If they’re worried about what’s driving the growing appeal of socialism, they need to look in the mirror.
.. You want fewer socialists? Easy. Stop creating them... The conditions under which the czars forced Russians to live gave rise to Bolshevism. The terms imposed at Versailles fueled Hitler’s ascent. The failures of Keynesianism in the 1970s smoothed the path for supply-side economics... the kind of capitalism that has been practiced in this country over the last few decades has made socialism look far more appealing, especially to young people... If you’re 28 like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congressional candidate who describes herself as a democratic socialist, what have you seen during your sentient life?.. As that happened, you’ve seen the rich get richer, and you’ve perhaps noticed that the government’s main response to this has been to keep cutting their taxes.. You witnessed the financial meltdown of 2008, caused by big banks betting against themselves. Capitalists might want to consider how all that looked to a young person who came from a working-class family and who probably knows someone who lost a job or even his house, while some of the bankers who helped create the mess walked away with golden parachutes, like that of Countrywide Financial’s Angelo Mozilo, which The Times valued at $88 million... You’ve watched corporations hoard profits, buy back their stock and not reinvest in their workers the way they once did as they move jobs to Central America and Bangladesh. If you read a lot, you know that stock buybacks were permitted under the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Rule 10b-18, which dates to the Reagan era, and that since it’s just an S.E.C. rule, it can be changed without having to pass legislation, but no one in either of the Democratic administrations since then bothered... Back in the days when our economy just grew and grew, we had a government and a capitalist class that invested in our people and their future — in the
- Interstate highways, the
- community colleges, the
- scientific research, the
- generous federal grants for transportation and regional development.
.. during all this time, socialism didn’t have much appeal. Back in the 1910s and ’20s, during an era of intense labor strife and before the existence of the welfare state, there were a couple of Socialist Party members in the House of Representative
.. But during the “Trente Glorieuses,” to use the French term — the glorious 30 years from 1945 to 1975 when everything largely worked in Western economies — socialism’s appeal in America waned.
.. So, back now to our 28-year-old. She was born in 1990. She will probably remember, in the late ’90s, her parents feeling pretty good about things — median household income did go up under Bill Clinton more than they had under any president in a long time, even more than under Ronald Reagan. But ever since, the median income picture has been much spottier, hardly increasing at all in inflation-adjusted dollars over 18 long years. And those incomes at the top have shot to the heavens.
.. if you were a person of modest or even middle-class means, how would you feel about capitalism? The kind of capitalism this country has been practicing for all these years has failed most people.
.. Yes, it’s given us lots of shiny objects to gush about. A smartphone that can display slow-motion video is a wonder. But an affordable college education, though perhaps not a wonder, is a necessity for a well-ordered society.
.. And if you’re a capitalist, you’d better try to understand it, too — and do something to address the very legitimate grievances that propelled it.
A Family in History
“My grandfather was the biggest Communist in America,” he said, “and I became the biggest capitalist in Russia.”
.. Bill Browder created his hedge fund, Hermitage, in 1996. The Kremlin turned on him hard in 2005, declaring him persona non grata. He had been a thorn in the side of Putin’s oligarchs.
In 2008, the authorities arrested Browder’s fearless and whistleblowing lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky — and tortured him to death.
.. I read an obituary of Felix Browder, Bill’s father. I then realized why Bill had asked me to be more specific when I asked, “Any relation?” Felix Browder was one of the greatest mathematicians in the world. (I don’t know from mathematicians.) He was, for example, chairman of the math department at Chicago.
Earl Browder had two more children, two more sons: Andrew and William. The former became the
- chairman of the math department at Brown; the latter became
- chairman of the department at Princeton. And there’s more Browder talent where that came from.
.. He was named after Shakespeare, having been born on the 400th anniversary of the writer’s birth (April 23, 1964).
.. Andrew’s daughter Laura, a professor at the University of Richmond, discovered something in the KGB archives: The dear nanny had been a spy, charged with keeping tabs on Earl. Of course.
.. Earl coined the famous (or infamous) slogan “Communism is 20th-century Americanism.” He ran for president in 1936, getting some 80,000 votes.
.. Communists in America were in particularly bad odor. In early ’41, the U.S. government sent Browder to prison on technicalities: passport fraud. But that summer, Hitler double-crossed Stalin, and the United States would soon be allies with Uncle Joe.
.. FDR commuted Browder’s sentence as a goodwill gesture.
.. After the war, Browder got on the wrong side of Moscow and was expelled from the American party. He died in 1973, having spent his last years with his son Bill in Princeton
.. Raisa, a Russian mother, and a mother of three sons. A Russian-Jewish mother at that
.. Felix entered MIT at 16. He had his bachelor’s degree in two years. By 20, he had his Ph.D. from Princeton.
.. One of his undergraduate professors testified that Felix was not a party member — and, moreover, that Felix had been the best math student in the history of MIT
.. Bill Browder affirms that his father was not a Communist. Rather, he was “a hard-core leftist professor,” like all the others. “I never met one who wasn’t,” says Bill.
.. Felix was indeed drafted into the Army. Not trusted with sensitive work, he spent two years pumping gas at Fort Bragg.
.. Felix worked on his math and, for the first and only time in his life, was around regular folks.
.. Felix and his wife Eva had another child besides Bill: their son Tom. He entered the University of Chicago at 15. Today, he is a leading particle physicist, dividing his time between Hawaii and Japan, searching for the origin of the universe... Bill was a rebellious kid, and he figured out how to rebel against a family of leftists: become a capitalist. He majored in economics at Chicago, whose department was a den of free-marketeers... In an act of shocking gall, the Russian state is investigating Browder for the murder of Magnitsky — and three other men. Thus do the murderers finger the champion of the murdered. Putin’s predecessors in the KGB would grin in admiration.
.. He could have walked away, tending his millions, but instead he has put himself in the crosshairs of one of the most powerful and ruthless governments on earth.
The Handmaids of Capitalism
American feminists gradually went along with the logic of capitalism rather than resisting it. This is a particularly useful description because it’s happened so consistently across the last few decades: Whenever there’s a dispute within feminism about a particular social change or technological possibility, you should bet on the side that takes a more consumerist view of human flourishing, a more market-oriented view of what it means to defend the rights and happiness of women.
.. They were divided over pornography, often bitterly — but over time the sex-positive side increasingly won out over the Andrea Dworkinish dissenters, even as the online realm was overrun with images and videos that more than justified her arguments. They were, and are, divided over prostitution, but it’s pretty clear that the version of feminism that supports the rights of sex workers to sell their bodies in the marketplace has the intellectual momentum.
.. the most culturally important strands of American feminism have been the ones devoted to making women’s lives safe for market capitalism rather than the other way around — with “lean in” and egg freezing for Silicon Valley elites and the temporary sterilization of I.U.D.s and LARCs for the working class, both together encouraging the idea that professional goals are the heart of personal fulfillment
.. The rather important female reality of motherhood, a Guardian essayist noted recently, “comes up in less than 3 percent of papers, journal articles or textbooks on modern gender theory.
.. At best, Christians may hope to build a counterculture, but in the wider landscape our ability to shape trends or resist them is at a historical low ebb.
.. it is a grave mistake for feminists to assume that because the moralism of the past was often patriarchal and sexist, they must always choose “consenting adults” individualism over a more holistic morality, a presumption for choice over a defense of human dignity, the logic of the market over more communitarian alternatives, a consumerist interchangeability of the sexes over a social architecture that respects their differences.
Why Marx Was Wrong
On the occasion of Karl Marx’s 200th birthday, the co-founder of communism has received more than a few positive reappraisals, even from Western leaders. But those arguing that Marx cannot be blamed for the atrocities that his ideas inspired should reexamine his ideas.
.. For much of the twentieth century, 40% of humanity suffered famines, gulags, censorship, and other forms of repression at the hands of self-proclaimed Marxists... Marx regarded private property as the source of all evil in the emerging capitalist societies of his day. Accordingly, he believed that only by abolishing it could society’s class divisions be healed, and a harmonious future ensured... Under communism, his collaborator Friedrich Engels later claimed, the state itself would become unnecessary and “wither away.” These assertions were not made as speculation, but rather as scientific claims about what the future held in store... it was all rubbish, and Marx’s theory of history – dialectical materialism – has since been proved wrong and dangerous in practically every respect. The great twentieth-century philosopher Karl Popper, one of Marx’s strongest critics, rightly called him a “false prophet.” And, if more evidence were needed, the countries that embraced capitalism in the twentieth century went on to become democratic, open, and prosperous societies.By contrast, every regime that has rejected capitalism in the name of Marxism has failed – and not by coincidence or as a result of some unfortunate doctrinal misunderstanding on the part of Marx’s followers. By abolishing private ownership and establishing state control of the economy, one not only deprives society of the entrepreneurship needed to propel it forward; one also abolishes freedom itself... Because Marxism treats all contradictions in society as the products of a class struggle that will disappear when private property does, dissent after the establishment of communism is impossible.By definition, any challenge to the new order must be an illegitimate remnant of the oppressive order that came before... Marx showed almost no interest in people as they actually exist. “Marxism takes little or no account of the fact that people are born and die, that they are men and women, young or old, healthy or sick,” he writes. As such, “Evil and suffering, in his eyes, had no meaning except as instruments of liberation; they were purely social facts, not an essential part of the human condition.”.. Xi views China’s economic development over the past few decades as “cast iron proof” of Marxism’s continued validity.But, if anything, it is exactly the other way around.it was the China of pure communism that produced the famine and terror of the “Great Leap Forward” and the “Cultural Revolution.” Mao’s decision to deprive farmers of their land and entrepreneurs of their firms had predictably disastrous results, and the Communist Party of China has since abandoned that doctrinaire approach.Under Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, the CPC launched China’s great economic “opening-up.” After 1978, it began to restore private ownership and permit entrepreneurship, and the results have been nothing short of spectacular... If China’s development is being held back by anything today, it is the remnants of Marxism that are still visible in inefficient state-owned enterprises and the repression of dissent.