COLLECTIVISM A FALSE UTOPIA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS ATLANTA - SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LIMITED TORONTO COLLECTIVISM A FALSE UTOPIA BY WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN NEW YORK JftfACMILLAN COMPANY 1937 Copyright, 1937, by THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. All rights reserved—no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in magazine or newspaper. Set up and printed. Published April, 1937. First printing. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA NORWOOD PRESS LINOTYPE, INC. NORWOOD, MASS., U.S.A. INTRODUCTION IT often happens that the absence of something is the best means of teaching a sense of its value. And the strongest positive conviction I carried away from a stay of almost twelve years in the Soviet Union was of the absolute, unconditional value of human liberty. This conviction was strengthened by a shorter period of observation of the workings of another type of collectivist dictatorship in Germany. Largely as a result of my impressions of the Soviet Union and of Germany I came to the con- clusion that the most important issue which confronts civilization in the present century is that of democ- racy versus dictatorship. A question that, in my opin- ion, far transcends in importance the precise point at which the line may be drawn between public and private enterprise in economic life, is whether the people are to own the state or whether the state is to own the people, as it very definitely does in the modern-style dictatorship. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole future of Western civilization, with its many humanist and individualist roots, is very intimately bound up with the answer which history will supply to this question. The book attempts to set forth a reasoned case Vi INTRODUCTION for the proposition that collectivism, both in its com- munist and in its fascist forms, is a false Utopia, on the basis of the demonstrable facts of the Soviet, Germany, and Italian experiments. There is also an effort to show the positive complement of this nega- tive proposition: that free institutions possess a prag- matic value far outweighing the largely illusory ad- vantages of the short-cut methods of dictatorship. It is impossible to write such a book without think- ing with admiration and sympathy of the many conscious martyrs and the still more numerous un- conscious victims of the three major post-war dictatorships, with their philosophies of class, race, and national fanaticism. One hopes that this long tale of heroism and suffering has not been in vain, and that the peoples of the countries which remain free will be strengthened in their resolution to pre- serve at all costs the method of liberty as they real- ize more clearly the moral and material and cul- tural price of its abandonment. My acknowledgment and thanks are due to the editors of the "Christian Science Monitor" and to the editor of the "American Mercury," who have kindly permitted me to incorporate in the book excerpts from articles which I previously contributed to these publications. WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN TOKYO November, 1936 CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION v CHAPTER I THE REVOLT AGAINST LIBERTY 1 II THE NEW TECHNIQUE OF TYRANNY 31 III COLLECTIVIST UTOPIA: REALITY AND MIRAGE 66 IV CAN DEMOCRACY SURVIVE? 116 V DEMOCRACY AND THE PROBLEM OF PEACE 146 VI THE CASE AGAINST LIBERTY 174 VII SOCIALISM: A ROAD TO FREEDOM AND PLENTY? 191 VIII THE CHOICE BEFORE CIVILIZATION 230 INDEX 255 COLLECTIVISM A FALSE UTOPIA CHAPTER I THE REVOLT AGAINST LIBERTY BEFORE the World War it would have seemed banal and superfluous to make out a case for human liberty, so far as North America and the greater part of Europe were concerned. Such things as regular elections, freedom of press and speech, security against arbitrary arrest, torture, and execution, were taken for granted in almost all leading countries. People could travel freely in foreign lands without worrying overmuch about passports and were not liable to be arrested by the police of one insolvent country if they failed to declare a few bills of the currency of its equally insolvent neighbor at the bor- der. Concentration camps for political recalcitrants and the wholesale conscription of forced labor as a means of getting public works done were unknown. Of course there were dark spots on the European horizon, such as Tsarist Russia and the Semi-Oriental Balkans. There were individual cases in which justice and freedom were obviously denied and trampled on. Such cases, however, were exceptions to be denounced, not rules of administrative practice to be accepted as 1 2 COLLECTIVISM: A FALSE UTOPIA normal and regular. The main trend was unmistak- ably in the direction of extending the area of politi- cal, personal, and civil liberty. It is an ironical sequel to the war that was sup- posed to safeguard the world for democracy that today the European picture is entirely different. The history of the post-war phase in Europe has been one of severe and unbroken defeats for the ideals of democracy and individual liberty. The revolutions of the twentieth century, unlike those of the eight- eenth and the nineteenth, have led to the contrac- tion, not to the expansion, of freedom. The two main governmental philosophies which have emerged since the war, fascism and communism, are based, in prac- tice, on the most rigid regimentation of the individual. Before proceeding further with an analysis of the revolt against liberty it is obviously desirable to have a definition of what liberty is. Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini, in all seriousness, have repeatedly ex- pressed the conviction that their regimes are the freest in the world. Indeed, anyone who would audibly express a contrary opinion in the Soviet Union, Ger- many, or Italy would soon receive convincing proof, if not of the incorrectness of his opinion, at least of the inexpediency of voicing it, by being consigned to a jail or concentration camp. Four indispensable foundation stones of liberty, in my opinion, are freedom of speech, press, assembly, and election. Equally important are safeguards for THE REVOLT AGAINST LIBERTY 3 the individual against arbitrary arrest and against im- prisonment or other punishment except after a fair and open trial, in accordance with a prescribed legal code; freedom of trade-union organization and of religious practice and profession. Inasmuch as strange tricks and parodies have been played with most of these conceptions under the mod- ern-style dictatorships it is necessary to define some of them more explicitly. The reality of freedom of speech, for instance, may fairly be measured by the amount of criticism of governmental measures and policies that may be uttered without risk of putting the critic in prison. Freedom of press cannot be said to exist when every newspaper is either directly un- der the control of the ruling party or is subject to the dictation of a state ministry. An election can be regarded as a serious test of the will of the people only if full freedom of speech, press, and agitation is assured to all parties and groups and, more especially, if voters who desire to do so are permitted to organize in parties. The workers cannot be said to enjoy freedom of trade-union or- ganization in Russia, where the trade-unions are dom- inated by the ruling Communist Party, or in Germany and Italy, where the labor organizations are super- vised by the state. Genuine freedom of trade-union organization is only found in countries where the members of the unions, without any prompting from the state or the ruling party, freely select their offi- 4 COLLECTIVISM: A FALSE UTOPIA cials and representatives on a democratic basis. Free- dom of religion implies, besides the right to hold church services, the right of believers in any creed or, for that matter, in any philosophical idea, including atheism, to advocate their views in speech and press and to establish and maintain, with voluntary contri- butions, educational and welfare institutions. Given this definition, I think it is or should be a matter of common knowledge that liberty, with some inevitable qualifications and defects, does prevail, in the main, in the United States and Great Britain, with its self-governing Dominions, in France and Scandinavia, Belgium and Holland, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia. The rest of Europe is now deliv- ered over to communist, fascist and semi-fascist meth- ods of rule. It is an equally obvious, if regrettable, fact that, as regards political and individual liberty, the clock has very definitely been set back, by com- parison with pre-war standards, in several leading European countries. The scales in pre-war Germany were weighted in favor of the aristocratic and prop- ertied classes 5 but Germany under the Kaiser was a paradise for John Stuart Mill, compared with the Nazi Third Reich. The police in Imperial Germany was strict, but one never heard of the outrageous beatings of helpless prisoners which have become com- monplaces in Nazi detention cells and concentration camps. And no one would have been more horrified than the correct bureaucrat of pre-war Germany at THE REVOLT AGAINST LIBERTY 5 the spectacle which Berlin experienced during the June 30th "purge," when bands of black-uniformed SS Guards scoured Berlin shooting down marked political opponents very much as Scarf ace Al Capone's henchmen picked off opponents of his hegemony when he was lord of the Chicago underworld.