Give Me Liberty

In Russia, then, our hope was realized; the economic revolution had occurred. The Communist Party had captured power with the cry, “All power to the councils!”

Russia’s State capitalism and the faint beginnings of free enterprise in Russia were destroyed, and the people controlled the national wealth. That is to say, in actual fact a sincere and extremely able man, Lenin, was in power, devoted to the stupendous task of reducing multitudes of human beings to efficient economic order, for what this man and his followers honestly believed to be the ultimate material welfare of those multitudes.

And what I saw was not an extension of human freedom, but the establishment of tyranny on a new, widely extended and deeper base.

The historical novelty of the Soviet government was its motive. Other governments have existed to keep peace among their subjects, or to amass money from them, or to use them in trade and war for the glory of the men governing them. But the Soviet government exists to do good to its people, whether they like it or not.

And I felt that, of all the tyrannies to which men have been subject, that tyranny would be the most ruthless and the most agonizing to bear. There is some refuge for freedom under other tyrannies, since they are less thorough and not so remorselessly armed with righteousness. But from benevolence in economic power I could see no refuge whatever.

Every report I have since heard from the Soviet Union has confirmed this opinion, and I listen only to reports from its friends, for I believe that Communists best understand what is happening there.

For twenty-seven years the men who rule that country have toiled prodigiously to create precisely the society we dreamed of; a society in which insecurity, poverty, economic inequality, shall be impossible.

To that end they have suppressed personal freedom; freedom of movement, of choice of work, freedom of self-expression in ways of life, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience.

Given their aim, I do not see how they could have done otherwise. Producing food from the earth and the sea, making goods from assembled raw materials, and their storing, exchanging, transporting, distributing and consuming by vast multitudes of human beings, are activities so intricately inter-related and inter-dependent that efficient control of any part of them demands control of the whole. No man can so control multitudes of men without compulsion, and that compulsion must increase.

It must increase because human beings are naturally diverse. It is the nature of men to do the same thing in different ways, to waste time and energy in altering the shapes of things, to experiment, invent, make mistakes, depart from the past in an infinite variety of directions. Plants and animals repeat routine, but men who are not restrained will go into the future like explorers into a new country, and exploration is always wasteful. Great numbers of explorers accomplish nothing and many are lost.

Economic compulsion is, therefore, constantly threatened by human willfulness. It must constantly overcome that willfulness, crush all impulses of egotism and independence, destroy variety of human desires and behavior. Centralized economic power endeavoring to plan and to control the economic processes of a modern nation is under a necessity, either to fail, or to tend to become absolute power in every province of human life.

“It doesn’t matter what happens to individuals,” the communists say. “The individual is nothing. The only thing that matters is the collectivist State.”

The Communist hope of economic equality in the Soviet Union rests now on the death of all men and women who are individuals. A new generation, they tell me, had already been so shaped and schooled that a human mass is actually being created; millions of young men and women do, in veritable fact, have the psychology of the bee-swarm, the ant-hill.

This does not seem so incredible to me as it once did. There may yet be a human bee-swarm in Russia. It would not be unique in history; there was Sparta.

There was Sparta, unchanging in its rigid forms of standardized behavior and thought until it was destroyed from without. There is the bee-swarm, static, unchanging through untold generations of individuals who ceaselessly repeat the same pattern of action devoted to the welfare of all. If there is progress in life, that it not life; it is a kind of animate and breathing death.