Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies

By: Kristian Niemietz

Narrated by: Russell Newton

Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins

Publisher's summary

Socialism is strangely impervious to refutation by real-world experience. Over the past hundred years, there have been more than two dozen attempts to build a socialist society, from the Soviet Union to Maoist China to Venezuela. All of them have ended in varying degrees of failure. But, according to socialism’s adherents, that is only because none of these experiments were “real socialism”.

This audiobook documents the history of this, by now, standard response. It shows how the claim of fake socialism is only ever made after the event. As long as a socialist project is in its prime, almost nobody claims that it is not real socialism.

On the contrary, virtually every socialist project in history has gone through a honeymoon period, during which it was enthusiastically praised by prominent Western intellectuals. It was only when their failures became too obvious to deny that they got retroactively reclassified as “not real socialism”.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 The Institute of Economic Affairs (P)2019 SpokenTome.Media

Socialism was never done right.

Almost apologetically, the book appears to lament that socialism has never been well thought of, after the country fails to implement it “correctly”.
However, at the end it sums up that East Germany never got the chance to run their socialistic government as it could have with all the factors against it.
An interesting read outlining the different socialistic experiments through recent time.

Vital and important message to the far left today

Great and vital info. Narration is okay. Great insight. A bit boring sometimes.
This explains the denial and side-stepping of socilaists today even after a century of death, destruction, poverty, starvation and oppression. When you lie about the past and you advocate for the same ideas which are directly responsible for hundreds of millions murdered and starved to death, then you are asking for a repeat and such ideas in universities and government must be thwarted.
If you honestly try to make a tee shirt, but fail, then you tried real tee shirt making. Especially, when people laud your tee shirt making efforts in the process. Then after the failure, they apologize and say real tee shirt making was never tried, look at all of these obvious faults and the ideals which weren’t upheld. This has nothing to do with tee shirt making. Insert socialism for tee shirt in the above statements and you have the socialist proponent arguments of today. Except the tee shirt maker’s attempts don’t result in the death of hundreds of millions.
Did the 20th century’s world wars or socialism cause more death in that 100 year span? The answer is you don’t know. They both ended the lives of hundreds of millions except one was inflicting the death tolls onto its own people.
May god save us from repeating the evil of socialism.

History of socialists disavowing failed socialism

This book is a comprehensive history of socialists disavowing failed socialism experiments after the ensuing atrocities resulting from socialism. It is comical because Newton documents the initial positive statements (and later disavowal) made by western intellectuals about socialist experiments beginning with the USSR and moving chronologically forward to the present. You cannot help but laugh at these socialist "intellectuals". Newton documents their love affair with socialist governments in their own words. Then when the experiment fails, the socialists claim it was not real socialism (the disavowal).