The Good Intentions Paving co.: Joshua Muravchick's Heaven on Earth

...The meliorist program that Bernstein advocated no longer shone with the promise of earthly divinity, and the orthodox—Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky—could not abide such heresy...

...Such cruelty was not even a matter of moral decision but rather of historical inevitability, according to Marx...

...In practice, matters did not turn out so rosily: the legions of pipefitters and hod carriers serene and wise and many-sided as Goethe failed to materialize as promised...

...There was consternation in the Marxist ranks when Engels' protege Eduard Bern-stein declared in 1898 that the oppressors had become less oppressive and the sharp moral distinction between capitalist society and socialist society had been blurred...

...Marx hates divinity and professes to love humanity...

...The comparatively modest ambitions of the American labor movement, like the ten-der Christian ministrations Dickens practices and recommends, do not profess to make heaven on earth...

...They were motionless, and had no resemblance to the human form...

...Heaven on Earth The Rise and Fall of Socialism BY JOSHUA MURAYCHIK Encounter Books/417 pages/327.95 REVIEWED BY Algis Laliunas To comfort the afflicted is perhaps the most spontaneous, the most natural impulse of religious duty in the Judeo-Christian tradition...

...The overcoming of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness...

...Lenin bent the canonical wisdom as a circus strongman does an iron bar...

...Without disparaging those indispensable sciences in their sanity, I utterly renounce and abominate them in their insanity...

...The failure of Owen's socialism—he or one of his followers introduced the term, which soon became a popular usage—only convinced subsequent socialists that success would require the transformation of all human society...

...having made Him, they can dispose of Him at their pleasure, and only after they have done so will they become truly human...

...but, as Muravchik argues, it was the socialist failure to make significant inroads into the United States that spelled its doom...

...and he could not have been more right...

...64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 George Meany...

...Wandering the streets of Whitechapel on a rainy November night, in the dire East End, Dickens comes upon the local workhouse, the homeless shelter of that day...

...The vastness of that new ambition transformed the character of socialism, from the gentle fervor of utopianism to the maniacal hardness of the new science...

...The criticism of religion ends in the teaching that man is the highest being for men, hence in the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being...

...Babeuf, who called himself Gracchus after a Roman tribune who took away surplus land from the rich and gave it to the poor, was a sometime laborer, chiseler of the poor, writer and forger...

...If the workers were growing more comfortable and less inclined to revolt, a revolutionary vanguard of violent intellectuals would bring on the proletarian revolution in the absence of willing proletarians...

...Dickens will not leave it at that, but talks to the five women—that is what they prove to be—and gives each of them a shilling to get some sup-per and a bed for the night...

...Pristine America seemed the likeliest spot to launch such an undertaking, and in 1825 Owen founded the city of New Harmony in Indiana, to the end of "gradually [uniting] all interests into one, and [removing] all cause for contest between individuals...

...Ideology is baloney," he used to say...

...Babeuf ended up on the guillotine and was to be enshrined in the hearts of Marx and Engels...

...The notion of socialist belief in the god that failed is not exactly novel, but Muravchik includes in his telling of the story some fascinating turns on men who rarely figure in the customary accounts: the French revolutionary Francois-Noel Babeuf...

...B O O K S I N R E V I E W The Good Intentions Paving Co...

...Gompers, the cigar maker who founded the American Federation of Labor, wrote in his autobiography that workers knew what was best for workers: "I saw the danger of entangling alliances with intellectuals who did not understand that to experiment with the labor movement was to experiment with human life...

...the utopian industrialist Robert Owen...

...the Tanzanian firebrand Julius Nyerere, and—on the anti-Communist side—the union men Samuel Gompers and Algis Valiunas is the author of Churchill's Military Histories: A Rhetorical Study (Rowman & Littlefield...

...Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions...

...Muravchik brilliantly makes the case that socialism was stymied here by the labor union leaders Samuel Gompers and George Meany...

...The arch-poet of such compassion, at once religious and democratic, is of course Dickens, and the brief 1856 essay "A Nightly Scene in London" is a summons to aid however one can the myriad forlorn and broken souls with which that city abounds...

...The pressure that another's suffering exerts upon heart and soul produces a sympathetic pain that cannot be ignored and reduces to inconsequence the purely rational assessment of the inconvenience or danger involved in coming to the victim's aid, or of the ultimate uselessness of helping someone bound eventually to come to a bad end...

...and the loathsome bourgeois who was supposed to die off for good continues to run the show, although he and his faltering God have run into competition from the holy warriors of Islam who have so quickly replaced Communists as the scourge of the earth...

...one's nature was determined at birth, and subsequent events acting upon the individual made him the marionette of circumstance...

...Muravchik writes that with Marx and Engels, "the socialist ideal which Owen had bathed in tones of kindliness took on instead the coloration of justice, retribution and hatred...

...Under Lenin's compelling touch, the Soviet Union became the glorious socialist motherland...

...and I address people with a respect for the spirit of the New Testament, who do mind such things, and who think them infamous in our streets...

...Perfection would not be had without the necessary cruelties to be visited upon the oppressors...

...That was the idea, anyhow...

...Men must realize that God did not make them but that they made God...

...perhaps a hundred million men and women died miserable and pointless deaths, starving, frozen, worked to extinction, tortured in very likely every way that one human being knows of making another scream in pain...

...The ruling Directory, unfortunately for Babeuf, was not averse to using terror itself, and it found the Conspiracy an intolerable threat to its own power...

...Good-hearted meliorism only perpetuates injustice, which cannot be eradicated without a revolution in consciousness that will bring on a revolution in social action...

...Socialists were ravished by the peculiarly modern beatific vision of the pie come down from the sky, but they never made good on the delectable feast they advertised...

...his science dictates that in time the proletarian masses will come to see the world with Marx's prophetic clarity, take their turn as God-demolishers and usher in the reign of unimaginably splendid Man...

...Meany likewise demonstrated a sensible revulsion against the ideas spun out to nowhere with which sense-less and bloody-minded dreamers intended to remake the world...

...Accordingly, society ought to take wholesale possession of its members and turn them into decent and content little puppets, untroubled by anxieties about the condition of their souls in the eyes of God, that nasty fabrication of woeful human delusion...

...Marx's often slighted sidekick Friedrich Engels...

...then there are of course obligatory and less interesting lucubrations on the usual suspects, such as Lenin, Deng Xiaoping and Gorbachev...

...Encouraged by this successful reform of some Scottish cotton mills, Owen embarked upon the project of establishing "a terrestrial paradise . . . in which harmony will pervade all that will exist upon earth...

...Twelve years earlier, in the "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," Karl Marx had unforgettably declared his contempt for such doped-up religiosity as Dickens', an illusion with no future: Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and the protest against real suffering...

...The 1 all-seeing state would oversee every man's physical and moral well being from cradle to grave, and "the great principle of equality, or universal fraternity, would become the sole religion of the peoples...

...The most telling rejoinder to Bernstein came from Lenin: "There is only one answer to revisionism: Smash its face in...

...The Welsh industrialist Robert Owen, like Marx and Lenin after him, knew that virtu-ally everything everybody else has ever known was wrong and that he was the oneto set things right...

...The demand that they should abandon illusions about their conditions is the demand to give up conditions that require illusions...

...the revisionist Eduard Bernstein...

...But Lenin's own revision of Marx would follow, and its peremptory dismissal of an essential doctrine proved far more successful than Bernstein's mousy moderation...

...But neither do they turn an already sad world into hell...

...It is the opium of the people...

...Five great beehives, covered with rags—five dead bodies taken out of graves, tied neck and heels, and covered with rags—would have looked like those five bundles upon which the rain rained down in the public street...

...SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65...

...Terror, of course, would be necessary to help the peoples appreciate the ecstasy they were being offered...

...Dickens makes the appropriate inquiries of the master of the workhouse and is told nothing can be done for the outcasts: the casual ward is full—that simple...

...but almost no other country was so disinclined to join the revolution...

...He closes his piece with a hot slap at the laissez-faire zealots who shrug their shoulders at such misery andcalls on all decent people who cannot walk past such sights without a terrible pang to do something about it, in the name of Christ: I know that the unreasonable disciples of a reasonable school, demented disciples who push arithmetic and political economy beyond all bound of sense (not to speak of such a weakness of humanity), and hold them to be all-sufficient for every case, can easily prove that such things ought to be, and that no man has any business to mind them...

...The New Moral World, however, was beset by the refractoriness of old immoral humanity: Owen's son, rather more sensible than his father, concluded that the model city was a bust because equal pay for working hard and for doing nothing tended to drive out the industrious and to encourage the indolent...

...he was nothing if not an enthusiast—from the Greek, a man full of the god—and early in the course of the French Revolution he foresaw the reign of goodness coming any day now: "The sans-culottes want to be happy, and I don't think it is impossible that within a year, if we carry out our measures aright and act with all necessary prudence, we shall succeed in ensuring general happiness on earth" After attaching himself in turn to various revolutionary factions, he became the brains, if that is the word, of the Conspiracy of Equals, whose aim was to eradicate "once and for all the desire of a man to become richer, or wiser, or more powerful than others...

...As the most advanced capitalist society, America should have fallen into waiting socialist hands like a ripe plum...

...outside the door are five persons, unrecognizable at first as persons, for whom the workhouse has no room that night...

...To suppose human beings responsible for their own thoughts and actions was ludicrous, he believed...

...In Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, Joshua Muravchik rightly under-stands that socialism was a religion that held out the prospect of bliss in this world, that undertook to refashion human beings so as to make them capable of achieving said bliss, and that could never deliver because men refused to be molded into the shape necessary for everlasting happiness...