Whatever the problem may be, socialism is not the solution | thearticle

It’s not often that a piece of junk mail makes me burst out in laughter, but that’s what happened recently when I picked up a flimsy yellow leaflet from the doormat and read: “Capitalism is

the problem; socialism is the solution.” It turned out that the leaflet is the British Communist Party’s plea for our vote in the upcoming elections for the Greater London Assembly, in which

the Party is bravely standing nine candidates. It was so laughable because it reminded me yet again how impossible it is to exaggerate the human being’s capacity for self-delusion. And

dressing up communism as “socialism” is such a tired old chestnut, one wonders why they bother. I’m just grateful that even in today’s left-liberal-driven, woke-obsessed Britain, very few

people are stupid enough to vote communist. Well, perhaps one or two_ Guardian_ readers. I say that because, after all, their former columnist (and Jeremy Corbyn sidekick) Seumas Milne is a

self-avowed apologist for Stalin, and then there is the infamous case of Richard Gott, one-time editor on the lefty rag, whose murky dealings with the KGB were long ago exposed by

authorities on Cold War espionage. Yes, the Guardian’s journalism has long had a dodgy smell about it; the IRA-loving Roy Greenslade is just the latest discredited hack. Anyway, the only

people who can still honestly believe that communism is the answer to any of life’s thorny issues are those who have never lived under the communist system. While the eastern half of Europe

suffered under Stalin’s brutal cosh, the western half was home to the wilfully duped (e.g. silly old George Bernard Shaw) or, much worse, those who were fully aware of the terror and

murderous purges but chose to brush them aside because “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” (e.g. Eric Hobsbawm here and Jean-Paul Sartre in France). Of course it took George

Orwell to observe: “But where’s the omelette?” China is the one exception in all this. It is quite true that millions have been lifted out of poverty and into a new middle class; the

standard of living in China has never been higher. But isn’t it interesting that this miracle happened only after the communist regime had wholeheartedly embraced capitalism? China’s

combination of an unashamedly capitalist economic system with an oppressive totalitarian political system has been rather clever, I have to admit. For China, it seems, capitalism has turned

out to be the solution to the problems created by socialism. But which of us would choose to be a subject of Xi Jinping’s ruthless surveillance state? Not many people from the West have

emigrated to live under “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. So where exactly has a more undiluted Marxism – oh excuse me, _socialism_ – worked? North Korea? In Cambodia under Pol Pot?

In poor starving Venezuela, the sad legacy of Hugo Chavez?  In the Castro brothers’ Cuba, such a delightful paradise that the flight of Cuban refugees to nearby Florida has not abated in the

past six decades, so that there are now 1.5 million Cuban-Americans living in that state alone?  No, dear readers, the only problem to which socialism is the solution is: how can we destroy

as many lives, societies and economies as possible, while pretending to care about humanity?