Thirty years after the Berlin Wall’s fall, the ‘cuddly socialism’ myth has returned
Thirty years ago, most observers were convinced that socialism was finished. I certainly was. The fall of the Berlin Wall – an event we conventionally date to Nov 9 1989, when the East German authorities announced that people would be allowed to cross into West Berlin without risking the guns, the dogs and the mines – happened to coincide with my gap year. When
I saw what was happening on the news, I changed my plans and set off to spend some time in what, in those days, we still called “Eastern Europe”.
To cross into the GDR that winter was to enter a world of pinched, grimy wretchedness. The local equivalents of Burger King and McDonald’s were vans selling greasy sausages between slices of bleached white bread. Some of the handsomest buildings in Europe were hidden behind cheap, peeling grey paint.
As Rainer Zitelmann recalls in The Power of Capitalism, only 16 per cent of East Germans owned telephones in 1989 (in West Germany, the proportion was 99.3 per cent). Two thirds of apartments were coal heated, and many lacked indoor plumbing. You would hear cars from miles away on the empty roads. And what cars! While West Germans were cruising around in BMWs and Mercedes, East Germans had to make do with rattling little Trabants. To buy even one of those misshapen bangers required a wait, incredibly, of between 12 and 17 years – through, naturally, a thriving black market catered to queue jumpers
East Germans, poor, deprived and frightened as they were, lived in a paradise compared with some Warsaw Pact citizens. The only products available in Bucharest when I got there were plum jam and a hideous brew labelled “Italian vermouth”. I watched the political unrest, in part, through the windows of a pub called Hanul Manuc – the only place in town you could buy beer, because it brewed its own.
If you had asked me then whether socialism – proper socialism, Corbynite controls and confiscations – would ever make a comeback, I’d have laughed. Planned economies had visibly failed. Even as late as the Seventies, Western intellectuals, as well as Communist leaders, were arguing that state intervention was economically as well as morally superior to market capitalism. By 1989, no one could make that case. In every country where it had been tried, socialism had led to poverty and oppression. Political persecution turned out not to be a detachable feature. The only way to maintain a state-run economy, to repress what Adam Smith called “the propensity to truck, barter and exchange”, was through a police state. That is why every socialist revolution – every one – relied on informers, labour camps and firing squads.
How can that rotten, discredited ideology be winning converts even in places that have never experienced it, such as Britain and the United States? Part of the answer, obviously, is that younger voters have no memory of the Cold War. When supporters of Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders call for socialism, they don’t imagine the East German version, or the Cuban version, or the Venezuelan version or any other actual example. They want an imaginary, pure, democratic, cuddly socialism. They want equality and social justice without the one-party state or the locking up of dissidents.
They decline to compare like with like, judging socialism as a textbook theory, but capitalism by its necessarily imperfect real-world manifestations. Even where history has given us laboratory-condition experiments – East and West Germany began from the same level of economic and political development, as did South and North Korea – they refuse to infer anything from them, airily dismissing each actual instance of socialism as “not real socialism”.
Why? Because, for many people, socialism has an emotional appeal unrelated to its actual impact. It may lead to misery, indigence and serfdom, but it chimes with some of our deepest instincts. Human beings evolved in tribes and kin-groups. A degree of collectivism works well in a hunter-gatherer society, and those early hominids who had a genetic predisposition towards it tended to have more children than those who did not. We carry their egalitarian and authoritarian DNA.
The modern world, by which I mean the liberal societies that evolved in the West in the 18th century, and spread across the continents in the 20th, can feel unnatural. The elevation of individual autonomy, private property and free contract may have made us wealthier, healthier, happier, longer-lived and better educated, but we can’t help feeling that the whole package is artificial.
Every generation since the Enlightenment has had its protesters against modern liberty – or, as they see it, against soulless materialism. It started with Rousseau, whose life was a protracted, if elegant, whinge against civilisation. The Romantics, the socialists, the fascists, the existentialists, various millenarian cults – all are, so to speak, a bewildered howl by our inner caveman against the safe and prosperous world created by free exchange.
Look at the Extinction Rebellion crowds smeared in fake blood and tell me that they are not the latest in a long line of apocalyptic movements predicting that human wickedness is about to trigger Armageddon. Or observe the protesters in Chile, a country that has moved in a single generation from poverty to firstworld wealth, but whose young people literally cannot believe their good fortune.
Every generation, it seems, has to go through the same learning process, struggling to adjust to counter-intuitive truths. Each must find out that individualism prompts deeper co-operation than state control; that good intentions don’t guarantee good outcomes; that government intervention fails in its own terms; that the removal of restrictions and regulations helps the poor and powerless; that compassion cannot be coerced; that commerce fosters equality as well as prosperity; and that those who claim to act for The People end up trespassing against real, living people.
How many times must we learn? Kipling knew the answer:
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
Voters with no memory of the Cold War don’t imagine the East German version of this rotten ideology