Socialism as promise and as religion
In an April 2019 episode of The Bob Zadek Show, host Bob Zadek framed socialism as a product being sold to Americans without the protection of what he called an economic FDA or economic SEC — agencies that would test an economic policy for safety and effectiveness before the public had to accept it. He named the Democratic Socialists of America, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders as the sellers of “the promise of Nirvana, the promise of unlimited life, the promise of happiness at little or no cost.” Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
His guest, Joshua Muravchik, author of Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism, said the title was in a sense tongue-in-cheek, meant to convey that socialism’s advocates believed it was the key to making life perfect or wonderfully better. He cited Karl Marx’s remark that under socialism a person might hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and write literary criticism in the evening, and the expectation that socialism would produce super-abundance and a “new man” with greater creative powers — Trotsky’s claim that every human being would have the creative powers of a Beethoven or a Goethe. Muravchik’s second point in the title was that socialism is not merely a political idea but a substitute religion; Marx and Engels, he said, began as two young men who hated religion and wanted to bring it down before they hit upon communism. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
Utopian failure and “scientific socialism”
Muravchik described roughly 40 to 50 American communes created by socialists for the purpose of experiencing socialism or proving it a superior system, distinct from religious communes whose purpose was worship. The socialist communes, he said, all broke down very fast, with historians putting their median lifespan at two years — “a uniform disaster.” Marx and Engels, he argued, knew these experiments had already failed and dismissed them by labeling their authors “utopian socialists,” claiming instead to have discovered “scientific socialism.” Muravchik called this one of the great intellectual con jobs of all time: science’s soul is experimentation, and the dismissed utopians had in fact experimented and produced clear results, which Marx and Engels waved away in favor of pure conjecture. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
Zadek extended the charge to the present, saying that when today’s democratic socialists are asked how they will pay for their utopia, they treat it as a detail to be dealt with later. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
Coercion, democracy and the welfare-state compromise
Zadek put it to his guest that socialism has always failed when attempted voluntarily, and therefore requires force — that longer-lived socialist countries exist only through the use of force, and that socialism demands the near-total surrender of autonomy over one’s person and property. Muravchik answered that he did not know that people ever willingly surrender freedom, which is why Lenin and those who emulated him, such as Mao, Fidel and Ho Chi Minh, understood they would have to make people surrender at the point of a gun. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
Democratic socialists, by contrast, sometimes came into government — the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party, and the German and Scandinavian Social Democratic parties — and began to nationalize industries and take away elements of private property. In each case, Muravchik said, the economies started sinking and the socialists themselves realized it was not working, settling instead for a compromise: building welfare states with higher taxes and new social insurance or benefits, while leaving wealth production in the private sector alone, though still subject to regulation. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
Zadek described Sweden as the model — not a socialist country at all, but a capitalist country with a vigorous free market and substantial private property, using the golden goose of the free market to drive the welfare system while taxing it enough to pay for benefits but not so much as to destroy it. He asked whether the American democratic socialists had declared war on that system; Muravchik agreed they do not embrace it, citing relentless talk of the 1% and billionaires as evil people whose money should be taken away, and calling Ocasio-Cortez more strident than Sanders on the point. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
The kibbutz exception
Asked whether full socialism necessarily requires the total surrender of personal autonomy, Muravchik offered one counter-example: the Israeli kibbutzim, socialist communes that really did work. There were about 200 of them, he said, and they accommodated the different needs and wishes of their members. They were not whole countries but voluntary communities, unlike a government imposing a system on people who would be stuck. They succeeded, in his account, because the settlers were passionate Zionists — people imbued with the idea of rescuing the Jewish people after 2,000 years of exile and after the Holocaust and creating a new country where Jews could live and be safe — and could therefore tolerate a system in which everything was shared and everyone was necessarily involved in everyone else’s business. After a couple of generations or several decades, almost all of them voted to transform themselves to a free-market basis once Israel felt relatively secure. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
Across episodes
The excerpts come from a single episode, Socialism Reincarnated (2019), and show no development between an earlier and later treatment.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the internal operation of any socialist state beyond the general claim that coercion sustained it, nor do they give dates, statutes or case law. They do not state what became of the kibbutzim after their votes to adopt a free-market basis, or how the welfare-state compromise has fared in any named country. The episode ends with Muravchik directing listeners to his book and website, and with no further argument recorded.