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Joshua Muravchik

Heaven On Earth; The Rise and Fall of Socialism. Hardcover – January 1, 2001

by Joshua. MURAVCHIK (Author)

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Product details

ASIN : B005ZH90C2
Publisher : - (January 1, 2001)
Item Weight : 2 pounds

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37 ratings

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Bob Suga

The most educational book I have ever read

Reviewed in the United States on January 4, 2019

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This is a book I will read again soon. I learned so much, and now have a better understanding of socialism.
I better understand it’s enticement and why it has not provided the outcomes intended. The kindle version is wonderful as it allows use of the dictionary, which I found invaluable. This book should be required reading for every high school and college student. I wish every American would read this.

13 people found this helpful

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Buenoslibros.es

One of the most enriching reading experiences in my life

Reviewed in the United States on December 19, 2011

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Against the brain-washed and self-deluded Socialists in the story are some heroic -but nevertheless common- people. What's an authentic American, do you want to know? A true American is a man like George Meany. Thank God most Americans can recognize themselves in Meany, still in this age and time.

"To him, a plumber was a plumber, not a proletarian. A worker was a guy trying to squeeze the most he could out of his job and hoping to get a better one. And if he was something more than flesh and blood, as he assuredly was, it was not because he was an embodiment of historical processes, but rather a husband, father, worshiper, patriot, pianist, artist, baseball player." Gotta love common-sense like that.

Mr. Muravchik explains in the epilogue the only case of a successful socialist community, the kibbutzim in Israel. Successful yes, but only for a generation or two. What happened? "[A debt crisis]. What was so devastating about all the borrowing [...] was that little of the money had been used as capital to boost the kibbutzim's earnings. Instead, it had been spent to raise the standard of living. The impulse to do this did not grow out of hedonism, but in the hopes of stemming the loss of members. By some point in the 1970s the majority of kibbutz-raised children were leaving." The children of the founders, being raised in this irrational pseudo-religion, were expected to be "the best kibbutzniks". It failed. It just goes against human nature. Decent humans want to be free. Amazing that Christians in the West should be looked down on by this crazy and dangerous God-haters as unscientific and irrational; well look at them!

One of the kibbutzniks admitted: "People like me who started as socialists concluded that you can work hard and get nothing while others don't work hard. It's so unfair." And this simple deduction had to take a whole life-span to be learned! Well, doesn't it look like 2 plus 2 to you? And "Those who leave [the kibbutz] are often the most economically productive." Wow, that's some deep, deep, thinking.

This book is about Socialism in action, not ideology, though it obviously gets explained while coursing the lives of those nutty fellows, the wealthy founders of this elitist ideology called Socialism. But it's a 100% history book, delving on the lives of the dudes, on what they preached (and this is not a metaphor) and what they lived, what they said to the crowds, and what they said among themselves. What a bunch of scoundrels, oh my.

You can safely read this book, no matter what your prejudices may be. This is not a politically biased book, it is history, factual, with names, locations, dudes, and their doings. No refuting the facts. It covers the whole wide-world, in their main scenarios, the main characters of the farce, their stories, their origin and their outcome. It is history from the street level. There's more action here than in all Tom Cruise's movies, and nothing is fake.

One of the most enriching reading experiences in my life. The colorless cover doesn't do it justice.

25 people found this helpful

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Jay A

The Best One Volume History of Socialsim ever

Reviewed in the United States on April 25, 2016

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Getting away from politics, I just finished the most incredibly interesting book, "Heaven on Earth, the rise and fall of socialism" by Joshua Muravchik. Mr Muravchik is, or at least was, a 3rd generation of the Socialist Party and was chairman of the youth wing of the party.

Following major figures beginning with Babuef during the French Revolution and ending with Tony Blair the book presents a history of socialism. I never knew what racists Marx and Engels where and how much they hated the common, working man. Marx subscribed to the Nazi version of the Jew and called for the destruction of the Slav race.

There are several interesting chapters on the crisis socialists faced in the 1890s when it became clear that Marx's predictions were not coming true and in fact the opposite seemed to be happening. Lenin's communism and Mussolini's fascism were those men's attempts to synthesize "real world" conditions with Marxism.

I already knew this, but Tony Blair turned the Labour Party into Thatcherism lite. The final chapter is on the Kibbutzs. I thought it would be boring but it turned out to be fascinating how they started out as one of the few examples of true socialism and in 3 generations have almost completely abandoned socialism.

People throw around "socialist" (and fascist too) and know almost nothing about it. Today socialism has come to mean corporate cronyism and a bureaucratic welfare state. That characterization completely misses the point of socialism, i.e. equality.

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P. Scrivener

The very human need to believe

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 12, 2014

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Joshua Muravchik is an apostate, a former National chairman of the Young People's Socialist League (USA), both of his parents were committed socialists, his mother apparently deeply upset by the contents of this book. Muravchik however, is not the hectoring, shouty, pointy fingered type. His review ( at just 350 pages) of the history of socialist development from Babeuf to Blairism is incomplete, Sweden being the most obvious exclusion, but contains sufficient information on a range of socialist intellectuals and followers to be both precise and informative. His writing style is easy to follow, well paced and engaging. Even though an American writer, other than a chapter on the two most prominent anti-socialist union leaders in the US, his case studies run the usual gamut, Robert Owen, a man apparently so esteemed in the US, that John Quincy Adams on his first full day as president when to listen to him lecture; Marx and Engels, I came away with the feeling that Engels was something of an intellectual masochist; Eduard Bernstein, one of the fathers of social democracy; Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Deng and Gorbachev. A chapter on Mussolini and Fascism shows the development and indeed seriousness with which Mussolini was taken at this period. It is interesting to note that his father corresponded with Lenin.

However, the most interesting chapters for me were on Clement Atlee, he was described as in every way a conservative except in his socialism. It is also interesting to note that despite his anti-war beliefs, he discovered that his socialist philosophy had not nullified his patriotism which he called 'the natural emotion of every true Briton'. He also said that 'it was not until the Great War that I fully grasped the strength of the ties that bind men to the land of their birth'. It is of course the conflict between international socialism and patriotic nationalism, both within and between countries that so many post WW1 conflicts have sat. It was not socialism that enabled Stalin to galvanise the Soviet Union into it's resistance to Hitler, but semi-theocratic nationalism.

The Chapter on Julius Nyrere in Tanzania is again full of interest because I knew so little about it, and it summed up very well the disparity between the socialist sentiment and it's inability to deliver standards of western living that the majority, even in avowedly theocratic countries aspire to.

But the most interesting chapter for me was the epilogue, which deals with the creation and decline of the Kibbutz system. A noble if limited experiment in some people's eyes, and one almost entirely dependant on a modernist state to protect and support it. The breakdown seems to have begun with the education and dormitory sleeping arrangements for children, many of whom were separated from their parents. Mothers particularly disliked the distress this sometimes caused and took their children back home. The additional space then required in their houses, then caused the buildings to be extended, made them more remote from communal living and gave them an enhanced pride in their personal surroundings, which they then wished to acquire and develop further. It is a fascinating examination of the battle between the communal and personal space. It is also similar to the communal living arrangements introduced at Magnitogorsk when it was being constructed. Workers were housed in open dormitories, but immediately looked to create private space. Some leaving altogether to build private mud and wood dwellings they could occupy privately.

A major thrust and a commonplace of discussions about socialism is the denial of its theocratic nature but the congruence with that fact. Eric Hoffer describes the need to believe in his book 'True Believer', and Muravchik illustrates it to good effect. In its frequent obsessions and schisms socialism reminds me of Millerism, the mid 19th century religious cult in America that once again prophesied the second coming and the end of time. It attracted a huge following, many people gave up everything to wait for salvation. Even when it failed to occur (again and again and again), it did not stop belief which merely morphed into other variants including the Seventh Day Adventists. It was known as the Great Disappointment. The fact that Marx tried to create a 'scientific' cause and effect in an effort to deny utopianism, does not of course make the argument persuasive.

There were and are many noble minded advocates of socialism, but like anything life in dealing with what Isiah Berlin called the crooked timber of humanity it is not a panacea or even from my perspective the majority of one in the everyday effort to support and maintain ever changing societies.

A good book from which I gained a lot. Recommended

4 people found this helpful

Dave Moody

Great read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 26, 2014

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A very interesting history of the rise and fall of socialism. Easy and fluent to read, would have been a 5 stars if there had been a bit deeper analysis of the reasons behind the fall of the regimes...

2 people found this helpful

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