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Heaven On Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism by Joshua Muravchik 

Review by Mark Webster

          This book chronicles the putrescence of socialism from Babeuf to Blair.  In between, Muravchik performs post-mortems on Robert Owen, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mussolini, Attlee, Nyere, Gompers, Meany, Deng Xiao-ping, Gorbachev, and Tony Blair.  Some of these men were thugs, such as Lenin: some were buffoons, like Mussolini.  Others, like Clement Attlee, who succeeded Churchill as Prime Minister, were humanitarians.  American labor leaders, such as Samuel Gompers and George Meany, were pragmatic working men who learned to distance themselves from socialism to protect workers. 

          Muravchik, a scholar at American Enterprise and national chairman of the Young People’s Socialist League from 1968 to 1973, shows why.  Socialism became a form of religion that lacked “any internal code of conduct to limit what believers may do.”  All attempts to make socialism religious, historical, scientific, or democratic failed.  Socialism is now best known for the bloody excesses from the Russian Revolution to Pol Pot’s massacres in Cambodia. 

          Many socialists believed they were “democratic socialists” when in fact they were statists, ready to use the coercive power of the state for their version of the improvement of man.  Muravchik notes the kibbutzim movement in Israel was the only socialist collective that chose democratically to abolish their socialist experiment. All the rest ended in bloodshed or bankruptcy.  Despite the abject failure of socialism, true believers still exist in many countries and in our own legislatures and universities.  As it turned out, Socialism was the opiate of the intellectual.  

          What was socialism?  Muravchik never defines the term, because there were many kinds of socialism.  For Clement Attlee, it was a “living faith translated into action.”  He particularly wanted to bring about a classless society.  For Gracchus Babeuf and his Conspiracy of Equals during the French Revolution, it was the collectivization of all property.     For Julius Nyere in Tanzania, it was the overthrow of Western selfishness and the rediscovery of ujamaa, the familyhood of native traditions.  For American Labor leaders Karl Laurrell and Samuel Gompers, socialism was “bread and butter” or “pure and simple” unionism.  For Lenin and Mussolini, it was the sheep’s clothing for the wolf of totalitarianism, a term Mussolini coined.  In all cases, private property would be abolished; everything would be owned by the state.  Everyone would live happily ever after in a heaven on earth in which makers would give according to their ability and takers would take according to their needs.  Of course, the takers soon outnumbered the makers.   

          Take, for example, an example close to home.  Robert Owen’s utopian New Harmony Village near Vincennes, Indiana, lasted just a few years. It attracted too many intellectuals, and too few skilled workmen created inefficient production with bureaucratic distribution and interminable meetings.  Theft, avoidance of work, and marathon partying were common.  The irony of it all was that Owen was a successful businessman in England.   

          Take another, but more distant, example.  In October 1917, Lenin seized power in five days.  One writer wrote Lenin “seized power not in a land ripe for socialism but in a land ripe for seizing power.”  Lenin built a system in which all power flowed from him.  Stalin later perfected this murderous system with brutal perfection. 

          Everything Lenin did, he clamed to have done in the name of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”  Real workers, however, avoided socialism when they had a say in the process. The two unlikely heroes of Muravchik’s book are Samuel Gompers and George Meany, the former a cigar maker, the latter a plumber.

Most socialists were not workers but members of the privileged classes.  Lenin and Attlee were lawyers.  Marx and Mussolini were journalists.  Mao and Nyere were teachers.  Gompers, however, believed worker organizations should be exclusively by and for skilled and unskilled workers.  He did not want to change society: he simply wanted higher wages and better working conditions for union members.  Gompers eschewed socialism and refused to let the labor movement be the “tail to their political kite.”  At the A.F.L.’s 1903 convention, he told the socialists: “Economically you are unsound; socially you are wrong; industrially you are an impossibility.”  In addition, Gompers did not trust government, because politicians would promise anything for labor’s vote and then breach the promises once in office.  He preferred strikes.   

          George Meany started out as a plumber and worked his way to the top of the A.F.L. For Meany, a plumber was a real flesh and blood working man and not some theoretical proletarian. Muravchik quotes Meany to say: ”Ideology is baloney.”   He hated and fought John L. Lewis, because his C.I.O had become infiltrated with Communists. With Jay Lovestone, ironically a former Communist, and Dave Dubinsky, the president of the I.L.G.W.U., Meany welded his union to the pipeline of the capitalist system.  Muravchik says Meany became a true “vanguard of the proletariat.”  He fought Communism because it repressed workers. He defended capitalism, because it, not Marxism, gave more workers a greater chance at a better life.   When Communism fell, both Solzhynitsen and Pope John Paul II gave thanks to the A.F.L   

          Under Tony Blair, according to two leftist writers cited by Muravchik, socialism “meant a set of values that should guide public policy under capitalism.”  Blair has sought a “Third Way” between Capitalism and Socialism.  This week, Blair will attend the Earth Summit in Johannesburg.  Listen to his speeches at the conference.  Only time will tell whether his high wire walk will succeed, but the odds are against him.  

          PBS will air a documentary in 2003 based on this excellent book.  The lesson Muravchik teaches is clear: government cannot change men into angels, and any effort to do so creates a hell on earth.    

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