Give me Liberty

[joeb]

This thread is about a book written by Rose Lane Wilder.  She was a communist(read socialist for we know Marx and Engels were socialists and she was a Marxist) as a young woman for she bought into the deceptive argument that the collectivist movement was the 3rd leg of the fight for liberty.  Her disillusionment with the movement came from her time spent in the eastern European area known as Georgia in the early 1900's.

I'm going to post the intro to the book and part of the first chapter to give you an idea of what she has to say.  I think it's an important read for anyone who wants to really understand the socialist/collectivist movement for it exposes its weaknesses thoroughly.

Here's a link to a free copy of the book.  You can get it in pdf or epub format.     https://mises.org/library/give-me-liberty-0

Here's a link to her page on wikipedia.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Wilder_Lane

Notice in her first paragraph her description of life in the US under Woodrow Wilson.  He is a hero of the American political left.  It truly makes me scratch my head how anyone could have a positive view of the man.  He was in essence a dictator who had secret police out listening to people talk and then arresting them for any speech he did not like.

In GIVE ME LIBERTY, Rose Wilder Lane has expanded her sensational Saturday
Evening Post leading article, ”Credo." This was the first candid, personal
account of the changing of an American’s mind, from an uncritical acceptance of
socialist-communistiNew-Deal philosophy to an understanding of American values.

To the many Americans who are still confused, and to all young Americans, Mrs.
Lane’s experience is fascinating and profoundly helpful. She describes vividly
her friendliness with Communists in New York, her enlightening encounters with
socialist bureaucracies in Europe, and her observations and discussions with
simple villagers and primitive communists in Russia during the early years of
the Soviet regime. One finds laughter, surprise, excitement, and shock in this
personal story. It will grip and hold any reader’s interest.

As one reads on, the deeper meaning emerges. The conflict between the Old World’s
ancient and now reactionary collectivism and America’s new and unique
individualism becomes clear. Mrs. Lane and her readers come to understand the
rarity and the supremely precious values of the personal freedom which only
Americans have ever known, the freedom which we have foolishly taken for
granted, and which we could lose.

                          GIVE ME LIBERTY
                          
IN 1919 I was a communist. My Bolshevik friends of those days are scattered now;
some are bourgeois, some are dead, some are in China and Russia, and I did not
know the last American chiefs of the Third International, who now officially
embrace Democracy. They would repudiate me even as a renegade comrade, for I was
never a member of The Party. But it was merely an accident that I was not.

In those days immediately after the first world war it was not prudent to
advocate fundamental changes in America. The cry was, ”If you don’t like this
country, go back where you came from!" I had friends, patriotic Americans from
American families as old as my own, who had been tried and sentenced
to twenty years’ imprisonment for editing a magazine friendly to the Russian
experiment. Ships lay with steam up and papers cleared, ready to whisk from
these shores, without legal process or any opportunity for defense, groups of
suspected radicals rounded up by agents of the Department of Justice. Policemen
were breaking down unlocked doors, smashing innocent furniture and, with
surprising lack of discrimination, beating up Russians who had fled from
communism because they didn’t like it.

Amid all this hysteria and in quite real danger, Jack Reed was organizing the
Communist Party in America.

I forget the precise locale of that historic scene, but I was there. Somewhere
in the slums of New York, a dirty stairway went up from the filthy sidewalk.
Haggard urchins at the door offered communist publications for sale. The usual
gaunt women were asking for help for someone’s legal defense. ”A dime, comrade?
A nickel? Every penny counts now."

We went up through the sluggish jostling on the stairs to the usual dingy room
with the rented chairs, the slightly crooked posters on smudged walls, the smell
of poverty and the hungry, lighted faces.

All those meetings were the same, that winter. Their light seemed to come, not
from the grudging bulbs that dangled from the ceiling, but from the faces. Our
police were shouting that communists were foreigners, and it was true that most
of the faces were foreign, and many of the voices. But these people had a vision
that seemed to me the American dream. They had followed it to America and they
were still following it; a dream of a new world of freedom, justice and
equality.

They had escaped from oppression in Europe, to exist in New York’s slums, to
work endless hours in sweat shops and wearily study English at night. They were
hungry and exhausted and exploited by their own people in this strange land, and
to their dream of a better world which they did not hope to live long enough to
see, they gave the dimes they needed for food.

I remember the room as a small room, with perhaps sixty men and women in it.
There was an almost unbearable sense of expectancy, and a sense of danger. The
meeting had not begun. A few men gathered around Jack Reed were talking
earnestly, urgently. He caught sight of the man with me, and his tenseness broke
into Jack Reed’s smile, more joyous than a shout. He broke loose from the
others, reached us in half a dozen strides and exclaimed, ”Are you with us!"

”Are you?" he repeated, expectant. But the question itself was a challenge. This
was a risky enterprise. ]ack Reed, as every communist knows, did not leave his
own country later; he escaped from it. Federal agents, raiding police, might
break in upon us at that moment. We knew this, and because I shared the
communist dream I was prepared to take risks and also to submit to the rigorous
party discipline. But the man beside me began a vague discussion of tactics;
evaded; hesitated; questioned and demurred; finally, with a disarming smile,
doubted whether he should risk committing himself, his safety was to valuable to
The Cause. Jack Reed turned on his heel, saying, ”Oh, go to hell, you damn
coward.”

This brief scene had shown me my complete unimportance at the moment; I
represented no group, carried no weight in that complex of theorists and of
leaders. I was merely an individual, just then
heartily in sympathy with Jack Reed’s words, and dazed by a miserable cold. I
went home. The cold proved to be influenza; I nearly died, expenses overwhelmed
me, I had to make my living, and before my health recovered I was in Europe.

By so narrow a margin I was not a member of the Communist Party. Nevertheless, I
was at heart a communist.

Many regard the collectivist State, as I did, as an extension of democracy In
this view, the picture is one of progressive steps to freedom. The first step was
the Reformation; that won freedom of conscience. The second was the political
revolution; our American Revolution against an English king was part of that.
This second step won for all western peoples varying degrees of political
freedom. Liberals have continued to increase that freedom by giving increasing
political power to The People. In the United States, for example, Liberals
gained equal suffrage, popular election of nearly all public officials, ini-
tiative, referendum, recall, and the primaries.

But now, we confront economic tyranny. Stated in its simplest terms, no man is
free whose very livelihood can be denied him, at another man’s will. The worker
is a wage-slave. The final revolution, then, must capture economic control.

I now see a dominant fallacy in that picture, and I shall point it out. But let
it pass for the moment. There is another picture. This:

Since the progress of science and invention enables us to produce more goods
than we can consume, no one should lack any material thing. Yet we see on the
one hand, great wealth in the hands of a few who, owning and controlling all
means of production, own all the goods produced; on the other hand, we see
multitudes always relatively poor, lacking goods they could enjoy.

Who owns this great wealth? The Capitalist. What creates wealth? Labor. How does
the Capitalist get it? He collects a profit on all goods produced. Does the
Capitalist produce anything? No; Labor produces everything. Then, if all working
men, organized in trade-unions, compelled all Capitalists to pay in wages the
full value of their labor, they could buy all the goods produced? No, because
the Capitalist adds his profit to the goods before he sells them.

From this point of view, it is clear that the Profit System causes the injustice,
the inequality, we see. We must eliminate profit; that is to say, we must
eliminate the Capitalist. We will take his current profits, distribute his
accumulated wealth, and ourselves administer his former affairs. The workers who
produce the goods will then enjoy the goods, there will no longer be any
economic inequality, and we shall have such general prosperity as the world has
never known.

When the Capitalist is gone, who will manage production? The State. And what is
The State? The State will be the mass of the toiling workers.

It was at this point that the first doubt pierced my Communist faith.