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By Jonathan S. Tobin | November 14, 2019

In recent years, socialismthe ideology that gave birth to some of the worst horrors of the 20th centuryhas made a comeback. Only 30 years after it was consigned to an unlamented grave with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is making its political return.

Part of this surge in sympathy for socialism is due to Bernie Sanders presidential candidacy, as well as the notoriety gained by one of his greatest supporters: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who, like the Vermont senator, is an avowed socialist.

A poll taken earlier this year by Gallup showed that some four in 10 Americans embraced some form of socialism. While a majority of those polled51%said that socialism would be a bad thing for the country, a staggering 43% said it would be a good thing.

Its not clear if those who tell pollsters they like socialism understand what they are saying. Some may just like Sanders or AOC, hate President Trump or view it as a catchall phrase expressing very liberal views about a variety of subjects or antagonism toward big business. But whatever it means, theres no doubt that the stigma attached to socialism during the struggle against communism during the Cold War and the historical record of what happens when Socialists take over nations has faded.

The irony about this is that, as scholar Ruth Wisse noted in a brilliant lecture given at the third annual conference on Jews and conservatisman event sponsored by the Jewish Leadership Conference and supported by the Tikvah FoundationJewish socialism is dead. By that, Wisse, who is arguably the greatest living authority on Yiddish literature, as well as a formidable and insightful commentator on Jewish history and politics, was describing something that is largely extinct.

Prior to World War II and the Holocaust, supporters of the Socialist Bund Party were not merely ubiquitous in Jewish life, but more numerous than Zionists in many places. Jewish socialists won the political allegiances of many Jews who saw in Marxism an escape from both economic misery and religious prejudice.

Yet those hopesboth in terms of the endemic economic failure of socialist systems and the promise of equal rights for Jewswere ultimately dashed by the success of the revolution in Russia. The same is true elsewhere in places where the extreme left has subsequently gained power, as events in Cuba and Venezuela subsequently proved.

Jewish socialists didnt wish to abandon their Jewish identities. They dreamed of a world in which Yiddish-speaking Jews would exercise a degree of autonomy and nurture their unique culture, in which capitalism would be routed and replaced with a more just system.

But what they discovered was that there was a profound contradiction between the promises of socialism for Jews and what it delivered. In a system built on compulsion and where governments could dictate behavior to their subjects, Jews inevitably found themselves being victimized and told to give up their separate identity.

The only place where Jewish socialism succeeded, at least for a time, was in Israel, where the power of the institutions it created helped build the state. It did not, however, have the same tyrannical impact of other socialist systems. Even there, such ideas were ultimately no match for the genius of the market economy. Still, the contrast between the kibbutzim in their heyday and collective farming elsewhere was that Jews were free to leave and not compelled to become state serfs.

The point about socialism that todays enthusiasts forget is how closely it is linked to the worst tragedies of the last century. Its hard for people to admit that the evidence shows that it did far more harm than good. Governments are needed to help those who fall through the cracks of systems rooted in economic freedom, but giving the state so much power inevitably leads to tyranny. And that is something thats always bad for the Jews.

But the point about Wisses autopsy on socialism is that its legacy is antithetical to Jewish interests. Sanders embodies the irony that the man who stands a chance of becoming the nations first Jewish or socialist president is someone who gave up the practice of Judaism and is not supportive of Israel. Nor is it irrelevant to point out that the greatest enemies of Israel and the most blatant purveyors of anti-Semitism in our political system, like AOCs fellow Squad members Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), have endorsed him. Neither is the choice of left-wing academic elites in the West to support an anti-Semitic movement like BDS a mere accident of history.

If in the past anti-Semitism was derided by some on the left as the socialism of fools, Wisse rightly noted that socialism has now become the anti-Semitism of the enlightened. The death of Jewish socialism and an honest look at how totalitarianism sprung from its bosom is a warning from history that Jewish communities everywhere cant afford to ignore.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNSJewish News Syndicate. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.

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Socialism Becomes the Anti-Semitism of the Enlightened - Jewish Link of New Jersey

The media has been awash over the past week with stories about the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

My favourite vignette concerns a couple living in East Berlin who were delighted to have a telephone installed in their apartment only weeks before the Wall came down. They had been on the waiting list for 19 years.

This captures the essence of socialism. The system could generate a tolerable standard of living for citizens, but it was grossly inefficient and run for the benefit of the producers rather than the consumers.

The old nationalised industries in Britain also offered us a glimpse of what life would be like under socialism. Under British Rail, new heating stoves really were installed in station waiting rooms on the very day that the line was closed to traffic for ever.

In the 1970s, people routinely waited at least six months for the nationalised telecoms company to install a domestic phone line.

This producer-just attitude persists. Todays Labour leadership has, for example, defended firefighters in the face of the recent damning criticism of their performance in the Grenfell Tower tragedy. For Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, the interests of the producers the public sector workers, even the fire chief who could retire at 50 with a pension of 140,000 a year come first.

Some will feel that this is unfair to socialism. Socialism in practice may have had its faults (such as the liquidation of nearly 100 million people by their own governments), but a better, different kind of socialism is apparently on offer in the future.

Remarkably, the leaders of the Communist Parties in Eastern Europe appear to have believed the same thing. The ideologists in their Politburos described countries such as East Germany as examples of actually existing socialism in contrast to the nirvana which would exist at some unspecified time in the future.

But we can only judge a system by its performance in practice, not by some Platonic ideal of what true believers imagine it might do. Everywhere it has been tried, socialism has been a failure. This simple fact cannot be repeated too often, particularly to younger generations to whom 1989 may seem as remote as the days of the Roman Empire.

Modern history has provided us with a whole series of what are termed natural experiments.

We cannot set up (as in the natural sciences) a laboratory in which one society is started up on socialist lines and the other on capitalist ones, and then observe their performances over time.

But we can observe the United States and the Soviet Union, West and East Germany, South and North Korea, China when it was purely socialist and China when it subsequently embraced a market-oriented economy.

In every single case, capitalism has delivered better outcomes: higher living standards, longer life expectancy, more holidays, more provision of health and education more of almost everything except slave labour and environmental pollution.

Capitalism can be criticised, but its faults are nothing compared to those of socialism.

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Todays apologists for socialism still wont acknowledge the lessons of the Berlin Wall - City A.M.

This November 9 marked the 30-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a notorious symbol of the oppression of communism and socialism. Yet people who love liberty cannot yet declare victory on this day of commemoration each year, because the battle hasnt been won: socialism is staging a comeback in Western democracies, especially in the United States and United Kingdom.

Its worth looking back at how the Berlin Wall was built. After World War II, Germany was a country divided.The regions occupied by the United Kingdom, United States, and France formed the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, a free-market-oriented democracy. The areas occupied by the Soviet Union formed the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, a Socialist regime.

This division extended into Berlin, creating West Berlin and East Berlin. Thus, one of the most dramatic and consequential social experiments in human history began: capitalism versus socialism, freedom versus tyranny, a free market economy versus central planning, command, and control.

Germans on both sides of the division spoke the same language and shared the same cultural heritage and ethnicity. Both sides, prior to their separation, had suffered similar destructions of infrastructure and severe damage in the economy.

Prior to Germanys surrender in 1945, regions in East Germany retained a slightly higher gross domestic product per capita compared to West Germany. In other words, East Germany had a head start when the competition between capitalism versus socialism began, but as the chart(created by Daniel Mitchell, a libertarian economist) below illustrates, the two countries economies rapidly diverged.

B.R. Shenoy, a prominent economist in India, noticed the significant differences of the two economic models in the divided city of Berlin in as early as 1960. Heobservedthat in West Berlin,Rebuilding is virtually completeThe main thoroughfares of West Berlin are near jammed with prosperous looking automobile traffic, the German make of cars, big and small The departmental stores in West Berlin are cramming with wearing apparel, other personal effects and a multiplicity of household equipment, temptingly displayed.

In contrast, when Shenoy went to East Berlin, he saw a good part of the destruction still remains; twisted iron, broken walls and heaped up rubble are common enough sights Buses and trams dominate the thoroughfares in East Berlin; other automobiles, generally old and small cars, are in much smaller numbers than in West Berlin The food shops in East Berlin exhibit cheap articles in indifferent wrappers or containers and the prices for comparable items, despite the poor quality, are noticeably higher than in West Berlin.

Interestingly, if we leave the specification of location in this paragraph blank, what Sheony observed could have been replaced by any socialist countries mirroring the same scene, whether of China in the 1970s, or Venezuela in 2010. Socialism consistently produces similar devastating results, no matter where it has been attempted.

Shenoy wasnt the only one who noticed the drastically distinct economic situations of East and West Germany in 1960. People in East Germany were aware of their poverty and political oppression, in contrast to the freedom and prosperity their families and friends enjoyed in West Germany since as early as the 1950s. East Germans wanted out.

Before 1961, people on both sides of Berlin could still travel freely back and forth, and only East Germany soldiers and border guards patrolled the dividing line of the city and set up checkpoints. Still, they didnt try to stop people from going to the west side. About60,000East Berliners commuted to West Berlin every day to get to good-paying jobs. Consequently, an estimated 2.7 million people fled East Germany between 1949 to 1960.

Desperately trying to stop this large exodus, the socialist government in East Germany erected a 91-mile wall across the border of East and West Berlin after midnight on August 12, 1961. The Berlin Wall was enhanced multiple times in the next two decades with electric fences, watch towers, lighting systems, and even minefields to discourage people in the East from escaping. East German soldiers and border guards were also authorized from day one to shoot anyone who dared to scale the wall to reach the West. East Germany officially became a giant prison.

However, the Berlin Wall failed to deter many in the East from risking their lives for freedom and prosperity. About5,000people successfully made it to West Berlin in the next two decades. Unfortunately, close to300people died while trying. The area near the Berlin wall and the wall itself were referred to as a death line.

We all know what happened when President Ronald Reagan visited Berlin in 1987. What I didnt know but later learned from theNational Archiveswas that a career U.S. diplomat in Berlin at the time told President Reagans speech writer, Peter Robinson, that Reagan had to watch himself: no chest-thumping, no Soviet-bashing and no inflammatory statements about the Berlin Wall. The diplomat further asserted that West Berliners, had long ago gotten used to the structure that encircled them.

Robinson decided to do a little research. He asked several West Berliners on the street if they had gotten used to the wall. One man told Robinson: My sister lives 20 miles in that direction, and I havent seen her in more than two decades. Do you think I can get used to that?It turned out the American diplomat who warned Robinson couldnt have been more wrong.

Based on his observations, Robinson wrote the speech for President Reagan, including the famous line, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Of course, the State Department and National Security Council rejected the line and thought it was too provocative. Despite this, President Reagan ignored them, because he held much stronger conviction about the evils of socialism than his advisers did. On June 12, 1987, President Reagan delivered the following memorable lines:

Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar. . . . As long as this gate is closed, as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open, but the question of freedom for all mankind. . . .General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate.Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate!Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

The speech was provocative, because it challenged the Soviet leader to do something morally compelling. By calling the Soviet Union out, President Reagan gave people who were held hostage by the failing socialist regime hope and encouraged them to fight for their freedom and a better life.

After the speech, East Germany witnessed many large protests. Two years later, on November 9, 1989, East Germanys government finally announced that its people could now travel to the west freely. Soon, a large crowd of East Germans gathered at the Berlin Wall and chanted the words We want out.East German soldiers were overwhelmed by the size of the crowd, and opened the gate. People from both sides of the wall started to chisel away at the wall with any tools available. The Berlin Wall started to fall apart.

Robert Heilbroner, a left-leaning economist,wrotefor TheNew Yorkerin 1989, The Soviet Union, China & Eastern Europe have given us the clearest possible proof that capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism. He declares that the contest between socialism and capitalism is over; capitalism has won.

It would have been nice if we had buried socialism once and for all in 1989. Yet like a zombie, socialism refuses to die.

It would have been nice if we had buried socialism once and for all in 1989. Yet like a zombie, socialism refuses to die. It is staging an unfathomable comeback in West democracies, especially in the United Kingdom and United States. In the U.K., Jeremy Corbyn, a socialist who hijacked the Labour Party, is running to become the next prime minister. He promises a socialist revolution in the U.K. economy, aiming for the redistribution of income, asset, ownership and power.

In the United States, from the Green New Deal, to a hefty wealth tax and Medicare for all, the Democratic Party is now led by unapologetic socialists, some of whom are running to be the next president of the United States. They want to expand government control in every aspect of our lives, strip our freedom to choose, and radically redistribute our hard-earned wealth.

Even more troubling, according to the latestreport by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, 70 percent of millennials said they would vote for a socialist leader. Only 57 percent of millennials believe the Declaration of Independence better guarantees freedom and inequality than the Communist Manifesto does.

As we commemorate the 30-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we must realize that the contest between capitalism and socialism is far from over. Every one of us who cherishes our freedom and wants to preserve our republic needs to join the effort to speak up about the bloody history of communism and socialism, and help our youth debunk socialist fantasies and recognize the real dangers of such policies.

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30 Years After Fall Of The Berlin Wall, Socialism Is Staging A Comeback - The Federalist

A London flat where the father of Russian socialism once lived has hit the market in the citys posh Bayswater neighborhood for 1.45 million (US$1.86 million).

Alexander Herzen, the first self-proclaimed Russian socialist, lived in exile in London in the 1850s and 60s, including several years in this grand Italianate mansion known as Orsett House thats since been divided into multiple apartments.

More:Mary Poppins Author P.L. Travers London Home Selling for 4.85 Million

A historic Blue Plaque, bestowed on the building in 1970, commemorates Herzens tenure there from 1860-61. It was a short but very significant time, during which Herzen saw his fight for the emancipation of Russian serfs realized through reforms by emperor Alexander II.

Indeed it was there at Orsett House that the Russian writer threw a massive party in honor of the emancipation. The fete, attended by radical European thinkers from Italian nationalist Guisseppe Mazzini to French socialist Louis Blanc, drew enough curious onlookers that a special police force was called to control the crowd, according to playwright Tom Stoppard, who wrote a trilogy for the stage about Herzen in 2002.

The quirky Victorian-era villa still sticks out on a street otherwise lined in identical terraced houses. It comes with a historic Grade-II listing for its period architecture, including a grand columned porch and leaded mansard roof, according to details from Historic England.

The available apartment, which hit the market at the end of September with estate agency Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward (KFH), spans the villas entire top floor with three bedrooms and two bathrooms.

From Penta:Second-Tier Cities Show Strong Growth on Prime Global Cities Index

Its laid out around a central great room and modernized kitchen with bedrooms arranged on either side. The home features hardwood floors and period architectural quirks, like a barrel ceiling in the kitchen and plaster moulding, according to the listing with KFH, which could not be reached for comment.

Mansion Global could not identify the owner.

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London Flat Where Russian Socialist Lived in Exile Lists for 1.45 Million - Mansion Global

Contents

Socialism describes any political or economic theory that says the community, rather than individuals, should own and manage property and natural resources.

The term socialism has been applied to very different economic and political systems throughout history, including utopianism, anarchism, Soviet communism and social democracy. These systems vary widely in structure, but they share an opposition to an unrestricted market economy, and the belief that public ownership of the means of production (and making money) will lead to better distribution of wealth and a more egalitarian society.

Thomas More (1478-1535).

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The intellectual roots of socialism go back at least as far as ancient Greek times, when the philosopher Plato depicted a type of collective society in his dialog, Republic (360 B.C.). In 16th-century England, Thomas More drew on Platonic ideals for his Utopia, an imaginary island where money has been abolished and people live and work communally.

In the late 18th century, the invention of the steam engine powered the Industrial Revolution, which brought sweeping economic and social change first to Great Britain, then to the rest of the world. Factory owners became wealthy, while many workers lived in increasing poverty, laboring for long hours under difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions.

READ MORE: The Original Luddites Raged Against the Machine of the Industrial Revolution

Socialism emerged as a response to the expanding capitalist system. It presented an alternative, aimed at improving the lot of the working class and creating a more egalitarian society. In its emphasis on public ownership of the means of production, socialism contrasted sharply with capitalism, which is based around a free market system and private ownership.

Sketch of a city plan for a new community in Indiana, based on the principles advocated by Robert Owen, a socialist philanthropist. The city was designed to give "greater physical, moral, and intellectual advantages to every individual."

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Early socialists like Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen and Charles Fourier offered up their own models for social organization based on cooperation rather than competition. While Saint-Simon argued for a system where the state controls production and distribution for the benefit of all societys members, both Fourier and Owen (in France and Britain, respectively) proposed systems based on small collective communities, not a centralized state.

READ MORE: Five 19th-Century Utopian Communities in the United States

Owen, who had owned and operated textile mills in Lanark, Scotland, headed to the United States in 1825 to launch an experimental community in New Harmony, Indiana. His planned commune was based on the principles of self-sufficiency, cooperation and public ownership of property. The experiment soon failed, and Owen lost much of his fortune. More than 40 small cooperative agricultural communities inspired by Fouriers theories, were founded across the United States. One of these, based in Red Bank, New Jersey, lasted into the 1930s.

It was Karl Marx, undoubtedly the most influential theorist of socialism, who called Owen, Fourier and other earlier socialist thinkers utopians, and dismissed their visions as dreamy and unrealistic. For Marx, society was made up of classes: When certain classes controlled the means of production, they used that power to exploit the labor class.

In their 1848 work The Communist Manifesto, Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, argued that true scientific socialism could be established only after a revolutionary class struggle, with the workers emerging on top.

Karl Marx (1818-1883).

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Though Marx died in 1883, his influence on socialist thought only grew after his death. His ideas were taken up and expanded upon by various political parties (such as the German Social Democratic Party) and leaders like Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong.

Marxs emphasis on the revolutionary clash between capital and labor came to dominate most socialist thought, but other brands of socialism continued to develop. Christian socialism, or collective societies formed around Christian religious principles. Anarchism saw not just capitalism but government as harmful and unnecessary. Social democracy held that socialist aims could be achieved through gradual political reform rather than revolution.

READ MORE: Communism Timeline

In the 20th centuryparticularly after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the formation of the Soviet Unionsocial democracy and communism emerged as the two most dominant socialist movements throughout the world.

By the end of the 1920s, Lenins revolution-focused view of socialism had given way to the foundation of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its consolidation of absolute power under Joseph Stalin. Soviet and other communists joined forces with other socialist movements in resisting fascism. After World War II, this alliance dissolved as the Soviet Union established communist regimes across Eastern Europe.

With the collapse of these regimes in the late 1980s, and the ultimate fall of the Soviet Union itself in 1991, communism as a global political force was greatly diminished. Only China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam remain communist states.

Meanwhile, over the course of the 20th century, social democratic parties won support in many European countries by pursuing a more centrist ideology. Their ideas called for a gradual pursuit of social reforms (like public education and universal healthcare) through the processes of democratic government within a largely capitalist system.

In the United States, the Socialist Party never enjoyed the same success as in Europe, reaching its peak of support in 1912, when Eugene V. Debs won 6 percent of the vote in that years presidential election. But social reform programs like Social Security and Medicare, which opponents once denounced as socialist, became over time a well-accepted part of American society.

READ MORE: How Much Did the First Social Security Check Pay Out?

Some liberal politicians in the United States have embraced a variation on social democracy known as democratic socialism. This calls for following socialist models in Scandinavia, Canada, Great Britain and other nations, including single-payer health care, free college tuition and higher taxes on the wealthy.

On the other side of the political spectrum, conservative U.S. politicians often label such policies as communist. They point to authoritarian socialist regimes such as that of Venezuela to raise concerns about big government.

The wide range of interpretations and definitions of socialism across the political spectrum, and the lack of a common understanding of what socialism is or how it looks in practice reflects its complicated evolution. Nonetheless, socialist parties and ideas continue to influence policy in nations around the world. And socialisms persistence speaks to the enduring appeal of calling for a more egalitarian society.

Pablo Gilabert and Martin O'Neill, "Socialism." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Fall 2019 Edition, Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

Peter Lamb, Historical Dictionary of Socialism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016)

Glenn Kessler, What is socialism? Washington Post, March 5, 2019.

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Socialism - Definition, Origins & Countries - HISTORY