What to tell younger people about socialism

Democrats are no longer making much of an effort to disguise themselves or mask their intentions; many if not most of them now appear to be out of the closet socialists. Moreover, many younger Americans have been taught by teachers and professors that socialism is the way of the future and the most certain path to happiness. What do you tell those people?

The most major experiment in socialism was the Soviet Union which held power in Russia for seven decades. I have never been in Russia, but Russian language is a sort of a hobby of mine. My college degrees are in mathematics and math majors usually minor in physics; nonetheless physics did not interest me at the time and I minored in modern languages, and have coursework equivalent to another bachelors in Russian language. I can read Russian easily enough, I know where the Russian letters are on a normal American keyboard and can type in Russian simply by switching the character set on the computer, and I can speak with Russians if they slow down just a little bit. And, in the process of getting to that point with Russian language, I have spoken with numerous people who lived under the Soviet Union and have heard numerous descriptions of how close that system ever came to working.

The United States has problems for sure, but we have never had any problems like that. The first thing you have to understand is that the Soviet state had an absolute monopoly on weapons so that there was never any possibility of the Russian people rising up and overthrowing that system. What basically caused that system to collapse was that the communist bosses themselves finally came to understand that the system could not be made to work, and got rid of it. Part of that involved mid-level communist/socialist bureaucrats getting to the shopping malls in Germany and Sweden and seeing ordinary middle-class European people buying things that they themselves could not own.

The Soviet system was in fact capable of succeeding at certain kinds of large projects; the things that it never succeeded at were providing the Russian people with decent food, decent housing, decent roads, decent infrastructure of every sort, decent consumer products, and every kind of thing that ordinary people need to live, thrive, and survive.

Norwich University in Northfield Vermont is one of the three schools that traditionally trained cavalry officers, the other two being VMI and West Point. Norwich also used to run the nation’s premier Russian language immersion program. In 1989 the school was experiencing a severe problem with the company that had the contract for food service for the school cafeteria. At the Russian language summer session at the time, there were a number of Russian immigrant families for students to practice speaking with, particularly at lunch, but the food was so bad that students were all going down to the 7/11 for chili dogs and bring those back to the cafeteria to eat, while watching those immigrants wolfing down the inedible cafeteria food with gusto and smiles on their faces, like “Damn!!! Where do these Americans get such great food?” The University got rid of that food service a couple of months later prior to the normal Fall session.

Similarly with roads. Friends who were driving in Russia in the early 90s told me that they were not able to drive more than about 35 mph on Russian roads for fear of damaging the suspensions of their vehicles.

Simple products such as soap or toilet paper or light bulbs... The situations Russians were dealing with for those kinds of things are inconceivable even to relatively poor Americans. Why, for instance, would anybody ever go out to the black market and spend seven kopeks for a dead lightbulb? That actually makes sense in a country where there is no shot at buying a working lightbulb. The idea was to take the dead bulb to your place of work, substitute it for a working lightbulb as if the working one had died a natural death, and take the working lightbulb home.

The list of problems also involved the idea of the “New Communist Man” that the system was supposed to produce. There had always been examples of a particular incarnation of this new communist man screwing up in some kind of a highly costly and indefensible manner in a situation in which a normal person would not be expected to fail. A certain kind of person was succeeding in life and people began to fear that this was having an impact on the nation’s gene pool.

One particular example stands out. Pavlik Morozov (Little Paul) was a hero of the Soviet Union with pioneer lagers and schools named after him. At age 14, Pavlik ratted out his family for hoarding grain during one of Stalin’s engineered famines; his family was executed; his grandfather killed him with in axe; and the grandfather was executed.

Again, the United States has its own problems. There are parasitic elements of our own system, vulture capitalism, crony capitalism etc. etc. which we would be better off without. But our system generally works.

There is a 1984 movie (“Splash”) you can watch which, amongst other things, shows more or less what it was that the Soviet food system was lacking.

The two brothers in the movie, Tom Hanks and John Candy, are typical middlemen in a distribution system which is basically self-correcting. At every step of that system, there is somebody who will lose money if anything goes more than the littlest bit wrong. That is the thing that the Soviet system never had.