What Gorbachev can teach the Tories
Beware the nostalgia for Seventies socialism: rigid state control bred alienation and depression
Imiss the days when the old were nostalgic and the young looked forward to the future. Now it’s the other way around. According to Ipsos Mori, Britons think life is getting worse and a third of young people wish they lived in the time of their parents’ childhood. This is a problem for Theresa May. Labour is back in fashion in part because many people have forgotten what it was like growing up under the red flag. But the Tories shouldn’t try to win them over with a bit of socialism. Instead, they must sell them the merits of capitalism.
The Seventies, we are often told, was a time when every Briton had a job for life, a house and a sense of social solidarity – until Margaret Thatcher came along and snatched it all away. This is false-memory syndrome. Mrs Thatcher won a majority in May 1979 because the unions, unemployment and inflation were out of control. With interest rates running at 14 per cent, it was hard to get on the housing ladder. And while Leftists write of the world going mad in 2017 – as if history never plumbed the depths of a Donald Trump or a Kim Jong-un before – in the Seventies people lived under a code of nuclear standoff so insane that it was actually called MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction. One of the players in this giant game of bluff, the Soviet Union, was trying its best to construct socialism. It didn’t work.
Russians often tell pollsters that they miss the Seventies too, which just goes to show that nostalgia is a universal delusion. They had to queue for food; dissent could land them in mental hospital. Society was rigidly controlled from the very top, which was problematic because the top was medically brain dead. By the late Seventies the ageing Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev got by on a cocktail of drink and drugs, and often slurred his speech. When he gave a public address, he would mispronounce the Russian word for “systematically” as the Russian word for “breasts”. Given that “systematically” comes up a lot in socialist theory, this must have had the effect of turning his speeches surprisingly blue.
I take that anecdote from William Taubman’s new biography of Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who became leader of the Soviet Union in 1985. Gorbachev doesn’t do as well as Brezhnev in polling. His democratic reforms helped to destroy socialism, which was a painful and humiliating transition for a proud superpower. It also wasn’t Gorbachev’s initial goal. He believed socialism could be saved by doing more of the same with extra oomph. His failure provides some useful lessons.
One is: don’t blame the people for the failings of the system. Alcoholism was rife in the Soviet Union, so Gorbachev raised prices and cut availability. The result: the people who went without vodka hated him; everyone else drank moonshine. Productivity continued to slide. The reason so many Russians got drunk was that there was no good reason to stay sober: a system in which they couldn’t speak their minds or materially better themselves bred alienation and depression. In 2017 we have the challenges of addiction, bad mental health, obesity, refusal to save money etc. The temptation is to try to regulate people to make them feel better or behave in a better way. Don’t bother. Get the economy growing, build houses, run creative schools and efficient hospitals – but otherwise, leave the individual alone. Our government struggles to collect the rubbish once a fortnight. How on Earth it’s going to cure our existential angst, I don’t know.
The Soviet Union also warns us against killing the spirit of free enterprise. And it really is a spirit.
I’ve always wondered why in 1985 Gorbachev didn’t do what the Chinese communists had done to great success and reduce state control of farms. Private farming would have meant profit; profit equals more food produced, more food equals happier citizens. Taubman says one explanation for Gorbachev’s timidity is that while the Chinese had only been mismanaging their agriculture since the Fifties, Russia started in the Twenties – and it was feared that the Russian peasants, by then falling in number and shorter on skills, had forgotten how to farm for profit.
It is possible to forget how to enrich yourself, or at least to forget the necessity of trying – and that’s why our youth’s implicit disaffection with capitalism is troubling. I actually trust that most will grow up to learn the value of the capitalist system that their parents chose over socialism when they put Mrs Thatcher in office, or that East Europe eventually won by tearing down Sovietism. But it’s up to today’s Tories not only to get the economy right but also to explain how an economy works. To explain that capitalism, yes, can mean greed and exploitation – Corbyn is right about that – but that the capitalist ethic also has done the world immeasurable good. Property rights, prudence, trust, self-reliance and innovation have helped to fight hunger and eliminate disease. And if Britain is going to overcome its present challenges, it’ll be by reviving those capitalist virtues that have been roadtested by history.