Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never DiesSocialism is strangely impervious to refutation by real-world experience. Over the past hundred years, there have been more than two dozen attempts to build a socialist society, from the Soviet Union to Maoist China to Venezuela. All of them have ended in varying degrees of failure. But, according to socialism’s adherents, that is only because none of these experiments were “real socialism”. This book documents the history of this, by now, standard response. It shows how the claim of fake socialism is only ever made after the event. As long as a socialist project is in its prime, almost nobody claims that it is not real socialism. On the contrary, virtually every socialist project in history has gone through a honeymoon period, during which it was enthusiastically praised by prominent Western intellectuals. It was only when their failures became too obvious to deny that they got retroactively reclassified as “not real socialism”. |
Contents
1 The enduring appeal of socialism | 1 |
Figure 1 Support for public ownership by sector in | 3 |
Figure 2 Support for public ownership by sector in | 4 |
Figure 3 Support for price controls by sector in | 5 |
Table 1 Support for regulation | 6 |
Figure 4 Support for a larger state in | 7 |
The pervasiveness of socialist assumptions | 10 |
Socialism and social democracy | 17 |
The working class is in power | 177 |
Figure 8 GDP per capita PPP Albania vs Romania and Bulgaria 19852017 in current international | 178 |
The organised might of the working class | 184 |
the early years | 190 |
the later years | 198 |
Remnants of GDR apologetics today | 205 |
A note on proGDR revisionism | 212 |
A different and a better way of doing things Its called socialism | 217 |
Figure 5 Economic Freedom scores | 19 |
A lazy straw man? | 21 |
Not for a lack of trying | 34 |
The straw men that were once alive | 54 |
A whole nation marched behind a vision | 59 |
Stalins pilgrims | 63 |
Remnants of Soviet apologetics today | 86 |
Conclusion | 94 |
A revolutionary regime must get rid of a certain number of individuals that threaten it | 100 |
Maos pilgrims | 102 |
Figure 6 GDP per capita PPP Peoples Republic of China vs Republic of China Taiwan 19802017 | 111 |
Remnants of Maoist apologetics today | 112 |
Conclusion | 114 |
The beginning of building the new man | 116 |
Castros pilgrims | 120 |
Why is Cuba different? | 128 |
A messiah rather than a dictator | 132 |
Kim Il Sungs pilgrims | 133 |
Remnants of North Korea apologetics today | 146 |
The kingdom of justice | 155 |
Figure 9 GDP per capita PPP in Chile and Venezuela 19802016 | 222 |
Figure 10 Oil prices in current US 19892017 by presidency | 224 |
Figure 11 Key governance indicators 20002015 | 226 |
Chávezs pilgrims | 232 |
After the zenith | 240 |
Coming full circle | 247 |
not real socialism again | 253 |
10 Why socialist ideas persist | 260 |
Intuitive anticapitalism or anticapitalism as a default position | 278 |
Figure 12 Global GDP per capita over time in constant international 1990 | 279 |
Figure 13 Global population and global poverty 18502010 | 280 |
Figure 14 Global average life expectancy at birth years 18702015 | 281 |
Figure 15 Annual number of hours worked per worker | 282 |
The Gary Lineker fallacy | 287 |
Conclusion | 293 |
real socialism is being tried | 304 |
Table 2 Distribution of seats in the new Peoples Chamber | 310 |
References | 360 |
About the IEA | 374 |
Common terms and phrases
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