What Is Being a Socialist?

Olavo de Carvalho
Jornal da Tarde, October 28th, 1999

Socialism has killed over 100 million dissidents and spread terror, misery and starvation over one fourth of the Earth’s surface. All the earthquakes, tornados, epidemics, tyrannies and wars in the last four centuries put together could not have produced such devastating results. This is a pure and simple fact, at the reach of anyone who can read the Black Book of Communism and make an elementary calculation.

Since, though, what determines our beliefs are not the facts but our interpretation of them, for the devout socialist there is always the subterfuge of explaining this formidable succession of calamities as the effect of random happenings, without any relation whatsoever with the essence of the Socialist doctrine, which would thus maintain the beauty and dignity of a superior ideal, immune to the full misery of its achievements.

To what degree is this allegation intellectually respectable and morally acceptable?

The socialist ideal is, in essence, the decrease or elimination of the differences caused by economic power by means of political power. But nobody can efficiently mediate the differences between the most and the less powerful without being more powerful than both; therefore, socialism must gather power enough not only to impose itself on the poor, but to victoriously face all the rich together. It is not feasible to socialism, thus, to equalize the differences of economic power without creating even greater differences in political power. And since the structure of political power cannot just float in the air without support, it requires money. It is not conceivable then that the new superior political power will not absorb in itself the previous economic power, taking the wealth of the rich and administrating it directly. It follows that in socialism what happens is precisely the opposite of what happens in capitalism: there is no difference between political power and the ownership of wealth: the higher the position of an individual and a group in the political hierarchy, the greater and fuller their control over certain wealth will be; no class will be richer than the rulers. Therefore, not only economic differences necessarily are increased, but, due to the unity of political and economic powers, they will have become impossible to be eliminated except through the complete destruction of the very socialist system. And even that destruction will not be enough because, since there is no rich class outside the nomenklatura, the latter will keep the economic power in its hands, merely changing its juridical legitimaticy, calling itself, now, bourgeois class. If the socialist experiment does not freeze as a burocratic oligarchy, it dissolves into savage capitalism. Tertium non datur. Socialism consists in the promise of obtaining a certain result by the means that necessarily produce the opposite result.

Understanding all this is enough to notice, immediately, that the emergence of a burocratic elite which controls tyrannical political power and unimaginable wealth is not an accident, but the logical and unavoidable consequence of the socialist idea.

This reasoning is at the grasp of any person with ordinary intelligence but due to a certain tendency of weak minds to believe more in their wishes that in reason, we could still forgive these people for giving in to the temptation to “make a bet” in the lottery of reality, putting their money on chance against logical necessity.

Even though this is immensely idiotic, it is still human. It is humanly dumb to insist on learning from your own experience, when we are gifted with logical reasoning exactly to be able to reduce the amount of experimentation needed for learning.

What is not human in any way is to reject at once the lesson of logic which shows the self-contradiction of a project and the lesson of an experiment, that to rediscover what logic had already taught, caused the death of 100 million people.

No intellectually sane human being has the right to attach oneself so stubbornly to an idea to the point of demanding that humanity sacrifices, on the altar of their promises, not only rational intelligence, but the very instinct of survival.

Such lack of capacity or refusal to learn denounces, in the mind of the socialist, the voluntary and perverse lowering of intelligence to an infra-human level, the conscious renunciation to that capacity of basic discernment which is the very condition of the “humanhood” of humankind. Being a socialist is to refuse, for pride, to assume the responsibilities of a human conscience.

Translation: Fábio Lins - Proof Reading: Jacqueline Baca