“The idea that socialism, other than various forms of voluntary
communities in which people choose material privation and seek agreed
equality, is the answer to anything runs against human experience.” ~
Doug Bandow
Doug Bandow – January 13, 2022 @ American Institute for Economic Research
Revolutions are common. Good revolutions, well, not so much. Indeed,
the American Revolution was one of the few that yielded a generally free
society based on the rule of law and democratic governance. Only a few
years later came the French Revolution. Many Americans initially looked
with favor at the overthrow of a genuinely despotic monarchy, in
contrast to the more constrained British system. The increasingly bloody
toll as contending factions struggled for power, however, turned even
former fans hostile.
Violence reached its crescendo under the Jacobins, who began as
members of the Jacobin Club, initially known as Society of the Friends
of the Constitution. With Maximilien Robespierre at their head, the
Jacobins created the Committee of Public Safety and Committee of General
Security and instituted the infamous Reign of Terror. Heads
rolled—literally, as the guillotine was put to prodigious use. By one
count 17,000 people were beheaded before the Jacobins lost power a
little more than a year later. Then Robespierre and other leading
Jacobins suffered the same fate, being dispatched from this world by
what revolutionaries termed the people’s avenger.
Although discredited in France, the Jacobins were admired elsewhere
as history passed by. The Bolsheviks looked to the Jacobins as models,
for example, despite seeing the French Revolution as a bourgeois affair.
The lack of sentimentality and determination to eradicate enemies
appealed to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin & Co. Leon Trotsky contemplated
trying Tsar Nicolas as the French Revolutionaries did Louis XVI. The
Soviets even erected statues to Robespierre and his confederates.
The Jacobins really were surprisingly gutless when it came to
murdering their political enemies and anybody else who fell afoul of
their judgment. It was the Bolsheviks, particularly with Joseph Stalin
at the head, who put real terror into “Reign of Terror.” RJ Rummel,
author of Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900, reported on life under
the infamous Man of Steel: “[M]urder and arrest quotas did not work
well. Where to find the ‘enemies of the people’ they were to shoot was a
particularly acute problem for the local NKVD, which had been diligent
in uncovering ‘plots.’ They had to resort to shooting those arrested for
the most minor civil crimes, those previously arrested and released,
and even mothers and wives who appeared at NKVD headquarters for
information about their loved ones.”
Alas, the murderous excesses of the Reign of Terror ruined the
Jacobins’ reputation in America. In the US early supporters of the
French Revolution, such as Thomas Jefferson, were derided as Jacobins.
And it wasn’t just conservatives who used Jacobins to discredit their
opponents. In 1964 Sen. Barry Goldwater and his supporters were tagged
“Cactus Jacobins.” Jacobin became a term of derision, used to paint
someone as an ideological extremist, even a violent radical, certainly
someone with no legitimate place in American politics.
Until recently, at least. A decade ago a young Bhaskar Sunkara launched Jacobin, a website, publication and foundation. They continue and he wants your support. It’s that time of the year, of course.
Sunkara appealed for funds: “It’s the best time to be a socialist in
the United States since the 1970s. The bad news is that it’s still not a
very good time to be a socialist in the United States.” When he talked
about socialism, he meant, well, socialism. Not the pantywaist,
liberal-faux, pretend-revolutionary silliness espoused by posturing
progressives, and not even the Bernie Sanders approach. How
revolutionary can a millionaire with three homes, who secretly loves
capitalism since it provides the cash that he wants to redistribute to
his political supporters, be?
It’s possible that Bernie once was a real socialist. In 1988 he had nice words
for the Soviet Union: “The revolution there is far deeper and more
profound than I understood it to be. It really is a revolution in terms
of values.” Eight years before he was an elector for the Socialist
Workers Party. Of course, it’s hard to follow all the twists and turns
in commie politics, but the SWP was Trotskyite. That meant it nominally
followed Leon Trotsky.
He was a critic of Joseph Stalin, which made him look quite harmless,
like a typically disheveled, and distracted academic with few skills
other than theorizing about how many revolutionaries could dance on a
pinhead while singing the Internationale.
In fact, Trotsky did not just dabble in violence. He commanded the Red
Army—as the People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs—during the
Russian civil war and later crushed the Kronstadt rebellion, in which
sailors and others demanded freedom and elections. He was a serious
thug, theorist, butcher, politician, and terrorist rolled into one.
Bernie may be an obnoxious sanctimonious hypocrite—shouldn’t he give
away at least one of his homes?—but he’s no Leon Trotsky. Nor any kind
of real socialist.
But it seems that Sunkara is. Indeed, he admitted a fascination with Trotsky and defended the murder of the royal Romanoff children
by the Bolsheviks. Sunkara also knows the only way to make a socialist
America is to seize power and steal everyone’s property. Though he
doesn’t put it quite that way. When Jacobin was created, he
wrote, “Our contributors didn’t always agree, but they shared a desire
to win a tiny, fragmented left back to fundamentals: a class-based
analysis of the world that knew (if not exactly how) that the Left’s
task was to rebuild working-class organizations capable of capturing and
transforming state power.”
He would, no doubt, like to do good once in a position to send forth
lefties determined to eradicate capitalism, essentially political
locusts empowered to consume Americans’ wealth. Wrote Sunkara: “Our
ideas were marginal, but they captivated us: the dream of a society
without exploitation or oppression, without unnecessary suffering, where
every person could reach their potential. A world with our animal
problems solved, so we could start dealing with our human ones.” Sounds
pretty good. But what does any of that have to do with socialism?
Sunkara tried to explain: “We publish pieces that reveal the truth
about capitalism: a system based on exploitation and the degradation of
the human spirit. Most of our daily online posts don’t seem to go deeper
than that. But we also have a vision of a world after capitalism, one
built from wealth and abundance around us. We want to radically extend
democracy into spheres liberalism has always shied away from—the social
and economic realm—and challenge private property in order to foster the
type of collectivism that can truly create conditions for individual
flourishing.”
He concluded: “Socialism is the name of our desire, but it may not be
what the movements that will one day transform the world will use. In
the meantime, we hope we can continue to play a role keeping alive the
dream of liberty, equality, and solidarity.”
The idea that socialism, other than various forms of voluntary
communities in which people choose material privation and seek agreed
equality, is the answer to anything runs against human experience.
Noteworthy is how little support worldwide there is for the ideology a
century and a half after Karl Marx publicized his version of utopia.
That is certainly the case in America. Admitted Sunkara: “We have no
illusions about how marginal we still are. Going from a few hundred to
62,000 subscribers in a decade is a nice story, but it only matters if
our political mission is advancing.” And it isn’t, if we are talking
about real socialism, as opposed to redistributionism, which is more a
political strategy than ideological movement.
Nor is serious socialism viable elsewhere in the world. The Soviet
Union, its Eastern European satellites, the People’s Republic of China,
and a handful of other nations—Cuba, North Korea, Laos, Vietnam,
Cambodia—implemented economic variants which included substantial state
ownership of the means of production. And the result was consistent.
Catastrophic. Disastrous. Horrendous. And worse.
Indeed, all these states engaged in mass repression. Several
conducted mass murder. Many carelessly, inadvertently, or callously
killed prodigiously while seeking to create a new man and society. The
total number of dead runs in the tens of millions, though we will never
have an accurate count. Rummel figured about 109 million killed. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression estimated between 85 and 100 million dead. The numbers boggle the mind.
No doubt, Sunkara would respond that he does not advocate such a
system, though over the years more than a few lefties have shown
disturbing fondness for the guys with the guns, including in the Soviet
Union, China, Vietnam, and Cuba. Some still do.
The only way to impose real socialism, in the end, is by force. Both
the Soviet and Chinese communists won power by promising land to the
peasants. Only when in power did the newly empowered socialists unveil
their true intentions and seize farmers’ lands. Agricultural
collectivization and state industrialization in both the USSR and PRC brought
extraordinary hardship, including mass starvation, killing tens of
millions. This was socialism, real socialism, and its “beneficiaries”
paid a very high price.
Even the socialist grandees in these regimes had little idea of the
economic world around them. Among the most famous “aha” moments came
when Boris Yeltsin, then a former Soviet Politburo member, visited a
Houston supermarket in September 1989. Wrote Pacific Legal Foundation’s Mark Hill,
Yeltsin “visits a small town in Texas and makes an unscheduled stop in a
grocery store. It’s the kind of store where all Americans regularly
shop to find everything they could want to satisfy a hunger or household
need. What Yeltsin found would not surprise us, but it amazed him. The
local Texas newspaper recounted how Yeltsin ‘marvel[ed]’ at the produce,
the fresh fish, and the checkout counter. ‘Even the Politburo doesn’t
have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,’ remarked Russia’s future
leader.” Such were the consequences of real socialism.
All of this forced most of the hardcore “socialist” regimes to turn
toward capitalism. Most dramatic was the experience of the PRC. Ethnic
Chinese, among the most entrepreneurial of people around the globe,
proved equally adept economically at home when Deng Xiaoping dismantled
the lunatic, murderous, inefficient, and impoverishing Maoist state.
Without subsidies previously received from the Soviet Union, Cuba’s
Castro regime suffered an economic crisis and was forced to abandon its
socialist quest. It allowed development of private businesses. At the
start such enterprises were to be family owned and staffed, but
entrepreneurs joked with me about the many “cousins” they hired, a
polite lie ignored by the authorities. Even North Korea has loosened
state controls, though Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un recently reversed
course, perhaps fearing the politically corrosive impact of South Korean culture on his rule.
Outside of terror systems, what country has implemented anything
close to true socialism? Certainly not the Scandinavian countries. They
are highly redistributive but have the money to be so because their
economic systems remain capitalist. Indeed, in certain ways they
represent better market systems than the US, with less special interest
regulation used to reward elites with access to political power. Across
the world today systems sometimes called socialist are almost always
social democracies, Berniesque systems of economic redistribution which
rely upon capitalism to produce abundant resources to plunder.
Some non-communist systems made an effort to attain socialism. The
post-World War II United Kingdom grabbed control of important industries
but fell far short of creating a socialist paradise. In Latin American
nations such as Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and most recently Venezuela,
politicians seized major economic enterprises but again, the results
were not recognizably socialist. Often the looting looked very similar
to that of nominally right-wing systems, such as the Philippines under
Ferdinand Marcos, Indonesia under Suharto, and more. Moreover, the
economic results were uniformly dreadful, probably the most important
reason such systems did not spread far.
Imagine a “democratic” system of socialism in America, in which the
means of production were taken over by the state—essentially, mass theft
on an enormous scale. Implementation would not be pretty: many
Americans would do all they could to avoid, evade, obstruct, and
sabotage such a transfer. Nor would human nature be mocked. Russian and
Chinese farmers already have shown that they work harder for themselves
than for “the people,” meaning political overseers and commissars. The
usual intellectual elites could wring their hands at the “greed”
exhibited by people who should be motivated by “solidarity,” but
sanctimony piled ever higher would only deepen the cynicism of most
people, especially in the working class.
Lack of knowledge and perverse incentives would wreak havoc.
Socialism could only work by modeling capitalist systems. How could
socialists price anything and produce everything without markets? The
notion that labor determines value would fail to sustain a functioning
economic system since any calculation of value is inherently subjective.
State monopolies rarely perform well, especially when manipulated for
political purposes, as they always are. The highly subsidized state
sector in China does little for socialism while wasting vast amounts of
the people’s resources. The lack of competition, both from existing
alternatives and new creations, would ensure inefficiency and waste.
Finally, socialism is most likely to produce what Sunkara blames on
capitalism, a system “based on exploitation and the degradation of the
human spirit.” Certainly, making economic gain the center of one’s life,
contributing to a society that elevates materialism, greed, and envy,
risks sacrificing vital aspects of the good life. But these vices have
little to do with the nature of the economic system. Human nature
transcends capitalism and socialism.
In any case, systems unable to satisfy material needs intensify the
desire for a better life. People always queued for the barest human
necessities in “people’s democracies.” And elites in socialist systems
inevitably used their political power for economic gain. When I visited
the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, I headed to the hard currency
store for soda and snacks; the shelves groaned beneath pricey consumer
goods, including fancy electronics, available only if you had Western
cash to exchange for the foreign, blue and green won, rather than the
local, red and pink won. In Cuba a colleague and I, visiting legally on a
journalism trip, were tossed out of a similar shop after snapping
pictures of what those with access to dollars or euros could buy, but
which those with only Cuban pesos could not.
Moreover, when the state extends its control over economic resources,
it inevitably limits other human activities. A market economy is but
one part of a free society, which is filled with nonmarket institutions:
families, clubs, churches, associations, friends, charities, and much
more. A free economic system expands their opportunities and scope
despite its imperfections.
In contrast, when politicians decide how to allocate resources, they
have no objective standards. Experience demonstrates that those in
disfavor, whether journalists, clerics, politicians, activists, or
anyone else, inevitably come up short. It really doesn’t matter whether
anyone intends socialism to act in this way. It will inevitably do so.
Thankfully, I believe Sunkara’s drive to impose socialism in the US
is doomed. Young people may talk about socialism without any
understanding of what it would really mean. Once they realized someone
up the bureaucratic chain would decide what kind of smartphone they
could buy and apps they could use—indeed, if they could do so at
all—their enthusiasm for the concept would quickly cool.
Still, I hope he keeps Jacobin afloat. It is a serious
venture with a serious mission that deals with serious ideas, in
contrast to the mostly braindead officeholders in both the Democratic
and Republican parties. While serving in the Stanford student senate
when I was supposed to be studying law, a socialist coalition took. They
were loopy lefties but recognized that America faced serious problems
and advocated systemic reforms, in contrast to the squishy liberals who
were, well, essentially useless for any and all purposes. America needs a
serious debate over its future. I hope socialists—real socialists, like
those affiliated with Jacobin—join in.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, specializing in foreign policy and civil liberties.
He worked as special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and editor of the political magazine Inquiry.
He writes regularly for leading publications such as Fortune magazine, National Interest, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Times.
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