The phrase "socialism doesn't work" is often trotted out as a retort to those who espouse progressive political ideas. I've had it thrown in my face on numerous occasions when I've suggested that perhaps something or other should be nationalised, or business interests curtailed. It is generally slung out as a lazy conversation stopper with no further insights to back the assertion. None are needed, it seems.
It's not clear where the phrase originates. Nobody of any importance seems to have said it. The phrase doesn't seem to have existed before being circulated by 'The Institute of Economic Affairs' or 'The Heritage Foundation' – those ultra-free market think thanks which since the 1970s have pushed their agenda through the rightmost factions of the UK Conversative and US Republican parties.
For decades, free market capitalists have used a range of propaganda techniques to promote their ideas and quash dissenting arguments. Think tanks, phoney economics departments funded by businessmen, nationwide PR campaigns led by celebrities – all designed to normalise their business-first and banking-first theories that no serious economists entertained. One of the most astonishingly brazen examples was the creation of the "Nobel Prize for Economics" – there actually is no such thing in the Nobel suite of prizes. It was invented by a bank in 1968 using the Nobel name to confer credibility on an otherwise tawdry award given to second rate academics they could find to peddle their ideas.
The entire Cold War from the 1940s to the 1990s was a similarly concerted attempt to discredit ideas about socialism and communism that threatened the American status quo. The slogan "Socialism doesn't work" emerged from this murky world of right-wing propaganda. It was simply disinformation. The actual facts tell a different story.
Academic studies have found that, when compared with countries with similar levels of economic development, socialism provides its citizens with a higher quality of life across a range of different metrics. In "Capitalism, Socialism, and the Physical Quality of Life," (Shirley Cereseto and Howard Waitzkin, American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 76, No. 6, 1986) for example, the authors found that socialist nations generally have lower rates of infant mortality, higher life expectancy, a bigger ratio of health professionals to citzens, and an overall higher "daily per capita calorie supply as a percentage of requirement."
In China, after the founding of the communist People's Republic in 1949, life-expectancy rose by 31 years – the fastest ever increase in human history. Incomes rose by 500%, and the economy grew by 64% per decade. More than 800 million people were lifted out of poverty, as measured by international bodies.
Those are pretty impressive figures for a system that "doesn't work."
So how could this idea that is clearly so wrong-headed still be circulating, despite all the facts to the contrary? Let's be clear about one thing. Capitalism works supremely well at generating wealth for a small bunch of people – the capitalists. Since it literally prioritises the amassing of profit over all else, if that is what you looking for, then no other way of organising economic activity is going to come close. And guess who is disseminating this tired old trope? Why, it's the capitalist class of course!
Whether or not you think "Socialism doesn't work" rather depends on the measurement you use to determine success or failure. If the yardstick you measure a system's success by is how much profit investors can make, then capitalism will almost certainly be the winner. But human life is messier than that, human needs are broader than that, and desirable outcomes across entire societies are more varied than simply 'a few people making a lot of money.'
While a good outcome for capital is increasing returns, outcomes for a human society should more reasonably assess the quality of life provided to its citizens in the round. We might measure things such as the opportunities for individuals, the amount of nurishment for citizens and their families, the conditions in which they live, their access to clean drinking water, access to health care, levels of inequality etc. As it happens, such things are measured by various international bodies including the World Bank, World Health Organisation and United Nations. There is data on life expectancy, literacy rates, school attendance rates, calorific intake, immunization rates, ratios of doctors to patients etc. This is the data that academic researchers look at. In all these metrics the outcomes in socialist countries repeatedly exceed those of the United States — supposedly the preeminent capitalist success story.
It's no wonder that the capitalists put so much effort into propagandizing their claims that the opposite is true. Even in Cuba – suffering decades-long trade embargos and technological constraints imposed by the US, as well as the constant military and political meddling in its governance – levels of life expectancy, literacy, education and healthcare have consistently outstripped those of the USA.
If socialism can achieve all this even under the constant punitive actions of an agressive superpower, what could it achieve if it was left to flourish? Well, the USA would rather the world didn't find out. Wherever socialist movements accede to positions of power, the USA has been the first to arrive on the scene to snuff them out. As well as Cuba, the US has undertaken military action in a long list of countries over seven decades to do exactly this – Korea, Guatemala, Vietnam, Laos, The Dominican Republic, Chile, Angola, Grenada, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, Afghanistan. The list goes on... Venezuela may be next by all accounts.
These military interventions weren't always successful, of course. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam successively fought off the USA, and is still governed to this day by the Communist Party of Vietnam.
While the USA is the baddest of bad actors in this regard, they aren't the only ones engaged in this activity. Wherever the interests of capital come under threat from socialists the same outcome is repeated. The case of Burkina Faso is particularly sad.
The socialist Thomas Sankara swept to power in 1983. Just 4 years later he was dead – murdered in an assassination backed by the the shadowy interests of capital and the previous Colonial occupier, France. And yet, within his brief period in power he:
It's an astonishing record for a system that doesn't work.
Notably, Sankara's government also planted thousands of trees as a means to counter the desertification of the land, and this brings us to another point that a simple capitalist accounting for profit fails to take in. It's all very well to have a boon in profits or shareholder dividends, but who is accounting for all the 'externalities' – the things that don't appear on the balance sheets? What about the dwindling insect populations, the sky-rocketing CO2 emissions, or the increasingly hot and acidic oceans? Conveniently, these things lie outside the remit of capitalist enterprise and capitalist theory is happy to ignore them.
Socialist countries on the other hand are able to recognise that a good outcome for humans requires a good outcome for the planet as a whole: afterall, we are part of a complex web of life which all has to be sustained if human civilisation itself is to be sustained. And while investing time and resources in preserving the natural world makes no sense in terms of the generation of profits, they are essential in maintaining our societies and the broader human quality of life.
Unlike capitalist economies, socialist states don't rely on finance markets to direct productive capacity to where it is economically viable. The state itself simply directs workers and money to where the effort needs to be made. China, for example, has directed huge resources to planting forests – 66 million hectares, by far the biggest reforestation scheme ever undertaken on Earth – and other land restoration schemes recognised by the United Nations as global flagship projects.
Similarly, Chinese investments in renewable technologies are part of a government-directed plan for a sustainable economy over the long term – even as the marginal returns from green energy investment have diminished to the point of not not being viable in capitalist economies (big oil companies like BP, Shell, and ExxonMobil briefly invested in green energy from around 2015 – 2020, BP even rebranding itself 'Beyond Petroleum', but pulled out as the profits dwindled). The Chinese state on the other hand just doesn't need to worry about whether it makes money or not, hence the Chinese have become the world leaders in green technologies that the free market has little interest in.
So, the idea that Socialism doesn't work is clearly nonsense: it works to create better outcomes and a better quality of life for its human citizens (all of them – not just a handful) and protects the wider ecosystem in a way that consistently out-performs capitalism. The only thing socialism doesn't work at doing is making capitalists richer. That's why it is so problematic to certain sectors of society, and why precisely those people worked so hard to propagandize this piece of disinformation.
So next time you hear the phrase "Socialism doesn't work" you might want to correct whoever uttered it. It might not work to make capitalists richer, but when it comes to the broader project of human existence, socialism works just fine.
You have been reading the essay "But Socialism Doesn't Work!" — Disentanling The Lie © 2025.