Charles Chaplin was a complicated person, formerly accused for being a Communist. (I use “Charles” rather than “Charlie” because this article focuses on the man rather than his movie persona.) These accusations had no merit, but the Wikipedia article on Chaplin echoes some of the charges against him. It claims that “he feared that capitalism and machinery in the workplace would increase unemployment levels” and that this view influenced his film Modern Times. It asserts that his late film Monsieur Verdoux presented views “criticising capitalism and arguing that the world encourages mass killing through wars and weapons of mass destruction.” (Wikipedia articles regularly change, so you might see something different at a future date.)

However, I can’t find any evidence that Chaplin opposed capitalism, the political-economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately owned. It’s been estimated his fortune was about $100 million when he died in 1977. There have been very rich advocates of a state-controlled economy, but usually they aim for power or wealth for themselves through their connections with the system. Chaplin didn’t do that. He seems to have been more of a squishy leftist, the sort who thinks that heavy governmental control over a market economy will make people better off. In spite of trying very hard, the FBI never found any evidence that he belonged to or financially supported the Communist Party. He was prevented from entering the United States in 1952, apparently without legal justification.

I haven’t seen Monsieur Verdoux, but the most-discussed bit in the movie, Verdoux’s statement after being found guilty of murder, presents a view which is anti-war, not anti-capitalist. He says, “As for being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it? Is it not building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing? Has it not blown unsuspecting women and little children to pieces and done it very scientifically? As a mass killer, I’m an amateur by comparison.”

His speech at the conclusion of The Great Dictator expresses some similar views and even ones that lean in a libertarian direction. At the start he says, “I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone.” There are a couple of references to “greed,” but it’s clearly referring to greed for acquisition by brute force, not for profits earned by free production and trade. He says, “Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel!”

The speech includes the unfortunate statement, “We think too much and feel too little.” That’s the opposite of the mechanically saluting, hatred-filled followers of Hitler whom he’s talking about. That line shows the squishiness of his philosophy, but it doesn’t make him an advocate of a command economy. Further on in the speech he refers to the Nazi rulers as “machine men with machine minds and machine hearts,” which certainly isn’t a description of thinkers. He says, “Don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty!” Going even more in a pro-freedom direction, he urges the world “to do away with national barriers.” Chaplin was fiercely opposed to nationalism.

A criticism of The Great Dictator is that it portrays a concentration camp lightly. When the film was released in 1940, it wasn’t known in the West that these camps were brutal extermination centers. He later wrote, “Had I known the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator; I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.” There were already plenty of indications that the Nazis were homicidally insane, but some people didn’t understand till graphic evidence of genocide emerged in 1945.

He was especially squishy about Stalin, refusing to call him a dictator, but he wasn’t an explicit Stalinist like Pete Seeger. He expressed sympathy for the USSR when Germany invaded it in World War II, but he was hardly alone in that. See, for example, the 1944 Warner Brothers cartoon “Russian Rhapsody,” where “Gremlins from the Kremlin” scare Hitler with a Stalin mask.

The film Modern Times and the machine metaphors in the speech suggest he was highly distrustful of mechanization, perhaps in a way similar to J. R. R. Tolkien. That doesn’t make him pro- or anti-capitalist. State-run factories also rely heavily on automation and often treat workers miserably.

Honestly, playing it back just now, though I’d heard it before, I’m amazed at how radically pro-liberty that speech is. Chaplin wasn’t a clear political thinker, but he was no advocate of socialism, communism, or fascism.