According to Francis Fukuyama’s well-worn end-of-history thesis, we are all capitalists now. However, a little over a generation ago more than a third of the world’s regimes professed to be socialist. Whereas now, assumptions about the benefits of free markets and economic growth go largely unquestioned by western political leaders, there was a time when even mainstream politicians in the west saw socialism as a fairer and more efficient alternative to capitalism.
In his book “Heaven on Earth: the Rise and Fall of Socialism”, Joshua Muravchik charts the history of socialism from its birth in the embers of the French Revolution, to its apparent demise in the debacle of tumbling walls and collapsing regimes in the final decades of the twentieth century. The book’s broad-brush historical approach to the subject and avoidance of theoretical abstraction ensures an epic and entertaining read. Unfortunately, this is also its main weakness. By failing to distinguish sufficiently between the different traditions of socialism, it ultimately offers a one sided account of socialism’s history that fails to rise above the author’s own conservative prejudices.
Few on the moderate left would dissent from Muravchik’s verdict on socialism of the Marxist-Leninist variety. Only Socialist Workers still hold to a belief in the historical inevitability of communism brought about by the seemingly eternally impending crisis of the capitalist system. Muravchik is right to point out the extent of the brutality that occurred in the name of this unlikely creed. “The socialist narrative turned history into a morality play without the morality,” is his arresting explanation for its particular brand of cruelty.
However, his verdict on socialism as it developed in liberal parliamentary democracies is less persuasive. It is true that a number of the early democratic socialists held beliefs – such as the nationalisation of industry, social ownership and the control of the means of production – which today seem outdated. Nonetheless, this branch of socialism demonstrated a capacity for revision and reform that was notably absent in its revolutionary counterpart. Many of the intellectual figures in this tradition – Bernstein, Tawney and Green, among them – derived their socialist principles, not from some formulistic creed, but from humanistic and ethical strains of thought that emphasised a commitment to the values of equality, democracy and individual liberty.
Muravchik, however, tends to treat the exponents of these two socialist traditions as one and the same. Their main differences, he contends, was over means, and not ends. Both have at their heart the vision of a socialist utopia, a “heaven on earth” in Moses Hess’ famous phrase, achieved through either democratic or dictatorial means. As a neo-conservative, it is hardly surprising that Muravchik would wish to portray social democracy as part of the same, discredited Marxist bag. Unfortunately, this can only be done at the expense of massively the distorting the history of social democracy as it has been, and is currently, practiced.
Clement Atlee, for instance, emerges from the book as a socialist diehard, vainly attempting to steer democracy along the path to a socialist utopia. “Atlee’s socialist conviction burned with an inextinguishable flame,” the author enthuses, incongruously noting a mere paragraph earlier that he was, in fact, “a devoted monarchist”.
This version of Atlee’s socialist belief is very far from what Atlee himself had to say on the subject. According to Peter Hennessy, “Atlee was a believer in step-by-step reform, through the careful accumulation of improvement and benefits for the least fortunate”. Furthermore, Atlee was careful to distinguish his moderate social democratic creed from the extremes of communism and laissez faire capitalism. “Communism”, he once said, “denies the dignity of the individual, Conservatism ranges the individual in classes.”
Tony Blair is given the reverse treatment of Atlee. He is portrayed as a chip off the old Thatcherite block, in order to fulfil his assigned role as socialism’s “inadvertent undertaker”. This is, of course, exactly the same accusation made against Blair by the hard left, who are still rehearsing the same tired old arguments of sixty years ago. The fact that it isn’t true is recognised by the majority of those on the moderate left, and by serious thinkers on the right.
Muravchik’s underlying argument is that any form of socialism is immiscible to democratic politics. Socialism, he contends, goes against the grain of selfish human nature. The only way it can succeed is through coercion. “If you build it, they will leave”, has proved to be “socialism’s epitaph”, he claims.
It is certainly true that today’s voters do not seem inclined to elect political parties supporting traditional socialist programmes of industrial nationalisation and state ownership. However, neither are they enthusiastic about parties advocating the wholesale privatisation of public services and the withdrawal of welfare benefits from the elderly and vulnerable. Indeed, by portraying Atlee as an old style nationalising socialist, Muravchik avoids confronting his real legacy: as the founder of a social democratic consensus in Britain that has remained surprisingly durable to this day, despite various concerted efforts from the right to undermine it.
This is not to say that there is nothing Muravchik writes worth reading. The book includes an interesting chapter on Robert Owen’s idealistic but ill-fated attempt to found a socialist community in America, called New Harmony. Also, Muravchik’s account of the split in the Communist League between the Marxists and revisionists at the end of the nineteenth century is particularly enjoyable, painting a portrait of internecine strife that will be familiar to anyone with experience of politics on the left. However, his pronouncement on the death of socialism as a political force is far too premature. As the Liberal statesman Sir William Harcourt once said, in a phrase whose sentiments still ring true today, ‘We are all socialists now.’