In Search of 'Real' Socialism.

• Author: Carden, Art

Socialism: The Failed

Idea that Never Dies

By Kristian Niemietz

372 pp.; Institute of

Economic Affairs, 2019

The Wikipedia page for "cryptozoolog/' 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 30 th 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 I 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...