Yes, Libertarians Really Are Lazy Marxists

[PETRUS]

Speaking of lazy, I often choose the excerpts carefully when I'm posting here so people can get the gist without clicking through. In this case, *I* am going to be lazy and just post the opening and encourage readers to follow the link and digest the whole thing.

From http://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/yes-libertarians-really-are-lazy-marxists/

I have only really just started studying Marxism in depth (though I am stopping short of Capital for now). Subsequently, while reading Bertell Ollman‘s Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society, it once again struck me that (right-)libertarianism is really just lazy Marxism. In many ways libertarianism reads like the first third of Marxism: the area which explores methodological questions and the nature of man. Both libertarianism and Marxism are generally fairly agreeable – and in agreement – in this area, but the former never really fleshes out its arguments satisfactorily. Often I find libertarians, after describing some basic principles (non coercion etc.), make the jump to property rights and capitalism being the bestest thing ever, without fully explaining it.*

I will focus primarily on Robert Nozick and Ludwig von Mises here, as they are the only two libertarians who really explored libertarianism from basic principles of man and his relationship to both nature and economic activity (Murray Rothbard was really an interpretation of Mises in this respect). Overall, I think Nozick and Mises combine to form a fair reflection of minarchist libertarianism.

The state of nature and the nature of man

In Anarchy, State & Utopia, Robert Nozick’s ‘State of Nature’ is one where there is no state (government). He asserts that individuals have rights to protect themselves from aggression, they have rights to the fruits of their labour, and they have the right to cooperate voluntarily, free from deception and theft.

It has always struck me how incomplete Nozick’s exposition of the state of nature is. That man should be a priori free from aggression and entitled to whatever he produces is not really in dispute. What bothers me is that Nozick never really attempts to explore the relationships between different men, between men and society, and between men and nature. For Nozick, an abstract expression of individual rights could be extrapolated up to the whole without much discussion of how things link together. This is especially odd because he demonstrated he was capable of understanding and the limits of such individualism in his incisive critique of methodological individualism. So much the worse for his philosophy that he didn’t apply this thinking to it....

(Read more http://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/yes-libertarians-really-are-lazy-marxists/)

Thoughts?

[Starry Messenger]

1. Libertarianism is a kind of utopian fantasy.

I'm not sure how Marxism would enter into their process at all. To me--libertarianism is a class expression of "individualism" ideology.

In order to adhere to it, you'd have to ignore all of the social and historical processes that went into the making of a person at any given time.

You'd have to examine things only in isolation, with no look at the context which was at work, as the author of this article states near the end.

In order to be able to do that, you'd have to have a certain amount of independence from the negative processes that come from the system, and be able to blame anyone who does have a negative relationship with the system on their own responsibility.

I think this paragraph is faulty:

Marx too believed that only man is capable of purposive activity, and this is what separates man from other animals. However, for Marx, the most purposive activity was labour, not consumption. Man engages in productive activity for two purposes: (1) the end product of his labour and (2) the ability to exercise the means he deems most important during labour. Marx saw capitalism as alienating because in a capitalist system, the individual becomes separated from both the product and the method of production.

It is true that Marx positions labor as paramount. But not for the purposes the author states, imo. Marx and Engels knew enough about evolution and science of their time to know that humans evolved the way they did because we were incapable of surviving without laboring in common. The rise of all of our characteristics that separate us from other animals come from our need to work together to survive as a species. If we hadn't, we'd have died out.

The "Libertarian Man" is the man in isolation who comes together with others in some negotiated way to sublimate "human nature" and allow cooperation. But that isn't how history happened. Therefore all the other principles of libertarianism are suspect from being founded on fantasy.

Marx saw capitalism as alienating because taken to the historical ends it has arrived at, it is a perversion of human existence. Even the capitalists themselves are often miserable creatures, but they are driven by the demands of the system too. The only thing good about it is that it was a historical improvement on feudalism, which was an improvement on slavery. The other good thing from a Marxist point of view is that it created a working class that is capable of taking the political reins from capitalism, and also unleashed productive capabilities unheard of in previous human history.

Unfortunately the mechanics of extracting expanding profits degrades the state of workers to the point where their survival is at stake. Milton Friedman stated in an offhand way that this is part of the omelet making, some eggs get broken, but it's ok because "many" benefit from capitalism. I think that's a pretty psychotic way of looking at the world, and you'd have to be some kind of sociopath to feel that some people were just going to be expendable. (Sorry, I know this is ridonculous long...I loathe Libertarians.)

[joshcryer]

4. I think it's an observation about the division of labor.

Both Mises and Marx believe it is a necessary condition on which human society must operate, and that's where their similarity is. I am unconvinced. I think the author is wrong in characterizing Marxism's "purposive activity" being "production." Marxism is just as consumptive as any other system, as consumption is simply physically unavoidable.

[PETRUS]

5. Hey there.

I've been meaning to reappear on this thread and thank you and limpy in particular for your thoughts. This blogger is not someone with expertise on Marx, so I'm not surprised you questioned some of his ideas there. (I'm not all that well informed myself when it comes to Marx, honestly.) But I think he/she does a good job of critiquing classical economics.

Even if it's not entirely accurate, I'm quite amused by the title. And it sort of resonated with me a little because I have some friends and acquaintances who are captivated by Ron Paul or the Austrians and that sort of thing. Now, I'd put these people in a different category than academic libertarians or those who fund (right) libertarian politics. But when I talk to them, I can't help but note that we share some of the same frustrations; I tend to see their complaints about the current arrangements as more incomplete than mistaken and expect that our differences flow from those diagnostic discrepancies, so to speak. Often enough, I find myself thinking "you're partway there..."

[Starry Messenger]

6. I honestly can't remember now why I had such a burr in my saddle in that post, lol.

This is kind of a change of subject, or a tangent. I've been reading about Bitcoin, the new currency invented by techno-libertarians that is supposed to free us all from government, banks, monopoly, etc. Decentralized money, put into the hands of the little guy by digital minting.

On their wiki last night I hopped over to the "Myths" page, where everything that drives me crazy about Libertarians is laid bare. The breezy dismissal of the Labor Theory of Value was my favorite hand-wave on a whole page of them.

Now, who doesn't hate monopolies, big banks, the tyranny of debt, the rentier subclass of the FIRE sector, all of it? We do share that frustration with them.

But I knock my head against the how of explaining that an economy doesn't exist in some discrete separate reality as an alternative to the "big" economy. Bitcoins are still in the world where the dollar exists, so it isn't replacing anything. People are still translating their bitcoins into dollar value to talk about how much money they have. There are so many holes in this project you could drive a truck through them.

Collectively this (and several other projects along these lins) is an idealist fallacy where Adam Smith is worshipped as the god of capitalism, and if all other capitalistic heresies can be eliminated then the righteous road back to "pure" capitalism which would avoid all the ills of monopoly, etc. Marxism just says "Science doesn't work that way." Realityville operates differently. There isn't some a priori plane where money pops out of the purely digital realm.

I think the differences flow from the split between idealism and materialism. A lot of people can see that there is a huge problem with the way we exist presently in society. The way we formulate a way to solve the problems tends to push us into different places on the political spectrum. I like Marxism because it puts into words things I had observed in life but never had a vocabulary for. I haven't figured out how to translate that into trying to talk to Libertarians, who seem to have experienced life differently than me, or perceive it differently?

[Fantastic Anarchist]

2. I'm being lazy for right now due to a bad bout of insomnia last night ...

... but I'm really glad that the author qualified his statement about &quot right-)libertarianism." I'm often saddened that there is a misconception about libertarianism, which itself originally, was (and is) a left-wing ideology. The original libertarians were squarely in the left-wing camp. I am a left-libertarian, a socialist in the anarchist tradition.

That said, this essay looks interesting, so I'm off to read and will hopefully comment later.

[limpyhobbler]

3. Or it could just say "Libertarians really are lazy thinkers."

There I fixed it.

The author alluded to a common root of both marxism and libertarianism when he says "That man should be a priori free from aggression and entitled to whatever he produces is not really in dispute." This is an idea that came with the modern era revolution in thinking. If you go back in history that's not really something that was universally believed. But it is part of the legacy of the Enlightenment and it's about how far back in history we need to go to find the common thread of right-libertarian thought and marxism. Before that people had other ideas such as divine right of aristocrats. Modern fascists and racialists have similar medieval ideas about superiority of one group over another.

Phrased another way, and it's also in the article, people "have rights to the fruits of their labour". I think marxists and right-libertarians all agree to this principle. But what even classical economists like Adam Smith understood, labor is a collective endeavor, so people need to decide how to split up the surplus fruits of the labor after the work is done.

When a capitalist assembles the money and workers and space and tortilla shells to make tacos, well the capitalist has done some work by bringing all these elements together in one place. And the worker who puts together the tacos has also done work.

So both the capitalist and the worker have competing claims against any surplus money that is created through this process.

Who should get the money, or how should it be split up since both parties appear to have competing claims to the money since they both expended some effort? I think libertarians would say the surplus should be divided according to the terms freely agreed to by the parties in advance - a work agreement or private contract. But in real life we know people don't always have a choice about where they work or whether to work at all.

A contribution of Marx was to point out that when there are equal competing claims against the fruits of a combined labor process, then force decides who wins. That's not a statement of what's right or wrong, as much as it is a description of what has happened in history. That's why human history is a history of class struggle - struggling over that surplus. That's why we end up with monopoly capitalism under the auspices of a corporate state.

So getting back to the point of the blog post, in so far as right-libertarians only analyze an idealized, fictional, highly theoretical version of reality, and don't examine history or real life examples to test whether their theories are correct, yes they are lazy.

But they are not lazy marxists since they don't accept the basic idea that value is created through combined labor, and subgroups in society have always fought about how to split up the surplus.

So I agree with what Starry Messenger said in post 1. People have always lived and worked together in communities.

I would add that protecting and expanding individual liberties is an important goal in my opinion. But so-called libertarians don't actually do that since the logical conclusion of what they promote is a sort of corporate capitalist tyranny where everything, even human life itself is reduced to its market exchange value in dollars.

So I also agree with Fantastic Anarchist in post 2. We're talking about right-wing libertarians here. There are other ideas and people out there that may also be called libertarian, who place a high value on individual liberty, but who certainly don't fall in the category we're talking about. I wouldn't mind being called a libertarian because I think people should be secure in their bodies and homes and generally not molested by government if they aren't doing anything wrong, and also I support freedom of speech, assembly, etc . It's a problem though because generally in the US libertarian means Milton Friedman or the Cato institute or something. On a bad day it means Rand Paul and Ayn Rand. It's a problems with labels when people have different definitions.