This Time, Things Will Be Different

Kristian Niemietz has a piece in Quillette about the seemingly endless failures of socialism, Venezuela being the latest of a long series of disasters.

Germany’s socialist left is currently embroiled in a row over the correct stance on Venezuela. The conflict came to the fore at the February conference of Die Linke, the country’s main socialist party, when a group of Nicolás Maduro fans stormed the stage, chanting slogans and waving banners with pro-Venezuela messages...

This coincides with the portrayal, and the self-perception, of “millennial socialist” movements across the Western world. A lot has been written recently about the resurgence of socialism among young voters. Socialist candidates such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the United States, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France have seen huge surges in popularity. And while the candidates themselves span the age spectrum, they all find their most enthusiastic support among young people.

Niemietz has also written a book about socialism and its cycles of enthusiasm, failure and eventual disowning by Western socialists. The book is worth reading too.

As I show in my new book Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies, socialist projects always go through honeymoon periods, during which they are enthusiastically endorsed by Western intellectuals. But since socialist policies generally lead to economic failure, and sometimes even political repression, those honeymoon periods typically don’t last for more than a decade. Then these foreign example fall out of fashion, and get retroactively reclassified as counterfeit socialism. The USSR, North Vietnam, Cuba and Maoist China all functioned as utopias du jour. In the 1970s, some Western intellectuals even pinned their hopes on more obscure areas of the world, such as Cambodia, Albania, Tanzania, Mozambique, Angola and Nicaragua.

There is an interesting observation which Niemietz makes in the book but not in this Quillette piece. It concerns the way socialists have a strong tendency to define their political ambitions in terms of desired outcomes rather than the practical means to achieve those outcomes. The problem is obvious enough because we see the same thing elsewhere.

For example we are too familiar with sustainable energy projects based on claims of starry-eyed outcomes which are neither technically nor economically feasible. It is surely interesting that we see the same cart before horse enthusiasms in socialism.

Niemietz's final point is the one all non-socialists must be aware of, the one socialists never learn. Socialism is only a small scale way of organising societies. It is essentially linear in its core concepts and cannot scale up to the non-linear complexities of modern societies and economies.

Regardless of what socialists say they want to build, socialism can only mean a society run by large, hierarchical government bureaucracies. It can only mean a command-and-control economy directed by a distant, technocratic elite. The reason it always turns out that way isn’t because revolutions are “betrayed” by selfish or undisciplined actors, but because no other path is possible. Unfortunately, this is a lesson that every generation needs to learn for itself—which is why each cohort is sneered at by its younger counterparts.

At the Die Linke conference, it was a fight about Nicolás Maduro and the fate of Venezuela. A decade from now, the spectacle will be repeated—with different names and flags. When it comes to socialism, hope springs eternal, even as socialism’s victims inevitably fall into poverty.