In 1977, Santiago Carrillo, then general secretary of the PCE, declared on TVE that “socialism and communism are identical, without any difference”. He pointed out that there are some classic social democratic movements operating in other European countries. Then I read someone – no … I remember who – that the difference between socialism and communism was a matter of time. The experiences and reflections of well-known critics and dissidents of socialism, in its various versions and intensities, which Ayn Rand classified in the matrix of collectivism, are certainly useful in the analysis. The list is long, some reacted in time, others not. Some of the best known are Solzhenitsyn in the USSR, Reinaldo Arenas in Cuba or the Hungarian of British origin Arthur Koestler, of whom we cannot understand why no one has made a Spanish film due to his presence during our civil war, especially in these times of democratic and historical memory. In Germany, we must remember one of the greatest representatives of critical currents, the writer Rudolf Rocker, who published in 1925 a devastating and little-known essay, entitled “The influence of absolutist ideas on socialism”. He did so at a time when various forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism were flourishing and consolidating in Europe, with consequences known to all. It is a short text from a socialist, but libertarian, anti-authoritarian and anti-statist. He almost surgically analyzes the historical tendency of socialism towards authoritarianism, denouncing Marxist, Bolshevik or Lasallian impulses in the different socialist organizations that appeared on the continent. In his work, he reflects, theorizes and shows how modern socialism, in all its extents and mutations, under one acronym or another, has almost unconsciously inherited the worst of monarchical absolutism, Jacobinism and also Napoleonic Caesarism. His analysis and conclusions, I believe, could not be more relevant today.
Indeed, in light of what we observe in many European countries, it is perhaps not an exaggeration to begin to think that so-called democratic socialism, social democracy itself, this intended adaptation to classical liberalism of still collectivist ideas, has been on our continent a kind of intermission. There will be those who deny it and call us hyperbolic, and they will be partly right with the idealized experiences of Central, Northern and British Europe, but we cannot ignore that essential democratic issues such as political pluralism, the separation of powers or freedom of expression, are seriously threatened, even crushed, precisely in these places.
According to Rocker’s reasoning and analysis, this happens because the authoritarian currents of the French post-revolutionary era have always been very present in socialism, and from Europe they have even sprouted to other places with similar results in light of the circumstances, conditions and socio-political moments of the place.
In the fight against liberalism, socialist options have always taken and accepted the ideological weapons of absolutism, that is to say the cult of the strong State, a social programming based on strong ideas as intoxicating as they are irrational, a more or less intense economic collectivism, the contempt for individual freedom, the imposition of equality practically by force, ignoring the madness that these experiments have provoked each time they have been put into practice.
Thus, as in the interwar period, the State continues today to be thought of and considered as the great organizer of society, and this is why the socialist parties, which are practically all of them, consider or have assumed that it is enough to control the State and make it omnipresent, to control everything and even to obtain impunity, thus establishing a new despotism that we can even call democracy. In fact, we have never seen so many despots crying for democracy.
The roadmap or drift is not particularly complicated to identify and understand. It begins by disproportionately strengthening the welfare state, wasting everything possible to expand the dependent social strata, continuing to undermine checks and balances, shamelessly placing like-minded and gregarious people in all decision-making spaces and in all economic and budgetary capacities, simultaneously gobbling up or conditioning the media, bringing ideologization into educational centers and universities, and even ending up manipulating elections if necessary. Because as Hemingway warned us, in this drift comes a moment when governments can no longer maintain themselves by honest means. It is true, and it would not be fair to admit it, that not all theorists of socialism shared this way of exercising power. We have known proposals or traditions, such as those of Godwin or even Proudhon, which are very contrary. These are experiences among which we can even include certain Spanish personalities, defenders of the extension of individual freedom, but the truth is that they are not the ones who triumphed.
In the obsessive struggle against liberalism, as noted, the representatives of triumphant socialism always end up resorting to methods and strategies of absolutism, sometimes consciously, other times without the majority of them noticing it, since they simply consider it justified, useful and necessary. Necessity is a virtue, the end justifies the means, all is well that ends well, and even with Batasuna or ISIS we understand whether it was necessary to fight the historical enemy which is none other than freedom. We cannot forget in the analysis the other great critic and dissident of the authoritarian drift of socialist ideas, the Yugoslav Milovan Djilas, who taught us that authoritarian socialists are like vampires, because they survive the circumstances which saw the birth and failure of their ideas.
Indeed, socialism continually returns to its objectives, continually seeking an ideological rearmament in the margins left to it by the success of the liberal formula of the State and in the opportunities offered by each cataclysm, conflict or change in the economic cycle, now also religious. In addition, they will always have the argument of the extreme right as a reflection of the mirror to attack indiscriminately, even if it looks like a defense, as our Antonio Escohotado denounced. If society does not react and oppose in time, the result of this drift can only be the development of conditions that will destroy coexistence and cause ruin, which should not be excluded, given what we have seen, that it is a relatively easy goal to achieve thanks to the proliferation of illiberal and totalitarian ideas that live today hidden in free societies.
This is not doom and gloom, or maybe it is. But we don’t know very well what happened in Romania and whether it is justified, nor what is happening in Britain or Germany, nor in France. We didn’t know enough about what happened in the United States in recent years and in Italy or Portugal, they have very little idea about current events in Spain, how close we are. Seen in detail and from a historical perspective, I do not know whether, in old Europe, we are working today to improve democratic conditions or to liquidate the model. I believe this confusion is an unmistakable mark of the rise of one form or another of authoritarian socialism.
In short, dissent from socialism, which is nothing other than the direct and frontal rejection of authoritarianism and Caesarism, whoever the protagonist, is urgent today, because it constitutes the most decisive citizen position to protect a free society. Not doing it on time is a historic mistake for which we will all end up paying the price.
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