Socialism has killed over 100 million dissidents, spreading terror, misery and famine over a quarter of the Earth’s surface. All of the earthquakes, hurricanes, epidemics, tyrannies and wars of the last four centuries combined have not produced such devastating effects. That is a pure and simple fact, accessible to anyone who can look into The Black Book of Communism and do some elementary calculations.
Since, however, what determine our beliefs are not facts but rather interpretations, the devout socialist always has recourse to the subterfuge of claiming this formidable succession of calamities as the effect of chance events, independent from the essence of socialist doctrines, which allows them to maintain, immune to all the misery of its achievements, the beauty and dignity of a superior ideal.
To what extent is this claim intellectually respectable and morally acceptable?
The socialist ideal is, in essence, the diminishment or elimination of differences in economic power by means of political power. But no one can effectively arbitrate the differences between the more powerful and the less powerful without being more powerful than both: socialism, therefore, must gather a power sufficient not only to impose itself on the poor, but also to successfully confront the wealthy. Therefore it cannot level the differences in economic power without producing even deeper differences in the level of political power. Moreover, given that the structure of political power cannot survive on thin air but, on the contrary, costs a lot of money, it is impossible to see how political power could subjugate economic power without absorbing the latter into itself; taking wealth from the wealthy and managing it directly. Hence, under socialism, contrary to what happens in capitalism, there is no difference between political power and control over wealth: the higher an individual and a group’s position in the political hierarchy, the larger the wealth at their complete and immediate disposal. There shall be no class richer than that of the rulers. Thus, the economic differences will not only have necessarily increased, but rather, after being consolidated in the unified political and economic powers, they will have become impossibly insurmountable—except by the complete destruction of the socialist system. Even destruction will not solve the problem, because, as no wealthy class outside of the nomenklatura, they will keep the economic power in their hands, merely swapping their means of legal legitimacy and now calling themselves the bourgeoisie. The socialist experience, when it is not crystallized in a bureaucratic oligarchy, dissolves into wild capitalism. Tertium non datur. Socialism thus constitutes the promise of obtaining a certain result through means which necessarily produce the inverse result.
One needs only understand this to immediately realize that the emergence of a bureaucratic elite endowed with tyrannical political power and opulent riches is no accident, but rather the logical and inevitable consequence of the very principle of the socialist idea.
This line of reasoning is accessible to anyone of average intelligence, but given a certain propensity in weaker minds towards belief in desires rather than in reason, one could forgive those poor creatures who give into the temptation of “taking a gamble” on the lottery of reality, betting against logical necessity.
Although this may be incredibly foolish, it is human. It is human stupidity to insist on learning from one’s own experience when we have been given the gift of logical reasoning, precisely so we might reduce the amount of experience needed for learning.
What is not human at all is rejecting both the lesson from logic, which shows us the inherent contradictions of a project, and the lesson from experience, which—rediscovering what logic had already taught it—caused the deaths of 100 million people.
No intellectually sane human being has the right to cling so obstinately to an idea so as to demand that humanity sacrifice, on the altar of its promises, not only its rational intelligence, but also its very instinct for survival.
Such incapacity or refusal to learn condemns the voluntary and perverse debasement of intelligence, in the mind of the socialist, to a subhuman level, the conscious abdication of that basic capacity for discernment which is the very condition of humanity. Being a socialist means refusing, out of pride, to take up the responsibilities of a human consciousness.
"What Does It Mean to Be a Socialist?," by Olavo de Carvalho, Jornal da Tarde, October 28th, 1999. Translated by Pedro Cava, revised by The Academy on May 2023.