Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism

Rating:
Summary: A Good Historical Overview
Review: dougrhon's June 21, 2002 and Craig Kennedy's June 7, 2002 reviews are good summaries and I won't repeat them. But I would emphasize: Muravchik writes well and his semi-biographical organization makes the pages turn pretty fast. Given the ease of reading, the book is surprisingly deep.

It covers a lot of ground. Of course, the subject is enormous. The reviewers who complain, "Hey, he could have talked about this" are all correct. Muravchik had to pick and choose and, overall, I think his choices were excellent.

When Muravchik says "socialism," he means two related beliefs: 1) that a substantial part of the world's major problems are caused by the fact that private individuals and private organizations own property, and 2) that these problems will end--and can only end--when property is held by the people in common (though there will be a transition stage while common ownership somehow works through the problems).

Tactically, socialists break into two camps. One (call it the Fabians) believes in trying to make things better even while capitalism continues, though with an eventual goal of superceding it. The other (call it the Communists) believes that making things better may actually make things worse, because it could postpone the Revolution. Making things better is only good if it builds "class consciousness": hatred of the capitalists and the love of the people who will make the Revolution.

Alas, says Muravchik, wherever the Revolution has succeeded in eliminating capitalism, it has failed to bring dignity and prosperity to the workers. And it has been a civil liberties disaster. On the other hand, efforts to improve capitalism--through regulation and "social safety nets"--have often had good results. Many people who once believed in government monopoly now believe in a "mixed economy" "regulated capitalism" "welfare state." They are, says Muravchik, no longer socialists, even though they may continue to use the word. Norway, Denmark and Sweden have cradle-to-grave social services but they also have big companies and a large private sector. They are not socialist countries.

Muravchik thus puts himself in the same general group as Francis Fukuyama who famously declared "the end of history." All serious thinkers believe in democracy and all serious thinkers believe in some sort of regulated capitalism. The big questions are solved; the rest is tinkering.

But perhaps he should have said more about this. Karen Sampson Hudson (May 23, 2002) seems to have missed the point entirely. And how stable is the present situation? How many people have really given up the idea that a good government (i.e. one run by people like them) should run everything? Have the European welfare states gotten so generous that they risk killing the capitalist geese that finance them? Is Hayek right that a big government, no matter how well-meaning, at some point is "the road to serfdom"? These are questions for a "post-socialist" future. "Heaven on Earth" is a history. Five stars.

Rating:
Summary: Superb history
Review: Every thinking person on planet Earth deserves to be given a copy of this book, along with Thomas Sowell's "Basic Economics."

Why?

Because these two books clearly reveal an intellectual truth, which strikes me as TRANSPARENTLY TRUE, just as the Pythagorean Theorem is TRANSPARENTLY TRUE. What is that truth?

If socialism = "public/group ownership of the means of production"

THEN socialism = "government ownership of the means of production."

And then: "we move from a market economy to a command economy."

Think about this, long and hard. We don't just "speculate" that command economies may not work very well -- we know from VAST empirical evidence that they lead to poverty, the EXACT opposite of what socialism promised.

And, if socialism does not mean "public ownership of the means of production," well then, what does it mean? :-0

Muravchik has written a compelling book, beginning with Babeouf, and continuing with Robert Owens and Friedrich Engels. He follows them, and their idealistic lies, through every step of the way.

Highest recommendation!!!

Rating:
Summary: What a refreshingly objective book!
Review: Hollywood's millionaire elites won't be waving this book in the air during talk show appearances raving about its brilliance--it's simply not "warm fuzzy" enough. In fact, unlike most books unleashed onto the masses today, this book is a brilliant scholarly achievment, yet written in a style accessible even to the high-school drop outs in Hollywood. But again, don't wait for any praise by rich celebrities. We live in an ideological, mystified world: if you disagree with something, it's pure evil, that's how we are today. Those who are still cheering on the fantasy of socialist collectivism see in this book a hostile barrier to their dreams; they vilify it in the same manner that the Ayotola Khomeni vilified Salman Rushdie's anti-Islam novel "The Satanic Versus" which brought about his own "death sentence." But despite one's own ideology, one cannot deny the refreshinginly rational and objective approach author Joshua Muravchik, a native Eastern European now living in Maryland, takes in his masterpiece. The book opens during the French Revolution, the birth of socialism, and ends with present-day Tony Blair--a socialist who is poised, like so many, to realize socialism's inherent hostilities to mankind. The book, scholarly though it is, is actually a fun read. It's descriptive, with supported facts, yet forgoes the moralisms like those found in most of the more popular pop-culture books on politics and contemporary society, like the rants of Ann Coulter and Al Franken. The most notable facts to derive from Joshua Muravchik's book is that nearly every child of a socialist leader has ended up moving to the United States. Even the father of the French Revolution lost his children 200 years ago to the alure of America. Interestingly, today one can find descendants of the French Revolutionaries not in France, but in the United States. Robert Owen, one of the founding fathers of socialism, could only conduct his experiments in the open society of America. His children accompanied him to America to help with his dreams of Utopia. Yet, after their experiements failed and failed again, Owen's children stayed behind, raising their children in America, proud and boastful of this new nation that allows so much freedom of expression. The list does not end there: Joseph Stalin and Fidel Castro's daughters are alive and well and living in the United States today. It's something to think about. I only hope that some publisher will release this book in a leather-bound edition so that I can add it to my library, but I won't hold my breath. Warm fuzzy socialism is still a more powerful seller than the beautiful reality of laisez-faire government. To me, however, Joshua Muravchik's book is so refreshingly rational and screams the obvious which has for so long gone ignored by the Leftist media, it's something that I would read to my children at bedtime.

Rating:
Summary: They Were As Gods
Review: Huh? Oh, sorry, I was reading a previous review, and the thought struck me that someone has already uploaded his brain "unto" a computer database. Anyhow, this was a great read, coming from a red diaper baby, and it reminded me of Irving Kristol's comment that "socialism is what socialism does.", not what its adherents would wish it to be. Muravchik emphasizes the nobility of the collectivist intent, men opening their eyes at the dawn of the scientific/industrial revolution, and thinking all things possible. "We are as gods, so we might as well get good at it." wrote Stewart Brand in the fabled sixties, and the leftist dream has spiraled downward ever since. As Isaiah Berlin recently said, for the first time since 1789, the European left has no ongoing project. A previous reviewer scornfully opined that this book was for people "...who need to be reminded, yet again, that people prefer democracy to totalitarianism." Well, yes, that's obvious, the question at hand being why socialist regimes turn despotic with such depressing regularity. When you consider the battalions of Western intellectuals who took Potemkin tours of the Soviet Union in the Thirties and proclaimed it "the future that works", it appears that a lot of very smart people living on this planet missed that message. I liked Muravchik's comment in the introduction, that the epitaph for socialist regimes in the twentieth century should be "build it and they will leave."

Rating:
Summary: The God That Failed...
Review: Not so long ago, millions of people thought they saw the future in the secular religion of socialism. With its claims of being a "scientific" was of organizing the world's political and economic systems, socialism attracted enlightened "progressives" who saw it as the answer to the world's ills. Repelled by the crassness of mass-market capitalism, weary of the tyranny of the boom and bust business cycle and seeking relief for a post-colonial third world, the educated elite adopted different forms of socialism as the way to bring about a paradise on earth. In "Heaven and Earth" Joshua Muravchik brings a storyteller's gifts to explain how this secular form of religion swept the globe faster than Christianity or Islam. Although the topic is portentous and weighty, the author has produced a very readable book, which depends on a series of vignettes - profiles of the men who gave socialism it's intellectual framework and then tried to make it a workable system. Muravchik begins with the origins of the left in the French Revolutionary era and the ideas of the radical egalitarian Gracchus Babeuf, describes the utopian socialism of 19th century radicals, explains the intellectual developments of Marx and Engels and then reveals the path that took us to the hellish world of the 20th Century Communist regimes. The author grew up as a third-generation socialist and his background as a "red diaper" has given him insights into radical socialism's appeal that others may not have. He describes the rise of Clement Atlee, the labor movement and the development of social democracy with a sympathetic but critical eye. While he clearly understands the appeal of socialism - which as recently as the 1970's was the form of government for sixty percent of the world's nations - Muravchik explains its fatal contradictions. As a former socialist be has embraced market capitalism as an imperfect but better superior answer and like millions of others, he has rejected the idea that human nature can be overcome and virtue enforced by the heavy hand of the state.

Rating:
Summary: A Review By Thomas Sowell
Review: Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous. Among people of every race, color, and creed, all around the world, socialism has led to hunger in countries that used to have surplus food to export.

Its economic disasters have afflicted virtually every industry. In its Communist version, it killed far more innocent civilians in peacetime than Hitler killed in his death camps during World War II.

Nevertheless, for many of those who deal primarily in ideas, socialism remains an attractive idea -- in fact, seductive. Its every failure is explained away as due to the inadequacies of particular leaders.

Many of the intelligentsia remain convinced that if only there had been better leaders -- people like themselves, for example -- it would all have worked out fine, according to plan.

A remarkable new book makes the history of socialism come alive. Its title is "Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism." Its author, Joshua Muravchik, is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a leading think tank in Washington. It is hard to find a book on the history of socialism that is either readable or accurate, so it is especially remarkable to find one that is both. The story told in "Heaven on Earth" is so dramatic and compelling that the author finds no need to gild the lily with rhetoric or hype. It is a great read.

This history of socialism begins more than two centuries ago, at the time of the French Revolution, with the radical conspirator Babeuf, who wanted to carry the revolutionary ideas of the times even farther, to a communist society.

It ends with current British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who brought the Labour Party back to power by dropping the core of its socialist agenda and putting distance between himself and previous Labour Party governments, whose socialist policies had so backfired that the party lost four consecutive national elections.

In between, there are stories of small communal societies, such as that founded in the 19th century by Robert Owen, the man who coined the word "socialism," as well as stories of huge nations like China and the empire that was known as the Soviet Union.

In all these very different societies around the world, the story of socialism has been a story of high hopes and bitter disappointments. Attempts to redistribute wealth repeatedly led to the redistribution of poverty.

Attempts to free ordinary people from oppression repeatedly led to what Mikhail Gorbachev frankly called "servility" to new despots. How and why are spelled out with both facts and brilliant insights expressed in plain words.

Human nature has been at the heart of the failures of socialism to produce the results it sought, even when socialist leaders were idealists like Julius Nyerere in Tanzania or Pandit Nehru in India.

Nowhere have people been willing to work as well for the common good as they do for their own benefit. Perhaps in some other galaxy there are creatures who would, but the track record of socialism among human beings on earth shows that this is not the place.

Worst of all, the concentration of political power necessary to try to reduce economic inequalities has allowed tyrants like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot to impose their notions and caprices on millions of others -- draining them economically or slaughtering them en masse or exploiting them sexually.

Mao Zedong, for example, had harems of young girls -- and occasionally boys -- for his pleasure in various parts of China.

There is no point blaming the tragedies of socialism on the flaws or corruption of particular leaders. Any system which allows some people to exercise unbridled power over other people is an open invitation to abuse, whether that system is called slavery or socialism or something else.

Socialism has long sought to create a heaven on earth but an even older philosophy pointed out that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Rating:
Summary: Very Helpful
Review: Socialism was a modern attempt to replace traditional religion with a set of beliefs purporting to be a science.

Although in the course of about two hundred years, socialism spread far and fast, it did not produce the good life for ordinary people. Muravchik points out that nothing worked. Not communes, revolution, fascism, third world socialism or social democracy.

This book in very readable because of its coverage of prominent historical figures who either advanced, impeded or modified socialism out of existence.

In the first category are obvious choices such as Robert Owens, Marx, Engels and Clement Atlee.

In the middle category is the towering figure of George Meany, a cold warrior of Reaganesque proportion while also a Social Democrat. A delicious quote from Meany is this one, when he was asked to have the American Federation of Labor join some international communist front group after World War II.

"What would we talk about? The latest innovation being used by the secret police to ensnare those who think in opposition to the group in power? Or, perhaps, bigger and better concentration camps for political prisoners?" (p. 251-2)

Conservatives and other Americans should develop a greater appreciation for George Meany who died in 1980.

A very current reason for reading this book should be its description of the life and political evolution of Tony Blair. Blair, who has transformed Socialism and is well known for his spinning and equivocating at home, should also be well appreciated by Americans for his support against terrorism.

This book is readable, memorable and on target.

Rating:
Summary: I wish everyone would read this.
Review: The errors of the communal impulse are meticulously documented in Joshua Muravchik's sensational Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism. I have seldom encountered a book that is such a perfect balance of entertainment and education as is Muravchik's. In a world where one can pay $25 for 200 pages of utter tripe, Heaven on Earth stands as a bargain and an ideal. It entertains as much as it educates. His compendium of the mayhem of that is socialism is also a testament to the necessity for historical analysis. He is similar to Anthony Beevor in the way his prose and style can create interest in a topic that one never wanted to study before.
The author of this work made a clever decision, and it was to focus on many of the lesser known members of the cult of socialism. Less publicized figures like Gracchus Babeuf, Robert Owen, and Julius Nyerere are given chapter long treatments. Clement Atlee, Samuel Gompers, George Meany, and the Israeli kibbutzim are discussed in order to flesh out the overall picture of the political actualities behind the success or lack of success of the socialist movement. It makes for a surprisingly suspenseful read, as many of the facts, stories, and quotations contained it the book the reader may never have gazed upon before.
The men who founded the movement known as socialism can best be described by a quote meant for Robert Owen which was, "He became a humanitarian, and lost his humanity." No better sentence can sum up the socialist mind and their 150 years of ruthless social engineering. Pass a cemetery and think of their legacy to the world. It is unfortunate that their bankrupt ideology remains politically viable in many locales today. Upon reading Heaven on Earth, the reader will realize that you can no more build a socialism which works than you can create a human being who will live forever.

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing outline of the intellectual history of socialism
Review: This book provides a one-stop history of socialist ideology from the French Revolution through the Blair government from the perspective of a self-described original red-diaper baby who has since rejected socialism. Although it is probably impossible to get an objective discussion of the intellectual history of socialism, this probably comes as close as anyone could get. If there were one flaw in the book, it would be the neglect of the Scandinavian experience with socialism, including its ultimate rejection by the voters in those countries (rejection? Yes. Ikea, Nokia, and Saab aren't state-owned, are they?)

I originally saw it in a bookstore and was especially surprised by the chapter on Mussolini. Apparently, Benito grew up in a socialist household, rose through the ranks of the socialist party, and broke from them in the aftermath of WWI. His father - a member of the International - named him after four different famous socialists, read Marxist texts at the dinner table every night. Young Benito was a rising star in the Italian Socialist party, edited their magazine, and eventually became a party leader. On the outbreak of WWI, Benito had the same reaction as his hero, Lenin: they both saw that the workers in various countries rejected Marx's internationalist philosophy and rushed to arms and exclaimed, "the international is dead". Benito, however, began to develop a new variation on Marxism: he believed that stronger countries oppressed weaker countries like Italy in the same way they believe that capitalists oppress workers. He believed that the entire country must rise up against the stronger nations in order to allow the workers to rise up as predicted by Marxist dogma. He also saw how camaraderie in the army was the epitome of the class solidarity they sought, and decided to pursue a strong state based on a strong, army-like command structure. You know: Fascism. Throughout his life, he continued to admire the work of Lenin and Stalin, and the feeling appears to have been mutual until he tossed in with Hitler.

The other chapters were also enlightening, but not as surprising. The failure of Owen utopianism is traced directly to Engels' appearance in his Church of Science. Engels and Marx are traced to their selected successor, Bernstein, and his observation that the Fabians' approach of reform was having the results that Marx claimed could only come about through revolution. This in turn led to a response by a young Russian named V.I. Lenin, bringing forth the theory of perpetual revolution, in which reform would be rejected and workers would be kept in a constant state of agitation. To see the outcome of that line of thought, I'd recommend the Black Book of Communism. There are also several chapters on the policies of Clements and the failure of the Socialist experiment in England, the experience of Socialism in Africa, and the fall of communism featuring Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev.

However, I found the chapters on the anti-socialist and anti-communist philosophies of Samuel Gompers and George Meany, and the epilogue describing the history of the kibbutzim in Israel to be the most fascinating. Despite leading the labor movement, Gompers and Meany were both strongly anti-communist and insisted that the goal of the labor movement was to negotiate for workers so that they could earn their way into the middle class. That stands in stark contrast to the union movement today, in which they are hardly distinguishable from the socialist parties. The kibbutz experience was similarly fascinating: it seems to have been successful so long as the survival of Israel hung in the balance, but has since fallen apart as younger people felt the desire for something more than working their lives away at subsistence level while giving away all privacy. They discovered that capitalism yields both individual economic results as well as moral bonuses like individual rights and privacy.

Rating:
Summary: the review before me, I have something to say
Review: Well you said "Upon reading Heaven on Earth, the reader will realize that you can no more build a socialism which works than you can create a human being who will live forever."
On the contrary, the computers of mid 21st century will exceed human intelligence and capacity and humans will be able to upload their brains unto computer databases, and hence, live for ever. So don't go making unvalidated quotes like that.