Text of a talk delivered at the Second Thoughts Conference in Krakow, Poland, May 4-7, 1989, just before Poland became free.
I was born fifty years ago in 1939, just before the Germans invaded Poland. This is my first trip to your country, and it has been inspiring to me to see that although you have been occupied for half a century you have not been defeated.
The members of my family were socialists for more than 100 years; first in Moravia and the Ukraine, then in New York and Berkeley. First as socialists; then as Communists; and then as New Left Marxists. My grandparents came to New York to escape persecution as Jews in the pale of settlement. My grandfather was a tailor. He lived with other Jews in poverty on the Lower East Side and earned $3 a week. He was so poor that sometimes he had to sleep under his sewing machine in the factory where he worked. Compared to czarist Russia from which he had fled, America was a new world: He was still poor, but he had arrived in a land of opportunities provided by its free-market economy and political democracy, a land where people could grow rich beyond their wildest dreams.
That was my grandfather's reality. Like many others who arrived in America, my grandfather also had a dream. His dream, however, was not a dream of riches. It was a dream he shared with other members of the International Left: the dream of a socialist future--a world of planned economy and economic equality, of material abundance and social justice. In 1917, my grandfather thought he saw his dream become reality in Bolshevik Russia. By this time, my grandfather had had a son. Like the children of other immigrant families, his son studied and worked hard to take advantage of the opportunities provided by America's freedom. He became a high-school teacher and married a colleague and also had a son.
By this time, my father was no longer poor like his father, but middle class. He and my mother could afford culture, travel, an automobile, and a grand piano. In 1949, with their school teachers' salaries, they bought a six-room house on credit for $18,000. In 1986, when my father died, the house belonged to him as his property. It was worth $200,000. That was my father's reality: riches and freedom beyond his father's wildest dreams.
But like his father, mine also had his heart set on a different dream than the freedom and wealth that America had made possible for him. Just as his father had been a socialist, my father was a Communist. He supported the "experiment" that Lenin and Stalin had begun in Soviet Russia. All his life he dreamed the Communist future, and he transmitted that dream to his son.
In 1956, events occurred in Moscow and in Eastern Europe that almost made me give up the dream I had inherited as my family birthright. In 1956, the head of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khruschev, gave his secret speech on the "crimes of Stalin" and thus drew aside a piece of the veil that had concealed from the faithful the grim reality of the socialist future. Soviet tanks thundered across the border to crush the brave forces of the Hungarian Revolution and to discourage the hopeful beginnings of the Polish October.
Instead of being awakened by these events, I joined a new generation who hoped to revive the humanist spirit of the dream itself. I was inspired to join the New Left by a Polish Marxist named Isaac Deutscher, who was my teacher. It was Deutscher who devised the theory out of which we hoped to revive the socialist dream.
According to Deutscher, the Stalinist state that had murdered millions and erected an edifice of totalitarian lies was a deformation of the socialist ideal that socialists themselves would overcome. The socialist revolution had taken place in the "backward environment" of czarist Russia. Stalinism was a form of "primitive socialist accumulation" produced by the cultural backwardness of that environment and the political necessities of building an industrial economic base.
In 1956, when Khruschev launched the process of de-Stalinization, Deutscher saw it as the prelude to the humanist future of which we all had dreamed. The socialist economic base--infinitely superior in rationality and productive potential to its capitalist competitor--had already been created. Socialist accumulation had been completed; the socialist superstructure would follow in due course. Socialist abundance would produce socialist democracy.
When we heard words like these, New Leftists all over the world became new believers in the socialist cause. Stalinism had been terrible, but the terror was over. The socialist economic base had been built in Russia. To complete the dream, all that was required was political democracy. In the New Left in the Sixties, we had a saying: The first socialist revolution will take place in the Soviet Union. Some leftists are still saying it today.
For 17 years, I waited in vain for the democratic revolution to come to Soviet Russia to complete the socialist dream. But it did not come. Oh, there was a spring in Prague. But Soviet tanks again rolled across the border to crush it. Five years later, another Polish Marxist--now ex-Marxist--stepped forward to explain why socialism would never be realized except in a totalitarian state. In 1956, Leszek Kolakowski had been a leader of the Polish October. In 1968, Kolakowski had been a defender of the Prague spring. Now, in 1973, at a conference in England, Kolakowski summed up 100 years of critiques of socialism that history had repeatedly confirmed: The effort to transform natural inequalities into social equality could only lead to greater, more brutal inequality; the socialist effort to transform individual diversity into social unity could only lead to the totalitarian state.
Deutscher was wrong. There would never be a socialist political democracy erected on a socialist economic base. Socialism was an impossible -- and therefore destructive -- dream.
But if Kolakowski was right, the future of peoples who lived under socialism was dark indeed. The totalitarian empire could not reform, but it could expand. Aided by dreamers all over the world, the expansion of that empire seemed likely, even inevitable.
Until now, the era of glasnost. Now, instead of a continuing expansion, we see Communism everywhere in retreat. Now, its believers are fewer and fewer, and the terrain itself is beginning to shrink. Yet who among us expected this? A year and a half ago, I participated in an international panel in Paris that discussed the question: Is Communism reversible? No member of the panel thought it was. This year, if a similar panel were held, the question would be: Can Communism save itself? Who would be so bold to say that it can?
Why were we so wrong? Because all of us, Kolakowski included, had our roots in the intellectual traditions of the socialist left. Experience had taught us all to be anti-Communist, but our critique of socialism was based on political theory and political considerations. We knew that totalitarianism was evil, but we thought that socialism worked. We were wrong. It does not work. Economically, it cannot succeed.
While we were wrong, others all along had been right. All those years, outside the socialist tradition, there had been voices crying in the wilderness saying that not only would socialism bring tyranny and suffering, it would not work. Seventy-seven years ago, five years after the Bolshevik triumph, Ludwig von Mises wrote a book on socialism that predicted the catastrophe we see before us. Socialist economy, he argued, was economic irrationality, and socialist planning a prescription for chaos. Only a capitalist market could provide a system of rational allocations and rational accounts. Only private property and the profit motive could unleash the forces of individual initiative and human creativity to produce real and expanding wealth--not only for the rich but for society as a whole.
Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, and the other liberal theorists of a free-market economy who warned of this outcome are the true prophets of the reality we see before us--of socialist bankruptcy and Communist retreat. Glastnostian democracy has not (and cannot) complete the socialist dream; it can only expose this dream as a nightmare from which Communism cannot wake up. The only way to wake up is to give up the dream. In 1989, according to Soviet economists, the average Soviet citizen had a daily ration of meat that was smaller than the daily intake of the average Russian in 1913 under the czar. Socialism makes men poor beyond their wildest dreams. The average Polish citizen is poorer today, in 1989, than my poor grandfather was in America, 50 years ago, when I was born.
The law of socialist economy is this: From each according to his exploitability to the nomenklatura according to its greed. Not only does the socialist economy not produce wealth at the rate a free economy does, the socialist economy consumes wealth. It consumes both the natural wealth of the nation and the wealth it has accumulated in the past. Every Communist revolution begins as a rape of the present and continues as a cannibalization of the past. Every Communist Party is the colonizer of its own country, and the Soviet empire is the colonizer of them all. That is the law of socialist distribution: From each nation according to its exploitability to the empire according to its greed.
But a system that lives by cannibalism, which consumes more wealth than it produces, is sooner or later destined to die. And that is what is happening before our eyes.
For myself, my family tradition of socialist dreams is over. Socialism is no longer a dream of the revolutionary future. It is only a nightmare of the past. But for you, the nightmare is not a dream. It is a reality that is still happening. My dream for the people of socialist Poland is that someday soon you will wake up from your nightmare, and be free.
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