Your Invitation Attached
REVIEW:
HEAVEN ON EARTH: THE RISE AND FALL OF SOCIALISM
By Joshua Muravchik, Encounter Books, 417p, $27.95
Reviewed by Penn Kemble
I began Josh's new book with some foreboding. Josh is a
long-time friend and co-worker, but has drifted somewhat
to the right, while I have remain stuck thinking about
a responsible course for social democrats. It embarrasses
me to admit that I half-expected a polemic written to
appeal to the sensibilities of Republican speechwriters
and free-market editorialists. I have been happily
surprised.
Most readers of this bulletin will truly enjoy this
book. It is not a tract. It presents a compelling
narrative, sometimes grim but sometimes amusing, carried
along by fascinating characters. Josh has somehow
developed an engaging prose style –- despite all
those years spent drafting resolutions and polemics.
Some of the subject matter will be familiar (how the
Bolshevik mind-set arose out of currents of thought
set in motion during the French Revolution), but it is
presented with fresh insights. There are also portraits
and stories that bring alive interesting issues and
perspectives in the history of socialism that most of
us rarely bothered much about, or long ago forgot.
Like Fred Siegel, who reviewed the book for The Weekly
Standard, I especially enjoyed the chapter on the 19th
Century utopian colonies in America (launched by the daft
dreamer, Robert Owen), and also that on the kibbutzim in Israel
(these, in Josh's view, foundered when communitarian illusion
ran aground on the rocks of traditional family structure.)
http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/001/122awpfo.asp
The portrait of Marx as a shameless moocher of Engels's
money and ideas is also intriguing. Josh notes that many
prominent Marxists never actually read all three volumes
of “Capital,” and suggests that the work's impenetrable
style helped sanctify it against empirical criticism
of its premises and predictions. The modest,
beleaguered Eduard Bernstein appears as an intellectual
hero, who from the beginning dared to challenge an
orthodoxy that grew into Marxism-Leninism, one of the
world's most virulent forms of political correctness.
“Socialism” is also a provocatively ambiguous book.
It can be read as a conservative portrayal of the
dangers that lie in attempts to transform human nature.
But it can also be read as a left-democratic critique
of the repeated betrayal of the labor movement and its
allies by elements of the intelligentsia. Trade
unionists and their allies sought greater voice in
and shares of the emerging industrial economy, but
they were constantly preyed upon by vain, domineering
and often well-to-do ideologues who thought the workers
ought instead to be building them their pyramids.
The AFL's Samuel Gompers and George Meany are offered
as examples of unflinching resistance to such pressures.
Some interesting issues arise that Josh and others might
well explore if PBS ever has the wisdom to base a series
on this book. (Our best hope, given the demise of
organized, face-to-face political discourse in America.)
There is some justification for a broad-brush critique
of all those who committed themselves to the end goal
of a socialist system, whether they worked toward it
by democratic or by violent and dictatorial means.
All shared a belief in the possibility of an entirely
new economic and political arrangement -– social
ownership and control of the means of production–-
and the “New Man” such an arrangement would require.
Both groups were unrealistic. And the more malign
among them too often exploited the more naive among
them for sinister purposes.
But the differences between the two groups deserve
careful attention, because while the democratic
socialists produced many “useful idiots” they also
produced thinkers and activists who played
an essential part in bringing down totalitarian
socialism – the Evil Empire. Josh argues in a
footnote that he does not stress the distinctions
among various groupings “that grew out of the socialist
acorn” because his purpose is history, not theory.
But he may do some injustice to history.
In the darkest days of the Cold War Ignazio Silone
declared that “the final conflict will be between
the communists and the ex-communists.” That was
an exaggeration: conservatives like Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan played important parts.
(Some might even argue that, in a stretch, Reagan
could qualify as an ex.) But there were times when
it seemed that the only people who really understood
the Soviet threat were democrats of the left. Communists
made the elimination of such people their highest
priority whenever an opportunity arose.
Critics on the left not only had a good first-hand
understanding of the character of communism. Because
they stood alongside the disenfranchised in their
struggles for a better life they could not be dismissed
as capitalist stooges, and could even challenge the
communists in their own constituencies. The intellectual
figures among them –-the tradition of George Orwell and
Sidney Hook and Leszek Kolokowski -- did not regard
themselves as socialists because of commitment to some
formulaic creed involving the nationalization of
industry, or because they yearned for the community of
property. Their commitment rested on the values of
equality, democracy and fair play. Such figures are in
some respects the descendants Eduard Bernstein, or of
religious and humanistic socialists who do not figure
very large in Josh's account.
Josh contends that because a contemporary and innovative
social democrat like Tony Blair has rejected the doctrines
of the old Labour Party on nationalization, and has cultivated relationships with British business, he thereby has turned
himself into a tepid knock-off of Margaret Thatcher. (This,
not surprisingly, is also the view of the remnants of what
the Brits call their "hard left.") But, whatever their
difficulties with Blair, not many British trade unionists
suffer long from such confusions. (Josh includes a goofy
photo of Blair from his rock-and-roll days, partly because
it is amusing, but also, I suspect, out of pique that
Blair's ingenious persistence complicates his thesis.)
There are, of course, many on the right who will not accept
the view that socialism is dead. (Josh has recounted to me
challenges to the description of his book as an obituary for
socialism: "Don't you know what Daschle really trying to
pull off?") These are the radical pro-capitalists, who have
their own orthodoxies, and consider any measures that require
taxes to be spent for common purposes to be unjust. As
Norman Podhoretz once remarked, they thought “the Soviet
Union was just the FTC with guns.”
For the sake of these unfortunates and ourselves, it's
a good idea to declare socialism dead. (Some might
argue that true capitalism, too, is dead -- but that
could be another book.) Serious people no longer give
much thought to nationalization of industry, social
ownership and control of the means of production,
community of property, and such.
But the heritage of Eduard Bernstein and the non-
Marxist currents that gathered in many of the social-
democratic parties still does have something valuable
to offer. This tradition stresses the importance of
democratic organization and common action as means
to achieve rights and economic justice, an emphasis
that distinguishes it both from individualistic
liberalism and from the paternalism of the welfare
state. (And often aligns it with the trade union
movement.) It is not dogmatic: it submits its
proposals to the tests of debate and practice.
As Tony Blair demonstrates, this tradition is not
inherently anti-business. Sometimes it holds that
government should act as a counterweight to private
economic power, but sometimes it urges government
to act as a facilitator. (Odd, isn't it: big
government stays with us but, in defiance of the
predictions of their self-appointed champions, the
rich keep on getting richer?)
The death and burial of socialism could be a benefit to
the responsible social democratic and “liberal” left.
Western European Social Democrats are discovering in
this season's round of elections that it's not enough to
ignore the vestiges of the socialists in the hope
that they will quietly go away. The debris needs to be
cleared away to make room for new thinking and political
opportunity.
A responsible left cannot be created either out of broken
dreams or false new enthusiasms (Look what happened to the
"anti-globalization" movement.) But neither can it be
devoid of hope and spirit. Max Weber, the German sociologist
who warned his countrymen of the dangers of 20th Century
extremism, said it well:
“Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.
It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly
all historical experience confirms this truth: that
man would not have attained the possible unless
time and again he had reached out for the
impossible.”
Paul R. Porter, an important figure in the American
Social democratic movement and the post-War
reconstruction of Europe, died in Sarasota, Florida,
on April 21. He was 94. His work prefigured the later
engagement of many younger social democrats in
democracy-building around the world.
Porter rejoined Social Democrats, USA in the mid-1970s
after long absence from the movement. He had resigned
from the National Executive Committee of the old
Socialist Party in 1941 over the Party's refusal to
come to Britain's aid through support for lend-lease.
Porter went to Greece, a crucible of Cold War conflict,
in 1949, where he directed the office of the Economic
Cooperation Administration (the Marshall Plan). He was
a top deputy on the U.S. team that developed NATO,
and eventually became one of the key officers of
the Mutual Security Agency, the over-all directorate
of the Marshall Plan. He also once served as
President of the Philadelphia taxi drivers' union.
Porter resigned from his government job with the
Marshall Plan when conservative members of Congress-–
Martin Dies Jr. and Senator Homer Ferguson-– made an
issue of his Socialist past and his long-divorced
former wife's involvement in communist-influenced
labor circles. He came to the view that to continue
in his job might jeopardize Marshall Plan assistance.
Porter's experience illustrates why the evils of
McCarthyism — however exaggerated by some -- cannot
be dismissed entirely.
American foreign policy has preferred the machinations of
realpolitik over efforts to encourage democracy in the
Middle East. Some believe it possible to achieve peace
even when so many people are without any fundamental freedoms.
Now some Israelis are questioning this logic. Here are excerpts
from a recent statement by Benjamin Netanyahu. We aren't
endorsing his candidacy -- but the ideas deserve attention:
"Those who fight as terrorists rule as terrorists. People
who deliberately target the innocent never become leaders
who protect freedom and human rights. When terrorists seize
power, they invariably set up the darkest of dictatorships—
whether in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or Arafatistan."
"That is why it is imperative that once the terrorist regimes
in the Middle East are swept away, the free world, led by
America, must begin to build the institutions of pluralism
and democracy in their place. This will not happen overnight,
and it is not likely to result in liberal, Western-style
democracies. But given an option between Turkish-style
freedom and Iranian-style tyranny, the choice is clear. We
simply can no longer allow parts of the world to remain
cloistered by fanatic militancies. Such militancies, once
armed with nuclear weapons, could destroy our
civilization. We must begin immediately to
encourage the peoples of the Arab and Islamic
world to embrace the idea of pluralism and the
ideals of freedom--for their sake, as well as ours."
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=105001950