Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism (2005) is a three-hourPBSdocumentary film (sometimes recut as a three episodes documentalmini-series) hosted byBen Wattenberg and narrated byHenry Strozier. The series' Executive Producer is Andrew Walworth. The series was produced for PBS by New River Media, Inc. (re-incorporated as Grace Creek Media, Inc. in 2008) and first broadcast as a special edition of the television seriesThink Tank in June 2005.
Heaven on Earth begins with the pronouncement: "This 3-hour documentary explores one of the most powerful political ideas in history. Socialism spread farther and faster than any religion. Then, in almost the blink of an eye, it all collapsed. What happened?"[1]
The documentary is divided into three distinct hour-long sections:[2]
This section describesRobert Owen and earlyutopian socialism before discussing the development of theCommunist Manifesto byKarl Marx andFriedrich Engels. Attention turns toVladimir Lenin and theBolshevik Revolution, theAmerican labor movement, and finishes with an examination ofCanadian socialism.
Section two focuses on revolutions in the 20th century, including the rise ofBenito Mussolini and the spread ofcommunism in China. Focus turns to democraticsocialism in Great Britain, theKibbutz movement in Israel, and socialism inTanzania. The hour ends with discussion about the apparent failure of many of these movements.
Section three focuses on showing setbacks in established socialist/communist states, specifically in showing how capitalism has gained favor as the economic philosophy of formerly socialist states. The documentary ends with a return to theKibbutz and discussion about how market forces have transformed the community.
Its companion book isJoshua Muravchik's 2003 book of the same name, which covers around the same material and follows pretty much the same structure (although it has a first chapter onBabeuf'sConspiracy of Equals, it addsGeorge Meany to theSamuel Gompers chapter, the Kibbutz data are all in one conclusion, theTanganyika/Tanzania chapter onThird World Socialism is not divided in two, just like the chapter onMikhail Gorbachev is not, and the decay of theLabour Party and rise ofMargaret Thatcher in the 1970s are just referred to in the beginning of theTony Blair chapter).
An updated edition, titledHeaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism, was published on 2 April 2019, which adds a chapter discussing modern developments (about 1989 to 2018).[3][4]
In this new edition, I have not emended any of the chapters of the original book, which cover the history of the previous centuries, other than to correct a few small (though embarrassing) errors and to update my account of the evolution of Israel’s kibbutzim. But I have added a long Epilogue, telling the story of this afterlife as it has unfolded thus far in the first decades of the new century.
— Joshua Muravchik, Preface ofHeaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism
The book has been accused of factual errors and right-wing bias.[5]Some criticism of conservative bias comes because many of the people involved with production of the documentary are self-proclaimedneoconservatives. Host Ben Wattenberg and author of the companion bookJoshua Muravchik were scholars at theAmerican Enterprise Institute, aconservative think tank.[6]Michael Gove, who appears in the documentary film as a participant at the "Capitalist Ball", says, "I don't believe that socialism is dead because I don't believe that the impulse which drives people towards the Left, the desire to control, meddle and interfere in other people's lives, can ever die."[7] Noa Shamir-Ronen, daughter of one of the founders of Israel'sKibbutz Ginosar, opines, "If in the past we used to work because of values, now there are new values. The supreme value – we are ordinary human beings – is money."[8]