Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism Hardcover – April 25, 2002

My copy of this book is sturdily bound and the lettering big enough. Mr Muravchik systematically exposes the incompatibility of Socialism with the current spiritual state of humankind. Socialism worked best when coupled with faith. At the end of the book the author makes the case why Socialism should be considered a secular religion. Great book.

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.

This book provides a one-stop history of socialist ideology from the French Revolution through the Blair government from the perspective of a self-described original red-diaper baby who has since rejected socialism. Although it is probably impossible to get an objective discussion of the intellectual history of socialism, this probably comes as close as anyone could get. If there were one flaw in the book, it would be the neglect of the Scandinavian experience with socialism, including its ultimate rejection by the voters in those countries (rejection? Yes. Ikea, Nokia, and Saab aren't state-owned, are they?)

I originally saw it in a bookstore and was especially surprised by the chapter on Mussolini. Apparently, Benito grew up in a socialist household, rose through the ranks of the socialist party, and broke from them in the aftermath of WWI. His father - a member of the International - named him after four different famous socialists, read Marxist texts at the dinner table every night. Young Benito was a rising star in the Italian Socialist party, edited their magazine, and eventually became a party leader. On the outbreak of WWI, Benito had the same reaction as his hero, Lenin: they both saw that the workers in various countries rejected Marx's internationalist philosophy and rushed to arms and exclaimed, "the international is dead". Benito, however, began to develop a new variation on Marxism: he believed that stronger countries oppressed weaker countries like Italy in the same way they believe that capitalists oppress workers. He believed that the entire country must rise up against the stronger nations in order to allow the workers to rise up as predicted by Marxist dogma. He also saw how camaraderie in the army was the epitome of the class solidarity they sought, and decided to pursue a strong state based on a strong, army-like command structure. You know: Fascism. Throughout his life, he continued to admire the work of Lenin and Stalin, and the feeling appears to have been mutual until he tossed in with Hitler.

The other chapters were also enlightening, but not as surprising. The failure of Owen utopianism is traced directly to Engels' appearance in his Church of Science. Engels and Marx are traced to their selected successor, Bernstein, and his observation that the Fabians' approach of reform was having the results that Marx claimed could only come about through revolution. This in turn led to a response by a young Russian named V.I. Lenin, bringing forth the theory of perpetual revolution, in which reform would be rejected and workers would be kept in a constant state of agitation. To see the outcome of that line of thought, I'd recommend the Black Book of Communism. There are also several chapters on the policies of Clements and the failure of the Socialist experiment in England, the experience of Socialism in Africa, and the fall of communism featuring Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev.

However, I found the chapters on the anti-socialist and anti-communist philosophies of Samuel Gompers and George Meany, and the epilogue describing the history of the kibbutzim in Israel to be the most fascinating. Despite leading the labor movement, Gompers and Meany were both strongly anti-communist and insisted that the goal of the labor movement was to negotiate for workers so that they could earn their way into the middle class. That stands in stark contrast to the union movement today, in which they are hardly distinguishable from the socialist parties. The kibbutz experience was similarly fascinating: it seems to have been successful so long as the survival of Israel hung in the balance, but has since fallen apart as younger people felt the desire for something more than working their lives away at subsistence level while giving away all privacy. They discovered that capitalism yields both individual economic results as well as moral bonuses like individual rights and privacy.