Dimensions: 9'' x 6'' 391 pages Encounter Books Publication Date: January 2002 Paperback ISBN: 1893554783 Hardcover ISBN: 1-893554-45-7

January 2002
Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism
By Joshua Muravchik

While socialism had established itself as a fact of life by the beginning of the twentieth century, it did not succeed in creating societies of abundance or in giving birth to "the New Man." Each failure inspired new searches for the true path that would finally lead to the promised land: revolution, communes, social democracy, communism, fascism, Third World socialism. None worked, and some exacted staggering human tolls. Then, after 200 years of wishful thinking and fitful governance, socialism suddenly imploded in a drama of falling walls and collapsing regimes and disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. In this book, Joshua Muravchik traces this fiery trajectory through sketches of the people who developed the theory, led it to power, and presided over its collapse.

Muravchik is a resident scholar at AEI and an adjunct professor at the Institute of World Politics. His books include The Imperative of American Leadership: A Challenge to Neo-Isolationism (AEI Press, 1996) and Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America's Destiny (AEI Press, 1991).

A summary of Heaven on Earth follows.

Much of the history of the past two centuries revolved around the pursuit of a single idea: socialism. It was the most popular political idea ever invented, rivaling even the great religions. Like them, socialism spread both by evangelization and by the sword, but none ever spread so far or so fast.

Once empowered, however, socialism failed to produce the rewards it promised. The more dogged the effort, the more the outcome made a mockery of the humane ideals that socialists proclaimed. Still, for a century and a half, no amount of disappointment weakened socialism's irresistible allure. Then suddenly, like a rocket crashing back to earth, it all collapsed. Today, in but a few flyspecks on the map is there still an earnest effort to practice socialism, defended as if by those marooned Japanese soldiers who held out for decades after 1945, never having learned that their emperor had surrendered.

Socialism's phenomenal rise and fall is the story of man's most ambitious attempt to supplant religion with a doctrine about how life ought to be lived that sought to ground itself in science rather than revelation. This new faith did not march through history of its own accord, through some mystical Hegelian process. Rather, it was invented, developed, popularized, revised, exploited, and abandoned by a chain of thinkers and activists. To understand the idea, what made it so powerful, and why it failed so disastrously, in some places claiming tens of millions of lives, it is necessary to learn about these seminal and fascinating individuals. Thus it is through a series of biographic sketches that the long, globe-spanning tale of socialism is best told.

Experiment and Revolution

Socialism was born in the French Revolution, which trumpeted equality, anticlericalism, and the promise that all things could be made new. Amidst the tumult and ecstasy, one impassioned visionary, "Gracchus" Babeuf, a feudal record-keeper convicted of forgery, proposed that the way to give substance to the slogan "liberty, equality, fraternity" was to collectivize all property. His Conspiracy of Equals, as it called itself, plotted a final uprising in 1796 to radicalize the revolution anew, but it was betrayed by police spies. Babeuf died on the guillotine after stabbing himself in the chest in a vain effort to take his own life, but the socialist doctrine that he had used his trial to expound took root just as he hoped.

In the early 1800s, when the thought of more revolution made Europe shudder, socialists turned to direct experimentation—mostly in America, which offered easy land and social tolerance. The experiments took the form of communal settlements. The most important of these were led or inspired by Robert Owen, a self-made Scottish cotton magnate whose fame as an industrial reformer was so great that when he arrived in the United States, two joint sessions of Congress, attended by the president, were held to hear his plans. Then, a thousand Americans harkened to Owen's call to join him in New Harmony, the socialist community he founded on the Wabash on a vast, developed tract that he had bought from a religious sect. There he gave frequent lectures on the "three great evils"—private property, monogamy, and religion—and organized weekly dances. But few did much work, and within a year, the once fruitful fields were overrun with weeds, the cupboards grew bare, and New Harmony soon collapsed in internecine acrimony.

The socialist experiments fared so poorly that the idea itself might have wasted away in infancy were it not then taken up by a unique tandem of prophets: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The one was born a Jew, raised a Protestant, and became a violent anti-Semite. The other was the scion of a prosperous business family who rebelled against the devout Pietist faith of his upbringing. Although both detested religion, they imbued socialism with something of the intellectual and spiritual force of the great religious texts, providing in their theory an account of man's history, an explanation of his current sorrows, and a vision of a redemptive future.

However, half a century after the publication of their historic pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, Marxism reached a crisis. Marx and Engels's leading apostle, Eduard Bernstein, one of the few socialist leaders who grew up poor, observed that the conditions of working class life were growing better, not worse as had been predicted. The theory was rescued by Vladimir Lenin, a young nobleman embittered by the execution of his adored older brother for making terrorist bombs. He argued that Marxist revolution could be brought about without the proletariat by a devoted vanguard.

World War I gave Lenin the opportunity to put his idea into practice, and in 1917 socialism achieved its first momentous triumph. Even those socialists who decried Lenin's methods or who viewed his state as little more than a caricature of their goals nonetheless felt strengthened in the conviction that history was flowing from capitalism to socialism. But the debate over the Russian model, and the war's demonstration of the power of nationalism, shattered the movement. Of the fragments that emerged, the most eccentric was led by Benito Mussolini, the fire-breathing leader of the Italian Socialists who split the Left by his support of the war and invented "fascism." Although the fascists started out as a party of the Left, several years later Mussolini led them in a lurch to the Right that seemed to turn socialism on its head. But the leap from Lenin to Mussolini was no bigger than from Marx to Lenin. Each distilled theory from the exigencies of revolutionary action.

The fascist chapter was explosive and brief, and socialism emerged strengthened from the defeat of this heresy in World War II. Not only did many more communist regimes arise, but social democracy found a new lease on life. Its rebirth began in Britain with the stunning electoral defeat of Churchill by Labour's Clement Attlee, son of a wealthy barrister, whose charity work with poor boys in London's slums convinced him that private property should be abolished, although it never dented his ardent monarchism. The war's aftermath also saw the appearance of dozens of new postcolonial states and with them the birth of "Third World socialism." It was a hybrid of communism and social democracy exemplified by Tanzania's Julius Nyerere, the son of a tribal chief. Sent to Edinburgh for education, Nyerere learned socialism from Britain's Fabians but once in power turned toward Chinese Maoism as a more suitable model for a poor country (and for imposing his economic convictions on a resistant populace).

Chinks in the Armor

At some point in the late 1970s, socialism reached its apogee when communist, social democratic, or Third World socialist regimes governed most of the world. There were, however, two chinks in socialism's armor. One was its dismal economic performance: Much of socialism's appeal sprang from the wish to ameliorate want and deprivation, yet in practice it often made things worse. The other was its utter failure to gain a foothold in America, the world's most influential nation, where, to add insult to injury, the leading antisocialist force seemed to be none other than the working class as exemplified by its chosen leaders. Samuel Gompers, who founded the American Federation of Labor in 1886, was a squat immigrant cigar maker who liked to say "my legs are too short to run away from a fight." He flirted with Marxism in his youth, even studying German to read it better, but turned sharply against socialism after concluding that it was a false panacea purveyed by middle-class dilettantes to the detriment of the workers. Gompers's mantle was later donned by George Meany, a New York high school dropout and semipro baseball player who followed his Irish father into the plumbing trade, rising to become one of the most powerful men in American politics. He purged the labor movement of racketeers, Jim Crow, and communists—and was one of the unsung heroes of the cold war.

As America's continued economic success mocked socialism's failures, various Third World nations began to rethink their economic direction. Astoundingly, so did the two communist giants, China and the USSR, under the stewardship of restless reformers. Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev were both lifelong communists who climbed to the pinnacle of their parties, but each had known the bitter taste of the system's capriciousness. Deng, once Mao's "golden boy," had been jailed, beaten, and humiliated in the "cultural revolution" and had had his son thrown out a window—all because Deng had proposed letting peasants farm their own plots. Gorbachev, as a boy, had seen his two grandfathers taken in Stalin's purges while, by his count, a third to half of the inhabitants of his native Crimean village of Privolnoye starved to death in a needless famine. Once at the helm, Deng and Gorbachev steered their countries on uncharted courses away from socialism.

It remained only for the social democratic branch of the socialist family to beat a retreat in order for the reversal to be complete. And in 1997, Tony Blair, a dashing college rock band leader turned politico, resuscitated Attlee's moribund party by campaigning with the slogan, "Labour is the party of business." Thus, 201 years from the date of Babeuf's failed coup, the story of the quest for "heaven on earth," as Marx and Engels's mentor, Moses Hess, first called their creed, was brought full circle.