Letter to a Communist Friend
DEAR A——:
I have now read, reread, pondered, and read still again the 270-odd pages of your communist manifesto. You will find your manuscript doubled in bulk by the sheets of jottings I have inserted at specific details. Meanwhile, as your first noncommunist reader, I cannot seem to let myself off without this additional word about your argument as a whole. I owe something of the sort to you, who are both an old friend and (as I suppose) the only communist in history who ever honestly wanted to know how his collectivist theology would strike an oldfashioned individualist. Perhaps, also, I owe it to myself: like many another ordinary American, I have for several years past felt myself being goaded nearer and nearer to the inevitable outburst. But most of all I owe it to the impersonal challenge contained in the personal situation. It is one of those unsought situations that call upon a man to stand and deliver. If I do not try to give a reason for the faith that is in me, I am a betrayer of the multitudes whose faith mine is. Not that I claim the slightest authorization to speak for them. They might not care for much of what I say or for the way I say any of it. But it happens that your particular challenge has come to me, and so, on pain of being a shirker, I have to meet it as best I can.
It is about faiths that we are talking — not you only, but both of us. A faith is a citadel. Try to dislodge us from ours if that is your idea of the commission that history has laid on you, but don’t look to the garrison to coöperate with you besiegers by making sorties against your camp, leaving their fortress empty the while. Neither as a critic nor as an American do I feel called upon to abandon my premises in favor of yours, for what is rather inanely known as ‘the sake of argument.’
I am one of 130,000,000 people who mean to stay put. We’re here because we’re here. Must I undertake a philosophical or historical analysis of communism to justify my dislike of it? No more than a farmer must undertake an appraisal of urban civilization to explain why he does n’t feel at home in Brooklyn. You have reminded me where the American Marxist stands to-day, and why. My task is to remind you where most of us non-Marxists stand, and why. I am not concerned with communism as a philosophical system; I do not profess to know how it looks in the cold white light of eternity. But I can show you, whether or not to your profit, something of how practical communism looks after refraction through a great mass of American minds as alien to it as my own.
Call this posture evasive and intellectually shabby if you must, but it has at least the historical justification that America has never yet been able to take the communist theorems seriously. This is a primary fact that might do a little toward clearing the air if all of us could recognize it. The nearest this country has ever come to serious alarm about the Marxist-Leninist gospel was during the Red scare just after the war. I have not forgotten the incessant raids, seizures, police brutalities, and deportations of those days; but by most sensible Americans they were deprecated even at the time in a mood between chagrin and derision. Most of us saw in them the gratuitous work of timid or fanatic officials seeing things under the bed or trying to found careers on the allaying of trumpedup terrors disseminated largely by themselves. I happened to divide those addled years among three large Eastern industrial cities, and I can assure you that the very editors who ranted in print against ‘un-American ideas’ were privately incapable of pretending that our institutions were endangered by anything except, perhaps, the excesses of their defenders. Few then faced the possibility that the revolution would establish itself even in Russia, and those few expected its dominant ideas to find precious little soil for their roots on this continent. Save for a negligible minority of bigots, the country simply saw no occasion to apply to the suppression of communism a thousandth part of the resourcefulness it was then devoting to the circumvention of the Volstead Act.
Since that interlude, communism has nearly ceased to be even a nominal rallying point for intolerance. The charge of undercover communist affiliations and objectives seems not at all to have impeded the extraordinary progress made by the CIO, and our general identification of the Spanish government cause with communism has not stood in the way of our sympathizing five to one with that apparently doomed cause. Trotsky the former devil-with-horns, a communist so unreconstructed that he finds it necessary to excommunicate the whole of Stalin’s Russia as a backslider from the faith, has lived to find himself an admired contributor to the Saturday Evening Post and the subject of an almost idolatrous article in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times.
It is one thing to recognize this apathy and another to understand it. You Marxists have, of course, your standard explanations of it, all of which boil down to the indictment that we prefer darkness to light because our deeds are evil. But, face it or flout it, the true rockbottom reason is that you do not make sense to us on the subject that one might call your only subject — the class struggle.
All of you presuppose, as the basis of your entire sociology, a class conflict so completely irreconcilable that it can end only in the grinding to powder of one class under the heel of the other. You agree, qua communists, that there is an inherent clash of interests between capitalist and worker, exploiter and exploited, rentier and wage earner. To you this implacable antagonism is the primary determining force in modern history if not in all history. You think it both inevitable and desirable that class solidarity, and hence class war, shall become steadily intensified and that the eventual classless society shall be ushered in by annihilation of the last vestiges of capitalism under a proletarian dictatorship. And it is from precisely that point, your point of departure, that our ways diverge, with the area of our disagreement enlarging as the square of the distance between us.
For none of all this seems to us either inevitable or desirable. We cannot believe at all in irreconcilable conflicts. If we could, we should disbelieve in civilization, which is without sense except as a framework for the reconciliation of conflicts. We do not even believe that classes exist in the sense and with the definitiveness postulated by every good Marxist since Marx; and if we did believe in their existence as a fact, we should still abhor it as an ideal. We think it a moral monstrosily that anyone should dream of procuring ‘social justice’ by putting the bottom layer on the top, to the end that the trampled may in their turn do the trampling. We cannot look at modern history, current events, or our own everyday experiences without being persuaded by a thousand evidences that class consciousness, so far from becoming intensified according to the Marxist requirement, is fast dissolving along with the identities of classes themselves. In fine, the Marxist thinks he sees, and certainly he wants to see, a war to the death between forces that in one sense do not even exist; forces that, so far as they do exist, are about as opposed to each other as the two legs on which you walk.
If, when you use the opprobrious term ‘capitalist,’ you meant simply one who has money to invest, all of us could follow you without too much bafflement — though with the reservation that the capitalist, even in this restricted sense, is gradually becoming easier to imagine than to isolate. We can even grant that there are, at some points and on specific occasions, clashes of interest between those who are working for money and those who are trying to make money work for them. But when you Marxists confront us with the capitalist in your larger generic sense of one emotionally committed to a particular ideology that dictates or governs his acts, our imagination bogs down. We think you are mistaking an effect for a cause.
In all sobriety I propound this to you: that no one of God’s creatures (except, apparently, the communist) cares or ever will care so much as one good round curse about any abstraction, system, or philosophy that you can rationally term ‘capitalism.’ The bad capitalist is concerned with amassing money or power or both, as much and as fast as possible, for himself. He is of those whom Milton called ‘blind mouths.’ To say that he acts out of capitalistic convictions or as an apologist and representative of the ‘profit system’ is to talk inhuman nonsense. As well explain that the barracuda that takes a chunk out of a swimmer’s leg is actuated by veneration for the laws of metabolism, or that his religion is anthropophagy. And for ‘capitalism’ your good capitalist cares as little as the bad. He wants to get his particular brand of motors or mousetraps made, distributed, and compensated, on terms that will let him make more and (he hopes) better mousetraps or motors. Like a house painter or a portrait painter, he is simply a man working at what he presumes to be his proper job, and hoping that he is a decent workman. He is not in the least working (as you and I happen to be just now) at either the defense or the condemnation of any kind of social order, and he can put up with any order that leaves him reasonably free to accomplish what he supposes will justify his existence. You may detest and abhor his job, but at least it is composed of the sort of realities men live by, whereas your discussion of it is confined to a mythology of abstractions erected on these realities by a tour de force of academic fancy — a mythology incapable of explaining the real motives of anybody doing anything.
And the other half of your class conflict — your exploited, disinherited class, your downtrodden wage slave? If you will look about contemporary America with your own eyes, forgetting for a moment all about what Marx thought he saw in the industrial England of 1850, and if, then, you will take a quick glance at the descriable and foregone part of the future, I think you will find yourself wondering what has become of this much bruited victim of capitalist inhumanity. The palpable truth is that the conflict of which he might have become a part is largely transferred to a quite different arena. It has been transmuted into a conflict of opposing interests within one class, one organization, and, oftentimes, one individual. The unfolding design of our industrial jigsaw puzzle tends more and more to interlock in each one of us the essential functions of laborer and capitalist, wage earner and employer, hired man and investor, producer and distributor and consumer; and so far as our ‘class struggle’ is a reality it means that increasing multitudes of Americans are divided against themselves.
The change has been brought about by the fact that industry has an entirely different law of self-preservation from the one that actuated it in 1850. Its latter-day law of self-preservation is the smallest possible margin of profit, the broadest possible market, and, as a necessary corollary, the highest possible wages. What do you think it would have done to Marx’s philosophy if he could have been shown an attested picture of a national administration, the administration of an industrial country of 130,000,000 people, taking it for granted as the A B C of economics that the prime necessity in a depression is to sustain and renew mass purchasing power, and acting on the assumption? What would he have said on hearing American industrialists proclaim with one voice that the men who assemble motorcars must ride to their work in the cars they assemble?
Consider any one of our billion-dollar corporations with tens, even hundreds, of thousands on its payroll, all engaged in the production of something universally held to be indispensable. It is to the interest of this corporation as a manufacturer to fight down the unit cost of its product by keeping wages at the lowest level, hiring and firing at its momentary convenience, and reducing its employees to the docile inertia of raw material. But it is equally to the same corporation’s interest as a distributor to do the precise opposites. The two tendencies are strictly inevitable. Also, they are strictly irreconcilable except by a compromise that in a generation has made the American worker, as compared with his counterpart in other lands, an envied prince of privilege. Like it or hate it, there is your irreconcilable conflict of capital and labor, modern style.
And here it is again: Early in this century the manufacturer of a humble, inexpensive, universal household necessity, soap, set out to bring a new stability and a revolutionized employer-employee relationship into what had long been a seasonal business with its own alternation of booms and depressions every year. This manufacturer, Procter & Gamble, clubbed the jobbers into relinquishing their custom of immense semiannual orders, prorated its production over the twelve months, guaranteed its workers a life tenure on a year’s pay every year, and established a system of very substantial bonuses and stock participation. The older employees were presently receiving more annual income in dividends than in their pay envelopes, though these were already high for the industry. Some of the coupon-clipping wage slaves became better off, without counting the capital value of their stock, than many a university president and all but the highestsalaried football coaches.
Other concerns have copied the system or parts of it, or come by their own processes to the same position; and on the whole it seems more reasonable to believe than to doubt that here is one more standard figure in the pattern of to-morrow.
The conflict of capital and labor! The class struggle! Why, the classless society of your dream is creating itself before your eyes, while you satirize and sabotage everything that speeds the process.
The class war may be said to constitute the intellectual centre of communism. Come now to its moral centre, the urge to justice, or what for a generation past has been called the social conscience. The world, according to every communist, teems with unendurable inequalities and wrongs, and the chief of them are public inequalities and wrongs perpetrated for private profit. They are inherent, in other words, in the nature of capitalism and of its profit motive. Where, under capitalism, human rights conflict with property rights, the property rights will infallibly prevail. Therefore capitalism must be destroyed, that wrong be destroyed; whence the moral justification of class war. Meanwhile, whoever does not hate capitalism, whoever cannot look for the attainment of social justice according to your definitions and by your programme, is an implicit enemy of justice and a conscious or unconscious betrayer of his own kind. So every one of you maintains with tireless zeal, until the rest of us almost despair of getting you to find, in your tight little world of formula, a cranny for the alien thought that our detestation of communism may signify as true a love of humanity as your own embrace of communism; as true a love, and even a far greater respect.
One of your own best historical chapters recites, in truthful words that burn in the memory, the familiar yet perpetually incredible inhumanities of the factory system as it worked in England a century and a quarter ago. You show us the child labor on a mass scale, the fiveyear-old babies tending machines fifteen hours a day for a dollar a week, industrial living conditions that killed three in four working-class children before the minimum working age, and so on. It is not astonishing that you should feel a Swiftian rage when you think of such shames and savageries of civilization; it would be astonishing if you did not. But it is astonishing that you can depict these dreadful miseries without a single suggestion from beginning to end that they have anything to do with the ruling spirit of an age in any way unlike ours. Don’t you see any significance in the mere fact that we — all of us — look back upon such things aghast and with appalled incredulity? The years 18001820 did not survey them in any such light. Those practices were actually acceptable in their day to a consensus of philosophers and clergymen. The bare rumor of an attempt to profit by anything of the sort on this continent to-day would provoke a general outcry, investigations, crusades, prosecutions, though the exploited victims were criminals and public enemies. Does your Marxist reading of history, then, make no room for such a reality as a changing Zeitgeist?
When you cite these dead-and-gone horrors as part of an intimate psychograph of capitalism caught off its guard, and with perfectly clear implications that capitalism is eternally one thing, we find in your indictment the same flaw, the same falsity, the same thrashing of chimeras, that prejudices your account of the class struggle. A mercantilist can, of course, be as ignorantly barbaric as anybody else in a time that countenances ignorant barbarism. There is no special reason for expecting the capitalist to rise above the dominant philosophy or to attain a morality superior to that of university and church. But when you charge the barbarities to the inherent nature of an unchangeable capitalism, in utter disregard of the state of public morality in general, you are handing yourself a challenge that you never answer. You should explain to us how it came to pass that, as the capitalistic method increased and flourished and swallowed the earth, the pitiless exploitations diminished, were obliterated, became in the eyes of all men revolting and unthinkable. Either capitalism cannot be quite so fiendish as you pronounce, or else it cannot be quite so dominant. If it were both conscienceless and omnipotent, patently we should have more and worse abuses with us still. Must you really be so hard-shell a Leninist as to deny that men could once respectably do for money a good many things that, if done now, would outlaw them from all respect, including self-respect?
The human sense of what is unendurable is perpetually expanding, or at any rate shifting its locus. Rank inequities persist until a consensus of mankind sees them in a new light, and then ways are found to rid the world of them, whatever entrenched privilege or assumed property right may forbid. (Who imagines for a minute that we should have chattel slavery in the United States to-day if the war of 1861 had never been fought?) An intolerably bad social adjustment cannot last for any great length of time beyond the general perception that it is intolerably bad, any more than a road or a schoolhouse can.
It is by this growth of public sentiment and heart that changes, lasting betterments great or small, come to pass; and I do not see how else they are to be brought to pass so long as we are both human and free. We have not the option of making everything perfect all at once by enlightened fiat. That option is a communist’s reverie — when it is not a fascist’s. We can either realize something of the ideal piecemeal at the natural tempo of human progress — the limited tempo at which society can assimilate change without dislocation — or we can fail to realize any gains at all by the impracticably hasty improvisations and dictates urged upon us by the reformers, the revolutionists, the everything-fornothing, everything-in-a-hurry boys and girls. And if we give them their way, we not only miss getting anything of value in snatching at everything, but we also lose our liberty into the bad bargain.
Races, civilizations, classes, as truly as individuals, have their season of unripeness for even the most desirable advantages. The manufacturing concern that has made modest capitalists of its day laborers to the number of several thousands once made a premature attempt to accomplish the same result. As far back as the 1890’s it introduced a bonus arrangement by way of the opening wedge — with what outcome? Why, every time the bonus fell due the whole personnel took it as a signal to quit work in favor of a prolonged spree. Their attitude, about which nothing could be done except by time and change, stopped the factories as dead as a lockout could have done. But within a few years a much more thoroughgoing scheme of participation was working perfectly and making responsible employees as well as prosperous ones. In a single class and within far less than a generation there was that change of posture about the uses of leisure.
Leisure happens to be one of the blessings that look most golden when vestured in the eloquence of the social rebel. It is, of course, the one that you have implicitly in view when you talk about ‘the realization of complete lives for the millions.’ Like many another blessing, it has a way of arriving with our readiness for it. I do not say that the twelvehour day never meant exploitation (though many thousands of men have worked the seventy-two-hour week at factory benches for a dollar and a quarter a day without feeling exploited; I know, for I am one of them). But it also meant hordes of men who had yet to learn any uses of time except working, eating, sleeping, and debauchery. Their successors have taken on more adult interests, and somehow the eight-hour day is with us, with the thirty-hour week in not too remote prospect. Emerson would have remarked that all this is as mathematically just as an algebraic equation. The disciple of Marx, no Emersonian compensationist, wants to supply all the advantages first and let the readiness to profit by them take care of itself. This is one more of his ways of standing on his head to pity the rest of us (who have our feet on the ground) for our unnatural posture.
We shut our ears and minds to communism, then, for precisely the reason that every communist gives for embracing it: the reason that we do care something about what becomes of our fellow men and do desire to see life develop toward, not away from, its best potentialities. What all of you and many of us agree are the real maladjustments and inequities of society tend, we think, progressively to disappear under a democratic organization, simply because it gives the freest play to evolution, to natural growth and change. Any practicable communist organization tends, on the other hand, to create or perpetuate the very sort of abuse that you hold up as definitive of capitalism. For example, in forced labor under Stalin you have worse than the essentials of Tsarist serfdom frozen hopelessly in situ for an immense newly created class of the unprivileged, and with the added horror that the cruelly uprooted victims understand clearly what is being done to them.
Even more ghastly in the unwavering light of history, though not so overtly, tangibly destructive of individual happiness at the moment, is the crowning paradox of practical sovietism and proletarianism. I mean this paradox: that men who ascribe all our characteristic modern disasters to the overrapid growth of industrialism should deliberately set out to cure the world’s ills by remorselessly industrializing the one great naturally agrarian country left in the Occident, and by doing it at a rate that would probably doom a culture seventyfive years more advanced to perish overnight of acute indigestion. There could hardly be a more blasting revelation of the narrowly urban, tawdry, factoryand-asphalt outlook of communism, its instinctive hatred of everything that encourages the human being to stand on his own feet, its grim concentration on making every department and detail of life one perpetual five-o’clock subway jam with no seats available except for the conductors. To us unenlightened skeptics the state of mind that can invoke such a programme in the name of humanity, of righting social wrongs, seems about on a level with the mediæval fanaticism that could rejoice in the destruction of millions by pestilence or famine on the ground that otherwise most of them would doubtless have fallen to the sword.
Communism says that men are brothers and each the others’ keeper. But when we judge it by what it does, we find that it is a conspiracy to nullify all the natural agencies we have ever had for allaying the world’s unrest and healing its diseases.
Your gospel according to Saint Marx, as a religion of strict materialism, undertakes to abolish injustices and evils solely by means of things — things supplied and things done. It promises all things to all men. But if the communist has ever stopped to wonder just how he is going to make good the promise or to get the things he so casually promises to hand out, no one has ever caught him at it. After three quarters of a century of his propaganda the world is still in outer darkness on the subject of how he expects to obtain his guaranteed results. We still wait, not too hopefully, for some disclosure of how you imagine everybody’s material wants are to be supplied by any general formula of planning-from-thetop, putting the bottom on the top, arbitrary expropriation and division and regimentation, dictated economy, or ‘production for use’ — in fine, any arrangement that excludes rewards, or what are called profits. Here is, then, that anomalous thing, a philosophy that stands or falls by the idea of practical efficiency, yet refuses even to discuss its modus operandi in terms concrete enough to let anyone know what it is talking about.
The general formula is, of course, as simple as the Rule of Three. There is enough for everybody, at least potentially, and all of it belongs to everybody. Your proletarian dictatorship has only to take over the ‘means of production’ and — according to the glib assumption — produce. But would it produce? Does it produce? And what are the ‘means of production,’ anyway? Tools, machinery, factories, patents, raw materials, engineers’ blueprints, power, and man power? Those are some of them, certainly — the ones that more obviously lend themselves to taking over. Are they enough to mean production on the scale and after the pattern of a nation’s needs? Or is there some less visible, more important factor that does n’t at all lend itself to taking over — some forgotten animating factor that perhaps makes all the others work together?
We are struck at the outset by two very odd, very glaring empirical facts. The first fact: All modern dictatorships, proletarian or other, have begun by inviting the millions to a banquet and then promptly commanded them to pull in their belts and feast solely on promises and moral superiority. The benefits are to begin only after unspecified decades of greater deprivation than the most deprived Western peoples have faced in modern times for any reason except war. And the second fact: The great existing proletarian dictatorship, your vaunted world laboratory of practical revolutionism, has called in foreign technologists in droves to teach the revolution a few saving vestiges of capitalist efficiency, lest nothing whatever work or get itself done, and has rewarded these advisers rather handsomely for contributing what the revolution had no idea how to get except at a price. In other words the revolution has been helpless to design any bridge of its own to throw across the gap between theory and practice. Yet it continues to resist and flout the obvious explanation, which is that its theory is inherently incapable of translation into practice.
The proof? It is so simple that every man in the street, including me, has always known it without thought. It is also so simple that it appears never to have arrested any communist alive, or any planned-economy publicist. Here it is, in the crass terms in which life has to be lived, but to which none of you abstract ideologists will condescend: —
Suppose America has been sovietized. You, because under the bad old régime you were a prophet crying in the wilderness, are suddenly exalted to the status of People’s Commissar for Production and Distribution of (shall we say?) Stove Bolts. As that, you are ultimately responsible for the efficient dispatch of maybe one five-hundred-thousandth part of the nation’s business. Your job is to see that every essential and nonessential industry, every manufacturer and wholesaler and retailer, every artisan, every householder in the land, shall be able to lay hands at any minute on just the stove bolt he needs for each standard use, each replacement use, each improvised use, including a thousand and one employments that a national convention of the hardware business could not think of if it shut up shop for two months and gave its whole mind to the task. If you slip, you will pay for it with your party membership and possibly with your head, for nonproduction or nondistribution is, by hypothesis, counterrevolutionary sabotage. Do you think you can do the job? Do you think any man or number of men could do it?
You have to know everything about the production of stove bolts, beginning with metal in the ground. You have to know all the common and most of the uncommon uses of every gauge, length, thread, every size and shape and thickness of nut. You have to know all that can be known about the construction of stoves — every model extant, 18301938, and every projected new model. You will have to have virtually a census of stoves. You must accurately correlate your production with the other schedules for mining, smelting, production of mining machinery, production and replacement and repair of machine tools, transportation, mechanical education. Your fact-finding and liaison staff proliferates until it is physically and temporally out of the question for you even to listen to one thousandth part of the information you have recruited it to gather. Its skillfully condensed reports, containing the data indispensable to the rudest sort of workable plan, look like the mountains of paper collected in a decennial census of the United States, You cannot conceivably glance at a fraction of them until years after the economic landscape has altered beyond recognition. You go mad from the despair of sheer ignorance — which is probably the true explanation of nine tenths of the so-called sabotage that has made so much work for firing squads in the U. S. S. R.
You cannot, in short, plan a nationwide economy — one that will work — without virtual omniscience. Leave the business, you say, to experts? There are no experts of the impossible.
You are repelled and disgusted by the ‘profit motive.’ In your mind the phrase stands for all the horrible things that horrible persons have ever done for gain. It means, to you, men individually battening on what belongs to all. But in the rock-bottom terms of this frank and simple exchange, the man-in-the-street’s terms and mine, what is the sense of this contumelious phrase? I can tell you to a frog’s eyelash. It is this: Under our system of free enterprise you can walk into a hardware store in Bradford, Vermont (population 1800), and know that you have a hundred-to-one chance of walking out a moment later with precisely the four tiny off-size stove bolts you need in order to replace in 1938 the panes of isinglass in the handsome fire door of a cooking range cast in Otter River, Massachusetts, in 1875. I have just done just that; and I find this little transaction — which involves, we will subversively hope, a microscopic profit to the profit-motivated seller and has certainly profited the buyer — distinctly more gratifying than my theoretical ownership of theoretical stove bolts that don’t exist outside of some ideologist’s blueprints of Platonia.
That is the sort of thing the profit motive makes possible, makes commonplace, and enables us to rely on every day of the calendar. And it does these things without any pretense of omniscience whatever, without a vestige of an economic plan. All that it calls for is one average human being’s will to base his own livelihood on his fellow men’s desires for some sort of useful, pleasant, or amusing things — the most powerful force in the world and the forgotten mainspring of your whole economic clock.
A dictatorship is more efficient than a democracy? It is efficient in ignoring all that makes up a livable life in the interest of some single, simplified, usually fanatical objective, such as victory in a war or preparation for a war that is not coming. (But how much of modern life is not made death by reduction to any such simplicity?) It is also efficient in intimidating masses of people into renouncing all overt demand for the things they know in their hearts human beings ought to have. Granting your dictatorship thus much on the score of efficiency, we have granted it about all that the facts warrant. To some temperaments it may be acceptable to live under a dispensation that does not dispense, and that does them out of everything of worth according to morally beautiful principles. But most of us will continue to find the greatest moral beauty in the principles of government that leave us the most nearly free to live our own lives.
Free to live our own lives! And that word brings us to the remaining, the really fundamental section of the Stalinist answer to the hydra-headed problem of efficiency. The superficial answer, as we have seen, is to plagiarize ad lib. from capitalism. But the basic, the ultimate answer to the great administrative problem of supplying the millions with what they want is simply to say: ‘Let them not want such things. Let them bridle and reëducate their desires. Let them learn to content themselves with what we think it salutary for them to have or find it convenient to supply. Who are they to demand bread when we instruct them to nourish themselves on the fine stones we toss out to them — expropriation, collectivization by force, militarization, universal espionage, forced labor, wholesale butchery of those who dissent and those who inconveniently agree?’
That is practical communism’s true solution of the problem that it has found insoluble — to flout the problem, and with it the people. In the stentorian language of its acts it proclaims that government is not an instrument for accommodating human desires and ensuring individual satisfactions. It says that, on the contrary, government exists to maintain the sacred theory; that to accomplish this it must sacrifice everything, and first of all the mere citizen, to maintaining itself. The citizen’s first duty and supreme privilege is to be coaxed, clubbed, disciplined, deluded, terrified, kneaded into whatever kind of lump the State finds useful.
The short, simple, unimprovable way to sum up this relation of the Absolute State to its people is to say that a dictatorship denies and destroys liberty.
I do not have to set the American and the Soviet ideas of liberty side by side in the stark contrast they invite, because you have spared me the trouble. You have done it in words that contrive to interest me very much: —
It will be found that, so far from having a greater freedom here than in the Soviet Union, we have only a different concept of freedom. Here we suppress people who, judged by capitalist standards, seriously threaten to destroy property. There they suppress people who threaten to restore it. This applies to speech as well as to other acts in both countries, and suggests the comparative bases of circumscription of liberties. And since ours is a concept of freedom under capitalism, theirs one under socialism, we find talk cheap, but let millions of our citizens starve in idleness; whereas they give every man a job and tell him to watch his tongue.
‘We find talk cheap.’ In other words, you are free here to write an uncompromising denunciation of American institutions, free to send it through the mails to whom you will, free to publish it, free to be paid money for your views if you can sell them in a free market and then to use the money for what you will, free to receive credit, honors, and perfectly parliamentary brickbats for them according to the merits or faults that different free minds find in them — free to be and to express yourself. Is all this so ‘cheap’ as to be worth nothing to you, a man who would suffocate under suppression?
And ‘we let millions of our citizens starve in idleness’! What millions? When? Where? About how many millions? Don’t you realize that one tenth of one million starving Americans in this year of the New Deal would have every national officeholder quaking in his boots and that the scandal would reverberate around the world? Per contra, have you yet to hear how Stalin, applying the Russian ‘concept of freedom under socialism,’ abetted famine with pitiless state exactions and literally starved uncounted thousands as a mere trivial incident to appropriation of the life-saving wheat they had themselves raised, which he then calmly put into the international market to pay for armaments and industrial machinery, in order to save his monstrous schedule of industrialization and his own face?
‘They give every man a job.’ This I take as an invitation to look forward with eager zest to the day when, here in my beloved northern New England, the owners of small independent farms, family farms, will be expropriated, their land combined into a few vast collectivized units run under state supervision for the production of exportable surpluses, and the late occupants tumbled into cattle cars — five, six, seven thousand at a haul — and whisked away to serfdom in the oil fields of Oklahoma and Texas, where they will be treated almost as kindly as plantation slaves once were and even reëducated ideologically in night schools lest they remain too benighted to be properly grateful.
As the conclusion of the whole matter I ask you: In God’s name and man’s, what is the sense of a freedom that is not freedom to do what you want to do?