“Socialism,” the great Winston Churchill said, “is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.”
“Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
In that last part, the prime minster got it wrong.
There’s misery aplenty in any socialist system, but in no sense is that misery shared equally.
Quite the contrary: Members of the ruling class in places like Cuba, North Korea or the old Soviet Union live wildly privileged lives compared to the “workers and peasants” over whom they rule.
That was illustrated this weekend — partly as tragedy, partly as farce — when a delegation of leftists from the anti-American Code Pink and other groups visited Havana to supportCuba’s totalitarian regime.
The Code Pink crowd, stacked with upper-class white women, flew first class on a chartered jet, unselfconsciously issuing press statements from their extra-wide and cushy seats.
Upon arrival they were chauffeured to Havana’s Gran Hotel Bristol, a luxury lodging operated by the Cuban government for select foreign guests — and off-limits to ordinary Cubans, other than those employed to change the sheets and scrub the toilets.
There the visiting socialists slept in air-conditioned comfort, thanks to generator-provided electricity, as the rest of the island sweltered through a blackout caused by the collapse of Cuba’s power grid.
The group claimed to be ferrying in food and relief supplies, but as they feasted and partied through the night they seem to have consumed more than they brought.
They were even treated to a concert by the pro-Hamas Irish rap group Kneecap, featuring amplified sound and a light show that drew power in quantities unthinkable to the unprivileged citizenry.
Blacked-out hospitals, meanwhile, had to cancel surgeries.
The visitors toured Havana in comfy buses, looking out at the regular Cubans as one might view zoo animals, then demonstrated their “solidarity” with the downtrodden citizenry by painting a cheery pro-communist mural.
Lefty streamer Hasan Piker trolled for clicks in a live broadcast, blinged out in a $690 shirt and even more expensive Cartier glasses and jewelry — an ensemble whose cost could have fed a Cuban family of four for a year (if there was food to be had).
Eating lobster while celebrating the People’s Revolution, even as the people themselves starve — a scene worthy of the Tom Wolfe treatment.
But that’s how communism works, and always has.
It’s sold as the equal sharing of wealth, but in practice it’s just the unequal sharing of misery.
Misery goes to the folks without power; wealth goes to the people with it.
In the old Soviet Union, the ruling class was called the nomenklatura because the same names kept repeating: Communist rule, it turns out, tends to be hereditary.
It’s the same in Cuba, and in North Korea too.
Marxists assured us that once true communism was established under a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the state would wither away and everyone would be free.
In fact, however, the dictatorship of the proletariat becomes a dictatorship of the party hacks, who have no interest whatsoever in a withered-away state that takes their positions and power along with it.
In 1957 Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas called these party hacks “The New Class” in his book of that title.
Under communism, he noted, workers and peasants were no longer ruled by capitalists, but by a managerial class of technocrats who claimed to act for the people’s benefit but somehow wound up with all the goodies.
Workers stood in long lines for bread and shoddy household goods, while technocrats bought imported delicacies in special stores.
Djilas was jailed for pointing this out.
Two decades later, in his book “The Russians,” New York Times reporter Hedrick Smith described the palatial residences of party leaders and generals, where domestic employees hand-polished the fruit displayed in baskets — even as ordinary Russians waited hours for dubious vegetables.
Likewise, North Korea has restaurants, coffee shops and gourmet pizza for the party elite — enough to impress gullible press tourists like the Times’ Nicholas Kristof, who visited there in 2017 — while regular North Koreans face hunger and even starvation.
And it’s not so different among America’s socialist elite: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani held an outdoor inauguration “block party” outdoors in the bitter cold that offered the masses neither food nor restrooms — five months after throwing a lavish three-day wedding extravaganza for himself at his family’s Uganda estate.
The communists can always find useful idiots — or just collaborators, maybe — from Western countries willing to play tourist and absorb the amenities in exchange for political support.
In Stalin’s era it was Walter Duranty. In 2026, it’s Code Pink.
So, sorry, Winston: Communism is misery, but not at all “equally shared.”
There’s plenty of pleasure for the people at the top, not so much for the people below.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
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