hat made life intolerable for most of the inhabitants of these socialist countries? The greatest Russian writer of the last century has given us the answer. To quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn: “Socialism begins by making all men equal in material matters. . . . However the logical progression towards so-called ‘ideal’ equality inevitably implies the use of force. Furthermore it means that the basic element of personality—those elements which display too much variety in terms of education, ability, thought and feeling—must themselves be leveled out. . . . Let me remind you that ‘forced labour’ is part of the programme of all prophets of Socialism, including the Communist Manifesto . There is no need to think of the Gulag Archipelago as an Asiatic distortion of a noble ideal. It is an irrevocable law” (Warning to the Western World).
It was therefore always predictable that by requiring the abolition of private property and the family, and monopolistic State ownership of agriculture and industry, the socialist pursuit of equality would necessarily produce the evil fruit of totalitarianism. One-party rule, the secret police, the imprisonment and torture of dissidents, concentration camps, mass executions, the political indoctrination of the young, the persecution of religious minorities—all these horrors have been the inevitable result of that concentration and monopolization of power that invariably corrupts the ruling elites and bureaucracies of all full-blown socialist societies. As an eminent Russian-born political scientist, the late Tibor Szamuely, wrote a generation ago in a pamphlet that should be read by the citizens of every civilized democracy: “How could it be otherwise? . . . How can there be any freedom when one’s livelihood from cradle to grave depends totally upon the State, which can with one hand give and with the other take away?” (Socialism and Liberty, 1977).
Unfortunately, left-wing intellectuals and other critics of free enterprise have always been reluctant to acknowledge the totalitarian logic of socialism, wedded as they are to a benevolent vision of the State and the dream of using its power to create a more just society. Consequently, despite all the evidence to date, many of them still pursue the phantom of “democratic socialism,” believing that democratic institutions can be relied on to prevent socialism from degenerating into tyranny. The great classical-liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century, by contrast, harbored no such illusions. Every single one of them discerned the incompatibility of state socialism with the maintenance of free and democratic institutions. They did so, moreover, long before the advent of the socialist tyrannies of the twentieth century.
One of the earliest warnings was sounded by John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) more than 50 years before the Russian Revolution. In a now-famous passage in his essay On Liberty (1859), Mill declared: “If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint-stock companies, the universities and the public charities, were all of them branches of the government; if, in addition, the municipal corporations and local boards, with all that now devolves on them, became departments of the central administration; if the employees of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government, and looked to the government for every rise in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this or any other country free other than in name.”
As Mill understood, you cannot maintain freedom of speech and of the press, or freedom of assembly and association, if all the means of communication—newsprint, meeting halls, radio stations, and more—are in the hands of the State. It is equally impossible, in such conditions, for opposition parties to win elections, particularly since a State-controlled economy prevents them, in any case, from acquiring the capital to finance their campaigns. That is why democratic socialism is a contradiction in terms. Either socialism must be diluted o