Winston Churchill was an outspoken opponent of Russian Communism from the beginning, not only because he saw it as a threat to the British Empire, although that was true, but because he perceived that its principles were inimical to healthy human society. In 1920, for example, he wrote an article for the Illustrated Sunday Herald in which he described Communism as “a pestilence more destructive of life than the Black Death or the Spotted Typhus.”[1] But Churchill also new that the poisonous effects of communist doctrine were not confined to the Russian Bolsheviks. He clearly held that Russian Communism and British Socialism were the same in principle, the latter not reaching the dimensions of the former mainly due to lack of time and opportunity, but both “fatal to the welfare of living nations.”[2]

Churchill lamented the drift toward Socialism in Britain the 1920s: “But we have seen with melancholy feelings how year after year a larger number of our own fellow-countrymen have allowed themselves to drift into an easy acceptance of Socialist doctrines and let themselves be regimented under foreign-made standards of Communist collectivism.” The relative mildness of British socialism in the past, Churchill warned, was imposed upon it by political obstacles: “They knew that at any moment, if they over-stepped the strict limits of ordinary government and administration, and if they tried any Socialist legislation or finance, or if they threatened to tamper with the Constitution or with the military forces or with the police, they would be turned out at a moment’s notice.” But, should they come into real political power, their principles would drive them to the creation of a Socialist State with all the trappings.

Churchill opposed Socialism, first, because such programs simply do not work: “Show me the parts of the country which at the present time are in the deepest depression, show me the industries which are most laggard, and at the same time you will be showing me the parts where these withering doctrines have won their greatest measure of acceptance.”[3] This, of course, is the kind of pre-election claim one would expect from an ordinary politician: the policies of my opponents are economically dangerous. But Churchill opposed collectivist doctrines on deeper grounds than these. He understood that Communism and Socialism contain certain claims about human nature: that it can be altered or overcome. Churchill knew that these claims are false because they are built on a faulty understanding of humanity:

It is not possible to draw a hard-and-fast line between individualism and collectivism. You cannot draw it either in theory or practice. That is where the Socialist makes a mistake. Let us not imitate that mistake. No man can be a collectivist alone or an individualist alone. He must be both an individualist and a collectivist. The nature of man is a dual nature. The character of the organisation of human society is dual. Man is at once a unique being and a gregarious animal. For some purposes he must be a collectivist, for others he is, and will for all time remain, an individualist.[4]

Collectively, man arranges for a government, and army and navy, civil services, and so forth. But society cannot favor one side of human nature to the exclusion of the other; political activity must take into account the whole or be led into absurdities. The absurdities become readily apparent when one remembers the body, the human needs and experiences which cannot be shared. Churchill lays special emphasis on the body and on eros as obstacles to collectivism: “But we do not make love collectively, and the ladies do not marry us collectively, and we do not eat collectively, and we do not die collectively, and it is not collectively that we face the sorrows and the hopes, the winnings and the losings of this world of accident and storm.”[5] Some things cannot be shared. Parents will not be perfectly content to surrender their children to the state; no reasonable person would expect their own fortunes to be of equal interest to a perfect stranger. To the eyes of common sense, such arrangements seem a colossal joke. But if it were a jest, it would be too grim for laughter; it would quickly evolve from comedy into tragedy.

 Love and affection cannot exist under such conditions, but their destruction is precisely the aim of collectivism. Affection for one’s own is to be stamped out so that, as Marx described, man may be wholly absorbed into society. Churchill describes the kind of society that will result when all the bonds of human affection have been subordinated to the State: “Real friendship becomes impossible when every man and woman you meet may be a spy. Even within the doors of your own home it may be unsafe to speak your mind. Your own child may betray you and the unnatural act be acclaimed and rewarded as a public service.”[6]

The facts of human nature will not perish willingly or easily, however, and insofar as they will not, they are the enemies of any scheme of collectivism, which must subordinate all private concerns to devotion to the state.  The problematic characteristics of human nature must be removed, and that requires that extreme measures be employed. Collectivist schemes demand a very high degree of control over those who live under them. Churchill warned that, if Socialism were whole-heartedly implemented, British citizens would soon feel its weight upon them: “Socialism is, in its essence, an attack not only upon British enterprise, but on the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy, tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils.” Churchill saw where the naive Socialism of Britain was leading, that it was ultimately and necessarily hostile to freedom and liberty:

My friends, I must tell you that a Socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom. Although it is now put forward by people who have a good grounding in the Liberalism and Radicalism of the early part of this century, there can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. It is not alone that property in all its forms, is struck at, but that liberty, in all its forms, is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism.[7]

The conception of liberty as the right of the individual to basically do as he chooses (within limits) according to his own lights is repudiated by collectivism. But individual freedom and liberty were, for Churchill, the essence of Britain. Thus, Churchill warned that collectivism in Britain was, and admitted itself to be, “the foe of the whole existing system of society.” [8]

[1]  Quoted in Robin Edmonds, “Churchill and Stalin” in Robert Blake and Wm. Roger Louis, eds. Churchill: A Major New Assessment of His Life in Peace and War (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993), 311.

[2]  See “Party Politics Again,” in Robert Rhodes James, ed. Winston Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963. 8 vols. (London: Chelsea House Publishers, 1974), VII 7170.

[3]  “Socialism” February 12, 1929, in Complete Speeches, V 4551-4552.

[4] Winston S. Churchill, Liberalism and the Social Problem (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1973; reprint, 1909 edition), 79-80.

[5]Ibid.

[6]  Winston S. Churchill, “Open Letter to a Communist,” in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, ed. Michael Wolff, vol. II, Churchill and Politics (Library of Imperial History), 357-358.

[7]  “Party Politics Again,” in Complete Speeches, VII, 7171-2.

[8]  “Socialism,” 4555.