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Abstract
Socialism 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”.
Table of Contents
| Section Title | Page | Action | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| About the author | xii | ||
| Summary | xiii | ||
| Tables and figures | xx | ||
| 1\tThe enduring appeal of socialism | 1 | ||
| Introduction: socialism is popular | 1 | ||
| The pervasiveness of socialist assumptions | 10 | ||
| Socialism and social democracy | 17 | ||
| A lazy straw man? | 21 | ||
| Not for a lack of trying | 34 | ||
| The straw men that were once alive | 54 | ||
| 2\tThe Soviet Union under Stalin: ‘A whole nation marched behind a vision’ | 59 | ||
| Soviet socialism | 59 | ||
| Stalin’s pilgrims | 63 | ||
| Remnants of Soviet apologetics today | 86 | ||
| Conclusion | 94 | ||
| 3\tChina under Mao Tse-Tung: ‘A revolutionary regime must get rid of a certain number of individuals that threaten it’ | 100 | ||
| Maoist socialism | 100 | ||
| Mao’s pilgrims | 102 | ||
| Remnants of Maoist apologetics today | 112 | ||
| Conclusion | 114 | ||
| 4\tCuba under Fidel Castro: ‘The beginning of building the new man’ | 116 | ||
| ¡Hasta Siempre, Comandante! | 116 | ||
| Castro’s pilgrims | 120 | ||
| Why is Cuba different? | 128 | ||
| 5\tNorth Korea under Kim Il Sung: ‘A messiah rather than a dictator’ | 132 | ||
| North Korean socialism | 132 | ||
| Kim Il Sung’s pilgrims | 133 | ||
| Remnants of North Korea apologetics today | 146 | ||
| 6\tCambodia under the Khmer Rouge: ‘The kingdom of justice’ | 155 | ||
| 7\tAlbania under Enver Hoxha: ‘The working class is in power’ | 177 | ||
| 8\tEast Germany under the SED: ‘The organised might of the working class’ | 184 | ||
| East German socialism | 184 | ||
| Western admirers of the GDR: the early years | 190 | ||
| Western admirers of the GDR: the later years | 198 | ||
| Remnants of GDR apologetics today | 205 | ||
| A note on pro-GDR revisionism | 212 | ||
| 9\tVenezuela under Hugo Chávez: ‘A different, and a better way of doing things. It’s called socialism’ | 217 | ||
| Socialism of the twenty-first century | 217 | ||
| Chávez’s pilgrims | 232 | ||
| After the zenith | 240 | ||
| Coming full circle | 247 | ||
| The aftermath: not real socialism – again | 253 | ||
| 10\tWhy socialist ideas persist | 260 | ||
| Haidt’s social intuitionist model and Caplan’s theory of ‘rational irrationality’ | 260 | ||
| Intuitive anti-capitalism, or anti-capitalism as a default position | 278 | ||
| The Gary Lineker fallacy | 287 | ||
| Conclusion | 293 | ||
| 11\tEpilogue\nAn alternative history: real socialism is being tried | 304 | ||
| References | 360 | ||
| About the IEA | 374 | ||
| Table 1\tSupport for regulation | 6 | ||
| Table 2\tDistribution of seats in the new People’s Chamber | 310 | ||
| Figure 1\tSupport for public ownership by sector (in %) | 3 | ||
| Figure 2\tSupport for public ownership by sector (in %) | 4 | ||
| Figure 3\tSupport for price controls by sector (in %) | 5 | ||
| Figure 4\tSupport for a larger state (in %) | 7 | ||
| Figure 5\tEconomic Freedom scores | 19 | ||
| Figure 6\tGDP per capita (PPP), People’s Republic of China vs. Republic of China (Taiwan), 1980–2017 | 111 | ||
| Figure 7\tPoverty in China, 1981–2013 (poverty line = $3.10 PPP per day) | 111 | ||
| Figure 8\tGDP per capita (PPP), Albania vs. Romania and Bulgaria, 1985–2017 (in current international $) | 178 | ||
| Figure 9\tGDP per capita (PPP) in Chile and Venezuela, 1980–2016 | 222 | ||
| Figure 10\tOil prices in current $US, 1989–2017, by presidency | 224 | ||
| Figure 11\tKey governance indicators, 2000–2015 | 226 | ||
| Figure 12\tGlobal GDP per capita over time (in constant international 1990$) | 279 | ||
| Figure 13\tGlobal population and global poverty, 1850–2010 | 280 | ||
| Figure 14\tGlobal average life expectancy at birth (years), 1870–2015 | 281 | ||
| Figure 15\tAnnual number of hours worked per worker | 282 | ||
| Blank Page | ii |