[Reader-list] Heaven on Earth

[Yazad Jal]

I have been reading this stunning new book, _Heaven on Earth: The Rise and
Fall of Socialism_ by Joshua Muravchik. Here's the prologue. At the bottom
are links to a few reviews.

-yazad

http://www.encounterbooks.com/heea/HEEAprologue.html

Prologue to _Heaven on Earth_:

       Socialism was the faith in which I was raised. It was my father's
faith and his father's before him.
       My grandfather, Avraham Chaim Muravchik, grew up in a small shtetl
outside Kiev in what was then the Russian empire. Born in 1878, he received
the orthodox religious training of every boy of his time and place. But like
many others of that generation he turned away from formal Judaism by the
time he entered high school, or gymnasium, as it was called.
       It was in the radical student circle at gymnasium that he met my
grandmother, Rachel. She was several years his junior since he had not been
able to afford the school until he had worked for a time as a lumberman,
while her family, which manufactured paper bags and lived in Kiev proper,
was better off. Together they joined the most radical of the newly formed
Russian leftist parties, the Socialist-Revolutionaries. It was distinguished
from the more Marxist-oriented Social Democrats by its endorsement of terror
tactics and by its theory that the leading role in the revolution would be
played by Russia's peasantry rather than its proletariat.
       Avraham Chaim and Rachel left for America in 1905, part of a wave of
Jewish emigration touched off by an orgy of anti-Semitic violence that
followed Russia's defeat by Japan and the abortive attempt to overthrow the
tsar. The peasants, it turned out, were more easily mobilized for pogroms
than for revolution.
       In America, the couple found work with the Yiddish language Jewish
Daily Forward, whose masthead was emblazoned with the famous injunction of
the Communist Manifesto: "Workers of the world unite!" And they settled in a
Harlem tenement, in which my father, Emanuel, was born in 1916.
       His boyhood was filled with the comings and goings of the exile
branches of the Russian Students Organization and the Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries. (The party had split in 1917, and my grandparents
stuck with the more radical half.) In 1929, Norman Thomas ran for mayor of
New York on the Socialist Party ticket, and the campaign crystallized my
father's budding interest in socialism. He chose it as the topic of an
eighth grade paper, and after four intense days in the library pronounced
himself a convert. A few months later, just after his thirteenth birthday,
he joined the party. It was a coming of age that substituted for a bar
mitzvah.
       My mother, Miriam, shared my father's views albeit with softer
ideological definition. But being of liberal spirit, they decided to refrain
from systematically indoctrinating me and my brother as they raised us.
Systematic indoctrination was scarcely necessary. The political cause was
the center of their lives. It was talked about over the family dinner table
and with their friends who were mostly comrades. On car trips, we would
while away the time by singing "We Shall Not be Moved" and other old labor
songs. I first visited our nation's capital in 1958 at the age of eleven
when my parents took us on the Youth March for Integrated Schools, one of
the earliest civil rights demonstrations. By my teens, I was a seasoned
protestor.
       By then I, too, had joined the party, eventually becoming the leader
of its youth wing, the Young People's Socialist League. It was a small
organization because socialism never caught on in this country despite all
my efforts and my father's. (His have persisted for more than seventy years,
while in my thirties I became an apostate and began to grope my way back to
Judaism.)
       But if we were out of step with America, we took heart from knowing
that America was out of step with the world. My comrade, Michael Harrington,
the famous writer who became chairman of the party in 1968 at the same
moment that I became chairman of the youth, boasted: "Most of the people in
the world today call the name of their dream 'socialism.'" I could not vouch
for his math, but, Socialism was undoubtedly the most popular political idea
ever invented.
       Arguably, it was the most popular idea of any kind, surpassing even
the great religions. Like them, socialism spread both by evangelization and
by the sword, but none ever spread so far or so fast. Islam conquered an
empire that at its height embraced twenty percent of mankind. Christianity,
the largest religion, can, after two millennia, claim the adherence of about
one third of the human race; it took 300 hard and bloody years before
Christianity could speak for ten percent of the world's people. By
comparison, within 150 years after the term "socialism" was coined by the
followers of Robert Owen in the late 1820s, roughly 60 percent of the
earth's population found itself living under socialist rule of one kind or
another. Of course, not all who lived under socialism believed in it, but
not all who were counted as Christians or Muslims were believers either.
       Yet once empowered, socialism refused to yield its promised rewards.
The more dogged the effort, the more the outcome made a mockery of the
humane ideals that it proclaimed. For a century and a half, no amount of
failure dampened socialism's appeal. Then, suddenly, like a rocket crashing
back to earth, it all collapsed. In the span of a couple decades, socialism
was officially repealed in half the places where it had triumphed. And in
the other half, it continued in name only. 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.
       In this book I trace socialism's phenomenal trajectory. It 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 on science
rather than revelation. Although its provenance was European, it was taken
up with ardor in China and Africa, India and Latin America and even in that
most tradition-bound of regions, the Middle East. No other faith ever
appealed as widely. It was not confined to salons and libraries but exerted
itself as well in statehouses and on picket lines, barricades and
battlefields. It did more than anything else to shape the history of the
twentieth century.
       Ironically, the power of this faith was to some degree obscured by
the popularity of Marxist theory, which held that ideas were merely the
surface froth thrown up by underlying currents of technological progress and
material interests. This, too, was a seductive notion because it answered
that most puzzling question: why do people think what they do? But this
"materialist" interpretation has not stood the test of time, least of all in
explaining socialism's own history. What interests or technology caused
socialism's triumph or its defeat in Russia? Its transmission to China,
Cuba, and North Korea? Its appearance in other forms in Sweden, Israel,
Tanzania, Syria?
       The idea of socialism did not march through history of its own
accord. It was invented, developed, popularized, revised, exploited and
abandoned by a chain of thinkers and activists. It was modified again and
again, sometimes for ulterior motives but also because, for all its
unmatched allure, it proved maddeningly difficult to implement. I have
chosen to tell the story of socialism by means of sketches of key
individuals each of whom exemplifies a critical stage or form in its
evolution. Some of these were seminal figures, responsible more or less
single-handedly for a major turning point. Who can imagine Communism without
Lenin, Fascism without Mussolini, or the peaceful self-nullification of the
Soviet Union without Gorbachev? Other important episodes, such as the rise
of utopianism or social democracy or the embrace of socialism by "Third
World" states, cannot be traced to a single individual, so I have selected
for portraiture the one whom I believe best represents each such element in
the drama.
       The manger in which socialism was born was the French revolution with
its emphasis on equality, its profound anti-clericalism, and its promise
that all things could be made new. Amidst the chiliastic confusion of serial
upheavals, one impassioned visionary, "Gracchus" Babeuf, proposed that the
way to give substance to the slogan "liberty, equality, fraternity" was to
collectivize all property. Thus did his Conspiracy of Equals, as it called
itself, serve as midwife to the new idea, which grew and developed over the
next hundred and twenty years. In the early 1800s, with most of Europe still
recoiling from the Napoleonic bloodbath, socialism turned away from
revolution to direct experimentation. This took the form of small
communities in which people could practice the life of collective ownership.
The most important of these-in America and England - were led or inspired by
the Robert Owen.
       The socialist experiments did not turn out well, and the idea itself
might have wasted away in infancy were it not then taken up a symbiotic team
of unique prophetic power-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They shifted the
basis of socialist hopes from individual experiments to broader historic
trends which fortified it against empirical failure. Although Owen's
movement had adopted the physical trappings of religion, erecting
church-like "halls of science" where sermons were delivered at Sunday
services, Marx and Engels achieved the far more profound breakthrough of
imbuing socialism with something of the intellectual and spiritual force of
the great religious texts. Their doctrine provided an account of man's
history, an explanation of current sorrows, and a vision of a redemptive
future.
       But half a century after the publication of The Communist Manifesto,
the socialist idea hit another crisis as Marx and Engels's leading heir,
Eduard Bernstein, observed that economic development was contradicting the
prophecy. The theory was rescued by Lenin, who kept it alive by performing
heart transplant surgery, replacing the proletariat by the vanguard. Still,
into the early twentieth century, although socialism had stirred millions it
remained a dream.
       Then, World War One 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, the most outre was
fascism which seemed to turn socialism on its head. But the leap from Lenin
to Mussolini was no bigger than from Marx to Lenin. Each man 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 Two. Not only did
many more Communist regimes emerge but social democracy found a new lease on
life, spearheaded by Clement Attlee's stunning electoral triumph over
Churchill in Britain at the end of the war. The aftermath also saw the
appearance of dozens of new post-colonial states and with them the birth of
"Third World Socialism." It was a hybrid of Communism and social democracy
exemplified by Julius Nyerere's Tanzania modeled part after Chinese Maoism,
part after British Fabianism.
       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 sprung 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 anti-socialist force seemed to be none other than the working
class-personified by leaders like Samuel Gompers and George Meany. 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, which, under the
stewardship of restless reformers Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev,
embarked 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 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 was brought full circle.
       I complete my telling with a digression from history to laboratory
science, as it were, by training a microscope on an Israeli kibbutz. Like
most such settlements, kibbutz Ginosar was secular, built by Jews who, like
my father and grandfather, preferred the teachings of Marx to those of
Moses. And like most, they succeeded where people in other lands had failed,
in creating a pure socialism, faithful to the blueprint, only to see their
progeny turn its back on this way of life. After so much hope and struggle,
and so many lives sacrificed around the world, socialism's epitaph turned
out to be: if you build it they will leave.

Links to reviews:
www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/001/122awpfo.asp
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/08/20/222733.php
http://www.aei.org/bs/bs13910.htm
http://www.gopusa.com/lindachavez/lc_0528.shtml
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/apr02/social.htm

Transcript of a TV debate:
http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript988.html

Chapter 1 of _Heaven on Earth_ is available on the web by going to Amazon's
web page for the book and clicking on "excerpt".  The chapter is titled
"Conspiracy of Equals -- Babeuf Plots a Revolution"