“Socialism” means public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.
Why have socialist ideas become so attractive again, despite the fact that, without exception, every socialist experiment over the past 100 years has ended in dismal failure?
Over the past hundred years, there have been more than two dozen attempts to build a socialist society. It has been tried in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Albania, Poland, Vietnam, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, North Korea, Hungary, China, East Germany, Cuba, Tanzania, Laos, South Yemen, Somalia, the Congo, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua and Venezuela, among others—not counting the very short-lived ones. All of these attempts have ended in varying degrees of failure.
The most recent example is Venezuela, which, just a few years ago, was being hailed by leading intellectuals and left-wing politicians as a model for the “Socialism of the 21st Century.” Now that the failure of Venezuela’s socialist experiment is obvious to all and sundry, left-wing intellectuals scramble for excuses.
Socialist experiment to date has gone through three phases.
(1) During the first phase, the honeymoon period, intellectuals around the world are enthusiastic about the system and praise it to the heavens.
(2) This enthusiasm is always followed by a second phase, the “excuses-and-whataboutery period,” which sets in when the system’s failings become more widely known. During this phase, intellectuals still uphold the system, but their tone becomes angry and defensive, probably because they are suffering from cognitive dissonance. They grudgingly admit some of the system’s deficiencies, but try to blame them on capitalist saboteurs, foreign forces or boycotts by the imperialists. Or they try to relativize those failings by talking about unrelated bad things happening elsewhere: “What about…?”
(3) Finally, the third phase sees intellectuals deny that it was ever truly a form of socialism, the “not-real-socialism” stage. This is the stage at which intellectuals claim that the country in question—for example the Soviet Union, Maoist China, or now also Venezuela—was never “really” a socialist country.
Socialists who criticize Stalinism and other forms of real-world, historical socialism always fail to analyze the economic reasons for the failure of these systems. Their analyses attack the paucity of democratic rights and freedoms in these systems, but the alternatives they formulate are based on a vague vision of all-encompassing “democratization of the economy” or “worker control.”
But these are exactly the same principles that initially underpinned the failed socialist systems in the Soviet Union and other countries. When contemporary socialists talk about a non-autocratic, non-authoritarian, participatory and humanitarian version of socialism, they are not being as original as they think they are. That was always the idea. This is what socialists have always said. It is not for a lack of trying that it has never turned out that way.
Socialists who criticize Stalinism and other forms of real-world, historical socialism always fail to analyze the economic reasons for the failure of these systems. Their analyses attack the paucity of democratic rights and freedoms in these systems, but the alternatives they formulate are based on a vague vision of all-encompassing “democratization of the economy” or “worker control.”
But these are exactly the same principles that initially underpinned the failed socialist systems in the Soviet Union and other countries. When contemporary socialists talk about a non-autocratic, non-authoritarian, participatory and humanitarian version of socialism, they are not being as original as they think they are. That was always the idea. This is what socialists have always said. It is not for a lack of trying that it has never turned out that way.
There was indeed a time, in the 1970s and 1980s, when Sweden was moving dangerously close to “democratic” socialism. For Sweden, this was a period of relative economic decline, which culminated in the crisis of the early 1990s. That model was abandoned for good reason. Sweden is now, once again, a relatively liberal market economy, albeit with a heavy tax burden.
There are people who confuse “democratic socialism” with “social democracy.” These are usually the same people who would, erroneously, claim that the system of the Soviet Union was “not socialism, but communism”.
“Democratic socialism” is just socialism, with a meaningless, but nice-sounding modifier attached. “Social democracy,” on the other hand, is a capitalist market economy with high taxes, generously funded public services and a generous welfare state. That is how you could describe Scandinavia, or indeed most of Western Europe, today.
There was indeed a time, in the 1970s and 1980s, when Sweden was moving dangerously close to “democratic” socialism. For Sweden, this was a period of relative economic decline, which culminated in the crisis of the early 1990s. That model was abandoned for good reason. Sweden is now, once again, a relatively liberal market economy, albeit with a heavy tax burden.
Nonetheless, the return of socialism as a mass movement is not the result of such semantic confusion. The more articulate and outspoken figures within the new socialist movement are very clear about what they mean by “socialism,” and that is definitely not “being a bit more like Sweden or Denmark.”
Source: Extracts from the article “Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies” by Mr Rainer Zitelmann