Let's Not Get Too Choked Up Over The Death Of Socialism
'The biggest intellectual event of the 20th century is the death of socialism.' When the neo-conservative intellectual Irving Kristol first offered that observation in the mid-1970s, it sounded almost perverse. But of course Kristol proved completely right: a faith that once moved millions has over the past decade gone the way of Albigensianism.
It is strange, then, to pick up a recent issue of Harper's magazine and see a long essay by a writer named George Packer about his decision to join the U.S. socialist party in, of all years, 1989. Packer and I attended college together in the late 1970s, and all these years later I remember him vividly: a keenly intelligent, earnest boy, almost universally liked. We all expected him to go on to great things: to become a famous writer or perhaps a crusading politician. Instead, he vanished off the face of the earth after graduation. Only now do we learn what he was doing with his time: he was editing the newsletter of the Boston chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. Of all the many crimes committed in the name of socialism over the past 150 years, the waste of George Packer's talents comes nowhere near the top -- but it is real, and sad, enough.
What is even sadder, on the evidence of the Harper's piece, is all these years later, Packer still does not seem able to grasp what exactly went wrong. 'When I joined,' he writes, 'I couldn't even have said exactly what socialism was, and I still can't.' Not so long ago, when socialism was still a living doctrine, socialists could tell you exactly what socialism was: it was an economic system that would promote greater equality and prosperity by confiscating private property, abolishing prices and interest rates, assigning people to jobs on a rational basis rather than by the higgledy-piggledy jumble of the free market, and paying everybody what he needed, neither less nor more.
The trouble is without prices and interest rates, society cannot make rational economic decisions. Without private property, valuable resources are squandered because nobody has an interest in caring for them. Assigning people to jobs is a polite way of describing slavery, and paying everybody what he needs, neither more nor less, is an inducement to idleness.
Packer seems to know this, but seeks to evade it by arguing, 'socialism has always had less significance as a program than as an ideal.' The trouble is, an ideal without content isn't much of an ideal. It's like the Monty Python sketch: 'We are here today to interview Dr. Elaine Nitwit, who has a new theory about dinosaurs. Dr Nitwit: your theory.' 'My theory about dinosaurs is new.' 'Yes. And?' 'And it's about dinosaurs.' 'But what is it?' 'It is mine.' Et cetera.
But at least Dr. Nitwit did not go on to tell us that while her theory lacked all content, she was a morally superior person for believing in it. Alas, that's what my classmate does seem to believe. All those dreary years at his newsletter have left behind, not a feeling of regret, but a quite unlovely moral vanity. 'What could it mean to call yourself by a name that has passed not only into popular disrepute but almost out of contemporary speech? It means either (1) you're old enough to have been around when it was a living, breathing idea (2) you've studied economic and political theory and have some hypothetical proposals for worker self-management; or (3) you have a good heart.
Actually, most of the socialists I have known (and back in the days when they were still numerous I knew quite a few) were selfish, bitter and exploitive people, not goodhearted at all. Socialism attracted them because it provided an outlet for their considerable capacity for hatred, while conveniently transforming 'compassion' from an irksome duty to those around you into a useful political slogan to justify punishing the annoyingly successful.
Which is why Packer's dirge for his old creed is premature. Socialism has collapsed as an idea -- a victim of its own crimes and failures -- but the psychic needs it fed live on. Now those needs express themselves in new forms: environmentalism, feminism, multiculturalism. Packer dislikes these new ideologies, and reasonably so. But I suspect in the end he will fall prey to one or another of them. After all, what's the alternative? Only the intolerable message of conservatism: slogans can never substitute for goodness; our worth as human beings is measured not by what we say, but by what we do.
Originally published in The Financial Post