Professor Ian Angell

Department of Management, LSE, London WC2A 2AE    |    +44 (0)20 7955 7655    |    i.angell@lse.ac.uk

What follows summarises my contribution to Peter Stead's discussion programme 'In the Dock' made for Radio Wales, where I spoke against the proposition that "Socialism has enriched Welsh Culture, and made us a stronger society."

 Against Socialism

What is Socialism? It's easier to say what it's not! Forget about the propaganda about looking after the poor - that's just spin, window dressing. And it's also a lie; except in so far as socialism makes everybody poor.

Socialism is a philosophy of power, of a group (the workers) with a 'project,' which aims to turn society into a well oiled-machine; social engineering, the factory metaphor turned on society. Socialists, pious commentators,  "become virtuous from indignation" (Nietzsche). Certain in their rightness, or rather self-righteousness, they launch "intimidation and glorification" (Barthes) on society. "Domination is transfigured into administration" (Marcuse). However, "the victory of the [socialist] moral ideal is achieved by the same 'immoral' means as every other victory: force, lies, slander, injustice." (Nietzsche)

Socialism's mode of operation is violence against the means of production, and to 'redistribute wealth': gangsterism and theft. That is until they take over, and then no-one, except the leadership, has any rights. The law is not meant for party members. Socialism has brought nothing but grief. From Hitler (for we tend to forget that Hitler was a socialist), Stalin, Chairman Mao, Kim Il Sung, right down to the little Hitlers, the self-important nonentities, who strutted around the Welsh Valleys of my childhood.

However, socialism is a product of industrial age. It has no place in the information age. It has degenerated into sentimentality; a delusion of virtue; the prejudice of yesterday's powerful. Socialism is a rabid form of collectivism, in which the good of the collective transcends any individual rights. The individual is the slave of the collective, in which the ends justify the means. It is individual talent, not the perspiration of the mob that generates wealth. Socialist 'mediocracies' ultimately kill off the potential wealth creation of their society.

It is individual talent, the great divider of humanity, that is the diviner of economic success. Hence labour and talent must no longer treated under one heading. No company/country can succeed without a talented workforce. Continuous innovation by the talent worker is the key to economic success. The good of society needs these people to produce. But there are clever people everywhere, so why is prosperity so unevenly distributed among nations? Performance depends on a balance between social capital and individual intellectual capital. Socialism has that balance all wrong.

The talented individual asks: "Is man a sovereign individual who owns his person, his mind, his life, his work and its products, - or is he the property of the tribe (the state, the society, the collective) that may dispose of him in any way it pleases, that may dictate his convictions, prescribe the course of his life, control his work and expropriate his products?" (Ayn Rand)

In the ant-hill of socialism no individual thought is allowed; but what happens when the human ant discovers that he is an ant? When, like Winston Smith in 1984, he shouts: "I am not a number." "All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude" (Marcuse). Socialism is servitude to the mob, or rather to its jumped-up leadership.

"Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you" (Rand). "The issue is whether the need of others is the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence. The issue is whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal" (Rand).

Sacrifice does not placate natural forces, in particular economic forces. Such forces have no conscience. There are "no moral phenomena, only a moral interpretation of phenomena" (Nietzsche). Baudelaire was right when he observed "one is punished for being weak, not for being cruel." Socialist Moralisers can bleat all they like, that this is unfair: "Nature is not immoral, when it has no pity for the degenerate" (Nietzsche).

And socialism is degenerative. Socialists believe in an absolute morality: their own codified prejudice, of course: socially constructed bigotries. There is no point in arguing about the most appropriate prejudice. That is best left to natural selection. It is natural selection, not the virtue in morality that ultimately arbitrates between winners and losers. For our world is "Beyond Good and Evil." There is no true and false, no good and evil, no morality - just social construction. All is Power, and the "Will to Power": everything else is sheer sentimentality.

And as for the future? Unless Wales dumps Socialism in the garbage bin of history, you have no future. For the "Road to Serfdom" (Hayek) beckons.

But it could be worse. You could have the nationalists!