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? In this interview, Kristian Niemietz,
author of Socialism. The Failed Idea That Never Dies and Head of Political
Economy at the Institute for Economic Affairs London, has the answers.

More Than Two Dozen Failed Experiments

Rainer Zitelmann: In your book, you write that socialism has always
failed. Looking back through human history, are there really no examples
of socialist systems that have actually worked?

Kristian Niemietz: No. 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.

Zitelmann: How can an idea that has failed so many times, in so many
different variants and in so many radically different settings, still be
so popular? After all, one of the remaining candidates for the
presidential nomination in the United States is a self-avowed socialist.

Niemietz: Indeed, and organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of
America (DSA) have been experiencing a huge influx of new
members�predominantly young people�over the past five years or so. The
organization has not just become much larger, but also much younger: the
median age among its members has dropped from 68 years to 33 years.
Socialism has become a young people�s movement. Socialism has become hip
and trendy.

Socialists have successfully managed to distance themselves from all real-
world examples of failed socialist experiments. Whenever you confront
socialists with any such example, they always offer the following
response: �These examples don�t prove anything at all! None of these
models were ever truly socialist. This is a straw man. You just don�t
understand socialism.�

Zitelmann: And isn�t it interesting that you only ever hear such
pronouncements once a socialist experiment has quite obviously failed? In
the early days of any new socialist experiment, it is enthusiastically
greeted by huge numbers of intellectuals.

Niemietz: Precisely. This has happened many times. 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 �Socialism of the
21st Century.� One leading left-wing intellectual, the Princeton Professor
Cornell West, proclaimed: �I love that Hugo Ch�vez has made poverty a
major priority. I wish America would make poverty a priority.� And the
high-profile journalist Barbara Walters enthused: �He cares very much
about poverty, he is a socialist. What he�s trying to do for all of Latin
America, they have been trying to do for years, eliminate poverty. But he
is not the crazy man we�ve heard� This is a very intelligent man.� From
Noam Chomsky to Naomi Klein�all the fashionable intellectuals were at it.

Now that the failure of Venezuela�s socialist experiment is obvious to all
and sundry, left-wing intellectuals scramble for excuses, coming up with
extremely convoluted ways of claiming that what we saw in Venezuela was
never �really� socialism at all.

Zitelmann: You also write that even mass murderers such as Josef Stalin
and Mao Zedong were enthusiastically celebrated by leading intellectuals
of their time. How widespread was this admiration for dictators like Mao
and Stalin among intellectuals?

Niemietz: It was very widespread. There were literally thousands of
Westerners who travelled to those places and returned full of praise. Most
of them did not leave written testimonies, but you can still easily find
hundreds of quotes from Western intellectuals who extolled Stalin und Mao.
More importantly, the people who did so were not outsiders. We are not
talking about the members of some obscure fringe party. We are talking
about well-established mainstream intellectuals, including some of the
most renowned writers and scholars of the time.

They were convinced that they saw a better society in the making. Even the
concentration camps in the Soviet Union and China, the Gulags and Laogai,
were admired: they were presented as places of rehabilitation, not
punishment, where inmates were given a chance to engage in useful
activities, while reflecting upon their mistakes. Even journalists and
intellectuals who didn�t completely turn a blind eye to the regime�s
crimes found arguments to justify what was happening: �But�to put it
brutally�you can�t make an omelet without breaking eggs and the Bolshevist
leaders are just as indifferent to the casualties that may be involved in
their drive toward socialization as any General during the World War who
ordered a costly attack.� Those were the famous words of Walter Duranty,
who was the New York Times� Moscow correspondent from 1922 to 1936.

When The Experiment Fails: �That Was Never True Socialism�

Zitelmann: You say that every socialist experiment to date has gone
through three phases. What are these three phases?

Niemietz: During the first phase, the honeymoon period, intellectuals
around the world are enthusiastic about the system and praise it to the
heavens. 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 U.S. imperialists. Or
they try to relativize those failings by talking about unrelated bad
things happening elsewhere: �What about�?�

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.

Zitelmann: People who call themselves socialists today usually acknowledge
the fact that socialist experiments have failed in the past. But do they
also draw the right lessons from these failures?

Niemietz: Absolutely not. 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.

Socialist projects do not start out with totalitarian aspirations�they
just end up that way. Lenin�s 1917 manifesto �The State and Revolution�
does not at all read like a blueprint for a totalitarian society. It reads
like a blueprint for, to use the currently fashionable term, �democratic
socialism.� Socialism is always democratic and emancipatory in its
aspirations, but oppressive and authoritarian in its actual practice.

Zitelmann: In your book you do not mention �democratic socialism.� Yet
these are precisely the models socialists like Bernie Sanders highlight,
for example when he references Sweden.

Niemietz: Sanders has long been oscillating rhetorically between
�democratic socialism� and �social democracy.� This is not a difference in
degree. It is a fundamental difference and you cannot have it both ways.

�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. In terms of their overall score on the various Economic Freedom
indices, they are not that far behind the U.S.

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�.

Nonetheless, the return of socialism as a mass movement is not the result
of such semantic confusions. 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.� Some of them specifically define their idea of socialism in
contrast to, and in opposition to, Nordic-style social democracy, because
they want nothing to do with the latter. To them, �socialism� means public
ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. And at
least on that�I agree with them.

<https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesdigitalcovers/2018/07/12/why-the-
rocks-social-media-muscle-made-him-hollywoods-highest-paid-
actor/?sh=258e0077136b>