Socialism: Trials and Errors

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Tanzania's President Julius Nyerere, the cooperative societies envisioned by Prime Ministers Michael Manley of Jamaica and Forbes Burnham of Guyana. Despite their great differences, these socialisms have several things in common. First, all these societies call themselves socialists, although their beliefs may be rooted less in Marxism than in nationalism or an indigenous phenomenon like the communalism of tribal Africa. Second, largely because of their experience with colonialism, they reject capitalism as identifiable with imperialism and exploitation. Third, they pursue policies aimed at decreasing the role of private property in the economy and sharply curbing investment by private foreign firms.

Despite all this diversity, socialists of whatever stripe have several ideals in common. One is the belief that if the means of production remain under the complete control of private owners, the worker will be exploited. Another is a firm commitment to egalitarianism, which the conservative historian Robert Strausz-Hupé calls "the strongest single element of modern society."

There are non-Marxian socialists, but all owe some debt to Karl Marx, who framed the classic socialist indictment of capitalism, accusing it of turning labor into a commodity and thus exploiting and dehumanizing workers while it enriches bourgeois owners. Most important, perhaps, was Marx's claim that he had discovered certain "scientific" laws of history. By creating an increasingly numerous and impoverished working class, goes his familiar argument, capitalism produced the very forces that one day would destroy it in an Apocalypse of violent revolution. This confident prediction, which for more than a century inspired nearly all socialists with a dual certainty—their cause is just, their triumph inevitable—has been transformed into a new, often hollow orthodoxy. It is now bitterly distrusted among disillusioned socialists themselves and by new, ideologically homeless radicals.

Socialism has spurred Western democracies to examine the inadequacies of the capitalist system. But today the record of socialism deserves even more careful scrutiny than that of capitalism. In whatever form, socialism makes far greater claims and far more sweeping promises than capitalism does, which is a major reason for its wide appeal. But socialism rarely lives up to its promises. Stalin's Gulag and Mao's violent Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—which represents socialism in its extreme form—give the lie to the Marxist claim that it is necessarily capitalism and not socialism that enslaves the human spirit. Economically, socialism has logged impressive achievements, sometimes against tremendous odds. Yet in comparing neighboring countries where one is socialist and the other is not (North Korea v. South Korea, Tanzania v. Kenya), the statistical evidence almost always favors the nonsocialist nation.

Socialism's political momentum in Europe and its mounting popularity elsewhere prompt a careful and balanced examination of what socialists have achieved once in power. Following is such an analysis, focusing on socialism's promise compared with performance in four key areas:

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

All socialists reject what they consider the wasteful anarchy of the capitalist marketplace and seek in different ways to put