the “social experiment” that Lenin and Stalin had begun in Soviet Russia. All his life he dreamed the Communist future, and he transmitted that dream to his son.
In 1956, events occurred in Moscow and in Eastern Europe that almost made me give up the dream I had inherited as a birthright. In 1956 the head of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, gave his secret speech on the crimes of Stalin and thus drew aside a veil that had concealed from the faithful the grim reality of the socialist future. Soviet tanks thundered across the border to crush the brave forces of the Hungarian revolution and to discourage the hopeful beginnings of the Polish October.
Instead of being awakened by these events, I joined a new generation that hoped to revive the humanist spirit of the dream itself. I was inspired to join the New Left by a Polish Marxist named Isaac Deutscher, who was my teacher. It was Deutscher who devised the theory out of which we hoped to revive the socialist dream.
According to Deutscher, the Stalinist state that had murdered millions and erected an edifice of totalitarian lies was a deformation of the socialist ideal that socialists themselves would overcome. The socialist revolution had taken place in the backward environment of czarist Russia. Stalinism was a form of “primitive socialist accumulation” produced by the cultural backwardness of that environment and the political necessities of building an industrial economic base.
In 1956, when Khrushchev launched the process of de-Stalinization, Deutscher saw it as a prelude to the humanist future of which we all had dreamed. The socialist “economic base”—infinitely superior in rationality and productive potential to its capitalist competitor—had already been created. Socialist accumulation had been completed; the socialist superstructure would follow in due course. Socialist abundance would produce socialist democracy.
When we heard words like these, New Leftists all over the world became new believers in the socialist cause. Stalinism had been terrible, but the terror was over. The socialist economic base had been built in Russia. To complete the dream, all that was required was political democracy. In the New Left in the Sixties, we had a saying: “The first socialist revolution will take place in the Soviet Union.” Some leftists are still saying it today.
For 17 years, I waited in vain for the democratic revolution to come to Soviet Russia to complete the socialist dream. But it did not come. Oh, there was a spring in Prague. But Soviet tanks again rolled across the border to crush it. Five years later, another Polish Marxist—now ex-Marxist—stepped forward to explain why socialism would never be realized except in a totalitarian state. In 1956, Leszek Kolakowski had been a leader of the Polish October. In 1968, Kolakowski had been a defender of the Prague spring. Now, in 1973, at a conference in England, he summed up a hundred years of critiques of socialism that history had repeatedly confirmed. The effort to transform natural inequalities into social equality could only lead to greater, more brutal inequality; the socialist effort to transform individual diversity into social unity could only lead to the totalitarian state.
Deutscher had been wrong. There would never be a socialist political democracy erected on a socialist economic base. Socialism was an impossible—and therefore destructive—dream.
But if Kolakowski was right, the future of peoples who lived under socialism was dark indeed. The totalitarian empire could not reform, but it could expand. Aided by dreamers all over the world, the expansion of that empire seemed likely, even inevitable—until now, the era of glasnost. Now, instead of a continuing expansion, we see Communism everywhere in retreat. Now its believers are fewer and fewer, and the terrain itself is beginning to shrink. Who among us expected this? A year and a half ago, I participated in an international panel in Paris that discussed the question: Is Communism reversible? No member of the panel thought it was. This year, if a similar panel were held, the question would be: Can Communism save itself? Who would be so bold to say that it can?
Why were we so wrong? Because all of us, Kolakowski included, had our roots in the intellectual traditions of the socialist left. Experience had taught us all to be anti-Communist, but our critique of socialism was based on political theory and political considerations. We knew that totalitarianism was evil, but we thought that socialism worked. We were wrong. It does not work.
While we were wrong, others all along had been right. All those years, outside the socialist tradition, there had been voices crying in the wilderness saying that not only would socialism bring tyranny and suffering, it would not work. Seventy-seven years ago, five years after the Bolshevik triumph, Ludwig von Mises wrote a book on socialism that predicted the catastrophe we see before us. Socialist economy, he argued, was economic irrationality, and socialist planning a prescription for chaos. Only a capitalist market could provide a system of rational allocations and rational accounts. Only private property and the profit-motive could unleash the forces of individual initiative and human creativity to produce real and expanding wealth—not only for the rich but for society as a whole.
Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, and the other liberal theorists of a free-market economy who warned of this outcome are the true prophets of the reality we see before us—of socialist bankruptcy and Communist retreat. Glastnostian democracy has not completed and cannot complete the socialist dream; it can only expose this dream as a nightmare from which Communism cannot wake up. The only way to wake up is to give up the dream. In 1989, according to Soviet economists, the average Soviet citizen had a daily ration of meat that was smaller than the daily intake of the average Russian in 1913 under the czar. Socialism makes men poor beyond their wildest dreams. The average Polish citizen is poorer today, in 1989, than my poor grandfather was in America fifty years ago, when I was born.
The law of socialist economy is this: from each according to his exploitability, to the nomenklatura according to its greed. Not only does the socialist economy not produce wealth at the rate a free economy does; the socialist economy consumes wealth. It consumes the natural wealth of the nation and also the wealth it accumulated in the past. Every Communist revolution begins as a rape of the present and continues as a cannibalization of the past. Every Communist Party is the colonizer of its own country, and the Soviet empire is the colonizer of them all. That is the law of socialist distribution: from each nation according to its exploitability, to the empire according to its greed.
But a system that lives by cannibalism, which consumes more wealth than it produces, is sooner or later destined to die. And that is what is happening before our eyes.
For myself, the family tradition of socialist dreams is over. Socialism is no longer a dream of the revolutionary future. It is only a nightmare of the past. But for you, the nightmare is not a dream. It is a reality that is still happening. My dream for the people of socialist Poland is that someday soon you will wake up from your nightmare, and be free.
This is from a talk delivered at the Second Thoughts Conference in Krakow, Poland, May 4–7, 1989, just before Poland became free. http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=21734
I was recently invited to address the question “Are We Conservatives?” before an audience at the Heritage Foundation. The very posing of the question tells us something about contemporary conservatism. I could no more have put the question “Are We Progressives?” to a comparable gathering of the left than I could ask a crowd of citizens “Are we Americans?” To raise such an issue to those audiences would be to question an identity and the foundations of a faith.
Conservatism,
