Matt Taibbi on Socialism

I love this response by Matt Taibbi to a reader. I haven’t had Matt’s life experiences, but I studied the history of the 20th century extensively in university and have come away with pretty much the same feeling about socialism.

I always believed the catastrophes of the 20th century (on the right and the left) proved the primary aim of every society should be keeping power as suffuse as possible, so that it’s never concentrated in the hands of any one person or group, irrespective of ideology. I guess I was duped by Fukuyama, too, because I assumed after the wall fell and the world got to see the extent of the horrors that went on behind the Iron Curtain that no one would ever take Marxism seriously again. But here it is, making comeback in a “Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” way, led as these movements nearly always are by spoiled rich kids whose parents must have let them play with matches.

I lived in both communist and post-communist Russia and in that time had the misfortune to see extreme corrupted versions of both capitalist and socialist systems. The government of Boris Yeltsin was a pure gangster state that with America’s help engineered instant mega-billionaires,and watching this inside-dealing, pay-for-play bailout system in action made the corruption easier to see when companies like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs were kept afloat using similar schemes after 2008.

But I also took in a dozen years of eyewitness stories from a Soviet system that was infinitely more ambitious in its repressive aims than Yeltsin’s government. I saw provincial basements whose walls were lined with bullet holes from NKVD massacres, listened to elderly witnesses to “de-kulakization” who described going to sleep at night to the screams of families freezing to death (barring citizens from taking in “kulak” families was an early cost-effective liquidation method), listened to story after story of Russians and other ex-Soviets who lost relatives because neighbors or co-workers snitched them out in exchange for cars or apartments, and heard countless other nightmares. I was never a socialist. No one with my background could be.