The Long Goodbye

National Interest, The, Summer, 2001 by Neil McInnes

Communism gave us the welfare state. One last reason to shed a tear for communism, we are told, is that it gave us the welfare state. Without a salutary fear of Bolshevik revolution at home, Western capitalists would never have conceded the social security measures that now temper the rigors of sickness, unemployment and poverty. So, says Hobsbawm, the October Revolution saved capitalism twice over, once in the war against Hitler and then "by providing it with the incentive, fear, to reform itself after the Second World War." But the Poor Laws date from Elizabeth I, and it was not Lenin but Samuel Johnson who taught us that, "A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization." Thus social welfare is a story centuries old, its heroes include even the likes of Bismarck and Disraeli, and further progress lies ahead of it. The Western communists contributed nothing to it but rather diverted resources away from it by their industrial disruption and political subversion.

WE HAVE taken Eric Hobsbawm, as Jean-Francois Revel took a clutch of French writers, to illustrate a paradoxical stance that is not uncommon on the intellectual Left today. On the one hand, it is admitted that communism has failed utterly and irrevocably. On the other hand, it is not admitted that it deserved to fail and now merits nothing but a curt burial. There is, on the contrary, a hankering to save some hope from the catastrophe, some hope of revolution, an aspiration to the overthrow of the existing liberal capitalist system so that certain vast problems can at last be resolved. It is an incoherent position and therefore will probably never have any political consequences. It falls into disrepute by panicking at every hiccup in the economy, every social malaise, as though they were the last gasp of Western humanity. The rational and benevolent attitude to take to people seized of these fears (they are not all to be patronized as youngsters--Hobsbawm is 83) is to concede that there are indeed vast problems to be resolved, but it is wiser to put one's hope in economic expansion and democratic reform, rather than in the vast delusions that should be buried along with communism. One only hopes that it will take less than thirty years to seal the grave.

Neil McInnes, a regular contributor, has also written for Encounter, Survey and Quadrant. He divides his time between Canberra and Paris.

(1.) Furet, Le Passe d'une illusion: Essai sur l'idee communiste au XXe siecle (Paris: Laffont, 1995).

(2.) Revel, La Grande parade: Essai sur la survie de l'utopie socialiste (Paris: Plon, 2000).

(3.) Stephane Courtois et al., Le Livre noir du communisme: Crimes, Terreur, Repression (Paris: Laffont, 1997). Trans. by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

(4.) Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Pantheon, 1994).

(5.) Hobsbawm, On the Edge of the New Century (New York: New Press, 2000).

(6.) Bukovsky, Reckoning with Moscow (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1998).