The Future of Socialism. Interview with Joshua Muravchik and Christopher Hitchens
The Future of Socialism
THINK TANK WITH BEN WATTENBERG
WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. By the 1970s, roughly 60 percent of the earth’s population lived under governments that espoused socialism in one form or another. But this is the era of free market economics. In Britain, Tony Blair has changed what it means to be a socialist. Israel’s famed kibbutz system, once the ideal of socialist utopianism has withered and what is left is now part of the market economy. And China is redefining its own brand of communism. What is the future of socialism?
To find out, Think Tank is joined by Joshua Muravchik, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the book Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, now a three-hour PBS documentary. And Christopher Hitchens, journalist, critic, frequent contributor to a variety of publications and author of many books including his most recent, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. The topic before the house: the future of socialism, this week on ’Think Tank’.
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WATTENBERG: Is it fair to say that the Labour Party in the United Kingdom is still a socialist party?
HITCHENS: Not in any sense that would have been recognizable to me when I joined it many years ago, forty years ago, now, no. Because it completely accepts that the permanence of the capitalist free enterprise system – it doesn’t even propose to replace it, even in some distant Utopian future. It’s made a final peace with that. On the other hand, it does have – or the Labour Government has managed to combine this with an economy that’s very nearly a full employment one for the first times since the Second World War – almost
nobody is looking for a job and can’t find one, with a very high level of welfare spending and socialist safety net – and with something that’s very important to me, which is internationalism. In other words, Prime Minister Blair considers it a matter of principle that we don’t coexist – our party doesn’t coexist with totalitarian or racist or aggressive or theocratic regimes or movements, and has sent British forces to defend Sierra Leone against the hand loppers and barbarians who were sent in from Liberia to Afghanistan to oppose the Taliban, and to Iraq to assist in the liberation long overdue of Mesopotamia. The finest traditions I think of the socialist movement have always been internationals and in solidarity. And on that, I think he scores very
high. And on that his conservative opponents have behaved disgracefully.
WATTENBERG: Okay. Josh?
MURAVCHIK: I think that Blair is the first of the social democratic leaders of Europe to recognize that capitalism is here to stay and ought to be here to stay. That the goal of people who consider themselves social democrats shouldn’t be to slowly step by step get rid of capitalism, but just to modify it to make sure that there’s some protections for the people who get left behind, and there are such people.
But in addition to that, I think Blair recognizes that even in that more modest mission there are ultimately limits. That is, you can tap into the wealth that’s created by capitalism to provide a social safety net, but that wealth isn’t inexhaustible. And also one has to have an eye to the sort of economic efficiency of the system so
that it keeps generating the wealth. At a certain point if you make welfare state too large it does start to be too big a tax on the efficiency of the system. So you have to make some compromises, even if you’re a social democrat.
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WATTENBERG: Okay, give us a little biography. Where you were born, etc, but mostly establishing your socialist credentials and the sort of hegira that you have gone through.
MURAVCHIK: Ben, I grew up in a socialist household. My parents were devoted members of the Socialist Party. Around the age of 20 I became the national leader of a group called the Young People’s Socialist League.
WATTENBERG: And then what happened?
MURAVCHIK: Sort of two things happened. One is I became – I came to feel that the most virulent enemies of the things that I believed – the socialist ideals that I held dear, which were democratic ideals – that the most virulent enemies of that were not on the Right but were people who were on the Left but further to my left. And so even though I was still a man of the Left I spent a – the larger part of my energies fighting against people who were further to my left. Over a period of years, though, I think this pushed me further toward the Right and I began to reconsider the whole idea of socialism, whether there was something basically flawed in that idea and I came to think that there was.
WATTENBERG: Christopher Hitchens, how about you? Again, where you were born, your intellectual pathway…
HITCHENS: Well, not into a socialist household. I came from a naval and military family in England. My mother was a descendant of those who left Poland and Germany – just in time, I would rather say – Jewish
and somewhat more liberal than my father. But a fairly conservative upbringing. And I found their worldview nostalgic and unsatisfactory. They were sad about things that were definitely over, principally the British Empire. I joined the Labour Party in about 1964 when Howard Wilson put an end to a long period of conservative rule in Britain. I very soon became disillusioned with him as a Prime Minister, principally because of his support for the American war in Vietnam. So my experience of labor anticommunism, social democratic anticommunism, very different from Josh’s in that to me it took the form of supporting what I thought of then and think of now as a war of aggression and of atrocity. And I began to hang out with people further to the Left. In the year 1968, which was when I was 19, it did seem really thinkable that there might be a world revolution that would put an end to the division of the world into blocks of nuclear superpowers and
empires. And that was formative for me and I think I stayed loyal to the ideas – some of the ideals of that for at least another two decades, until I found that I was suffering chronically from diminishing returns. Having been writing a weekly column for The Nation magazine, I began to notice something very unpleasant, which was
that the left had become a status quo force. It didn’t want regime change in the Middle East, for example; it wasn’t prepared to stand up to fascism in former Yugoslavia; it wasn’t prepared to resist National Socialism on the part of Slobodan Milosevic. And my final break with the left came when it began to exhibit signs of sympathy for jihadism: third world totalitarianism in the most fervent form.
WATTENBERG: Let me just make one distinction clear here for our viewers. There are democratic forms of socialism and non-democratic forms of socialism. Is it fair to say that communism is a non-democratic form of socialism, and what we call social democracy – or socialism – is a democratic form of socialism where the people vote for it?
HITCHENS: Well, it would be nice if that formal separation could be made but it’s not historically true. The big split in the Left begins in July/August 1914 where the democratic socialist parties of the Second International suddenly betray all their principles and decide that they will ally themselves with Czars and Kaisers and Kings and Monarchs and armies and militarism, who no one’s voted for, who are not democratic. So by that betrayal they licensed the view that was held by many Marxists through large part of the 20th century that wasn’t an
absurd belief that socialism probably couldn’t be achieved except by some combination of legal and illegal or constitutional and forcible means. That there was a class war going on, not just a discussion about the future. There was an actual conflict in which one had to prepare to fight.
MURAVCHIK: I think your polemical instincts are getting the better of you, Christopher. For just the sake of simplicity, there have been these two broad strains with myriad variations in each in socialist thought. One of which was that socialism is something inherently participatory and that it can only be brought about or approximated by means of voting and peaceful democratic methods. And another strain, which in essence said the revolution is everything and the goal is what we must get to and it’s fine to do it by violence and it’s fine to do it by dictatorship. If the people don’t see the value of it yet, they’ll see it eventually and in the meantime it’s alright to rule by coercion of force in order to bring this system into being.
HITCHENS: We could both be right – I mean I don’t want to be too conciliatory, nor do I want to be too polemical – we could both be right, but I mean you have to allow for the fact that in very large portions of the globe the socialist cause could not be advanced by democratic argument because the sistering power’s despotic, and furthermore when it wasn’t despotic it could become despotic in response to a socialist challenge, as with the emergence of fascism in Europe: the reserved strength of the ruling class saying, ‘No, no; you may think you can vote to go left but you can’t. We’ll stop this by force. We’ll drown the parliament in blood. We’ll put an end to voting.’