John Pilger

Two aspects of socialism contribute to the frequency with which a socialist order — or an attempt at a socialist order — so often swiftly becomes Hellish. 

First, socialism claims the means of production as communally owned, and that claim implies that labor is owned by the community. Which proposition means that that the capacity for labor belongs not simply to the individual in whom it is realized, but to the community as a whole. Very simply put, socialism is an economic order of slavery. Seldom do socialist look directly at this point; still less seldom do they acknowledge it. They imagine a slavery that, after economic development, is comfortable, even elevating; but, having opened the door to slavery of an idealized sort, they open the door to slavery of a very dire sort. 

Second, those socialist who do not simply engage in a fantasy in which good will somehow produces a flood of goods and of services imagine economics as great problem of technical efficiency. Socialists of the first sort, offering only hand-​waving, must quickly give way if they ever even get started. Socialists of the second sort may often begin with humanitarian aspirations, but their visions of economics have no places for aspects of the economic process that are human and essential. In the processes of production, people are imagined by these socialists simply as components like livestock or like machinery rather than as participants acting with their own interests and expectations. Humanity comes too late in the plans of these socialists, or it comes not at all.