The Wikipedia page for “cryptozoology” defines it as “a pseudoscience and a subculture that aims to prove the existence of entities from the folklore record, such as Bigfoot, the chupacabra, or Mokele-mbembe.” Kristian Niemietz’s Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies explores cryptozoology’s politico-economic analog, the never-ending hunt for successful socialism, which he likens to a unicorn hunt. Socialism’s endless failures haven’t stopped people from claiming it’s an economic, political, and moral ideal.

The book couldn’t come at a better time. It was released last year, 30 years after the Berlin Wall fell. Next year will mark the 30th anniversary of the end of the Iron Curtain, and 2023 will be the 30th year since the Soviet Union disintegrated. Yet, here we are, in 2020, with people who should know better touting the theoretical glories of socialism. What gives?

Love story / Niemietz, of London’s Institute of Economic Affairs, provides a thick, informative, and delightfully pugnacious book that you can download for free from IEA’s website. The book explores intellectuals’ romantic attachments to socialist experiments in the USSR, China, Cuba, East Germany, Cambodia, North Korea, Albania, and Venezuela. Each of these romances begins with the belief that “this socialist experiment is supposed to be the fulfillment of the vision and the pattern for the future,” and ends with the determined conclusion that this “wasn’t real socialism” once the regime’s failures become too obvious to ignore.

The romance progresses through three stages, according to Niemietz. There is the honeymoon period in which socialists tout the various purported successes of the new regime. They write articles extolling the experiment and perhaps tweaking nay-sayers who said “socialism can’t work” but who were clearly proven wrong by the workers’ paradise du jour.

The next stage, which begins when the first signs of failure and oppression start to appear, he calls “the excuses-and-whataboutery period,” where apologists for the workers’ paradise try to explain away the problems. They are claimed to be the fault of people who can’t stand to see socialism succeed (e.g., the Central Intelligence Agency, major corporations) and to factors outside the Visionary Leader’s control (falling oil prices).

Finally, there is the “not-real-socialism” stage. Niemietz writes:

Eventually, there always comes a point when the experiment has been widely discredited, and is seen as a failure by most of the general public. The experiment becomes a liability for the socialist cause, and an embarrassment for Western socialists.

This is the stage when intellectuals begin to dispute the experiment’s socialist credentials, and, crucially, they do so with retroactive effect. They argue that the country was never socialist in the first place, and that its leaders never even tried to implement socialism. This is the deeper meaning behind the old adage that “real” socialism has never been tried: socialism gets retroactively redefined as “unreal” whenever it fails. So it has never been tried, in the same way in which, in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, the government of Oceania has always been at war with East Asia.

Thus do we have intellectual leaders like linguist Noam Chomsky who claim that the USSR was in no way “socialist” and the presumption among many that it is gauche to bring it up in discussions of whether or not socialism is or isn’t advisable. That this or that experiment failed simply shows that it wasn’t real socialism. That socialism is good, true, and beautiful is an axiom, not a hypothesis.

The reasoning is as follows: If it is real socialism, then we will see peace and prosperity. We don’t see peace and prosperity. Therefore, it couldn’t have been real socialism. Chomsky, for example, identifies socialism as “the liberation of working people from exploitation.” Since we did not see the working people liberated from exploitation in the USSR and elsewhere, then they did not practice real socialism, or as British political commentator and Labour Party activist Owen Jones defines it, “the democratisation of every aspect of society.” As an idea, socialism is simply immune to criticism. That it “works” when implemented completely and faithfully is taken for granted and cannot be refuted. The conclusion is baked into the constantly shifting definitions.

The thought that counts / As Niemietz notes, the socialists have a habit of speaking in terms of the aspirations of the system rather than its concrete institutional characteristics. I would argue that it is free-market capitalism that represents “the democratisation of every aspect of society” because people vote with their money. As for whether capitalism is “democratic,” in it mass culture tends to win. Jones, no doubt, would disagree, but what are the specific institutional characteristics of a society in which “every aspect” has been “democratised?” As Niemietz puts it in describing an opinion column by commentator and avowed socialist Elizabeth Bruenig, she “merely talks about a set of aspirations—and even then, only at a very high level of abstraction—and effectively defines her version of socialism as ‘a system that would fulfill those aspirations.’ ”

This helps us to understand why the failed idea never dies. Niemietz begins with a pair of epigrams from Eugen Richter’s 1893 book Pictures of the Socialistic Future, which if more people had read it and paid careful attention, we might have avoided a lot of the problems we’ve had since the Russian Revolution. Pictures begins with optimism about “this new reign of brotherhood and universal philanthropy” and ends with the narrator writing:

An order has just been issued to reduce the bread rations of the entire population by one half, and to do away with the meat rations altogether.… I am regarded with such increasing suspicion that a search might be made, and my papers confiscated at any moment.

Richter’s book paints an uncannily accurate picture of the transition from hope to horror in the socialist society, and it’s a story that was rewritten in the blood of victims time and again throughout the 20th century.

Fading stars / Very cleverly, Niemietz concludes his book with a series of imagined newspaper dispatches from an alternative history in which East Germany remained communist through the 1990s. They are only barely imagined; as Niemietz notes, many are inspired directly by actual apologia for socialism. Predictably, once our alternative-history East German socialist experiment fails, it is abandoned as “not real socialism.” Deliciously, in this alternative timeline the writers dismissing socialism as having not actually been tried in East Germany express enthusiasm for and optimism about the visionary “socialism for the twenty-first century” of a rising star in Venezuela named Hugo Chavez.

We know how that one turned out: much the same as in the USSR, China, and elsewhere. And now, Venezuela wasn’t “real socialism,” just like the others.

The thing is, every time it was “real socialism.”

Niemietz carries us through the stories of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia, Albania, East Germany, and Venezuela. The Soviet Union very much was deemed real socialism in the wake of the Bolshevik takeover. American journalist Lincoln Steffens said of it, “I have seen the future, and it works!” Rexford Tugwell, probably the most prominent member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust,” wrote, “The future is becoming visible in Russia.”

Once it became clear the USSR was failing—people turned sour on Stalinism after Nikita Kruschev’s 1956 speech—they turned to Mao’s China. Comparing the mainland to Taiwan, Niemietz writes, “The difference between the two is that Taiwan became a magnet for Western investors, while mainland China became a magnet for Western intellectuals.” Those intellectuals later became less enthusiastic about the Chinese experiment when pro-market reforms led to the greatest mass movement out of extreme poverty the world has ever seen.

And so on, through North Korea, where according to the economist Joan Robinson “Prime Minister Kim Il Sung seems to function as a messiah rather than a dictator” and where the country’s successes were obscured by a “curtain of lies.” North Korea is now deemed to not be “real” socialism, which is to say that it is undeniable that the country is a brutal, repressive, and impoverished dictatorship. Or consider Cambodia, which Jan Myrdal, son of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal (the latter co-recipient with F.A. Hayek of the economics Nobel in 1974) called “the kingdom of justice.” In Niemietz’s words:

Khmer Rouge socialism was once seen as a romantic, agrarian, back-to-the-roots socialism by some mainstream Western intellectuals. Their absolute numbers were never large, but they included some of the leading scholars in the relevant academic disciplines.

There was Albania under Enver Hoxha, another example of “this time is different/​that wasn’t ‘real’ socialism.” And East Germany, where intellectuals

practise the inverse of damning with faint praise: they praise with faint damnation. The shoot-to-kill order at the Berlin Wall becomes “a lack of travel possibilities,” police state repression becomes “a climate of uncertainty,” etc.

And of course, there’s Venezuela, which became the socialist darling du jour after Chavez rose to power. (He was the subject of a lot of fawning eulogies after his death in 2013.) Niemietz quotes Canadian political writer Naomi Klein, writing in 2007 (the year she published her book The Shock Doctrine):

The new leaders in Latin America are also becoming better prepared for the kinds of shocks produced by volatile markets. … Surrounded by turbulent financial waters, Latin America is creating a zone of relative economic calm and predictability.

Now, of course, “Venezuela’s socialist credentials are being retroactively withdrawn,” Niemietz notes.

Conclusion / His book’s title is blunt, but it probably needs to be. He refers to socialism as “the failed idea that never dies.” It strikes me as insane that societies are once again playing footsie with an ideology and system that led the scholar R.J. Rummel to invent the term “democide” to describe “the intentional killing of an unarmed or disarmed person by government agents acting in their authoritative capacity and pursuant to government policy or high command.” However, as Niemietz notes, people don’t reason like judges and weigh the evidence carefully and dispassionately. We reason like lawyers: we start with what we want to believe and then reverse-engineer an argument for it.

This might mean, of course, that Niemietz and I are being uncharitable and unfair. After all, we have been told repeatedly that real socialism has never been tried, and we keep being told that next time things are sure to be different.