by ProfDave, ©2022
(Oct. 20, 2022) — October 3 was Reunion Day in Germany, commemorating the day in 1990 when East and West Germany were reunited.
Do you remember the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall? You have to be at least middle aged. After World War II, Germany was broken up into Berlin and four zones of occupation – American, British, French and Soviet. Berlin, additionally, was split between East and West. The western zones were soon merged and given independence in due time, but the Soviets made a puppet state out of the East. It was the gem of the eastern bloc – a model of the worker’s paradise.
In the summer of 1979, I took my family on an historian’s tour of old Germany. As we passed up the Rhine and across Bavaria, everywhere was music and color and festival. Every home had window boxes with bright flowers. When we bedded down in cheap hotels, the streets outside were full of happy people.
Then we came to the border on our way to Wittenberg, birthplace of the Reformation. Barbed wire and machine guns. The guards went through everything in the car. They particularly enjoyed the slides we had bought along the way. The countryside was quiet, the highway adorned with propaganda billboards. When we got to Wittenberg, everything was gray. People whispered on the streets. Gray, silent people lined up to buy ice-cream dished out on clamshell crusts by gray people in a gray shop. No trouble sleeping here! The sidewalks rolled up at sundown. The small museum talked mostly about the peasant revolt incidental to the Reformation. Some paradise. Isn’t socialism wonderful?
Berlin was even grimmer, bisected by The Wall. My family and I saw the Berlin Wall from both sides. It was a high brick wall, with barbed wire on top and towers with guards and machine guns at intervals. There were guard dogs, too – German shepherd, of course. Like a prison. On the east side was an empty street – I think it was mined. The tall apartment buildings had all their windows bricked-up. On the western side were graffiti memorials to people who had been shot on this side trying to escape. They almost made it. All the windows had window-boxes with flowers in them.
Ronald Reagan famously challenged the Soviet premier to “Tear down this wall” – and it was torn down in 1990. Freedom was immediate, but it took decades for prosperity to return to the east. Trump’s wall was intended to keep people out; this was to keep them in. Why?
That was the two Germanys before reunification. You could still see the same contrast between the two Koreas (if you could even get into the North) or the two Chinas. Why the contrast? It used to be the same country – and Germany is again. Hong Kong was once “the jewel of the Orient” but is losing its luster. Why is one part bustling with wealth and happiness while the other is miserable and poor? One is free, the other suppressed.
Socialism makes a beautiful utopian vision: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” raising up the oppressed and putting down the privileged. Sounds great, but why does it end in dismal slavery for everyone but a paranoid few? Why is the richest nation in South America rapidly becoming its poorest?
Why has the Socialist vision so spectacularly failed where most thoroughly applied? Socialism neglects human nature, reality, and its own history.
First, human nature does not come in masses but in individuals. All factory workers are not the same – never were. All capitalists are not the same, either. Neither are all women, all blacks, all gays, all Muslims, all nationalists, all anything – because of their moral choices. All of us are partly good and partly bad – because being good is hard work. Sweeping stereotypes – classism, racism, sexism – are prejudice, contrary to the reality of human nature. Extreme individualism, as in the West, has its own evils, but treating whole classes the same stifles freedom and ignores individual responsibility and accountability.
Second, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” ignores human motivation and stifles enterprise. It rewards dependency and punishes excellence, robbing the successful for the benefit of the less competent or enterprising (or the party). In the Soviet Union, after the initial burst of enthusiasm (and bloody civil war), productivity plummeted despite relentless quotas. Why work hard if there is no getting ahead?
Third, and related, is the failure of materialist morality. Marxism attacks religion and denies spiritual values in general. Human beings are not mere physical entities. There is more to life than a government check. Without a moral law beyond government regulations, what have we got to keep people honest, truthful, and conscientious? Is there any standard of truth beyond the party line?
We have been asking why East Germany (the workers’ paradise — and the rest of the Soviet bloc, too) felt compelled to build walls to keep people in while Trump felt compelled to build a wall to keep people out? So many reasons and so little space!
Socialism, in its “scientific” idealism, ignores reality in so many ways. We talked about how it ignores human nature and the reality of non-material values. It also puts blinders on its adherents/subjects by enforced groupthink. Original ideas are discouraged, and dissent is cancelled. No one is allowed to tell the emperor that he is naked – that his theories are not working. So, the books are cooked and mistakes compounded instead of corrected. Foolishness prevails, waiting on the party line – which can never be wrong, right?
Second, equality is a wonderful thing, but (as the pig in Orwell’s Animal Farm put it) “some animals are more equal than others.” All leftist revolutions profess to express “the will of the people,” but in practical terms, someone has to speak for, administer and enforce the “people’s will.” To enforce equality, social justice must take away liberty and rob the rich in order to feed the poor. Equality of opportunity is the objective of a free society, but equality of outcome requires taking initiative away from both rich and poor. Success is discouraged and penalized, while the deprived are made passive and dependent on the state. Social mobility ends in a mass near the bottom of the socio-economic column. No one succeeds. Those with any get-up-and-go head for the exits (West Berlin or the Rio Grande).
Socialism ignores history, particularly the history of revolutionary regimes. Every sort of power structure has the potential for abuse. Everyone has a tendency to do the wrong thing, checked by conscience and/or the fear of God. Socialism began as a response to the abuse of industrialization, including Christian good will, legislative reform, labor movements as well as Marxism.
“The revolution” exploited legitimate grievances and negative emotions of resentment, envy and revenge against “the establishment” – rather than positive moral suasion. “The people,” whether a majority or a minority, required leadership. These leaders, professing to represent the people, assumed unlimited power to accomplish the revolution, but found it inconvenient to lay it down. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and the party leadership became the new elite, guided by their own laws and rivalries. The revolution fed on itself, resulting in a dictatorship supported by a massive bureaucracy and secret police enforcement. This process has occurred in every Marxist state. Can “democratic” socialism avoid the same elite tendencies?
A second historic problem with socialism has been the inefficiency of central planning. For example, how is it that public schools cost twice as much (including tax revenue) per-pupil as private schools? Hmmm. Socialism, where applied, tended to ever greater state intervention to provide mass outcomes. Executive offices at the national level are relied upon to solve economic and social problems by general programs, losing touch with local conditions and shouldering aside individual effort and private enterprise. When an individual makes the wrong decision, they and their family pay the price, but when a federal agency errs, the whole nation may suffer. Decisions became removed from their consequences. Every effort is made to avoid responsibility rather than correct errors.
The third historic problem – or is it a human problem – is the corruption of power. “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” (Lord Acton – 19th century historian). Socialism concentrates administrative as well as political power in the hands of the bureaucratic class. As their spheres of activity spread into daily life, those who issue directions become less and less accountable to those directed. There is every temptation for figures small and great to take advantage of their positions on the one hand and to evade responsibility on the other. Especially as fear replaces faith as a moral motive.
In conclusion, socialism has a record of turning utopia into dystopia. The dream of delivering the oppressed masses from hopeless drudgery and poverty – applied – tends instead to plunge the whole society into hopeless drudgery and poverty. With guaranteed subsistence but without the hope of individual or family advancement productivity and initiative slack. Confiscating the gains of entrepreneurs and capitalists discourages enterprise leading to a sluggish – pre-industrial – economic growth. Socialism has yet to find a way to produce broad prosperity.
East Germany called itself the German Democratic Republic, but socialism has failed – spectacularly – to guarantee democracy. Single-party rule has little interest in liberty. Economic freedom was associated with capitalism, not socialism. Can individual producers or enterprises be allowed to succeed in an egalitarian economy? The tendency is towards ever-increasing regulation and restriction – if not confiscation of gains. Soak the rich! The expanding government expands regulation of not only economic activity but also cultural and political expression, religion, speech and assembly. Is dictatorship inevitable? Can it be avoided?
So, Germany celebrates “Tag der Deutsche Einheit,” the day of German reunion, in early October. And well they might. No one wants to go back to the “good old days” of secret police and bread lines, although the government no longer guarantees jobs and non-competition. Germany is second only to the USA as a magnet for refugees fleeing conflict and repression.
No one should suffer oppression or exploitation. Only evil should be repressed. Hatred, prejudice, lust, and greed need to be checked in every society, every system. We should both invest and share our surpluses. These are moral problems, not economic problems, human problems, not class problems. What we need is a revival of faith, love and morality, not a revolution of hatred and destruction.