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Fraser Institute

‘New Socialist Man’ was a selfish corrupt cheat

Published

22 minute read

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew D. Mitchell

It’s a common trope that capitalism corrupts. Anyone who has spent time with our species knows that we can be avaricious, materialist and selfish. Tempting as it may be to think that socialism would make us better, it seemed to make us worse.

The communist revolution sought to reshape the economy by giving government control over the means of production. But socialist revolutionaries had more than the economy in their sights. They aimed for nothing less than an extreme makeover of human nature. Unfortunately, actual socialism seemed to make people worse, not better.

Why did socialists seek to change man?

Marx believed that “the essence of man” was “no abstraction inherent in each single individual.” Instead, this essence was “the ensemble of the social relations.” And by changing social relations, he believed man could be changed for the better.

For his part, Stalin saw that certain aspects of human nature were stumbling blocks to the socialist dream. In 1935 he told a conference of collective farm labourers that “a person is a person. He wants to own something for himself.” It will “take a long time yet to rework the psychology of the human being, to reeducate people to live collectively.”

But Stalin and others believed that, given enough time, socialism would create what they called the “New Socialist Man.” He would be intelligent, healthy, muscular, selfless and supremely dedicated to the cause. Basically, he’d look like everyone in the socialist “realist” paintings that the government compelled artists to paint.

He would care less about his private life and his family and more about society-at-large. It was in this vein that Soviet education theorists taught that “By loving a child, the family turns him into an egotistical being, encouraging him to see himself as the centre of the universe.” In the place of such “egoistic love” the state encouraged “rational love” of the broader “social family.”

Socialists had a practical reason for remaking man. Without economic freedom, citizens had little incentive to produce. In a capitalist society, Adam Smith’s butcher, brewer and baker serve us dinner because they are incentivized to do so; it puts money in their pockets and food in the bellies of their children. But in a state-run canteen the workers were paid whether they served decent food or not. The socialists hoped that by remaking human nature—by creating a New Socialist Man motivated to serve others and not just himself and his family—they could solve this incentive problem.

How did people change?

As I’ve explained in an earlier post, the incentive problem was never solved. The New Socialist Man never got very good at serving others, so socialist societies were systematically poor.

But what happened to human nature? Did they succeed in changing it? The species evolves over generations so, of course, the seven-decade socialist experiment didn’t alter human genes (when Marx sent a copy of Das Kapital to Charles Darwin, it apparently sat unread on Darwin’s shelf). But socialism did have a profound effect on cultural norms and attitudes. And these changes were almost entirely for the worse.

In my book on Poland with Pete Boettke and Konstantin Zhukov, we quote one Pole from the late-1980s who observed: “one can make a generalization that everybody in Poland who has the chance engages in a good deal of stealing, cheating, and supplementing his or her income by illegal means.”

Another complained: “Why must I so often do things to get a promotion or improve my family’s living standard that run against my conscience? Why and how has it become true that I am a swine? When did I realize it, and when did I stop caring?”

Socialist planners also worried about cultural decline: “What is going to happen to the character of the young generation,” a state planner asked, “if from the very beginning of their working career in the enterprise, they are being taught and morally forced to cheat at the expense of the whole society?”

In our Estonia book, we quote Václav Havel, the poet-playwright-dissident who became Czechoslovakia’s last president. He identified the problem in his New Year’s address of 1990:

We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities… I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact, and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all—though naturally to differing extents— responsible for the operation of totalitarian machinery, none of us is just its victims; we are all also its cocreators.

Even Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev complained in his autobiography of “a gradual erosion of the ideological and moral values of our people.”

Why was the New Socialist Man a worse man?

The control problem is one explanation for this gradual erosion of moral values. With no carrots in the form of market incentives, socialist leaders deployed a terrifying array of sticks—mass deportation, widespread surveillance, arrests and slave labour. They even weaponized children against their parents (a topic I plan to cover in a future post). And since the socialist revolution was built around the notion of class warfare, the socialists felt justified in using these sticks against any class that stood in their way: kulaks, capitalists, ethnic minorities, nationalists, internationalists, left deviationists, right deviationists, religious leaders, cultural icons and intellectuals.

In the face of such widespread terror, it’s no wonder that the socialist state bread cultural habits of anger and distrust. But terror was not the only source of cultural rot. The dysfunctional economy, with its everyday contradictions and absurdities, was another source.

Despite the promise of material abundance, shortages were endemic to the socialist economy. Consumers routinely faced shortages of soap, coffee, sugar, laundry detergent, cigarettes, rubber, transportation, household appliances, cars, housing, clothing and—above all—meat. The shortages arose in part by accident. Without market-determined prices, planners were often flying blind. But shortages were also purposefully engineered by bureaucrats to solicit bribes from rationed consumers.

The only legal way that people could get what they wanted was to wait in line—sometimes for weeks on end. And even then, thugs could jump the queue. Those who didn’t want to wait would resort to bribery and the black market. Even socialist planners and factory leaders had to use the black market to meet their targets in the Five-Year plans. People commodified their relationships, using friends and family to supply them with what the socialist economy would not. This gave rise to what was called “an economy of favours” and the saying that “One must have, not a hundred rubles, but a hundred friends.”

The political scientists John Clark and Aaron Wildavsky describe the dynamic:

When the need for social or political contacts to accomplish anything—from getting enough steel in order to meet one’s factory’s plan quota to finding chocolate for a child’s birthday party—become indispensable… human relations suffer. People expect both too much and too little from friends, family, and acquaintances: too much, since almost every aspect of your life depends on what others can do for you; too little, since the instrumentalization of these relations means that they are sucked dry of any inherent pleasure.

The anthropologist Janine Wedel describes the effect on a Polish woman who manipulated her connections to obtain curtains: “[She] feels a kind of revengeful pride—she is happy to manipulate a system that has humiliated her all her life.”

As we put it in our Poland book: “The new socialist man was not the selfless creature of Marxist writing. He was a grifter who had no choice but to make his way by cheating the rest of society, just as the rest of society cheated him.”

It’s a common trope that capitalism corrupts. Anyone who has spent time with our species knows that we can be avaricious, materialist and selfish. Tempting as it may be to think that socialism would make us better, it seemed to make us worse.

The communist revolution sought to reshape the economy by giving government control over the means of production. But socialist revolutionaries had more than the economy in their sights. They aimed for nothing less than an extreme makeover of human nature. Unfortunately, actual socialism seemed to make people worse, not better.

Why did socialists seek to change man?

Marx believed that “the essence of man” was “no abstraction inherent in each single individual.” Instead, this essence was “the ensemble of the social relations.” And by changing social relations, he believed man could be changed for the better.

For his part, Stalin saw that certain aspects of human nature were stumbling blocks to the socialist dream. In 1935 he told a conference of collective farm labourers that “a person is a person. He wants to own something for himself.” It will “take a long time yet to rework the psychology of the human being, to reeducate people to live collectively.”

But Stalin and others believed that, given enough time, socialism would create what they called the “New Socialist Man.” He would be intelligent, healthy, muscular, selfless and supremely dedicated to the cause. Basically, he’d look like everyone in the socialist “realist” paintings that the government compelled artists to paint.

He would care less about his private life and his family and more about society-at-large. It was in this vein that Soviet education theorists taught that “By loving a child, the family turns him into an egotistical being, encouraging him to see himself as the centre of the universe.” In the place of such “egoistic love” the state encouraged “rational love” of the broader “social family.”

Socialists had a practical reason for remaking man. Without economic freedom, citizens had little incentive to produce. In a capitalist society, Adam Smith’s butcher, brewer and baker serve us dinner because they are incentivized to do so; it puts money in their pockets and food in the bellies of their children. But in a state-run canteen the workers were paid whether they served decent food or not. The socialists hoped that by remaking human nature—by creating a New Socialist Man motivated to serve others and not just himself and his family—they could solve this incentive problem.

How did people change?

As I’ve explained in an earlier post, the incentive problem was never solved. The New Socialist Man never got very good at serving others, so socialist societies were systematically poor.

But what happened to human nature? Did they succeed in changing it? The species evolves over generations so, of course, the seven-decade socialist experiment didn’t alter human genes (when Marx sent a copy of Das Kapital to Charles Darwin, it apparently sat unread on Darwin’s shelf). But socialism did have a profound effect on cultural norms and attitudes. And these changes were almost entirely for the worse.

In my book on Poland with Pete Boettke and Konstantin Zhukov, we quote one Pole from the late-1980s who observed: “one can make a generalization that everybody in Poland who has the chance engages in a good deal of stealing, cheating, and supplementing his or her income by illegal means.”

Another complained: “Why must I so often do things to get a promotion or improve my family’s living standard that run against my conscience? Why and how has it become true that I am a swine? When did I realize it, and when did I stop caring?”

Socialist planners also worried about cultural decline: “What is going to happen to the character of the young generation,” a state planner asked, “if from the very beginning of their working career in the enterprise, they are being taught and morally forced to cheat at the expense of the whole society?”

In our Estonia book, we quote Václav Havel, the poet-playwright-dissident who became Czechoslovakia’s last president. He identified the problem in his New Year’s address of 1990:

We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities… I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact, and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all—though naturally to differing extents— responsible for the operation of totalitarian machinery, none of us is just its victims; we are all also its cocreators.

Even Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev complained in his autobiography of “a gradual erosion of the ideological and moral values of our people.”

Why was the New Socialist Man a worse man?

The control problem is one explanation for this gradual erosion of moral values. With no carrots in the form of market incentives, socialist leaders deployed a terrifying array of sticks—mass deportation, widespread surveillance, arrests and slave labour. They even weaponized children against their parents (a topic I plan to cover in a future post). And since the socialist revolution was built around the notion of class warfare, the socialists felt justified in using these sticks against any class that stood in their way: kulaks, capitalists, ethnic minorities, nationalists, internationalists, left deviationists, right deviationists, religious leaders, cultural icons and intellectuals.

In the face of such widespread terror, it’s no wonder that the socialist state bread cultural habits of anger and distrust. But terror was not the only source of cultural rot. The dysfunctional economy, with its everyday contradictions and absurdities, was another source.

Despite the promise of material abundance, shortages were endemic to the socialist economy. Consumers routinely faced shortages of soap, coffee, sugar, laundry detergent, cigarettes, rubber, transportation, household appliances, cars, housing, clothing and—above all—meat. The shortages arose in part by accident. Without market-determined prices, planners were often flying blind. But shortages were also purposefully engineered by bureaucrats to solicit bribes from rationed consumers.

The only legal way that people could get what they wanted was to wait in line—sometimes for weeks on end. And even then, thugs could jump the queue. Those who didn’t want to wait would resort to bribery and the black market. Even socialist planners and factory leaders had to use the black market to meet their targets in the Five-Year plans. People commodified their relationships, using friends and family to supply them with what the socialist economy would not. This gave rise to what was called “an economy of favours” and the saying that “One must have, not a hundred rubles, but a hundred friends.”

The political scientists John Clark and Aaron Wildavsky describe the dynamic:

When the need for social or political contacts to accomplish anything—from getting enough steel in order to meet one’s factory’s plan quota to finding chocolate for a child’s birthday party—become indispensable… human relations suffer. People expect both too much and too little from friends, family, and acquaintances: too much, since almost every aspect of your life depends on what others can do for you; too little, since the instrumentalization of these relations means that they are sucked dry of any inherent pleasure.

The anthropologist Janine Wedel describes the effect on a Polish woman who manipulated her connections to obtain curtains: “[She] feels a kind of revengeful pride—she is happy to manipulate a system that has humiliated her all her life.”

As we put it in our Poland book: “The new socialist man was not the selfless creature of Marxist writing. He was a grifter who had no choice but to make his way by cheating the rest of society, just as the rest of society cheated him.”

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Energy

Global fossil fuel use rising despite UN proclamations

Published on

From the Fraser Institute

By Julio Mejía and Elmira Aliakbari

Major energy transitions are slow and take centuries, not decades… the first global energy transition—from traditional biomass fuels (including wood and charcoal) to fossil fuels—started more than two centuries ago and remains incomplete. Nearly three billion people in the developing world still depend on charcoal, straw and dried dung for cooking and heating, accounting for about 7 per cent of the world’s energy supply (as of 2020).

At the Conference of the Parties (COP29) in Azerbaijan, António Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, last week called for a global net-zero carbon footprint by 2050, which requires a “fossil fuel phase-out” and “deep decarbonization across the entire value chain.”

Yet despite the trillions of dollars already spent globally pursuing this target—and the additional trillions projected as necessary to “end the era of fossil fuels”—the world’s dependence on fossil fuels has remained largely unchanged.

So, how realistic is a “net-zero” emissions world—which means either eliminating fossil fuel generation or offsetting carbon emissions with activities such as planting trees—by 2050?

The journey began in 1995 when the UN hosted the first COP conference in Berlin, launching a global effort to drive energy transition and decarbonization. That year, global investment in renewable energy reached US$7 billion, according to some estimates. Since then, an extraordinary amount of money and resources have been allocated to the transition away from fossil fuels.

According to the International Energy Agency, between 2015 and 2023 alone, governments and industry worldwide spent US$12.3 trillion (inflation-adjusted) on clean energy. For context, that’s over six times the value of the entire Canadian economy in 2023.

Despite this spending, between 1995 and 2023, global fossil fuel consumption increased by 62 per cent, with oil consumption rising by 38 per cent, coal by 66 per cent and natural gas by 90 per cent.

And during that same 28-year period, despite the trillions spent on energy alternatives, the share of global energy provided by fossil fuels declined by only four percentage points, from 85.6 per cent to 81.5 per cent.

This should come as no surprise. Major energy transitions are slow and take centuries, not decades. According to a recent study by renowned scholar Vaclav Smil, the first global energy transition—from traditional biomass fuels (including wood and charcoal) to fossil fuels—started more than two centuries ago and remains incomplete. Nearly three billion people in the developing world still depend on charcoal, straw and dried dung for cooking and heating, accounting for about 7 per cent of the world’s energy supply (as of 2020).

Moreover, coal only surpassed wood as the main energy source worldwide around 1900. It took more than 150 years from oil’s first commercial extraction for oil to reach 25 per cent of all fossil fuels consumed worldwide. Natural gas didn’t reach this threshold until the end of the 20th century, after 130 years of industry development.

Now, consider the current push by governments to force an energy transition via regulation and spending. In Canada, the Trudeau government has set a target to fully decarbonize electricity generation by 2035 so all electricity is derived from renewable power sources such as wind and solar. But merely replacing Canada’s existing fossil fuel-based electricity with clean energy sources within the next decade would require building the equivalent of 23 major hydro projects (like British Columbia’s Site C) or 2.3 large-scale nuclear power plants (like Ontario’s Bruce Power). The planning and construction of significant electricity generation infrastructure in Canada is a complex and time-consuming process, often plagued by delays, regulatory hurdles and substantial cost overruns.

The Site C project took around 43 years from initial feasibility studies in 1971 to securing environmental certification in 2014. Construction began on the Peace River in northern B.C. in 2015, with completion expected in 2025 at a cost of at least $16 billion. Similarly, Ontario’s Bruce Power plant took nearly two decades to complete, with billions in cost overruns. Given these immense practical, financial and regulatory challenges, achieving the government’s 2035 target is highly improbable.

As politicians gather at high-profile conferences and set ambitious targets for a swift energy transition, global reliance on fossil fuels has continued to increase. As things stand, achieving net-zero by 2050 appears neither realistic nor feasible.

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Business

UN climate conference—it’s all about money

Published on

From the Fraser Institute

By Kenneth P. Green

This year’s COP wants to fast-track the world’s transition to “clean” energy, help vulnerable communities adapt to climate change, work on “mobilizing inclusivity” (whatever that means) and “delivering on climate finance,” which is shorthand for having wealthier developed countries such as Canada transfer massive amounts of wealth to developing countries.

Every year, the United Nations convenes a Conferences of Parties to set the world’s agenda to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It’s the biggest event of the year for the climate industry. This year’s conference (COP29), which ends on Sunday, drew an army of government officials, NGOs, celebrities and journalists (many flying on GHG-emitting jet aircraft) to Baku, Azerbaijan.

The COP follows a similar narrative every year. It opens with a set of ambitious goals for climate policies, followed by days of negotiating as countries jockey to carve out agreements that most favour their goals. In the last two days, they invariably reach a sticking point when it appears the countries might fail to reach agreement. But they burn some midnight oil, some charismatic actors intervene (in the past, this included people such as Al Gore), and with great drama, an agreement is struck in time for the most important event of the year, flying off to their protracted winter holidays.

This year’s COP wants to fast-track the world’s transition to “clean” energy, help vulnerable communities adapt to climate change, work on “mobilizing inclusivity” (whatever that means) and “delivering on climate finance,” which is shorthand for having wealthier developed countries such as Canada transfer massive amounts of wealth to developing countries.

Some of these agenda items are actually improvements over previous COPs. For example, they’re actually talking about “climate adaptation”—the unwanted stepchild of climate policies—more this year. But as usual, money remains a number one priority. As reported in the Associated Press, “negotiators are working on a new amount of cash for developing nations to transition to clean energy, adapt to climate change and deal with weather disasters. It’ll replace the current goal of $100 billion (USD) annually—a goal set in 2009.” Moreover, “experts” claim the world needs between $1 trillion and $1.3 trillion (yes, trillion) in “climate finance” annually. Not to be outdone, according to an article in the Euro News, other experts want $9 trillion per year by 2030. Clearly, the global edifice that is climate change activism is all about the money.

Reportedly, COP29 is in its final section of the meta-narrative, with much shouting over getting to a final agreement. One headline in Voice of America reads “Slow progress on climate finance fuels anger as COP29 winds down.” And Argus News says “climate finance talks to halt, parties fail to cut options.” We only await the flying in of this year’s crop of climate megafauna to seal the deal.

This year’s conference in Baku shows more clearly than ever before that the real goal of the global climate cognoscenti is a giant wealth transfer from developed to developing countries. Previous climate conferences, whatever their faults, focused more on setting emission reduction targets and timelines and less about how the UN can extract more money from developed countries. The final conflict of COP29 isn’t about advancing clean energy targets or helping vulnerable countries adapt to climate change technologically, it’s all about show me the money.

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