Socialism’s
Endless Refrain: This Time, Things Will Be Different
written by Kristian Niemietz
Berlin ,
and there was no one else to argue with. There was just the left, the far left,
and the very far left.
Venezuela .
Venezuela , Chávez and Maduro really
did try to build something new. There were genuine attempts to create
alternative models of collective ownership and democratic participation in economic
life. In particular, the government heavily promoted the formation of worker
co-operatives and various forms of social enterprises. We now know that nothing
much would come out of those efforts, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.
written by Kristian Niemietz
Quillette,
March 30, 2019 -- 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.
Nicolás Maduro is the
successor to Hugo Chávez, and has served as Venezuelan President since 2013.
The legitimacy of his presidency has been in free fall in recent years, and
many now call him a dictator. As Maduro’s popularity has waned, his tactics
have become increasingly brutal. In 2018, a panel of legal experts convened by the
Organization of American States recommended that the regime be referred to the
International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.
Many members of the Die
Linke party establishment, however, still side with Maduro, whom they see
as a comrade under siege. Others, especially in the party’s youth organisation,
take the opposite view—which is why the February conference was contentious.
One young member describes the party’s in-house Chavistas as “die-hard reactionaries, who have an antiquated
understanding of socialism.”
This has been widely
portrayed in the German media as a struggle between reformists and
fundamentalists, with the battle lines running loosely along generational lines.
In this version of events, the older crop of socialists tend to have a more
rigid, dogmatic understanding of socialism, while the newer generation is more
open-minded in its approach.
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.
This socialist revival
is, of course, neither a homogenous movement, nor a fully worked-out policy
program. But if there is a common thread, it is the belief that emerging forms
of socialism could be completely different from anything that has flown under
that ideological banner in the past. For these new socialists, socialism
doesn’t necessarily mean a society run by large, hierarchical government
bureaucracies. Nor does it mean a command-and-control economy, directed by a
distant, technocratic elite. It means experimenting with new forms of social
ownership and democratic decision-making, devolving power to the grassroots,
and empowering ordinary working people.
Since earlier
socialist projects didn’t develop in this way, modern socialists tend not to
identify with them; and sometimes even reject the idea that these precursors
were even “socialist” at all. If one had to summarise the public-facing posture
of modern socialism in one sentence, it would be: “This time will be
different.”
The problem is that it
won’t be. Notwithstanding the often sympathetic media portrayal lavished on
modern socialists, there’s little reason to believe that the governments they
produce, if elected, will differ in basic structure from those of their
ideological forebears.
Even in the
above-cited example of Die Linke member attitudes toward Venezuela , I
see little evidence that young socialists are taking any sort of radically new
approach. They are simply too young to have any kind of strong, active memory
of a time when Venezuela
represented the great white hope of socialism. Chavez died in 2013, before many
of today’s 20-somethings became politically active. They have not made the same
emotional investments in personalities, parties, movements and whole nations as
their older fellow travellers. As a witty headline writer put it in 2012, “To college freshmen, Kurt
Cobain has always been dead.” Similarly, to today’s college freshmen, Venezuela has
always been in crisis.
As it happens, I
remember the beginnings of Venezuela-mania in the mid-2000s quite well. I was
not a socialist, but I spent a lot of time arguing with socialists—because,
well, I was a student in
On the one hand, there
were (typically older) socialists who still felt varying degrees of attachment
to the former German Democratic Republic (the GDR, i.e., East Germany ) and its “big brother,” the Soviet Union . They did not want to reanimate the GDR, and
they condemned the Stasi and the Berlin Wall. But they could not completely let
the dream go.
On the other hand,
there were (typically younger) socialists, who felt no such attachment. They
saw themselves as the vanguard of a different kind of socialism—less rigid,
less dogmatic, less ideological. They saw GDR nostalgists as die-hard
reactionaries. And when they looked around the world for a place where
socialism was evolving in a way that was new, exciting, flexible and
democratic, that place turned out to be
This was not entirely
an act of political self-delusion. When Chávez outlined
his vision for a “Socialism of the 21st Century” at the
2005 World Social Forum, he defined it explicitly in opposition the socialism
of the USSR .
Soviet socialism, in Chávez’s words, was a “perversion.” This time would be different.
And notwithstanding
the chaos and cruelty that has unfolded in
In the mid-2000s, things
were looking up. Oil prices had more than quadrupled in real terms since Chavez
first came to power in 1998. And as a result, the Venezuelan economy was
booming, flooding the government with petrodollars. Chávez could afford to
spend lavishly on social programs and public-sector projects. Western
socialists finally had their proof-of-concept. Here was a country whose success
seemed to prove that socialism could be economically viable, democratic and
(for a time) respectful of human rights. And so it’s not surprising that many
on the left built up a strong emotional attachment to Venezuela .
There was even a fad for a political ideology known as Chavismo—a
mash-up of socialism, populism, Latin American internationalism and recycled
Bolivarianism.
Back then, it was the Chavistas
who would look down on nostalgic comrades who still retained an attachment to
earlier, discredited socialist projects. Now, suddenly, they find themselves in
that same unfashionable role.
This has happened many
times before, and is part of a predictable cycle. 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 .
One common,
backward-looking delusion in all of these cases: When explaining away the
failures of the past, it was assumed that the hierarchical, stratified
character of failed socialist projects had been a result of some deliberate
political choice. Which is to say: It was believed that previous socialist
experiments had failed because the leaders of these movements caused them to be
centralized and autocratic as a matter of design—as opposed to a democratic
socialist system based on mass participation and a radical decentralisation of
power.
But the truth is that
mass participation and radical democratization always had been
idealized by socialists, including by socialist leaders who led successful
national movements. But these dreams never survived, because it simply isn’t
feasible to run a large society and a complex economy in this kind of
participatory way. Democratic socialism works perfectly fine in small, self-selecting
and homogenous high-trust communities with relatively simple economies, the
prime example being the Israeli Kibbutz. But that model is not scalable (and
hasn’t even aged particularly well in Israel itself). There is a reason
that, even at the height of the Kibbutz movement, Kibbutzim never grew beyond a
certain size. There seems to be an upper limit of around 1,500 people, and even
that is rare: Most Kibbutzim have fewer than 500 members.
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.
Dr. Kristian Niemietz
is Head of Political Economy at the Institute of Economic
Affairs. Follow him on Twitter at @K_Niemietz.
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