The Spire

Todd Rado ’26

Opinions Editor

In my short time as part of The Spire, I have been accused of having Communistic sympathies. I am guilty as charged. I hope to explain to you why I hold this opinion, if you’ll suspend your disbelief. The perspective of far too many is that Socialism was an abject failure—unequal, authoritarian, and a laughable theory of governance. That sounds like a charged way to analyze not just one but multiple countries, which isn’t always wrong, but does necessitate deeper questioning. The actual conclusion is different: history shows us Socialism works. From Cuba to Chile, from the Soviets to the Zapatistas, for all their bureaucratic or disorganized flaws, produced better results for more people than any other nation.

 Perhaps the best place to start is with the results. What has Socialism done for people? Short answer, more than any other system. Cereseto & Waitzkin (1986) was a Cold-War meta-analysis, comparing all Socialist and capitalist countries along axes of physical quality of life. Socialist nations significantly outperformed their counterparts in PQoL in 30 out of 36 comparisons. They tested this twice. Navarro (1992) confirms these results a third time, Lena & London (1993) a fourth, and Hill (2024) a fifth. Macro lens out of the way, let’s consider case examples. America has a homeless population of ~650,000. To tackle this, America, in Grants Pass v. Johnson, made homelessness punishable by law. Cuba, by comparison, enjoys a homeless population of zero. They enjoy a literacy rate of 99.67 percent and lead Latin America in quality of education, whereas the majority of American adults read below a 6th grade level. Even with a brutal, illegal embargo imposed on them by America, Cuba has a longer life expectancy due to their internationally acclaimed healthcare—which they share with the world for free. Beyond Cuba, there’s more examples. Chileans loved Allende for his economic growth, free milk for children, land redistribution, and increased wages—no wonder the CIA had to replace him with a fascist. Further, the Zapatistas, per Gallegos & Quinn (2017), produced far-improved results in healthcare of women than they had for decades. Socialism, working as intended, provides higher standards of living, because its ideological basis is in power to the people. Capitalism, working as intended, only takes for itself, because its ideological basis is treating human rights like commodities.

To understand the means, we turn to “Blackshirts and Reds” by Historian Michael J. Parenti, for a breakdown of the conditions of Socialist authoritarianism (which did not include “100 million killed.”) What of the executions? The gulags? The genocide? “The total executions,” Parenti writes, “from 1921 to 1953…were 799,455.” (Parenti, 80). These figures include Nazis and the Tsarist whites. In any given year, only 12-33 percent of Gulag prisoners were political prisoners, and 20-40 percent of prisoners were released. The death rates of the Gulag were never spectacular—only three out of 1000 during non-WWII years. Prison laborers were paid fairly for their work over eight-hour-days—which is better than American prisons. Of the Holodomor, there are a few things to acknowledge. Living in America, it doesn’t seem this way, but the stance that the Holodomor was a genocide is incredibly fringe, with only 35 countries accepting this. The famine was not targeted. Ukraine did not suffer the greatest amount of deaths per capita — Kazakhstan did. Soviet policy likely played a role in exacerbation, but at large, the Holodomor was a result of the growing pains of the five-year plans (and wealthier farmers killing 35 percent of the country’s livestock,  just to oppose collectivization), not intentional harm. If these plans didn’t continue rapidly, the entire world would know the horrors of the Third Reich (which were always enemies with the Union. There were Soviet coordinations with Europe two weeks before the war started to send a million troops into Germany if Europe agreed to an alliance. They refused.) Lastly, the groundwork these plans laid transformed Russia into leaders in healthcare, women’s rights, racial justice and equality, workers’ rights and welfare, and education. This is not a carte-blanche whitewashing of Stalin, but rather, the recognition that an ideology is worth paying attention to if the most salient criticisms of its “worst” executions and leaders are right–wing claptrap, and the good they achieved is censored without review. 

Let’s focus on Capitalism. After the periods of famine in both Russia and China, each nation continued the greatest sustained increases in life expectancies in human history, whereas Capitalism still can’t figure out the issue, killing more than 10 million people per year via inefficient distribution. Social-Democratic nations aren’t much better, with countries like Sweden being third globally in per capita arms exports, killing the planet to uphold their half-baked compromise of the two systems. Capitalism does all of this singly in the name of “freedom,” which it truly doesn’t care about, if Operation Condor or the Five Eyes alliance is any evidence. The West continues to unjustly pump everything into the dying form of capitalism, when Socialism, be it through vanguard or commune, would be immeasurably better for all humanity.

Featured image courtesy of Google Images

Copy Edited by Lily Wasmund ’28