When I was a student at City College, I took a course in the history of Russia with a likeable anti-Soviet historian who was so extreme that regular Kremlinologists considered him an embarrassment. In his writings on Lenin, for example, he attributed Lenin’s role in the Russian revolution to a desire for personal wealth, among other things. Years later I came across works written for secondary students which called Karl Marx a bad father because he spent all of his time in the British Museum writing subversive books instead of supporting his family.

Reading Joshua Muravchik’s dull, dense and sometimes unintentionally comical history, Heaven on Earth I thought of these examples, of old HUAC hearings, and also an old Communist garment worker song: 'The right-wing cloak makers and the social Democratic fakers, are making by the workers double-crosses. They preach socialism, but they practice fascism, to preserve capitalism, by the bosses.'

Muravchik, a former National chair of the Young Peoples Socialist League (1968-1973) a sort of knot hole gang for right-wing social Democracy in the United States, and a long-time resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (well funded interference runners for big business), has produced a melodramatic history of socialism that would make my old anti-Soviet City College teacher quite happy, along with readers of the National Review and Fox News viewers. His very trite thesis, which begins with the confession that 'Socialism is the faith in which I was raised. It was the faith of my father and my father before him...' is that socialism has been an expansionist, destructive theology which sought 'heaven on earth,' a 'God that failed' and committed crimes far greater than other theologies or secular movements.

The narrative is based on selected secondary sources and selected quotations interpreted in the most negative light. Although I am no psychologist, I can see that Muravchik does exactly what he accuses socialists of doing (the term, which I remember from another City College course, is 'projection'). He starts out with an explanation, searches for materials to support that explanation, discards everything that doesn’t support that explanation, and then supports his original explanation.

In the chapter on the development of Marxism cutely titled Scientific Socialism: Engels Confronts the Oracle, Muravchik quotes Engels to the effect that most German Social Democratic party leaders hadn’t really mastered Capital at the time that Otto Von Bismarck outlawed the SPD in the early 1880s, but had read the Communist Manifesto and other works providing education in class struggle. For Muravchik this matter of fact statement is interpreted thus: 'If few read or understood Capital, what was its importance....Unlike the Torah, New Testament or Koran, all of which are studied assiduously by believers, Capital fulfilled its purpose just by existing. Believers could assure themselves that it contained profound evidence that their world-view was more correct than any other.' To support that interpretation Muravchik quotes the serious English Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm to the effect that Capital was more bought than read and some did keep it on their book shelves as evidence of the scientific nature of socialism.

Neither Engels nor Hobsbawm’s comments support in any serious way Muravchik’s religious interpretation, but he sandwiches their statements around his own to create the impression that they do. Of course the voluminous theoretical debates concerning Marxist theory in the Second and Third International, the conventions and congresses of Socialist and Communist parties, and journals of the socialist movement throughout the world don’t quite fit in with this picture, so they aren’t mentioned.

Muravchik then writes a predictable narrative in which the Russian revolution produces a regime horrors. The revolution is expansionist, producing not only Communism but also Fascism, under the leadership of the former Socialist, Benito Mussolini, whom Muravchik, with tongue somewhat in cheek, calls 'the original ‘red diaper baby’ '

The Nazis are thrown in with the comment that ' what distinguished Nazism from traditional forms of socialism was its febrile nationalism, although not its virulence against despised peoples'(some nasty remarks by Marx against Croats and Czechs are used to support this point). A quote from Hitler is even dredged up to create the impression that Hitler, even through he sought to destroy the Marxism, also saw himself as an heir to the Marxist tradition (even Hannah Arendt would turn over in her grave at stuff like this)

Muravchik sometimes acknowledges socio-economic causes of socialism the way Ronald Reagan acknowledged homelessness, as something that may exist but has nothing to do with the real story of history. For Reagan that story was the upward march of unregulated capitalism; for Muravchik the immoral implementation of an amoral 'theology.'

Heaven on Earth is very much in the tradition of Bush administration reports and right-wing media commentaries – instead of lies, damned lies, and statistics, there is a narrative of distortions and very false impressions. Those who read it will be initiated into the Gospel of anti-Socialism according to St. Muravchik, where Adam Smith and his heirs defend the ethical science of capitalism against a socialist theology without morality.

There is a vast scholarly literature, both philosophical and historical, both Marxist and non-Marxist, based on serious cannons of scholarship and the use of both primary sources and diverse research paradigms that challenges and surpasses pretty much everything Muravchik says. That won’t mean much to him or his employers at the Heritage Foundation. Unlike the Hillquits, Dubinskys and the Thomas,' in the old Communist garment worker song, Muravchik isn’t 'making by the workers false promises.' He is telling them by inference to bow their heads to their capitalist masters and find their rewards either in an afterlife or in higher deficits and lower taxes in this one (the contemporary version of Republican Heaven on Earth) because the alternative, socialism, is evil, even if it has deluded people into believing that they can live without exploitation and oppression.

I wouldn’t recommend you read this book if you don’t have to. Don’t even steal it. Read John Somerville’s Philosophy of Marxism (Marxist Educational Press), Phil Foner’s histories of American workers, Herb Aptheker on the American Revolution, American Negro Slave Revolts, indeed pretty much anything International Publishers list. Then, if you pick up Muravchik in a library or a Heritage Foundation reading room, you will really know how much more you know than he does.

Heaven on Earth:The Rise and Fall of Socialism By Joshua Muravchik San Francisco: Encounter Books: 2002