In this series, Dr. Carson examines the connection between ideology and the revolutions of our time and traces the impact on several major countries and the spread of the ideas and practices around the world.
“There’s only one general feeling at Westminster [the British Parliament]. That independence must be stamped out at all costs. . . . The policymakers in all three parties are in complete agreement on that.”¹
The thrust of the idea that has the world in its grip is to take away the independence of the individual. This thrust inheres in the idea as it is formulated here as well as in the socialist way of looking at conditions which are supposed to be remedied.
The formulation of the idea being used here is that the aim is to concert all human efforts for the common good. The only direct way to achieve this is to make the individual into a cog in a vast machine, to make the efforts of each individual coordinate with those of the human race. Such a coordination is only possible when individual independence no longer exists or is no longer capable of action.
The animus of the idea runs deeper than this. It is, as has been stated before, to root out the penchant of the individual to pursue his self-interest. It is a religious, or quasi-religious, aim at bottom, an aim which entails the transformation of the individual. On the socialist view, man’s original sin is the pursuit of self-interest. It is, they think, the source of all the ills in the world. A massive effort has been made to transform men along these lines.
But all efforts to eradicate man’s pursuit of self-interest have been to no avail. The greater the effort to erase it, the more determinedly do men pursue their self-interest as they conceive it. There is abundant evidence that even when the most drastic efforts have been made to remove the opportunity for the pursuit of self-interest, in slave labor or concentration camps, for example, men continue to do so, even to the detriment of their fellows. When man is bereft of all else—wealth, family, position, the comfort of religion, and the amenities of society—he pursues self-interest as long as any will remains in him.
There is reason for this. The denial of the right to pursue one’s self-interest is, in effect, the denial of the right to life. Our very survival hinges regularly on a lively interest in self. From the most primitive savage to the most urbane civilized man this has been true. Nor could it be otherwise. Each individual must attend to the means for sustaining himself and avoiding the dangers that threaten him. He must either see to his bodily needs, or it must be done for him. He must be constantly wary of things about him that can do him harm: fire which can burn him, water in which he may drown, high places from which he may fall, objects that may fall upon or hit him, and a thousand and one other dangers. He must be on the lookout for ways to provision himself and be on guard lest his provisions be taken from him.
The Foundations of Society
The individual is not necessarily alone in his efforts to survive, though he may sometimes be. Ordinarily, though, he may have help from others and render assistance in return. Society is founded upon mutual exchange and aid, and the individual finds advantage to himself both in making exchanges and rendering aid. None of this alters the fact that the individual’s pursuit of self-interest is as deeply embedded in his nature as is the will to survive, and necessarily so. There is no need to suppose that it is man’s only motive, or always his predominant one, but whether it is or not, it is ineradicably there. Socialists to the contrary notwithstanding, the opposite of the pursuit of self-interest is not the pursuit of the common good; it is the abandonment of the self to destruction.
Socialism does not succeed, then, in eradicating the individual’s inherent bent to pursue his self‑interest. It can, at most, induce him to conceal it by making hypocritical claims about the motives behind his acts. Socialism does not do what it cannot do; it does instead what it can. It does not root out self-interest; instead, it reduces and attempts to remove the means for individual independence. The individual has an ingrained bent toward independence, too, but the means have to be available or acquired, and they can be largely removed.
Independence is essential to individual freedom and responsibility. Freedom without the independence to choose and act is a contradiction in terms, a notion without content. In like manner, the individual cannot logically be held responsible for acts not freely and independently done, nor can he assume responsibilities without a measure of independence. As a practical matter, freedom consists of the right of the individual to dispose of his own energies, employ his faculties, use his own resources—that is, manage his own affairs—for his own good and constructive purposes. Responsibility entails both attending to those obligations which arise from his situation and taking the consequences of his acts. Socialism victimizes the individual by its continuing assault upon his independence. Tacitly, socialism promises freedom without responsibility; in fact, it takes away the means individual independence—for exercising either.
Organization and Numbers
Socialists use two devices mainly both to undermine and take away the independence of the individual and to instrument him as a cog in a wheel. They are organization and numbers. The discussion of numbers will be deferred for later treatment so that we can focus on organization here.
The most basic and comprehensive organization used by socialists is government, but all organizations are utilized to the extent that they can be. The secret police in Russia are referred to as “the organs” by people generally. This is a most appropriate nomenclature for them. They are organization in its most completely diabolical form. They are a secret society, in effect, empowered by the rulers to use whatever means are necessary to bring the populace to heel. Communists use all organizations to this end, some more directly than others, but all of them in some way. Gradualists tend to interpenetrate all organizations, control them, and make them instruments of government power.
To understand how organizations have been used and the impact they have on the individual—plus why socialism fails—it will help to look at the nature of organization, not just governmental organizations, not just organizations penetrated by government, but organization itself. It is a subject needing much deeper treatment than can be given to it here as well as much more thorough analysis. Much of the trouble in these times can be ascribed to our failure to limit organizations and assign responsibilities clearly within them. We have tended to venerate organizations and to suppose that any ills arising from them can be attributed to abuses of them. Or again, we seek to counter organization with other organizations, and the effect is often enough that the individual tends to get crushed by contending organizations. Hence, at least a sketchy understanding of organizations is to our purpose here.
One Man in Charge
It is in the nature of the organization that there should be one person at the head of it. Attempts to have several people with coequal authority at the head do not work out well. Such an arrangement sets the stage for a struggle in which one person finally emerges as the recognizable head. The most dramatic illustration of this principle has been what has happened in the Soviet Politbureau when the Premier, or whatever office the head might hold, died. There would be solemn declarations that henceforth the Politbureau would operate on the principle of collective responsibility. A struggle has ensued each time, and at the end one man has emerged as the leader. This is generally the pattern for every organization whatever its size, though the struggles may not be so dramatic or have such far reaching consequences.
Every organization of any considerable size is hierarchical. That is, there is some sort of chain of command, or whatever it may be called, through which the determinations made at the top are passed down through the ranks. The hierarchy may be rigid and clearly visible to everyone, as in a military table of organization, or it may be much more subtle and informal. Indeed, some heads of organizations are so determined to hold all power that they never allow any dispersions of it to become clearly settled anywhere else. This is one of the hallmarks of an arbitrary and despotic organization. Be that as it may, all sizeable organizations have some sort of hierarchy.
Whatever its purpose, any organization has one other characteristic that it is essential to grasp. The organization is a device for exercising control through or over those within it. This control has a confining impact on individuals. By directing and controlling individuals, organizations tend to restrict the independence of the individual and take away from him the management of his affairs in those areas to which the organization extends. To put it another way, an organization tends to confine the acts of the individual within limits set by those at the top, and what gets done tends to be limited to the vision of a single man.
The Family and Government
All societies have had some form of organization. Indeed, two organizations are essential to human society: the family and government, the family as a means at least of nurturing the young and probably caring for the old, and government for keeping the peace and protecting from aggression. Family and government are probably the models for all other organizations. Complex societies have often had a considerable variety of organizations: armies, religious organizations, trade guilds, industrial enterprises, and so on. In looking back on them, we usually see readily how they limited, restrained, and confined the individuals within them. For example, it is easy for us moderns to perceive the confining character of the Medieval manor, the guild, the monastery, and other such organizations. Indeed, the authority of the Medieval Catholic Church seems to most of us to have entailed great restrictions on the liberty of the populace in general.
It is most unlikely, however, that the generality of men at that time viewed the matter in that light. Ordinarily, the organizations within which they lived and labored were a part of the parameters of life; one might as well complain of floods or droughts as of the manor, the guild, or the church. Undoubtedly, man complained of the hardness of particular overlords or the limitations of some particular restriction—especially if it were new—, as they are ever given to doing; but the general framework was accepted as a thing established of God and its doings hardly distinguishable from acts of God. It is only when arrangements have been unsettled as by some catastrophe, such as the Black Death which swept Europe in the fourteenth century, or the confrontation with other cultures, such as happened following the discovery of America, or the decay of some vital institution, such as that of the Catholic Church in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that men are apt to resent and resist the confinements generally.
Transforming Man
A specter has been haunting Western Civilization since the time of the French Revolution. It is the specter of the transformation of man. The catastrophe entailed was forestalled following the French Revolution, but the residue left from that and other efforts has been gaining ground since the late nineteenth century and has now spread to the whole world. It is here referred to as the idea that has the world in its grip. The idea gains control in part by taking over organizations and using them to ends implicit in the idea.
The revolutionary ardor of those under the sway of the idea is usually expressed as an assault upon our received organizations generally. (For example, some nineteenth century socialists were so antigovernment in their animus that they became anarchists.) This continually misleads us, and perhaps them, as to what they are about. Once those under the sway of the idea are in power we may learn, however, that their object was not to destroy organization, as such, but to use it to extend control over the individual, to sap his independence, and take from him the management of his affairs. True, revolutionaries sometimes crush particular organizations, but that is only as prelude to replacing them with others more effective for their purposes.
It is as appendages of organizations that contemporary man is most vulnerable to the thrust of gradualist socialism. It is by way of his dependence on organization—for his job, for his education, for his pension, for his sustenance—that the individual is drawn into the maw of the state. Economic independence underlies all independence. “For economic independence,” as C. S. Lewis said, “allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that’s the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone’s schoolmaster and employer?”2 Since the thrust of gradualist socialism may not be toward the state’s becoming everyone’s employer, it might be better to modify it to say when the state controls everyone’s employer. Communism, of course, makes everyone under its power into an appendage of its organizations.
Platform for Collectivism
What I am getting at is this: It is the prevalence of organizations in modern life that set the stage for the triumph of collectivism. It is the modern dependence upon and veneration of organization that has paved the way for the fastening of the grip of the state upon us. It is the very control over the individual that is characteristic of organization that socialists use to build upon. This control is a disadvantage in all organization, even as it may be the means to strength of the organization, and it is the primary reason for the economic failure of socialism. Let us look at the impact of this control more closely.
There is a usually unstated premise which undergirds the belief in organization. It has sometimes been phrased this way and, if memory serves, Marx so phrased it: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. (This is a variation on the mathematical axiom that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts.) There is a sense in which this is true when an organization or collective is considered as a whole and men are considered to be parts.
An organization is much more effective in intimidating, coercing, restraining, and exerting force than are the same number of individuals in their separate capacities. A small army can conquer a large populace which has no organized military force. Indeed, a few bandits, under the control of a leader and prepared to use force, can intimidate and terrorize a community. Massed pickets of a labor union can stop production in a whole industry. The principle which underlies the effectiveness of organization can be stated bluntly this way: An organizational whole is greater than the sum of its parts in its destructive potential.
The principle has a most important corollary. It is this: An organizational whole is less than the sum of its parts in its constructive potential. It is the belief to the contrary that undergirds collectivism. The idea that has the world in its grip holds that if all efforts could be concerted the results would be of a magnitude incomparably greater than would those of individuals acting independently from one another. But the very attempt to concert all efforts by organization runs athwart the above principle.
The Failure of Socialism
The validity of the principle—that the organizational whole is less than the sum of its individual human parts in constructive potential—has been dramatically illustrated in the Soviet Union. Virtually all of the land in the Soviet Union is in the hands of the state and the work force is organized either in large state or collective farms. But the farming people have been allowed from time to time to have small plots from which they as individuals or families are permitted to keep and sell the produce. The difference between the produce from these tiny plots and the giant farms was summarized this way by Eugene Lyons:
According to the government’s own figures . . . , private plots with a mere 3 per cent of the nation’s sown acreage accounted for 30 per cent of the gross harvest, other than grains; 40 per cent of all cattle-breeding, 60 per cent of the country’s potato crops, 40 per cent of all vegetables and milk, 68 per cent of all meat products. Their fruit yields . . . are double those of state orchards for equivalent areas, its potato harvest per hectare two-thirds higher than on collective farms. Even in grain, which is a very minor element in the private sector, it produces one-third more per sown unit than an average socialized farm.3
The reason for these dramatic differences can be readily explained. When an individual is working on his own plot, managing his own affairs, and receiving the fruits of his labor, the effort can engage the full potential of the individual. It engages his intelligence, his ingenuity, his knowledge, his skills, and his watchful attention. (Watchful attention is often decisive in farming; tending and harvesting at the right time can make a great deal of difference.)
Limiting Human Initiative
We see from this example, too, the reason for the validity of the principle. Organizations are unable to muster the full constructive effort of the individuals within them. Any organization tends to subject the individuals who are to do the constructive work to the determination of those higher up in the hierarchy, and ultimately to a single man. By so doing, it tends to limit the extent to which the individual can and will put his whole attention to it and apply all his capabilities.
The principle, then, has the look of being universal, of applying to every sort of organization, governmental and private, and I believe it is. That is, an organization will get less constructive results from a given number of individuals than those individuals could produce if they were managing their own affairs and assuming full responsibility for them. We know from experience, of course, that such universals require for their validity the universal qualifier—all other things being equal—as well. That is, a given number of individuals acting on their own could produce more than the same number organized, if there are no supervening factors. The critical supervening factor in the modern world has been the widespread and ever more extensive use of capital, i.e., tools, equipment, technology, and supporting materials. With capital, the principle is modified to read: A given number of individuals with capital in an organization can produce more than the same number without capital acting on their own.
The Will to Do
The operative word, however, is can, not will. This qualification moves us back nearer the principle from which capital tends to pull us. The farm workers on a Soviet state farm often have a great deal of equipment—tractors, gangplows, harvesters, and so forth—for use on the state lands which is not available on their own small plots. The disparity in production has to be accounted for in other terms than those of capital.
Whether organized workers with capital will produce more than those acting on their own without capital depends on the extent of the control over them and the incentives they have to produce. The tighter the control over them the less opportunity there is for individuals to exercise their constructive potential. The more remote the workman is from ownership of capital or receipt of the fruits of his labor the less incentive he has to produce. The greater the force exerted the less are the constructive returns. To turn it around, well paid workers who have freely chosen their employ and have leeway in going about their work along with being held individually responsible for what they produce may come close to realizing their constructive potential within an organization.
Even so, if the principle is correct, organization introduces a drag on the constructive potential of individuals. Large doses of capital may compensate for or hide it. Where complex operations are involved, many of the disadvantages of organization may be offset by combining the efforts of individuals with diverse skills and specialties in uniquely productive ways. This is a way of saying that capital and specialization can temporarily compensate for the drag of organization. The organizational drag remains, however, and in a never ending effort to overcome it we are pressed toward ever greater capitalization and specialization.
Bureaucratic Drag
We castigate one of the aspects of organizational drag as bureaucracy. Unionization adds the drag of an organization to organizational drag. Governmental privileges, subsidies, preferences for capital, recognition and aid to organizations, and use of power to facilitate the operation of organizations tend to help overcome organizational drag. Governmental control and regulation tend to add to the organizational drag.
In a free market, there would no doubt be organizations. They would come into being where complexity of getting the job done tended to favor organization. But they would be open to continual challenges by individuals and partnerships who would have the natural advantage of engaging their whole beings in the effort. This would tend to press organizations always in the direction of giving more leeway to their employees in the performance of their work and placing more responsibilities on them. Indeed, organizations would be pressed in the direction of renting out or selling their equipment and contracting the tasks on a piece work or project work basis. The market tends to reward constructive effort and penalize destructive effort; thus it presses always in the direction of individual ownership, control, and responsibility.
What has all this to do with the idea that has the world in its grip? It lays the groundwork for understanding how the individual is held in the grip and subdued, what the impact of governmental control is, and points the way toward restoring the independence of the individual. The most direct relevance is this. Business used organization to integrate manufacturing and distribution of goods. By so doing, it provided the basic idea with which socialists have been enamored since the late nineteenth century, namely, of concerting all effort through organization and ultimately by the use of the force of government. The factory system provided the model of economic organization for socialism. To see how this happened, it will be helpful to review a little the history of the rise and character of that system.
The Factory System
The factory system had forerunners in mines and mills, but it took definite and distinct form in the textile industry in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From there, it spread to other countries. The crucial thing that happened was the concentration of production in central locations, in factories. Theretofore, most textile manufacturing had gone on in homes, and if it was done for sale, it was often handled in what was called the “putting out” system. “Factors” put out raw materials to workers in their homes, and the yarn or other products were then picked up and paid for from time to time. The workers were what we would call self-employed, providing their own simple equipment and housing (capital), doing the work themselves, and being paid by the quantity they produced. A critical change occurred when production was moved into factories.
Why production was moved into factories is not difficult to explain. There were several inventions—the spinning jenny, the “mule,” and an assortment of other machines—which made it possible for a given worker to produce much more in a given span of time. Much of this equipment not only required a greater outlay of capital than had earlier devices but also it could be much more effectively utilized with greater energy than humans could exert. Falling water provided the power for early textile factories, and it was the quest for this power that induced entrepreneurs to concentrate manufacturing (a word which originally meant hand-made) in factories.
The factory system was a mixed blessing, if blessing it was. There is no question but that a great increase in production took place with this innovation. Goods poured forth from it in such quantity that people from every walk of life were able to have more and better clothes. Financially, too, the factory system was a great success; it was the foundation of increasing prosperity in England, and before long in other lands of the West.
The Dark Side
There was, however, a nether side to this development. It was in the character of work life in the textile factories. Much has been written about the harshness of conditions in these early factories, of small children chained to machines working from dawn to dusk, of pallid and pinched faces rarely touched by the sun, of girls for whom the flower of youth was nipped in the bud by unremitting toil, of bodies warped and bent to the shapes required for tending the machines.
Whatever of exaggeration there may be in particular accounts, the picture that generally emerges must be substantially accurate. The making of yarn and cloth had traditionally been work mainly for women and children. The nimble fingers of children were right for the tasks, and the attendance to detail and patience most highly developed in women was an asset. The employment of children, and particularly girls, made the factory system especially unpleasant for later generations to accept.
What I would focus on in the context of this work, however, was the loss of independence and the management of one’s own work affairs in the factory system. Work in these factories entailed some of the worst features of organization. The factory owners or managers prescribed the time for workers to come to work, how long they would work, what tasks they were to perform, and how the work was to be done. In the early stages of the factory system, control was often not restricted to the work life; it was extended over the whole life of the workers. Villages were built around the factories, and workers might be required to live in and pay rent upon the houses so provided. These villages often had a company store in which the scrip in which they could be paid might be spent. Often enough there were company police, augmented by spies who kept the managers informed about the behavior of the workers.
A Counter-Movement
In significant ways, the factory system ran counter to the great liberating movement which had been going on in England and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere. In agriculture, great headway was being made in separating ownership of property from control over people. Serfdom, which tied the peasant to the soil and made service to the owner obligatory, had been abolished. Before long, indeed, serfdom and slavery would be abolished in all lands where Western and Christian influence was strong. New arrangements had been devised for farming land which left the tenant increasingly on his own to manage his own work affairs; the only thing he owed the landlord was a portion of the product.
Even so, the factory system was in many ways the product of a particular historical setting. The initial inventions for textile manufacturing were made at a time when falling water was the only considerable non-animal power system available. Thus, places for housing the machines had to be built adjacent to the water supply and the machines had to be concentrated near the master wheel. Also, the principle of separating the ownership of property from control over people was incompletely realized. Servants and farm workers were hired for wages. Indentured servitude was still common. It was a widespread practice for fathers to hire out their children or sell them into indentured servitude. Given the attitudes of the time about the subordination of women and children to men, it would have been odd if the factory masters had done other than assert control over them.
Be that as it may, the great productivity of the factory system should be attributed primarily to the use of machines and power from falling water or, in time, steam engines (i.e., to capital). It is doubtful that the increase in productivity should be attributed either to the greater industriousness of workers or to an organization which regimented and controlled the workers. Any organizational drag, however, was much more than offset by the advantage of using large machines harnessed to a non-animal power source.
The Use of Machines
The crucial role of capital can be demonstrated by a simple machine such as the early cotton gin. Eli Whitney’s gin turned by one man could separate as much lint from the seed as could twenty-five men working with their hands. To put it another way, the most skilled and industrious person could get, say, three pounds of lint in a day. Whereas, an equally industrious person could get seventy-five pounds, say, by using a machine. The machine, in this case, would be the only difference. The principle remains basically the same for all constructive effort, though complexities cause difficulties both in perceiving and applying it.
The factory system provoked the concern and wrath of many men. Indeed, the history of the nineteenth century is laced with uprisings, revolts, strikes, movements, ideologies, and what not, aimed at doing something about it. The Luddites went about it in the most direct way. They proposed to solve the whole problem by breaking up the machines, probably the most irrational of a whole host of largely irrational reactions. Some of the early socialists, too, tended to blame the machines. Robert Dale Owen, himself a factory owner, wanted to dispense with all sorts of mechanical devices. But it was Karl Marx whose analyses and prophecies gave the turn to socialism that became central to the idea that has the world in its grip.
Marxian Misinterpretation
By a grotesque distortion of classical economics, Marx arrived at the conclusion that the industrial worker was being cheated out of his rightful share—virtually all of it—of production. His labor theory of value tacitly attributed virtually the whole of productivity to industrial workers. Capital, which was the primary source of increased production in the factory system, was downgraded to the point that it was an insignificant factor in production.
Marx did not attack organization, as such, fundamentally, and the matter of control over the worker was only secondary. This is not surprising. He, along with other socialists, was no doubt precommitted to seeing the problem as being private ownership and the solution as collective control. The factory system, as such, was not rejected; instead, Marx saw it as the means to a bright and glorious future. Once the workers had seized the factories and were running them, all the problems of the world would be solved. As a result of the seductiveness of his ideas and the faulty reasoning they incorporate, much of the world is now confined in a system that institutionalizes the worst features of the early factory system.
The State as the Factory
Communism is the nineteenth-century factory system writ large. It is the factory taken over by the state and government bureaucrats substituted for owners and managers. It is the mill village confiscated by the state and housing become a prerogative of those who serve and please the government. It is the company store become a state store and the state’s scrip substituted for company scrip. It is the fence that once surrounded the factory now expanded to surround the whole state to keep the inhabitants in. It is the organizational control of the workers universalized with no alternative employers or way out. It is the company spies and police now the instruments of a totalitarian state with the force of government at their disposal. It is the carrying out to its ultimate conclusion of the notion that man’s prosperity can be achieved by integrating him into the organization using him as a cog in a giant wheel.
All this was implicit in Marxism but concealed by his proclaimed opposition to capitalism and his concern for the worker. What he really opposed was individual ownership, and what he really proposed was using the force of the collective to control the worker. In the hands of Lenin and Stalin, collective control became government control.
The Handles for Control
Organizations provide the handles which evolutionary socialist governments use to control and victimize the individual. They take away from him, by these, the independence of the individual and control over his affairs. Earlier, gradualists had a great deal of animosity toward privately owned organizations, but that appears to have diminished as government control has proceeded. Gradualists do not create new organizations, as a rule, as communists do; they rather focus upon controlling those already in existence, and, through them, individuals. Organizations provide convenient handles, such as for collecting taxes, for example, or for imposing rules.
The socialist bias in favor of organizations and against individual independence is often concealed by a rhetoric of opposition to business as well as by sporadic actual assaults on business organization, as in anti-trust action. But a closer examination divulges the information that the preponderance of organizations in our lives can be ascribed to government intervention. The government support of organization may be as simple as the Internal Revenue Service rule that only contributions to organizations may be deducted as gifts, never those to individuals; however worthy the cause. But the truly massive support of organizations vis-a-vis individuals is found in government intervention generally.
Government Intervenes
Organizational drag favors individuals and partnerships rather than organizations over any span of time. This drag can be offset or temporarily overcome by new infusions of capital and by specialization (expertise, techniques, and so forth). New infusions of capital are provided, in considerable measure, by government fueled inflation. Specialists are trained and provided largely by government-supported educational institutions. There are a host of other ways by which government intervenes to enable organizations to expand and grow, for otherwise they decline and die because of organizational drag. But perhaps enough has been said to suggest how government has acted to bring more and more people under the sway of organizations. In addition to what all this may suggest, government empowers labor union organizations, and governmental organizations themselves grow apace.
The idea that has the world in its grip would concert all human action. The thrust to do this is experienced as loss of independence by the individual in the management of his affairs. Organization is one of the main means by which this is accomplished. The reduction of the individual to a number is the other, and we must now turn to that.
Next: 31. The Subjugation of the Individual.
—FOOTNOTES
‘John Fowles, Daniel Martin (New York: New American Library, 1978), p. 336. This is spoken by a character in a novel and does not necessarily indicate the opinion of the author.
2C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock, Walter Hooper, ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich., William B. Eerdmans, 1970), p. 314.
3Eugene Lyons, Workers’ Paradise Lost (New York: Twin Circle Publishing Co., 1967), p. 217.
***
Organizational Demands
In the field of politics, the dispossessed dream of a social order which shall be based on righteousness, a system in which men will not exploit their fellow men, in which each shall contribute according to his capacity and each shall receive according to his need. Upon this conception a political party is built. It gives battle, over the years, to the existing order of things. . . .
In the course of time the party achieves power. By this time it is led no longer by starry-eyed idealists, but by extremely tough guys—who then proceed to use their newly acquired power to establish a stronger despotism than the one they overthrew, and to sew up all the holes in it that they themselves discovered in the old. What emerges is not freedom and social justice, but a more comprehensive and totalitarian control, used to maintain a new privileged class, which, because of the earlier experience of its members, is still more ruthless than the old.
–W. J. BROWN, “Imprisoned Ideas”
