Book Review 
Heaven on Earth (The Rise, Fall and Afterlife of Socialism) 
Joshua Muravchik 
5/5 stars
"393 pages of Communism's fatal design flaws and failed efforts to create a New Man." 

*******
-393 pages/13 chapters≈30/chapter
-1008 point citations/393 pages=2.56/page.
VERY well sourced.
-≈12 hours of reading time.

Verdict: Recommended.

The author is clear that each of these 13 chapters is chosen to characterize an archetypical person in the socialist dream. 

A lot of times people may speak for or against Socialism, but they don't have that much concrete material to say one way or another. 

Reading a book like this will help solve that problem--or at least as much as you can remember from this book's massive bulk.

Big takeaway lesson from this book (Eric Hoffer quote): "The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless."

If somebody comes along trying to lead you in revolution, it is more likely than not that you are their self-actualization project/emotional therapy.

*******
1. Robert Babeuf. The first socialist was a product of the French Revolution; as in many cases, these socialist revolutions start out as the plaything of intellectuals - - as opposed to people that work everyday in a factory. 

2. Robert Owen. The kibbutz / commune idea is not new: here is a case of it being proven to not work a full two centuries ago. (40 years before the American Civil War.) Neither is the belief in tabula rasa that would make it all possible.

3. Karl Marx ("Scientific Socialism"). Marx was a trifling bum. He never held a job a *single* day in his life. From 1851 to 1860, Engels transferred £55/annum to him--twice the yearly income of a British worker. During his lifetime, his own work was ignored and The fact that there's any memory of him is because of Engels popularization of his work.

4. Eduard Bernstein (and Vladimir Lenin). He lived long enough to see the ideas of Marx and Engels falsified by history, and at this point the question is whether or not they are treated like any other writer or as scripture. Bernstein believed the former, and Lenin believed the latter, which ultimately won out.

5. Vladimir Lenin ("Real Existing Socialism"). Details of his ascent to power and immediate pivot to brutality and suppression.

6. Mussolini+  some Hitler ("Fascism"). Fascism is his brainchild, But it is actually a product of the left and not the right (as is commonly thought these days). Mussolini started out as a socialist / anti-clericalist, and found nationalism later as a vehicle to power. Quiet as it is kept, Nazis were National Socialists.

7. Clement Atlee ("Social Democracy"). Fabian socialist. In the mold of Bentham, Mill and Owen rather than Marx and Engels. Strategy was piecemeal reform..

8. Julius Nyrere ("Ujaama"). "One party. One man, one vote, one time." He started out declaring self-reliance, but ended up being Africa's largest per capita recipient of foreign assistance. (Tanzania's GDP per capita is about $1,200 today.)

9. Samuel Gompers ("Union Card"). Gompers saw that radicals (socialists/communists/ etc) tended to co-opt labor movements for their own ends, and put as much distance between the American labor movement and the socialists as possible - - a situation that has persisted.

10. Deng Xiaoping/Mikhail Gorbachev-The first an example of successfully economic reforms, and the second an example of unsuccessful ones leading to collapse. Snippets of the brutal political conditions from the Mao years and beyond.

11. Tony Blair ("Party of Business"). Tony Blair is credited with having brought the Labor to party back to the right after successive electoral defeats. Labor à la Tony Blair≠ Labor à la Clement Atlee.

12. Israeli kibbutzim. Even the Jews couldn't make them work.

13. Afterlife. Jeremy Corbyn. Venezuela. Hugo Chavez. Xi Jinping. 

Neat factoids:

1. The metric system is the only part that survived of the French attempt to decimalize everything, including months days and hours. 

2. Socialism spread farther and faster than any religion. From the 1820 coinage of the word socialism until 1970, 60% of the Earth was living under socialist rule of one type or another. (Contrast this with Xtianity claiming the loyalty of 1/3 of Earth after about 20 centuries and Islam claiming about 1/4 after 13 centuries.)

3. As an example of how socialism is just another religion: When Robert Owen found out that his various collectivist projects were not going to work, he just recreated something very similar to a church. (They sang hymns and held Sunday services;They paid missionaries to missionize and called them "socialist bishops." They held seances.)

4. 58 third world states declared themselves "socialist."  7 in Asia, 13 in Latin America / Caribbean, 3 in non-African Middle East, and 35 in Africa (p.206).

5. Das Kapital had 4 volumes. The first written by Marx himself. The second and third written by Engels. And the fourth written by Eduard Bernstein.

6. Syndicalism is a variant of socialism.

7. (p.325) Tony Blair ran on a platform of "change"  that was not sharply defined. In that way, B. Hussein Obama was an imitator.

8. (p.343) Amana appliances started out as a German Protestant communal sect in Iowa in the 1800s.

Second order thoughts:

1. These mass movements are also the brainchildren of wealthy people WAY more than spontaneous movements by workers. 

It is amazing how many of these "revolutionaries"  were either supported by their parents (Rosa Luxembourg. Vladimir Lenin. Karl Marx. Leo Jogiches. Bernie Sanders.) or from wealthy families (Clement Atlee. Beatrice and Sydney Webb. Jeremy Corbyn.)

2. "And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page."

a. You have some indigenous people somewhere that have to get educated by Western/white people to become idiots. (Pol Pot. Julius Nyrere, et al).

b. You have some people somewhere co-opting of movement representing people that they themselves don't know. (Karl Marx. Robert Mugabe.) 

c. You have some people in a hurry to take over a country from colonial authorities that they promptly run into the ground. (All of Africa.)

d. Socialism --> Totalitarianism as sure as night follows day. ("We just have to make this program work come even if it's at gunpoint.)

3. Socialism is not the panacea that a lot of black people think it is, most notably in its failure to do anything in Africa. Even the early labor movements (AFL-CIO) initially did not want any part of black people. (That was part of Asa Phillip Randolph's gripe.)

4. The two party system is not such because of any shadowy conspiracy. In Britain, as in the United States each party has to rediscover its message over time. Once you stop losing elections is when you know that you've gotten the message right. (It took six consecutive elections with less than 40% of the vote before Labor got it together.

5. Socialist expenses increase the further a country goes left. In the case of Russia, it was rectified without right collapse. In places like the United States/United Kingdom, people like Bill Clinton/Tony Blair presided over cutbacks of various types to social insurance.

6. With enough churn, Labor can become the "party of business"  in Britain. Or how "socialism with Chinese characteristics" can be substituted for Communism. Or, how the Republican party can become the party of working people and multi-ethnic while the Democratic party becomes one for wealthy white people.

8. In a nutshell, the Enlightenment discrediting of Christianity left Europe hungering for a new faith (p.355) which they promptly used in a lot of destruction. Engelks and Marx recast it into a compelling religious faith.


Vocab:

opéra bouffe
calumnation
doughty
parastatals
trundle bed
Knights of Labor
phthisical
stinting
voluptuary
denizen
bearded 
provenance
Third Way
fillip
apposite

Quotes:

(p.67). Karl Marx: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist." 

(p 79). Mark's asked him to ghostwrite the articles. Engels dutifully accepted the burden, coming from his day job at the firm, where he earned money to help support Marx, to spend his evenings doing Marx's job.

(p.88). Unlike the Torah, the New Testament or the holy Quran, all of which are studied asiduously by believers, capital fulfilled his purpose just by existing. Believers could assure themselves that it contained profound evidence that their worldview was more correct than any other.

(p.220). Western socialists looked upon the Africans like parents hoping to fulfill their dreams through their children.

(p. 165) A socialism liberated from the Democratic and cosmopolitan element fits nationalism as a well-made glove fits a beautiful hand. (Charles Maurass)

(p. 166) They were reminders of Mussolini's point that fascism was a heresy of socialism - - very much the same relationship as Christianity to Judaism or other heretical schisms. 

(p. 241, S. Gompers) "I saw how professions of radicalism and sensationalism concentrated all the forces of organized society against a labor movement.... I saw that leadership in the labor movement could be safely entrusted only to those into whose hearts and minds have been woven the experiences of earning their bread by daily labor. I saw the danger of entangling alliances with intellectuals who did not understand that the experiment with the labor movement was to experiment with human life."

(p. 252) Around 70 [Gomper's] health began to fail, forcing him to reduce his cigar consumption to 25 a day.

(p. 269) Not only did American labor contribute more than its share to the downfall of Communism, it proved to be one of the great obstacles to the global advance of socialism in any form.

(p. 277) One group of local party leaders was paraded through a village street, each man led by a rusty wire that penetrated his testicles. At the village Square all were shot. "

(p.313) Socialist ranks were fortified by erstwhile Communist who hastened to realign themselves as social democrats. 

(p.318) In the British system, there are no primaries; candidates are chosen in a series of meetings. 

(p. 333) The mainstream Left may pour the cream that lightens the coffee of capitalism, but they are not offering any other beverage.

(p. 354) In Jewish believe the focus of messianism is not on eternal reward but on progress toward moral perfection. 

(p. 355) Most anthropologists agree that religion is universal; they have yet to discover a civilization of logical positivists. (They're 5,300 members of the American humanist association and 16 million of the Southern Baptist Convention.)

(p. 359) Part of the power of Marxism was its ability to feed religious hunger while flattering the sins of being wiser than those who gave themselves over to earn unearthly faiths.... The socialist narrative turned history into a morality play without the morality.

(p. 387, Clemenceau) Any man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, and any who is still a socialist at 40 has no brain.