Yes, Real Socialism Has Been Tried—And It Has Failed Every Time

Over the past 100 years or so, socialist experiments around the world unleashed a vast tide of tyranny, starvation, and mass murder on a scale never seen before in human history. Socialism was implemented in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, Maoist China, Chavez-Maduro’s Venezuela, and other places. In every one of these places, it has failed. As American writer Joshua Muravchik observes in his 2019 Wall Street Journal article on socialism, “It’s hard to think of another idea that has been tried and failed as many times in as many ways or at a steeper price in human suffering.” 

Despite its demonstrated record of producing evils, however, the spirit of socialism is very much alive today even in the United States. According to a 2019 Gallup poll, as many as 49% of millennials and members of Gen Z (ages 18 to 39 in 2019) hold a favorable view of socialism. Socialists are fond of saying that socialism has not failed because real socialism has never been tried. In the eyes of today’s democratic socialists, the earlier socialist leaders failed because they were “authoritarian socialists” who believed in a strictly hierarchical, top-down bureaucracy and “perverted” socialism’s noble ideals—if, instead, our socialist government is led by public-spirited people whose beliefs are rooted in democratic principles, then we will achieve real socialism and all will be well. The problem, they argue, has never been the socialist horse, but the jockeys who rode it and led it astray.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. When today’s socialists talk about building a non-authoritarian socialist government rooted in democratic and humanitarian principles, they are far from original. In fact, that has always been what the earlier socialists said they would achieve. Aimed at improving the lot of the common people and creating a more egalitarian society, the early socialist movements emerged primarily as a reaction to the inhumane working conditions and yawning wealth disparities in industrialized Europe. Empowering working-class people, dismantling societal hierarchies, and ensuring a more equitable distribution of goods and services have always been among the many honorable objectives of socialist leaders. Socialist regimes have all ended in varying degrees of totalitarianism, to be sure, but there is no denying that earlier socialist leaders, just like today’s, generally started with good intentions.  

Lenin’s seminal book The State and Revolution, presumably the closest thing ever to a Leninist manifesto, does not read at all like a master plan for creating some sort of a totalitarian society. Instead, we see Lenin’s sheer authenticity in trying to salvage his nation and envisioning a brighter future for the masses. Hugo Chávez, architect of Venezuela’s socialist experiment, was constantly praised for his noble intentions by mainstream intellectuals such as Cornel West, Naomi Klein, and Noam Chomsky. President Carter claimed that he “never doubted Hugo Chavez’s commitment to improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen.” Not even Stalin and Mao set out with the intention of creating a totalitarian state and turning their countries into a living hell. It was always in practice, however, that socialist regimes turned out to be totalitarian. As German economist Kristian Niemietz put it, “Socialism is always democratic and emancipatory in its aspirations, but oppressive and authoritarian in its actual practice.”

The problem, therefore, has not been bad jockeys, but the socialist horse itself. Real socialism has been tried many, many times and it has ended in dismal failure without exception. By the time it collapsed in 1991, the USSR had left humanity with what German historian Tarik Cyril Amar called “a legacy of tyranny and oppression, at first manically bloodthirsty and then (mostly) depressingly drab.” Its economy had been stagnating for two decades with farms and factories producing far short of the demand. Soviet satellite states, independent in name only, were held under tight rein by the USSR and replicated most of the brutal methods the Soviets used to suppress opposing voices. Their economies were even more enfeebled than the Soviet economy, with the New York Times in 1987 calling Eastern Europe “increasingly a museum of the early industrial age.” Singapore, a city-state that had only two million residents at the time, was exporting 20 percent more machinery to the West than all of Eastern European nations combined. 

In Asia, Mao’s Soviet-style socialism plunged China into two of its most catastrophic historical periods ever: the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The former was a bold, comprehensive campaign to industrialize China’s agrarian economy that went horribly wrong and resulted in more than 30 million Chinese starving to death. The latter was Mao’s attempt to purge political opposition and reassert his authority after the failure of the Great Leap Forward. Notwithstanding the benign-sounding name, the Cultural Revolution was notoriously vicious. It crippled the Chinese economy, obliterated much of China’s social fabric, and caused yet another two million deaths. It wasn’t until the late seventies when Deng Xiaoping steered China away from socialist planning and incorporated elements of the free-enterprise system that the country’s well-known economic miracle started gaining momentum. 

More recently, Chavez’s and Maduro’s socialist regimes have turned Venezuela, once the wealthiest nation in South America, into utter ruin. Its economy is now marked by hyperinflation, oppression, and starvation, with nearly one-fifth of the population having already fled the country since 2014. Socialism has also been tried in Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Somalia, and many other countries. The end result has always been the same: tyranny and mass suffering. Ordinary citizens, the very people whom the socialists claimed to champion, were shot dead on the streets, thrown in prison camps, and deprived of the most basic human rights. What started as a well-meaning commitment to improve life for the masses brought about economic collapse, political oppression, and more than 100 million deaths across socialist societies. 

German philosopher G.W. F. Hegel famously said, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” The enduring appeal of socialism attests to Hegel’s insight. However, the underlying problem is not that we are unable or unwilling to learn from history. Rather, we have so often found ourselves repeating the mistakes of previous generations because we have taken the wrong lessons from those mistakes. The conclusion we should draw from our socialist experiments is not that we need a different jockey to achieve real socialism, but that real socialism has been the problem all along. Unless we truly take this lesson to heart, it won’t be long before we find ourselves stuck in a living hell once again.  

Matthew Xiao is a senior studying economics and mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences. The Cornell Review publishes guest submissions and Letters to the Editor.