“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” - winston churchill, 1945
this is of course a false dichotomy, as churchill was prone to present. he saw the world in black and white; he had no concept of dialectics. but, he was accurately describing the type of authoritarian collectivism that existed, at that time, in both the soviet union and nazi germany, which were two different sides of the same coin. and, while i might reject this definition of socialism, he was accurately describing what he saw before him.
a more accurate statement would have been as follows:
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of collectivism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
socialism (and especially it's anarchist variant) is, in fact, the way to synthesize these two ideas. no serious marxist, socialist or anarchist would ever put the collective over the individual; the point is that we best achieve individual rights by working together, in unison - not that we should enforce tyrannical laws to protect the few at the expense of the many. nothing could be less socialist than that.
a quote by the alpha-anarchist bakunin (marx' chief opponent, who warned that marxism would create unimagined levels of human misery, and was thrown out of the international for it) is perhaps relevant:
"we are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality"
i can't find the exact quote i want, and would direct you to this excerpt from a chomsky text:
the point i'm making is that we're falling into the kind of collectivism that churchill and bakunin both criticized, from opposite points on the spectrum; they both saw how much of an infringement this kind of thing is on human liberty, and both equated it to suffering, slavery and widespread misery.
this is not socialism, this is fascism; as it was in russia, and as it is in china. socialism needs individual liberty to be at the forefront of the discourse, or it quite easily collapses into this sort of fascism. and, we must never forget that the purpose of socialism must be to maximize individual liberty, or we've merely lost the plot and fallen back into backwardsness.
we need to stop romanticizing the equal sharing of misery, and get back to seeking an equal sharing of blessings - and that is stated because i am a leftist, and not in spite of it.