Lessons from Twentieth Century Socialism

Gore Vidal famously called the U.S. “The United States of Amnesia” for its collective inability to learn from the past. ¹ A nation and culture that was founded by European settlers on boundless optimism made possible by a seemingly boundless frontier, boundless capitalist enterprise, and the boundless repression of labor (slavery) was among the first to “forget” the Soviet Union and Mao’s China as soon as they melted away at the close of the twentieth century. In the 1980s, England’s Margaret Thatcher gave the clue to the thinking that would prevail after the collapse of the USSR: “there is no alternative,” she said, to capitalism. The deep-seated Cold War fears of socialism were retained long after the demise of these two giant states, and became part of the ideological stockpile used to destroy any remnants of the past and prevent emergence of other alternatives in the future. Seventy years of socialist city building was erased as global finance and real estate rushed in to join local oligarchs in the production of new orientalist enclaves. Short-term profit-making replaced long-term planning and the modern, carbon-intensive city multiplied the environmental problems left by the old regimes. Without looking back, the new regimes have failed to learn from both the good and bad of the past.