This Time, Things Will Be Different

Kristian Niemietz has a piece in Quillette about the seemingly endless failures of socialism, Venezuela being the latest of a long series of disasters.

Germany’s socialist left is currently embroiled in a row over the correct stance on Venezuela. The conflict came to the fore at the February conference of Die Linke, the country’s main socialist party, when a group of Nicolás Maduro fans stormed the stage, chanting slogans and waving banners with pro-Venezuela messages…

This coincides with the portrayal, and the self-perception, of “millennial socialist” movements across the Western world. A lot has been written recently about the resurgence of socialism among young voters. Socialist candidates such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the United States, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France have seen huge surges in popularity. And while the candidates themselves span the age spectrum, they all find their most enthusiastic support among young people.

Niemietz has also written a book about socialism and its cycles of enthusiasm, failure and eventual disowning by Western socialists. The book is worth reading too.

There is an interesting observation which Niemietz makes in the book but not in this Quillette piece. It concerns the way socialists have a strong tendency to define their political ambitions in terms of desired outcomes rather than the practical means to achieve those outcomes. The problem is obvious enough because we see the same thing elsewhere.

For example we are too familiar with sustainable energy projects based on claims of starry-eyed outcomes which are neither technically nor economically feasible. It is surely interesting that we see the same cart before horse enthusiasms in socialism.

Niemietz’s final point is the one all non-socialists must be aware of, the one socialists never learn. Socialism is only a small scale way of organising societies. It is essentially linear in its core concepts and cannot scale up to the non-linear complexities of modern societies and economies.