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Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class
Abstract
Libertarianism needs a theory of class.
This claim may meet with resistance among some libertarians. A few will say: “The analysis of society in terms of classes and class struggles is a specifically Marxist approach, resting on assumptions that libertarians reject. Why should we care about class?” A greater number will say: “We recognize that class theory is important, but libertarianism doesn't need such a theory, because it already has a perfectly good one.”
... The exchange of information taking place through the internet is expected to be uncensored and free but at the same time, it can be offensive and uncivilized. Long (1998) as being a liberal theorist favors Utilitarianism and he was of the view that for the greater well-being of the society such feelings of hurt are necessary as a price for the generation of greater ideas. ...
Purpose of the study: The purpose of the study is to examine the use of cyber hate by the Pakistan's mainstream political parties. The issue of poll rigging in Pakistan's General Elections 2013 is examined through discourse analysis of the related tweets. The study also aims at comprehending the extent to which cyber ethics were violated during the digital electoral campaigns. Methodology: Discourse Analysis of the tweets generated from the official Twitter handles of PTI and PMLN leaders was conducted to examine the use of cyber hate by the Pakistan's mainstream political parties. Violation of cyber ethics was explored through the qualitative interviews of 8 purposively selected social media managers of PMLN, PPP, and PTI. Main Findings: The findings indicated that party leadership/politicians used the elements of cyber hate which included abusive language, provocation, and character assassination against their opponents during the digital electoral campaign in general and regarding the poll rigging issue of Pakistan's General Elections 2013 in specific. Resultantly the tweets using strong adjectives and metaphors on the political opponents were more frequently re-tweeted and attracted more favorites. Applications of this study: The study can be helpful in various cross-disciplinary areas that focus on the examination of the usage and impact of social media and cyberspace as a medium for hate speech dissemination. The study can significantly contribute to areas related to cyber ethics, digital electoral campaigning, freedom of expression, and political opinion building. Novelty/Originality of this study: The study's originality lies in its attempt to unfold the foundations of digital electoral campaigning in Pakistan and how cyberhate was used as a pivotal tool for advancing the political narratives in a fragile democratic society.
... Rothbard's approach to this problem is, in fact, highly dialectical in its comprehension of the historical, political, economic, and social dynamics of class. 193 Logically, therefore, Libertarians who share our class analysis of state capitalism should evaluate each proposal for "free market reform" not only in terms of its intrinsic libertarianism but, in the context of the overall system of power, how it promotes or hinders the class interests that predominate in that system. We must, as Chris Sciabarra put it in his description of Marx's dialectical method, "grasp the nature of a part by viewing it systemically-that is, as an extension of the system within which it is embedded. ...
... 7. For a critique of the "bad" Rand in this regard, see Long 1998. 8. Greenspan (1967) is no slouch when it comes to a defense of gold as monev in the free market context. ...
At first glance, there is good and sufficient reason to criticize any attempt to link Ayn Rand and Austrian economics, such as is attempted in the present collection of essays. After all, the school of thought founded by this novelist and philosopher is non-controversially called "Objectivism," while the Austrian or Praxeological School of economics-epitomized in the works of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard-is well known as the "Subjectivist School." But the polar opposites implied by these appellations are more apparent than real. For while "objectivism" for Rand meant an insistence on objective reality, "subjectivism" for the Austrians has nothing to do with its rejection. Rather, Austrian subjectivism focuses on the claim that consumer tastes are subjective, and that prices reflect this phenomenon.
... Indeed, it is precisely this kind of claim that is at the core of another intellectual movement that is sometimes referred to as 'left‐libertarianism.' What makes this movement 'left' is not its denial of private property rights in external goods, but rather its claim that the consistent recognition of self‐ownership and private property rights is incompatible with much of capitalism as an actually existing and historical phenomenon. See, for an overview, (Chartier, 2009; Long, 1998 Long, , 2010 Rothbard, 1965) volume provide excellent examples. My second task will be to assess the general idea of BI from the perspective of market libertarianism. ...
This article provides a brief overview of the relationship between libertarian political theory and the Basic Income (BI). It distinguishes between different forms of libertarianism and argues that at least one form, classical liberalism, is compatible with and provides some grounds of support for BI. A classical liberal BI, however, is likely to be much smaller than the sort of BI defended by those on the political left. And there are both contingent-empirical and principled-moral reasons for doubting that the classical liberal case for BI will be ultimately successful.
This review of Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government, by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, lauds its virtues, while criticizing its tendencies toward a partial and one-sided understanding of the nature of the revolution it extols. In bracketing out a deeper analysis of the role of business in the creation of modern corporatist political economy and the debilitating effects of war and the national security state on markets at home and abroad, the authors ultimately fail to provide the more robust defense of freedom that Rand’s project implies.
This study will seek to answer the following research question(s): what exactly is “solidarity unionism”, what is its relation with industrial action and whether and to what extent it affects and it is affected by the recent reforms of the right to strike in certain countries; questions that this study considers vital for the future of trade unionism.
The prevailing tendency in mainstream libertarianism is to look at particular proposals for "free market reform" atomistically, based on whether they reduce formal statism, and without regard to their role in the statism of the overall system. But to ascertain whether they constitute a net reduction or increase in statism, we must first examine their function within the greater whole. This means looking at the class nature of the larger system, the identity of the forces controlling it, and whether particular measures-regardless of formal statism-increase or reduce the state-conferred privilege of the ruling class in real terms.
Classical liberalism has only theoretically touched on the question of economic exploitation. On the contrary, libertarianism (right and left) tries to account for this phenomenon from the central concept of negative freedom. Such a theoretical option tends to highlight the asymmetry between free market transactions and the coercion exercised by social groups or by the State, which represents the only possible definition of the concept of exploitation. At the normative level, the libertarian principles of acquisitive justice constitute both the justification for the inequality of property, market exchange and the principle of a critique of exploitation. The article questions the possibility of constructing a concept of exploitation consisting of the concepts of negative freedom and acquisitive justice.
Bu çalışmada sosyal bilimlerin önemli kavramlarından birisi olan “sınıf” kavramı üzerinde durulmaktadır. Önce sınıf kavramının etimolojik ve tarihsel kökenleri incelenmekte ve daha sonra toplumların sınıf yapılarının özellikle feodalizm ve kapitalizm dönemlerinde nasıl dönüştüğü ele alınmaktadır. Çalışmanın asıl amacı Smith ve Marx’ın sınıf kavramına yaklaşımlarının bir mukayesesini yapmaktır.
Looking at today’s political landscape, it can only be concluded that liberalism is embraced and advocated by many political parties, think tanks, and supra-national institutions, as well as many civil movements around the world. It must be that liberalism is a house with many rooms in which the focus is on different aspects while sharing the same fundamental set of beliefs. That in itself is not surprising, as most political trends are characterized by many different underlying drivers that often have emerged over longer periods of time in history and have helped shaping the many different angles from which political theory can be approached. A good illustration is the fact that most Western democracies are called ‘liberal democracies’, although they tend to deviate significantly from each other in terms of their structure and founding principles, as well as ways of effective functioning, thus pointing towards that political diversity. Despite ‘liberal’ democracy having become (albeit with severe criticism) somewhat of a global default model ever since the collapse of the USSR, countries like China have opened up to market economy principles while adhering to their one-party state principle.1
Mainstream analysis of pension privatisation and compulsory fully funded retirement scheme defines these programmes as an extension of classical liberal political philosophy and emphasises consumer sovereignty, intensified competition, and market efficiency. We take issue with this widely shared characterisation of pension reform, highlighting its role in giving preferential treatment to the corporate actors responsible for managing private pensions. Chapter 1 conceptualises the perverse distributive impetus of privatisation, drawing on two traditions. Public choice theory has highlighted the prevalence of political rent-seeking—the pursuit of unearned income streams by lobbying government for market privileges. Simultaneously, the critique of state capitalism emphasises the government role in the protection of corporate interests. Political rent-seeking is illustrated with reference to Chile, the pioneer of compulsory fully funded pensions.
A cosmopolitan account of global justice can provide normative grounding for a variety of anarchism. It is possible to frame a model of global justice featuring peoples with con-strained sovereignty in light of John Tomasi’s suggested Rawlsian defense of “free market fairness” (Part II). But a more radicalized version of Tomasi’s proposal—one in accordance with which the demands of justice would be compatible with, and might even require, some variety of anarchy—can be effectively articulated in dialogue with Andrew Kuper’s somewhat similar suggestion (Part III). A broadly Rawlsian cosmopolitanism can be worked out in anarchic terms (Part IV).
In 1981, Chile's military dictatorship introduced a major reform of the retirement system, replacing a set of long-standing public pension arrangements with a system of privately administered, defined contribution, individual accounts. For a wide spectrum of scholarly opinion, the provisions that were created by this reform represented the institutional embodiment of neoliberalism, emphasizing individualism, competition, and economic efficiency. We reject this characterization of the Chilean pension reform. In particular, this article evaluates Chile's private retirement system against pension design principles that would be suggested by neoliberalism, focusing on concentration in the pension fund management industry. We argue that Chile's experiment in pensions’ “privatization” was deeply conservative, creating a state-organized system of market privilege rent-seeking that was biased in favor of big business. But neither neoliberalism nor conservatism are satisfactory approaches to retirement income protection, and Chileans would be best served by a well-designed social insurance pillar.
A frequent objection to the ‘historical’ (in Nozick’s sense) approach to distributive justice is that it serves to legitimate existing massive inequalities of wealth. It is argued that, on the contrary, the historical approach, thanks to its fit with the market anarchist theory of class conflict, represents a far more effective tool for challenging these inequalities than do relatively end-oriented approaches such as utilitarianism and Rawlsianism.
This book elaborates and defends the idea of law without the state. Animated by a vision of peaceful, voluntary cooperation as a social ideal and building on a careful account of nonaggression, it features a clear explanation of why the state is illegitimate, dangerous, and unnecessary. It proposes an understanding of how law enforcement in a stateless society could be legitimate and what the optimal substance of law without the state might be, suggests ways in which a stateless legal order could foster the growth of a culture of freedom, and situates the project it elaborates in relation to leftist, anticapitalist, and socialist traditions.
One of the major debates within libertarian thought concerns the need for a centralized state structure to sustain the norms governing agents' behaviour in society. Minarchists support state monopolies over the means of coercion to ensure that society abides by these norms, whereas free-market anarchists consider such monopolies damaging and unnecessary, with norms maintained by agents' natural motivations. This article finds that the libertarian ‘pre-political’ principles which free-market anarchists adopt lack objectivity and plausible independence, creating a fundamental tension between the endorsement of a libertarian morality and anarchist commitments to pluralism of legal and political structures. It suggests that libertarians place a core, shared value on individual agency, but that this value can only be universalized through political processes of discussion and agreement, and sustained only in the presence of institutional sanction and coercion mechanisms. This article argues that libertarian commitments to agency require such mechanisms to be welfarist and minimally state-like, and proposes various ways in which the appropriate structures and policies could be realized, stressing the continuity of this novel form of libertarian welfarism with the aims and underlying values of both sides of the libertarian debate.
Pincione argues that procedural constitutional guarantees of market freedoms best protect individuals from domination. If he is right, Philip Pettit's claim that various forms of state interference with private markets are needed to forestall domination will prove to be unwarranted. Pincione further contends that market freedoms are best protected by procedural rules for political decision-making, as opposed to constitutional guarantees of private property and other substantive rules.
Central to his position are claims that the dispersion of economic power precludes domination, and that free entry into markets furthers such dispersion. As against the idea that the state is in a better position to disperse economic power, Pincione argues that the constitutional provisions needed to implement that idea are contestable, and to that extent require interpretive powers that themselves involve domination. Only a constitution that, as a side effect of its procedures for political decision making, generates full private property rights holds out hope of shielding citizens from domination. This is so, because a plurality of suppliers of goods and services is a structural feature of the free market, in a sense of “structural” that matters for measurements of domination based on fairly uncontroversial claims about persons and resources.
While the classical Greco-Roman tradition is not ordinarily thought of
as associated with radical individualism, many of the central concerns of
such radical individualists as Frédéric Bastiat, Herbert
Spencer, Benjamin Tucker, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, and Ayn
Rand—including their views on human sociality, spontaneous order,
and the relation between self-interest and non-instrumental concern for
others—are shown to be inheritances from and developments of
Platonic, Aristotelian, Epicurean, and Stoic ideas. Hence those working in
the classical tradition have reason to explore the radical individualist
tradition and vice versa.
It is commonly claimed that workers in sweatshops are wrongfully exploited by their employers. The economist’s standard response to this claim is to point out that sweatshops provide their workers with tremendous benefits, more than most workers elsewhere in the economy receive and more than most of those who complain about sweatshop exploitation provide. Perhaps, though, the wrongfulness of sweatshop exploitation is to be found not in the discrete interaction between a sweatshop and its employees, but in the unjust political and economic institutions against which that interaction takes place. This paper tries to assess what role, if any, consideration of background injustice should play in the correct understanding of exploitation. Its answer, in brief, is that it should play fairly little. Structural injustice matters, of course, but it does not typically matter for determining whether a sweatshop is acting exploitatively, and it does not typically matter in a way that grounds any kind of special moral responsibility or fault on the part of sweatshops or the MNEs (Multinational Enterprises) with which they contract.
In his Discourses (1755), Rousseau argues that inequalities of rank, wealth, and power are the inevitable result of the civilizing process. If inequality is intolerable - and Rousseau shows with unparalledled eloquence how it robs us not only of our material but also of our psychological independence - then how can we recover the peaceful self-sufficiency of life in the state of nature? We cannot return to a simpler time, but measuring the costs of progress may help us to imagine alternatives to the corruption and oppressive conformity of modern society. Rousseau's sweeping account of humanity's social and political development epitomizes the innovative boldness of the Englightment, and it is one of the most provocative and influential works of the eighteenth century. This new translation includes all Rousseau's own notes, and Patrick Coleman's introduction builds on recent key scholarship, considering particularly the relationship between political and aesthetic thought.
La Boétie cannot be easily assimilated into any of the major schools of political theory, for he sought to keep off the beaten track, consciously avoiding traditional approaches to the problem of authority concerned above all with the relative value of different forms of government. He wrote from outside of power, from a perspective that questioned its very basis, thus rendering its articulation into governmental structures unnatural and its underlying domination unbearable. He searched out the roots of domination: “I should merely like to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. Surely a striking situation!” (p. 46).
Cultural evolutionism ("survival of the fittest" in terms of cultural and social forms); society as organism (heavy organic analogy); evolution from homogenous state to heterogeneous state, increasing differentiation, specialization, division of labor and interdependence; society has reality beyond sum of individual parts; progress is driven by man’s innate adaptability to higher states of perfection
Barthelemy) Charles (Pierre Joseph) Dunoyer (1786-1862) was born on May 20, 1786 at Carennac in ancient Turenne (Quercy, Cahorsin), the present-day Lot. His father, Jean-Jacques-Philippe Dunoyer, was seigneur de Segonzac. Destined at an early age for the order of St. Jean de Malte, he began his education in the order's near-by house at Martel. With the confiscation of the order's houses in 1792, his aunt, formerly of the Visitation order, and, then, the former Benedictine prior of Carennac, continued his education at home. His secondary education was completed at Cahors in the ecole centrale, one of the newly established schools under the Directory in which the ideas of the 18th century philosophes, and especially, the Ideologues, predominated. In 1803, Dunoyer went to Paris to study law at the newly founded Universite de Jurisprudence. Dunoyer arrived in Paris as a major intellectual and political era was ending and a new one — the Empire — was beginning. Dunoyer's education at the ecole centrale had introduced him to the major thinkers of the Enlightenment and their followers during the Revolution and Directory. Beginning in 1800 a strong campaign against the Enlightenment was initiated in Paris, but was countered with lessening impact by the major organ of the philosophe tradition, La Decade Philosophique, of which the principal editor had been Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832). Say was general editor of the Decade from its founding (An II, April 29, 1794) until his entry into the Tribunat in 18OO. m The education with which Dunoyer came to Paris was the product of the work of a number of men who contributed to the Decade. Pierre Claude Francois Daunou (1761-1840), who was to be closely associated with Charles Dunoyer during the Restoration, was the major force in the development of the ecoles centrales as he had been for the creation of the Institut de France. During 1791-1792 Talleyrand had proposed a secondary education based on langu-ages, literature, history and ethics; and Condor-cet had countered with an emphasis on mathematics, sciences, and the political and moral sciences. In 1795, after a proposal by Lakanal for a more scientific program, a less scientific one of Daunou was adopted. Earlier, Daunou, along with Lakanal and Sieves, desired that education be freed to be supplied by private initiative. Daunou emphasized that liberty was a necessary condition for scientific progress.
The Conservative has long been marked, whether he knows it or not, by long-run pessimism: by the belief that the long-run trend, and therefore Time itself, is against him, and hence the inevitable trend runs toward left-wing statism at home and Communism abroad. It is this long-run despair that accounts for the Conservative's rather bizarre short-run optimism; for since the long-run is given up as hopeless, the Conservative feels that his only hope of success rests in the current moment. In foreign affairs, this point of view leads the Conservative to call for desperate showdowns with Communism, for he feels that the longer he waits the worse things will ineluctably become; at home, it leads him to total concentration on the very next election, where he is always hoping for victory and never achieving it. The quintessence of the Practical Man, and beset by long-run despair, the Conservative refuses to think or plan beyond the election of the day. Pessimism, however, both short-run and long-run, is precisely what the prognosis of Conservatism deserves; for Conservatism is a dying remnant of the ancien régime of the pre-industrial era, and, as such, it has no future. In its contemporary American form, the recent Conservative Revival embodied the death throes of an ineluctably moribund, Fundamentalist, rural, small-town, white Anglo-Saxon America. What, however, of the prospects for liberty? For too many libertarians mistakenly link the prognosis for liberty with that of the seemingly stronger and supposedly allied Conservative movement; this linkage makes the characteristic long-run pessimism of the modern libertarian easy to understand. But this paper contends that, while the short-run prospects for liberty at home and abroad may seem dim, the proper attitude for the libertarian to take is that of unquenchable long-run optimism. The case for this assertion rests on a certain view of history: which holds, first, that before the 18th century in Western Europe there existed (and still continues to exist outside the West) an identifiable Old Order. Whether the Old Order took the form of feudalism or Oriental despotism, it was marked by tyranny, exploitation, stagnation, fixed caste, and hopelessness and starvation for the bulk of the population. In sum, life was "nasty, brutish, and short"; here was Maine's "society of status" and Spencer's "military society." The ruling classes, or castes, governed by conquest and by getting the masses to believe in the alleged divine imprimatur to their rule.
This lecture was delivered to the graduating class of the United States Military Academy at West Point on March 6,1974. ince I am a fiction writer, let us start with a short, short story. Suppose that you are an astronaut whose spaceship gets out of control and crashes on an unknown planet. When you regain consciousness and find that you are not hurt badly, the first three questions in your mind would be: Where am I? How can I discover it? What should I do? You see unfamiliar vegetation outside, and there is air to breathe; the sunlight seems paler than you remember it and colder. You turn to look at the sky, but stop. You are struck by a sudden feeling: if you don't look, you won't have to know that you are, perhaps, too far from the earth and no return is possible; so long as you don't know it, you are free to believe what you wish-and you experience a foggy, pleasant, but somehow guilty, kind of hope. You turn to your instruments: they may be damaged, you don't know how seriously. But you stop, struck by a sudden fear: how can you trust these instruments? How can you be sure that they won't mislead you? How can you know whether they will work in a different world? You turn away from the instruments. Now you begin to wonder why you have no desire to do anything. It seems so much safer just to wait for something to turn up somehow; it is better, you tell yourself, not to rock the spaceship. Far in the distance, you see some sort of living creatures approaching, you don't know whether they are human, but they walk on two feet. They, you decide, will tell you what to do. You are never heard from again. This is fantasy, you say? You would not act like that and no astronaut ever would? Perhaps not. But this is the way most men live their lives, here, on earth. Most men spend their days struggling to evade three questions, the answers to which underlie man's every thought, feeling and action, whether he is consciously aware of it or not: Where am I? How do I know it? What should I do? By the time they are old enough to understand these questions, men believe that they know the answers. Where am I? Say, in New York City. How do I know it? It's self-evident. What should I do? Here, they are not too sure—but the usual answer is: whatever everybody does. The only trouble seems to be that they are not very active, not very confident, not very happy-and they experience, at times, a causeless fear and an undefined guilt, which they cannot explain or get rid of. They have never discovered the fact that the trouble comes from the three unanswered questions-and that there is only one science that can answer them: philosophy. Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man's relationship to existence. As against the special sciences, which deal only with particular aspects, philosophy deals with those aspects of the universe which pertain to everything that exists. In the realm of cognition, the special sciences are the trees, but philosophy is the soil which makes the forest possible. Philosophy would not tell you, for instance, whether you are in New York City or in Zanzibar (though it would give you the means to find out). But here is what it would tell you: Are you in a universe which is ruled by natural laws and, therefore, is stable, firm, absolute-and knowable? Or are you in an incomprehensible chaos, a realm of inexplicable miracles, an unpredictable, unknowable flux, which your mind is impotent to grasp? Are the things you see around you real-or are they only an illusion? Do they exist independent of any observer—or are they created by the observer? Are they the object or the subject of man's consciousness Are they what they are—or can they be changed by a mere act of your consciousness, such as a wish? The nature of your actions-and of your ambition-will be different, according to which set of answers you come to accept. These answers are the province of metaphysics -the study of existence as such or, in Aristotle's words, of "being qua being"—the basic branch of philosophy.
This book is about differences in intellectual capacity among people and groups and what those differences mean for America's future.(preface) The major purpose of this book] is to reveal the dramatic transformation that is currently in process in American society---a process that has created a new kind of class structure led by a "cognitive elite," itself a result of concentration and self-selection in those social pools well endowed with cognitive abilities. Herrnstein and Murray explore] the ways that low intelligence, independent of social, economic, or ethnic background, lies at the root of many of our social problems. The authors also demonstrate the truth of another taboo fact: that intelligence levels differ among ethnic groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)(jacket)
This book argues the case for a society organized by private property, individual rights, and voluntary co-operation, with little or no government. David Friedman's standpoint, known as 'anarcho-capitalism', has attracted a growing following as a desirable social ideal since the first edition of The Machinery of Freedom appeared in 1971. This new edition is thoroughly revised and includes much new material, exploring fresh applications of the author's libertarian principles.
Among topics covered: how the U.S. would benefit from unrestricted immigration; why prohibition of drugs is inconsistent with a free society; why the welfare state mainly takes from the poor to help the not-so-poor; how police protection, law courts, and new laws could all be provided privately; what life was really like under the anarchist legal system of medieval Iceland; why non-intervention is the best foreign policy; why no simple moral rules can generate acceptable social policies -- and why these policies must be derived in part from the new discipline of economic analysis of law.
I Why Is the Rent-Seeking Industry So Small?.- 1 Introduction.- 2 Rents, Ignorance, and Ideology.- 3 The Cost of Rent Seeking: A Metaphysical Problem.- 4 Efficient Rent Seeking, Diseconomies of Scale, Public Goods, and Morality.- II Random Thoughts on Rent Seeking.- 5 Rent Seeking: The Problem of Definition.- 6 Rent Seeking and the Market.- 7 Strategic Behavior, Mixed Strategies, and the Defects of the Nash Equilibrium.- 8 Rent Seeking and Transfers.- 9 Rent Seeking and Tax Reform.- 10 Concluding Thoughts.
This paper represents the initial phase of a larger study which will present the outline of an analytical model of the structure and dynamics of the state capitalist system as it has evolved historically in the US. The model will attempt to synthesize the theoretical insights of Austrian economics and the concrete historical and socioloaical analysis of . both Old Klght and Neu Lcit rrmcs of the status quo. This inmal paper iocuscs on tuo related problems: rhe identtficauon oi a key locus oi ultimate dti!,~on.makmg within the aalc cap~tal~st ,yslem and the prcsenvdrion of an outline of the broader structuralcharacteristics of this system. This paw in isolation offers a highly static, structural model of the system and our subsequent work in this field will focus an a descriotian of the dvnamic orocesses underlvin~ the evolution of ~~~~~~ ~ ~~ ~ , . - rhc synem. Th!, later work xill mvolre a sysremauc appl~cation ofthe Miscs~an theory of inlcrvcntionism and (he Auclrian theory of the busmss cycle in an auempl lo understand hou and why the stale cap~talist syacm erohes ober tlme. Most lmponantly. this later analysis will reinforce our assertion, somewhat arbitrarily made at this point, that the state capitalist systemis characterized by inherent instability. In view of the broad scope of the problems covered, the analysis which follows will necessarily be highly summary, touching only on the basic outline of the argument, and the details will have to be supplied in lengthier studies which will follow this one.
Iwant to do the following in this chapter: First to present a series of theses that constitute the hard-core of the Marxist theory of history. I claim that all of them are essentially correct. Then I will show how these true theses are derived in Marxism from a false starting point. Finally, I want to demonstrate how Austrianism in the Mises-Rothbard tradition can give a correct but categorically different explanation of their validity.
In the popular academic mind, the doctrine of class-conflict seems to be inextricably linked to the particular Marxist version of the idea. Lip-service is often paid - especially by those eager to diminish the claims to originality of Marx and Engels - to the fact that these writers had precursors in this approach to social reality. Frequently a certain "French school," preceding Marx and Engels and influencing their views, is alluded to, and the names Guizot, Thierry, Saint-Simon and a few others are sometimes mentioned in this connection. But what that earlier perspective consisted in, and how it might differ from the more familiar Marxist model, is rarely if ever broached. And yet this earlier view is not only more correct and faithful to socio-economic reality than the Marxist version (a point which must be assumed here, since there is no space to demonstrate it) but may well account for a discrepancy and contradiction within Marxism which has been noticed and commented upon but never explained. When Marx says that the bourgeoisie is the main exploiting and parasitic class in modern society, "bourgeoisie" may be understood in two different ways. In England and the United States, it has tended to suggest the class of capitalists and entrepreneurs who make their living by buying and selling on the (more or less) free market. The mechanism of this exploitation would involve the classical Marxist conceptual apparatus of the labor theory of value, the appropriation of surplus value by the employer, and so on. On the Continent, however, the term "bourgeoisie" has no such necessary connection with the market: it can just as easily mean the class of "civil servants" and rentiers off the public debt as the class of businessmen involved in the process of social production.t" That these former classes and their allies are engaged in the systematic exploitation of society was a commonplace of 19th century social thought, somehow myster- iously lost sight of as these same classes have risen to greater prominence in the English- speaking nations. Tocqueville, for instance, in his Recollections, states of "the middle-class," which historians tell us came to power in 1830 under the "bourgeois monarchy" of Louis Philippe: "It entrenched itself in every vacant place, prodigiously augmented the number of places and accustomed itself to live almost as much upon the Treasury as upon its own industry.""lSimilar statements can be found in many later writers, such as Gustave Le Bon and Taine.
Part One of Marx's “On the Jewish Question” is a communitarian manifesto, one of the finest and subtlest ever penned. But has it anything valuable to offer defenders of liberalism?
I think it does; for in “On the Jewish Question” Marx points to a potential danger into which communitarians are liable to fall, and I shall argue that his discussion sheds light on an analogous peril for liberals. Specifically, Marx distinguishes between a genuine and a spurious form of communitarianism, and warns that a failure to recognize this distinction may lead communitarians to embrace liberal values in communitarian guise. Using Marx's analysis as a model, I hope to show that the same distinction may be found within the liberal tradition, posing a corresponding danger (communitarian values in liberal guise) into which contemporary liberalism has in large part already fallen.
The Suicidal Corporation
- H Paul
- Weaver
Big Business and the Rise of American Statism
- A Roy
- Childs Jr
- Jr
The Myth of the Robber Barons (Herndon: Young America's Foundation
- W Burton
- Folsom
Introduction: The Roots of Individualist Feminism in Nineteenth-Century America
- Wendy Mcelroy
Concepts of the Role of Intellectuals in Social Change Toward Laissez Faire
- Rothbard
For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, rev
- N Murray
- Rothbard
The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought
- Ayn Rand
Healing Our World: The Other Piece of the Puzzle, rev
- Mary Ruwart
The Literature of Liberty The Libertarian Reader: Classic and Contemporary Readings from Lao-tzu to Milton Friedman
- G Tom
- Palmer
Gustave de Molinari and the Anti-Statist Liberal Tradition: Part I
- Hart
The Social Analysis of Three Early Nineteenth Century French Liberals: Say, Comte, and Dunoyer
- Weinburg
The Laissez-Faire Radical: A Quest for the Historical Mises
- Rothbard
The Perversion of Liberty
- Libertarianism Schwartz
Feminism and freedom
- E Michael
- Levin
The Early History of Rome, trans
- Livy
The Natural History of Its Growth, trans
- On Bertrand De Jouvenel
- Power
After the Revolution: Marx Debates Bakunin The Marx-Engels Reader
- Bakunin
Notes on the History of American Free Enterprise
- Rand Ayn
The ABC of Anarchism Life of an Anarchist: The Alexander Berkman Reader
- Alexander Berkman
Men against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America
- James J Martin
Versus the Anarchists
- Engels Friedrich
Classical Liberal Exploitation Theory
- Raico