Socialism: An Obituary for an Idea

...No one even seriously claims that the British people are in any sense "happier" as a result of their socialist experiences...

...The "utopians" were not much interested in affluence, as we have come to understand that term--i.e., an ever increasing amount and variety of consumers' goods made available to an ever increasing proportion of the population...

...Bankruptcy was inevitable, and we have seen it come in our own time, as a spirit of nihilism has dismissed not only the answers derived from tradition but the very meaningfulness of the questions to which tradition provided the answers...

...Apparently it was not long, then, before God took notice of young Moon and accorded him the divine appointment he had so avidly sought...

...More than that: it was a necessary ideal, offering elements that were wanting in capitalist society--elements indispensable for the preservation, not to say perfection, of our humanity...

...During the following decade, as Moon's missionary zeal won converts to the new sect, his business acumen built for him a sizable industrial fortune-the sale of manufactured goods ranging from munitions to ginseng tea yielding an estimated $15 million annually...

...Perhaps the most extraordinary fact of twentieth-century intellectual history is that all thinking about socialism takes place in non-socialist countries...

...The British love of liberty is still strong, the British liberal pohtical tradition still possesses a large degree of popular acceptance, the British people as a whole are still more reliant on common sense than they are enamored of political fantasies...

...It must be emphasized that this is not a question of the institutional reality diverging markedly from the original, inspiring ideal--as the Christian Church, let us say, diverged from the original vision of the Gospels...

...What the central planners of the Soviet Union clearly cannot do is to create an "affluent" society in which its citizens would have a standard of living on the level of that of Western Europe and America...

...Paul did to Jesus--the frustration has been absolute and definitive...

...The crucial difference between "scientific" socialism and "utopian" socialism lay in their attitude toward economic growth and material prosperity...

...That would be the whole gloomy story had not God announced to Sun Myung Moon that Christ was not his only son...

...There has been more nationalization of industry in Britain, the trade unions are far more belligerent, the "left" socialists--the ideological fanatics who redouble their socialist efforts as the socialist ends fade into unreality--are more influential...

...Which is why all those who remain loyal to this ideal will The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976 5 always end up bewailing another "revolution betrayed...

...Hesitant Joseph P. Duggan, who graduated this year from the University of Dallas, is assistant managing editor of The Alternative...

...It is no accident, after all, that the Greek polis--the model of political community--neither believed in nor practiced religious toleration, to say nothing of religious pluralism...

...the women are garbed in ankle-length white dresses...

...The Soviet Union, they tell us, is not "socialist" at all...

...They did expect to abolish poverty and to achieve a decent degree ,of material comfort, which would be equally shared...

...Which is to say, for many generations capitalism was able to live off the accumulated moral and spiritual capital of the past...

...The main function 6 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976 of the socialist community, as they conceived it, was to produce a socialist type of individual--persons who had transcended the vulgar, materialistic, and divisive acquisitiveness that characterized the capitalist type of individual...

...In the beginning, God created Adam and Eve sinless and ordained that they procreate to establish a perfect race...

...In the case of totalitarian socialism--that current of socialist thought for which Lenin stands to Marx as St...

...Nor is it really a demand for intrusive government by a The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976 7 powerful and ubiquitous bureaucracy--though that is how socialists and neo-socialists prefer to interpret it...

...The "Scientific socialism" of Marx and his followers-whether they defined themselves as "orthodox" Marxists, "neo"Marxists, "revisionist" Marxists, or whatever--aimed to transform all of society, and quickly...

...The event, the "Bicentennial God Bless America Festival...

...On Easter morning of 1936, he claims, Jesus appeared to him and asked him to establish God's kingdom on earth...

...It is, rather, a strategy whereby organized labor on the one hand, and the state bureaucracy on the other, receive an ever increasing share of the national income and of political power...

...The demand for a "welfare state" is, on the part of the majority of the people, a demand for a greater minimum of political community, for more "social justice" (i.e...

...Indeed, the original socialist criticism of the bourgeois world is, to a remarkable degree, a secular version of the indictment which the "reactionary" Catholic Church was then continually making, though to a world increasingly deaf to Christian tonalities...

...But these deviations and transformations, this development of Christian doctrine, were the work of the Church Fathers, whose powerful minds can fascinate us even today...

...It derided the idea of slowly converting people to a belief in socialism, until these people formed a majority...

...And the socialist ideal was, in many respects, an admirable one...

...This assumption, in turn, was possible only because the founders of capitalism took it for granted that the moral and spiritual heritage of Judaism and Christianity was unassailable, and that the new individualism of bourgeois society would not "liberate" the individual from this tradition...

...A "good life" has thus come to signify a satisfactory "life style"--just another commodity that capitalism, in its affluence .and generosity, makes available in a thousand assorted varieties, to suit a thousand tastes...

...At last the time arrives for the main event--a fiery chastening delivered in ringing Korean and translated, paragraph-by-paragraph, into the halting English of a retired Korean army officer...

...It is more appropriate to take cognizance of, and pay one's respects to, his positive qualities...

...Moreover, the works of Western Marxist thinkers--and some are indeed impressive--are suppressed in socialist lands...

...One could discover that from reading books, to be sure, but it is sometimes enlightening to interview an actual survivor...

...Joseph P. DHgga Os, Myra& Moou Korccm i~d, stri~is:, imprerawio, and umrdd-br Massif, S u Mym, g Moo* ~ploys ati.CoaHu~, old.f~shio~d reviualism, ad d power~ p.blic, re/4tio.s mschi~ to h,Ji/d . bizarrc--#~ bis r The scene is the Washington Monument...

...As it happens, says Moon, a new messiah is abroad in the land at this very hour, preparing to set up God's kingdom on earth--a peacefill world-family, commingling East and West...

...but it seems that they are insufficiently resolute or intelligent to bring "true" socialism about...

...Egalitarianism, in Sweden, does not reflect any sincere personal commitment on the part of the Swedish people to the ideal of equality...

...Though the moral and spiritual impetus toward socialism may have been derived--and is still largely derived--from a profound sense of the inadequacy of modernity to satisfy the yearnings for political community, post-utopian socialism itself has become a modernist political doctrine...

...Now, to ever greater degree, anti-capitalism is becoming synonymous with one form or another of barbarism and tyranny...

...The consequences for the Swedish economy are entirely predictable: slower economic growth, higher inflation, lower productivity-all amidst increasing popular discontent...

...This "utopian" socialism was not really "utopian" at all...

...The people of Israel were next chosen to pave the way for the coming of God's son, Jesus Christ...

...One of the things that can be done is to design all measures of "social welfare" so as to maintain the largest degree of individual choice...

...Socialism is what socialism does...

...It might free him from a particular theology, or a particular church...

...That kind of wayward development is natural and inevitable, if always dismaying--ideals pay a large price for their incarnation...

...Today, we live in a world with an ever increasing number of people who call themselves socialists, an ever increasing number of political regimes that call themselves socialist, but where the socialist ideal itself has been voided of all meaning, and frequently of all humane substance as well...

...But then the issue will be posed anew: what can a liberal capitalist society do to inoculate itself against a resurgence of anticapitalist dissent...

...For Sun Myung Moon ;t has been a long and determined journey to this eccentric setting beneath Washington's obelisk...

...Indeed, all the objective indices of social pathology--crime, juvenile delinquency, corruption, ethnic dissent, emigration, etc.--show steady increases...

...It is reasonable to expect that the Labour government will be succeeded by a Conservative government, and the British experience with socialism will be followed by a "reactionary" affmmation of the principles of liberal capitalism...

...As Cardinal Newman once observed, it is not too hard to show the flaws in any system of thought, religious or political, but an erroneous idea can be expelled from the mind only by the active presence of another idea...

...Though Britain's movement toward "socialism" came much later than Sweden's, and though some of the more conservative British socialists still talk as if a Swedish condition was the ultimate ideal they were striving for, the British impulse has been more powerful, less controllable, less deferential toward economic realities...

...This is true of both the Communist and social-democratic versions of "scientific socialism," each of which, in its own way, takes a "managerial" and manipulative approach to politics, and tries to create a new political community through the actions of government upon an unenlightened and recalcitrant populace...

...Reading them, one finds that socialism derives its spiritual energy from a profound dissatisfaction, not with one or another aspect of liberal modernity, but with that modernity itself...

...In circumstances such as these, socialist communities "work," in the sense of continuing to exist and continuing to hold on to the loyalties of a new generation as well as those of the founding members...

...They were by no means Spartan in their conception of a good community...

...As for Western countries with social-democratic governments, such as Britain or Sweden--well, they get a passing grade for "effort" Irving K#stol is editor of The Public Interest, a member of the Wall Street Journal's Board o f Contributors, and in the coming academic year, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington...

...Sun Myung Moon, known to his devoted followers as Lord of the Second Advent...

...We now know part of that answer...

...The original sources of socialist dissent are best discovered by going back to the original socialists: the so-called "utopian" socialists, as distinguished from the later "scientific" socialists...

...Since the Swedish Social Democrats are still officially committed to the socialist ideal, they find it impossible to resist this ideological pressure...

...All the utopian-socialist communities had a religious core--at the very least a "religion of humanity" into whose values young people were indoctrinated...

...The nation chosen 8 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976...

...In the twentieth century, both these movements succeeded in establishing themselves as the governments of major nations...

...To call it a "secular religion" is not far off the mark, and most of the original "utopian" socialists would have found nothing arguable in this ascription...

...They work most effectively, as historians of socialism are fond of pointing out, when the religious core is strongest, because then the shared values are most successfully affirmed and reaffirmed...

...Yet a Western standard of "affluence" is precisely what the Soviet citizens want...

...In the case of contemporary socialism, however, the ideal itself has ceased to be of any interest to anyone--it has not been adapted to reality but contemptuously repudiated by it...

...1) The people who set out to create a socialist community must sincerely subscribe to socialist beliefs...

...The absolute contradiction between the socialist reality today and the original socialist ideal is most perfectly revealed by the utter refusal of socialist collectivities even to think seriously about that ideal...

...It is not at all a demand for "socialism" or anything like it...

...For with the passing of the socialist ideal there is removed from the political horizon the one alternative to capitalism that was rooted in the JudeoChristian tradition and in the Western civilization" which emerged from that tradition...

...The drift is unremittingly toward the "left," and will remain so, as long as the Social Democrats are in office...

...THE ALTERNATIVE: AN AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOLUME TEN, NUMBER ONE / OCTOBER 1976 Irving Kristol Socialism: An Obituary for an Idea The dead idea of sodalism is putrifying both the world's mind and the world's body...

...The basic defects of a liberal-capitalist society have been obscured from us by the socialist critique itself--or, to be more precise, by the versions of this critique which ultimately became the intellectual orthodoxy of the socialist movements...

...Scientific socialism," in contrast, denounced capitalism for failing to produce the society of abundance made possible by modern technology, and mocked at "utopian" socialism for wishing to curb "needs" rather than satisfying them copiously...

...on the crisis of social democracy in Britain, to be published next spring, by Doubleday...

...Obviously, the central planners can do certain things--i.e., build steel mills or dams or armament factories...

...Born to a Presbyterian family in northern Korea in 1920, Moon showed early aspirations for saintly celebrity...

...When I was 12 years old," he recalls, "I started praying for extraordinary things...

...at first, Moon agreed to the solem0a task...

...Over the past quarter century, a host of "conservative" and "neo-conservative" economists and social critics have showed us how such mechanisms could and would work, and their intellectual victory over earlier "Fabian" conceptions of social reform has been decisive...

...To understand how America attains most-favored.nation status in Moon's economy of salvation, it is necessary to rehearse the whole of biblical and secular history as revised and amended in Divine Principle...

...distributive justice), than capitalism, in its pristine, individualistic form, can provide...

...To challenge or criticize those values, and the way of life associated with them, was to risk immediate expulsion...

...This was very much a Protestant conception of the relation between men and the values by which they lived and died...

...The program continues with Sunburst, described as a "folk-gospel" group...

...As has been noted, there are no socialist intellectuals in the Soviet Union--only an increasing number of anti-socialist intellectuals...

...This modesty was a matter of principle: being community-oriented rather than individual-oriented, "utopian" socialism saw no merit in the constant excitation of individual appetites, which would inevitably place severe strains on the bonds of community...

...But with each generation that capital stock was noticeably depleted, had to be stretched ever thinner to meet the exigencies of life...

...As such they do serve a purpose: they help the historian and scholar understand what socialists used to think socialism was all about...

...Neither, of course, are such regimes as exist in Peru or Syria or Zaire, whose claims to socialist legitimacy are not to be taken seriously...

...Over the next nine years, with the advice and assistance of such luminaries as Moses, Buddha, and Jesus, and with a direct line of communication with God, Moon received and synthesized the revelation later to be published as/~'vtne Priuciple...

...Indeed, it is the only kind of socialism that has ever worked...

...Theprimum mobile around which all this hubbub spins is the Rev...

...And since capitalism, after two hundred or so years, is bound to endure crisis and breed disaffection, it is nothing short of a tragedy that anti-capitalist dissent should now be liberated from a socialist tradition which--one sees it clearly in perspective--had the function of civilizing dissent, a function it was able to perform because it implicitly shared so many crucial values with the liberal capitalism it opposed...

...In a sense, Great Britain represents Sweden's "socialist" future...

...The dead idea of socialism is now putrifying both the world's mind and the world's body...

...But their conception of a "decent" standard of living was, by twentieth-century standards, quite modest...

...It was an admirable idea, but now it must be removed and buried...

...People who persist in calling themselves socialist, while decrying the three-quarters of the world that has proclaimed itself socialist, and who can find a socialist country nowhere but in their imaginings--such people are anachronisms...

...The political mass movements that had socialist goals then divided into two kinds: those which thought a liberal parliamentary democracy should be preserved within a socialist community, and those which thought this both unrealistic and undesirable...

...Here again, the Israeli kibbutz gives us an insight into the "utopian" intention...

...The essential point of this indictment was that liberty was not enough...

...The effort to create a socialist society that would be more prosperous, more "affluent," than a capitalist one, while creating a socialist citizenry through unremitting force rnafeure, has been a disastrous failure...

...This is all quite ridiculous, of course...

...but he would "naturally" rediscover for himself, within himself, those values previously associated with that theology or church...

...This approach made it possible for "scientific" socialism to become the basis of a mass movement, since it pandered so explicitly to the mass appetites excited--but also, to some degree, at any particular moment, frustrated--by capitalism...

...A society founded solely on "individual rights" was a society that ultimately deprived men of those virtues which could only exist in a political community which is something other than a "society...

...But they will have to be answered if the death of socialism is not simply to mean a general disintegration into political pseudo-socialist forms whose only common element is a repudiation, in the name of "equality," of individual liberty as a prime political value...

...The most important political event of the twentieth century is not the crisis of capitalism but the death of socialism...

...ably (if not perfectly) compatible with a liberal capitalist society...

...Those Swedes who still think of themselves as socialists are intensely dissatisfied with this state of affairs, and are constantly urging the government toward greater state control and a more egalitarian distribution of income...

...The date, September 18...

...The inevitable question is: what was the weakness at the heart of this ideal that made it so vulnerable to reality...

...The consequences for the British economy have been disastrous --Britain now vies with Italy for the title, "the sick man of "Europe"--and there have been no discernible compensating improvements in the British social and political order...

...Where one can claim success for it, it is a success that is a kind of failure in socialist terms...

...Such is the case of Sweden, after decades of social-democratic government...

...It is hard to believe that Britain will simply continue on this downward course...

...By 1965 Moon was prepared to journey to America, or as he calls it, the new Promised Land...

...True, there is a dwindling band of socialist fideists who keep insisting that we must not judge socialism by any of its works...

...And in all such instances the end result has been frustration and disillusionment...

...It did not reject them and in no way scorned them, but simply assumed that the individual would be able to cope with this matter as he did with his other "private" affairs...

...What, for instance, shall we do about the government of those most peculiar capitalist institutions, the large corperations--bureaucratic (and, in a sense, "collectivist") versions of capitalist enterprise that Adam Smith would surely have detested...

...Capitalist society itself--as projected, say, in the writings of John Locke and Adam Smith--was negligent of such virtues...

...The trouble is that it can only work under certain very restricted conditions...

...others are plainly bewildered...

...It has to be removed and buried--with appropriate honors if that will help...

...And (3) they must be fairly indifferent to material goods, so that a voluntary equality will easily prevail...

...Sartre's Marxist writings have never been published in Russia, just as Brecht's plays have never been produced there, and just as Picasso's paintings have never been exhibited there...

...The kibbutz aims to satisfy all the basic economic needs of the community, and even to achieve a pleasing level of ~omfort for its membership...

...In this respect, one can again see the fallacy in the analogy--so frequently and glibly made--between contemporary socialism and early Christianity...

...Socialism can be seen, in retrospect, to have been a kind of rebellion against the possibilities of nihilism inherent in the bourgeois Protestant principle--an effort, within the framework of modernity, to reconstruct a political community that would withstand the corruptions of modernity itself...

...These and other questions will continue to make any "counter-reformation" on the part of liberal capitalism an exceedingly fragile enterprise...

...Practically all of the truly popular and widespread support for a "welfare state" would be satisfied by a mixture of voluntary and compulsory insurance schemes--old-age insurance, disability insurance, unemployment insurance, medical insurance--that are reason...

...The New Hope Singers perform, swelling with bland energy reminiscent of "Up With People...

...But "affluence," it~ the sense of" widespread individual possession of such "luxuries" as automobiles, television sets, hi-fi radios and record players, freezers and refrigerators, travel abroad, etc., is solemnly regarded as a political threat, to be coped with cautiously and prudently...

...There are no intellectual hegiras to Moscow, Peking, or Havana...

...It is an event of immense significance...

...One hears little such prattle today, even from official Soviet sources...

...Central economic planning of a rigorous kind has demonstrated a radical incapacity to cope with a complex industrialized economy and urbanized society...

...nor is China, or Yugoslavia, or Cuba, or Hungary, or all those other "people's democracies...

...It has been a prosperous country, with a healthy economy and a stable society--but its economy and society can be fairly described as "mixed," i.e., half-privatecapitalism, half-state-capitalism...

...I asked for wisdom greater than Solomon's, for faith greatfr than the Apostle Paul's and for love greater than the love Jesus had...

...Managerial" socialism has turned out m be far more utopian than "utopian" socialism...

...Similarly, it contemptuously rejected the notion of creating model socialist communities within the womb of capitalist society--as say, the early Christians created their own exemplary communities throughout the Roman empire...

...A folk ballet follows, then fireworks...

...In our own time, the Israeli kibbutz can remind us of what a socialist community, in the original sense, was supposed to be like...

...2) They must be satisfied with a small community-otherwise there will be division of labor, bureaucracy, social classes, in short a "society" rather than a community...

...Soviet Communism is a pseudo-religion, and the Soviet government is a pseudo-theocracy, which, even after decades of coercion and terror, has been pitifully unable to effect any kind of mass conversion to socialist beliefs...

...Not a single interesting work on Marxism--not even an authoritative biography of Karl Marx!--has issued from the Soviet Union in its sixty years of existence...

...Other problems indigenous to a liberal capitalist society are still virgin territory so far as constructive theory is concerned...

...But the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt could boast of comparable achievements--there is nothing "socialist" about the ability of an all-powerful state to get certain things done...

...Like the New Hope Singers, Sunburst's men wear ruffled shirts and butterfly-bow ties, holding neutral ground between formal and hip...

...But in an obituary, it is indelicate to begin with the deceased's flaws of mind and character...

...The Saint-Simonians, as we know, very consciously set out to establish a post-Christian religion that preserved the best of Christianity as they understood it...

...Among these virtues are a sense of distributive justice, a fund of shared moral values, and a common vision of the good life sufficiently attractive and powerful to transcend the knowledge that each individual's life ends only in death...

...But this kind of socialism has always been marginal to socialist history, which had much larger ambitions...

...If you want to study Marxism, with Marxist intellectuals, you go to Paris, or Rome, or London, or some American university campus...

...The Church certainly did deviate from the original teachings of Jesus and his apostles, and did transform these teachings into a theology suitable for an institutional religion...

...In the case of contemporary socialism, there are no Church Fathers--only heretics, outside the reach of established orthodoxies, developing doctrines for which socialist authority has no use at all...

...Satan foiled the plan by seducing Eve, thus polluting the human bloodline...

...Ironically, only liberal capitalism can perform that funereal task...

...That discontent will not be calmed by a more punitive and egalitarian tax system...

...The immense bureaucracy involved in such planning simply cannot compete with the free market as an efficient mechanism for allocating resources, nor is bureaucratic caution able to substitute for entrepreneurial risktaking as a mechanism of innovation and economic growth...

...These citizens were never "socialists" in any meaningful sense of that term, nor have sixty years of Communist rule succeeded in making them such...

...The plaintive lament of the purist that socialism (or capitalism, or Christianity) has "never really been tried" is simply the expression of petulance and obstinacy on the part of ideologues who, convinced that they have a more profound understanding than anyone else of the world and its history, now find that they have been living a huge self-deception...

...This appetite will not be appeased by a more equal distribution of income or wealth...

...A gawking throng gathers between the sweeping arcs of flags and bunting...

...The crowd reacts with ambivalence: some stand reverently, awe-struck...

...Moon's newly.proclaimed revelations incurred him excommunication by the Presbyterian Church, and in 1954 he launched the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity-better known to Koreans as the Unification Cult, or to Americans by the more dignified "Unification Church...

...The same destiny has awaited the non-Leninist, socialdemocratic version of "managerial" socialism...

...Socialism, apparently, is one of those ideals which, when breathed upon by reality, suffers immediate petrifaction...

...Not an easy mission, but not in principle an intractable one...

...And, even more important, what can a liberal capitalist society do about the decline of religious beliefs and traditional values--a decline organically rooted in liberal capitalism's conception of this realm as an essentially "private affair" neither needing nor meriting public sanction...

...This essay will appear in The Future That Doesn't Work, a book edited by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...In the earlier decades of the Soviet regime there was a lot of windy talk about "the new Soviet man" who would emerge from "the Soviet experiment...

...The problem, at the moment, is to persuade the business community and the "conservative" (i.e., anti-socialis0 political parties of their practicality...

...The demand for "more' '--not for "more equal" but for "more"--will feed upon itself, until an economic, and eventually political, crisis will either create an authoritarian regime that copes with discontent by repressing it or provoke a reversion to a more liberal-capitalist economic order...

...But Christ renounced an earthly kingdom and died on a cross without ever marrying and founding the perfect race...

...It survived so long as traditional religious habits of mind survived in the individualist, secularized society of bourgeois capitalism...