11:04am
Great comment, KevinDC.
Loyalist Spain during the Spanish Civil War is another example. Labor UK is another— it didn’t end up as tyranny, but Labor nowadays has quietly accepted that socialism was a mistake and isn’t trying to nationalize industries, just impose tyranny.
Gary Lowe
Dec 23 2019 at 12:44pm
No surprises here. The dynamic described in the book reminds of Phil Tetlock’s work on forecasting. People will always come up with way to justify their predictions post-hoc rather than defining what would make their prediction true ex ante and then evaluating their prediction on whether those conditions came true.
Alan
Dec 23 2019 at 1:35pm
This is the standard response from socialists today:
https://imgur.com/xf5UB1e
Mark Z
Dec 24 2019 at 8:54pm
The ’embargo argument’ is the lynchpin of that response, and it just doesn’t work. Sanctions against Venezuela are likely economically negligible, and even with Cuba it can’t explain anywhere near the preponderence of socialism’s failure there (or elsewhere, for that matter).
Joseph Hertzlinger
Dec 23 2019 at 3:36pm
On the other hand, socialists point to European welfare states as examples of socialism.
In order to criticize socialism, we need a definition that include what people ask for (in order to avoid straw men) and excludes Northern Europe. I recommend the following definition: Socialism is when you get rid of private-sector billionaires.
People are asking for that and it excludes Scandinavia.
Jon Murphy
Dec 23 2019 at 5:04pm
That’s not a particularly good definition. It would imply everything pre-1980s was socialist, and Scandanavia has many billionaires. Sweden, if I recall, has the most billionaires per capita.
That said, you do hit on an important point: “socialism” is something of a vacuous term. While before it was defined as government ownership of the means of production, “socialism” has been broadened, mainly by critics on the right, to include many public works projects including welfare programs.
Mark Z
Dec 24 2019 at 9:06pm
That’s not a definition of socialism at all. I don’t think anyone (including socialists) would consider a laissez faire economy where the state makes up 10% of GDP, and the richest person has $999 million, to be socialist.
There is some ambiguity in the word, it’s true, which is because there are two variables under discussion that tend to be conflated: 1) how regulated/planned the economy is, and 2) how much redistribution there is. Of course, #2, taken to the extreme, is basically indistinguishable from #1 taken to the extreme. Scandinavian countries are, for developed countries, relatively high on #2 and relatively low on #1. Usually, when people sympathetic to socialism use the word, I think they mean mostly #1 (a more regulated, centrally planned economy) with some of #2. “Medicare for all”, the “Green New Deal”, and anti-corporate sentiment in general strike me as more characteristic of socialist sentiment today than, say, support for a UBI, which is purely redistributive. Socialists seem more driven by hatred of the private sector (and belief that the government can do better) than by a mere desire for more redistribution. So the traditional definition of socialism as favoring state control over production is still the most useful one.
artifex
Dec 23 2019 at 4:04pm
Do socialists really make the “that wasn’t real socialism” argument that often? To me, it seems that they are more interested in talking about inequality, power, oppression, communalism, and capitalism’s being bad. That makes themselves look good and their intellectual opponents look bad, whereas saying “that wasn’t real socialism” makes them look naive and causes other people to roll their eyes.
Yet it is not obvious that the mocked response is wrong. I don’t think it is true that “as long as a socialist experiment is in its prime, almost nobody disputes its socialist credentials.” Yes, many prominent people have come out in favor of each experiment, and many dispute that, and most are dishonest, and so on. However, there have also always been people advocating kinds of socialism different from any that have existed. And kinds of socialism that have existed are not representative of all possible kinds. If all you knew about socialism was the failed natural experiments, you could not easily conclude that the bad outcomes were not due to features selected for in kinds of socialism that have existed.
I think the strongest, best reasons to dismiss socialism are not related to the natural socialist experiments and that they require more technical understanding of why the experiments failed. This causal understanding is unappealing to people who are not socialists but also not libertarians, since it also argues against other kinds of statism. The natural experiments are mainly only useful as additional evidence that the strongest, best reasons are true.
KevinDC
Dec 27 2019 at 9:18am
Hey artifex –
You wrote:
Do you have any counterexamples to give? For example, when Venezuela was doing well due to sky high oil prices, there were lots of authors saying “yep, Venezuela is exactly the kind of socialist system we’ve been advocating for, and look how well it’s working!”, and after the house of cards came crashing down, these same authors were saying “But Venezuela was never a true socialist country, why would anyone even think that it was? The collapse of their economy proves nothing about socialism.” What I can’t seem to find is even a single example of an author saying Venezuela was “not a true socialist country” during the time Venezuela was doing well.
Can you point to even a single advocate of socialism who was actively or publicly disputing the “socialist credentials” of Venezuela during the years the country seemed to be doing well and was being held up around the world as a socialist success story? I can’t positively prove no such examples exist, but I’ve yet to find one. And if socialists had been disputing the “socialist credentials” of Venezuela during that time, they’d have a pretty strong incentive to draw attention to those articles, because as it stands now, their denials sound like they’re saying “Even though at the time lots of people were saying Venezuela was exactly what they wanted in socialist system, I knew all along it was not a true example of a socialist system – I just never said anything about it out loud or on the public record until after Venezuela collapsed because of all of the reasons.”
artifex
Dec 27 2019 at 3:28pm
I have no counterexamples. But you should not expect to find counterexamples, independently of the claim’s being true. Any counterexamples would have to be from outside the socialist mainstream, so they wouldn’t be from the press or prominent advocates. Venezuela started failing very fast after Chávez was elected, so you’d need to look at comments made before 2001, not in the press, and not from prominent advocates. That’s a tough ask no matter if the claim is false. I do not think the claim is false because I know of counterexamples—I think it is false because I know there have been people with socialist views very different from the socialist mainstream.
Miguel Madeira
Jan 1 2020 at 1:31pm
The Trotskyist factions connected to the International Workers League and to International Workers Union
The anarcho-socialists of “El Liberatario”
the pro-Hoxha “Bandera Roja”
The “La Causa Radical”
Theodoro Peitkoff and the “Movimento al Socialismo”
“Patria para Todos” and “Podemos” (the Venezuelan party with that name) were ambiguous, joining and leaving the Chavista coalition from time to time (today they support the government, but because the courts appointed Chavistas to the leadership of these parties)
Even the Communist Party of Venezuela and the Trotskyists connected to the “International Secretariat of the Fourth International”, even if they support the government, don’t, I think, consider it the “true socialism” (for some reason they remain as independent organizations), only a “progressive” regime that is more close to “true socialism” than the alterntives
T Boyle
Dec 23 2019 at 5:14pm
It’s important not to overlook the Nordics, which are often held up as examples of socialism that succeeded. The more extreme examples are too easy as targets. You have to address British Labor, and France, too.
KevinDC
Dec 23 2019 at 6:26pm
Hey T Boyle –
I started reading the book Caplan talked about today, I’m about 80 pages in so far. You’ll be pleased to know that the author does not, in fact, overlook the Nordic countries – he dedicates several pages explaining why they are not examples of successful socialism. Quick excerpts –
Mark Anderson
Dec 23 2019 at 11:54pm
Since my background is Norwegian I’ll settle for their form of government. Conservatives always claim it isn’t socialism.
Brian Turner
Dec 24 2019 at 10:17am
I agree that the left plays the “not true socialism” game opportunistically but defenders of laissez-faire versions of capitalism do the same. For example, had Taiwan and South Korea in the 1960s-90s been basket cases, we’d have heard that the extensive state intervention was the cause of the problem thus it was “not true capitalism”.
Mark Z
Dec 24 2019 at 9:30pm
With respect the ‘Nordic model,’ I think the most that can be validly argued (not necessarily correctly, but plausibly at least) is that having higher taxes – particularly on for the middle and working classes – to fund a more generous welfare state doesn’t derail developed economies, that low taxes aren’t necessarily a prerequisite to strong economic growth. What makes no sense at all (and yet is still done) is to defend nationalizing some industry by referring to a country in which that industry is private, or to argue that we could/should increase regulation of some industry by appealing to countries where said industries are less regulated than the US. One can say, “look at Sweden, clearly we can raise our income taxes and still do ok.” I’m not convinced we should, but it’s true that Sweden has much higher income taxes and is still prosperous. What one can’t say is, “look at how well Sweden is doing, clearly we should reduce oppose school choice, raise the estate tax, and resist any privatization of social security.” That doesn’t work, since Sweden abolished its estate tax, has implemented school choice type policies extensively, and has partially privatized social security.
Sid
Dec 25 2019 at 7:36pm
Oooh, I hope there’s going to be video of the debate with Brian Leiter. Looking forward to it.
Miguel Madeira
Jan 1 2020 at 5:36pm
Sorry, but this is nonsense; specially in the case of the USSR, the claim “it is not-real-socialism” started almost since the begining:
The article of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, “The Revolution in Russia Where it Fails”, is from 1918
From 1918 to 1927, the Communist Party of Russia/Soviet Union was a machine of producing dissidences, claiming that the leadership of the party was not building the “real socialism”: Kommunist (1918), Democratic Centralism Group (from 1919), Workers’ Opposition (from 1919), Workers and Peaseants Socialist Party (1921), Workers’ Truth (1923), Workers’ Group (from 1923), Trotskyists (from 1923)…
The split of the Comunist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD) is also from 1921
In the 1930s, we have the “council communists” (a derivation of the KAPD) and the “bordigists” (a split in the Communist Party of Italy); during the decade, many things (the “Popular front” policy, the repression against the anarchists and the POUM in the Spanish Civil War, the begining of the great purges, etc.) made many people on the left to break away with the Soviet Union, usually going first to Trotskyism but in many cases spliting also the the Trotskyist orthodoxy (Bruno Rizzi, Max Sachtman, etc.)
After the World War II, we have groups like the Socialism ou Barbarie in France or the Johnson-Forest Tendency (C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya) in the USA
And, in the 1960s, the whole “New Left” (many are admirers of Cuba, China or Vietnam, but all are, almost by definition, against the Moscow-version of socialism; note that I don’t understand what differences they saw between the USSR and Cuba or Vietnam)
And it is ironic to say that “The not-real-socialism defence is only ever invoked retrospectively, namely, when a socialist experiment has already been widely discredited”, and, in the following lines, talking about George Orwell (who in the 1930s and 1940s was saying “It is nor-real-socialism”)
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