Socialism is strangely impervious to refutation by real-world experience. Over the past hundred years, there have been more than two dozen attempts to build a socialist society, from the Soviet Union to Maoist China to Venezuela. All of them have ended in varying degrees of failure. But, according to socialism’s adherents, that is only because none of these experiments were “real socialism”. This book documents the history of this, by now, standard response. It shows how the claim of fake socialism is only ever made after the event. As long as a socialist project is in its prime, almost nobody claims that it is not real socialism. On the contrary, virtually every socialist project in history has gone through a honeymoon period, during which it was enthusiastically praised by prominent Western intellectuals. It was only when their failures became too obvious to deny that they got retroactively reclassified as “not real socialism”. Listen today…  

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Set in 1890’s Imperial Germany, this remarkable novella follows the arc of a family as narrated by the head as he initially enthuses over the socialist sweep to power. Quickly, however, he progresses through various stages of disenfranchisement that inevitably follows: first tempering his expectations, then ratcheting them downward, followed by grappling with cognitive dissonance brought about by the internal contradictions of the new system. When those contradictions are inescapable, he finally spirals into angst and despair as he comes to fully comprehend the horrors of socialism. Realizing it is too late for himself, his family and livelihood largely destroyed, he commits one final act of repudiation against his socialist future. Originally written in German in 1893 by the journalist and politician Eugen Richter, it was translated into English in 1907 by Henry Wright with Thomas Mackay providing an introduction to the English text. Now that so-called “democratic socialism” is finding new found vogue in the current age, Mark E. Jeftovic provides a new forward with contemporary context. Get it now 

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As we were wrapping up production on Dr Kristian Niemietz’s “Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies” we got together on Skype to discuss, “not real socialism”, democratic socialism, and why this bad idea that never works, never dies…. Listen on Youtube or check out the audiobook.

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