Utopias’ Treatment ©The Marc Karlin Archive

(Music) Edward Elgar-Cello Concerto in E minor

V/O (Archive) Socialism is a very attractive idea and could remain a very attractive idea so long as there were not many,at best none, socialist governments.

V/O (Archive) If you begin to tamper with economic freedom, you find it doesn’t work very well, therefore you have to go further and impose further controls on the economic activities in order to get the result you want. And in doing that you run up against increasing resistance from ordinary people and in order to beat down that resistance you have to limit their political freedoms too.

V/O (Archive) It is hard to access the damage the welfare state has done in Britain to the spirit of independence and social conventions that impel people to overcome their own poverty.

V/O (Archive) Socialism and social democracy according to Schneider’s Objectivism beliefs soften the play of competition by forcing people to share their wealth with others through taxation.

 

V/O (Archive) I think greed, as a matter of fact, lead us by an invisible hand to a welfare state because the truly greedy man wants comfort and security, and he ordinarily partitions government to give it to him. The capitalist wants challenge and creativity.

 

V/O (Archive) You can compare practice to practice, there’s no competition. Capitalism is completely overwhelming socialism.

V/O (Marc Karlin) The one crisis Socialists were not able to predict was their own. Socialism once thought of being inevitable is now replaced as a socialism that is remote, at best half remembered. Unable to state confidently a vision of the future, yet in the name of renewal and adaptation, impatient to shed its past.

V/O (Marc Karlin) Everyone speaks about socialism as if we all know what it is –  for it or against it. When people are saying farewell to socialism, this is a film about what it is they are saying farewell to, a series of portraits of individuals and their ideas one might encounter on a journey through the life of socialism in Britain today.

V/O (Marc Karlin) The film is not about definitions it is more an invitation to see whether there is still a place for the word us in the current political vocabulary.

Channel 4 broadcast ‘Utopias’ on Monday 1st May 1989 at 10.45pm.