Christian Michel
Why Libertarians Should Read Marx
And Engels ...
The Swiss author
Denis de Rougemont (1) used to wonder how come
it was that he met so many people who had read Marx, but never one who was reading
Marx. Well, I am presently reading Marx, which I had really never done before,
and I am finding the exercise highly stimulating. Studying Marx may sound like
a total waste of time. Has history not proven his ideas to be fatally wrong, if
not plainly lethal? At the same time, I profess to be a libertarian, so what
can I possibly gain by reading an apology of "collective ownership of the
means of production" and “dictatorship of the proletariat”?
My interest in Marx finds its source in an article by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, which
was published in a French review two years ago.(2) Since then, I have worked my way through
quite a few books and articles. The purpose of my talk today is to tell you why
I believe Marx’s analysis of history is fundamentally correct, except for one
point — a fairly crucial one, of course, which I will explain — and why Marxism
is a tool which libertarians can find extremely useful in making people
understand the domination they are subjected to in our social-democratic
societies.
The core of
Marx's philosophy of history, as you all know, is class struggle. The
opening sentence of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (3) reads : “The history of all hitherto existing
society is the history of class struggles”. Marx co-authored the Manifesto
with his friend and supporter Friedrich Engels, but the manner of beginning a
book with this opening salvo is definitely Marx’s; he is the one, not Engels,
who has the requisite boldness. Marx is a romantic creator, in a league up
there with Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy and Richard Wagner, one who dares to be
heroic. No intellectual in our post-modern world seems capable of conceiving a grand
narrative.
Marx is also a
moralist. To him, the history of humanity cannot be value-free, it is not the
history of rocks and insects and birds, it is rather a cosmic war between Good
and Evil, and Marx tells us clearly who are the perennial villains and who are
the heroes. Violence in the world has a meaning and it is leading us somewhere.
History has a direction.
Let me give you
my understanding of Marx's class struggle.
Having declared
in the opening sentence of the Manifesto that all history is the history
of class struggle, Marx adds immediately in a footnote “of written
history”.
For prior to the
invention of writing, societies were nomadic, organised in tribes, with each
tribe made up of less than 100 individuals. There was scarcely any division of
labour, other than sexual. The tribe would designate a chief, and modern
ethnology tells us the chief had very little power. His main function was to
defuse any conflict among tribesmen, not as a judge (he had no power to judge),
but more by using his charisma to talk people out of their quarrels. His authority
would be limited to leading the hunt and, of course, the war. That is all. In
his essay, The Origin of Property, Family and the State, (4) Engels describes social life in these primitive
tribes as something very much like “anarchy”.
I would like to add
here that modern anthropology supports Engels’ analysis. Primitive societies
did not know anything that resembles political power, let alone a state. They
had no use for it. Pierre Clastres, in his fascinating book, Society Against
State, (5) notes that the only distinctive
feature between “primitive” and “modern” societies is not agriculture, it is
not sedentary life, it is the institution of a state. A modern society is a
society that is subject to the power of a state. So called primitive societies were
not.
In economic
terms, nomadic tribes (which Engels calls gens) do not accumulate a lot
of goods. The only capital they use is what people can carry on their backs or
on the back of an animal. Not much. Thus, between tribes, violence is limited
(there is not much to conquer and to loot), and war is considered more like a
sport, a rough athletic competition. Note that war was a game played by all
tribesmen. All able-bodied men went to war, when called for; there were no
professionals.
How did the state
come about? With the development of agriculture began a process of capital
accumulation. In order to farm, one must first clear the land. Trees have to be
uprooted, fields have to be irrigated, tilled and planted. Granaries have to be
built to store grain for the year, pending the next harvest. All this
preparation and construction may take many months, and it is hard work. So
people started to think: “Why should we do it? When we go to war, we
take prisoners, so let the prisoners do the hard work”. And so, says Engels,
society experienced its first division into classes, between a class of
masters and a class of slaves, between exploiters and exploited.
Of
course, the society which has accumulated such capital becomes the envy and the
target of its neighbours. War is no longer a sport: it can pay, and pay well,
because if you conquer the enemy’s land which has already been cleared and
irrigated, with a year or more of supplies in its storehouses, it saves you the
investment and hard work of producing yourself. So each society had to organise
some sort of permanent defence against marauders and invaders. Each society
took out of its surplus enough food to pay for a group of people who would have
no other function than to protect, i.e., a professional army.
Now once the
rulers had an armed force at their disposal, the temptation was there to use it
permanently against their own people, to consolidate the rulers’ power. Thus,
says Engels, there emerged a new institution, which would maintain “order” in society,
and of course an order favourable to the dominant class. (6)This institution is called “the state”.
Let me quote
directly from Engels :
“In order to maintain this public power,
contributions from the state citizens are necessary -- taxes. These were
completely unknown to gentile society [the so-called “primitives”]. We know
more than enough about them today! With advancing civilisation, even taxes are
not sufficient; the state draws drafts on the future, contracts loans, state
debts. Our old
[Engels was writing this in 1867. What would he have
to say about our modern Europe, with states plundering a full 50% of all wealth
created in society and running debts equivalent to two years of GNP!]
“In possession of the public power and the right of taxation, the officials now
present themselves as organs of society standing above society… Representatives
of a power which estranges them from society, they have to be given prestige by
means of special decrees, which invest them with a peculiar sanctity and
inviolability.”
“The state is therefore by no means a power imposed
on society from without... Rather, it is a product of society at a particular
stage of development...”
The first point I
wish to emphasise here with Marx and Engels is that the state is a human
construct; it is not inherent to mankind, as the queen is to an ant colony or a
beehive. Human societies existed historically without a state, and there is no
reason why we could not organise ourselves again in the future without a state.
My second point
is that — as Marx and Engels tell us — the state is the instrument of
oppression used to keep in check the exploited masses. Without the state, mass
exploitation would not be possible.
Now, the dominant
class amounts to only a fraction of the population, sometimes as low as 10 to
20%. Surely, 20% cannot exploit 80%. How is it therefore that this small minority
manages to stay in power?
For controlling
the state is not enough. Maintaining an army of professional warriors to keep
in check citizens who very often do not have the right to bear arms is indeed a
way of enforcing your power over society, but it is not a guarantee. An
insurrection, a massive taking to the streets, a general strike, can overthrow
any government, even supported by the military, as history has witnessed so
many times. So the ruling class always used another means of wielding its
power, ideology, and understanding how ideology works may be Marx's
greatest contribution to the study of history.
Ideologies are
the changing ideas, values, even feelings, through which individuals experience
their society. (8) Ideologies present the
dominant ideas, the beliefs and values of the ruling class, as being the ideas
of society as a whole. Thus individuals, because they think by using the
concepts, the words and the references of others, are prevented from grasping
how society actually functions, to the extent that they cannot even suspect
that they are exploited. Marxist thinkers, like Gramsci, Lukacs and Althusser,
have expanded greatly on Marx's concept of ideology, and it goes further than
Ayn Rand's sanction of the victim. For Marx, and especially for Gramsci,
I would say ideology achieves the perfect crime. A perfect crime is not when
the criminal remains unknown, it is one that nobody even suspects to be a
crime, where death is declared purely accidental, and no one will look for a
criminal. For Marx, the victims have nothing to consent to; they do not even
see themselves as victims. Quite the reverse. They say “the master is good, he
feeds me every day; he does not beat me more often than I deserve to be.”
The production of
ideology is the intellectuals’ job, and up until recently, intellectuals were
part of a clergy. You know the famous definition given by Marx of religion as
being the "opium of the people." (9)
Religion was perceived as a sort of sedative of the mind. So even when people
might have become aware of their oppression, there came the ruling class’
second line of defence: “Yes, my friend, you are right, God placed you at the
bottom of society, but it is for your own good, you will be all the happier in
a later life”; “it is God’s plan for society that there exist lords and
servants ; sorry, old chap, you are one of the servants, but you wouldn’t want
to rebel against God’s will, would you ?”.
Armed with such
powerful tools as the state police and ideology, the dominant class never gives
up its power gracefully. Why would it? It seems it has the means to rule
forever. Yet, history shows us that changes did take place. Marx identifies two
such transformations in human history, from slavery to feudalism, and from
feudalism to capitalism.
So what caused
these momentous changes?
The answer is:
technical innovations, which forced changes in the production process. Marx is
often interpreted as a technological determinist on the basis of such isolated
quotations as: “The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the
steam-mill gives you society with the industrial capitalist.” (10) It is of
course more complicated than that. But basically, what we can say is that the
dominant class’ power base is the control over certain commodities, over
certain sources of wealth. But the dominant class cannot predict, let alone
control, the emergence of a new technology. When this technology emerges, it
may be in the hands of a group of people who are not members of the dominant
class. And suddenly these pioneers generate a transformation in the means of
production, in the way society is organised, and therefore in the way society
thinks, how it apprehends itself, because, says Marx, the way we work, the
function of production, what we do, influences who we are. And the growing numbers
of people who are involved in the new technology see society with new eyes;
they start questioning whether the power of the dominant class is legitimate.
This is exactly
what has happened throughout history, of course. For instance, new inventions
in the 18th century, including the steam engine, were both a
consequence and a cause of the philosophy of Enlightenment, which exposed the
arbitrariness of the “divine right of Kings”, and hence of all aristocratic
privileges, and led to the American and French revolutions.
It is difficult
to dispute the relevance of Marx’s and Engels’ analysis of history. I concur
with all they say about class struggles and the function of ideology — prior to
the Enlightenment. Quite obviously, the slave is dispossessed, she may not own anything,
not even her own body; she is clearly exploited. The feudal serf is hardly in a
better condition; he is tied to the land; he cannot leave it and is sold with
it.
But when Marx
goes on to say that employees under the capitalist regime are dispossessed as
the serfs were, I have a problem following his reasoning. Marx believes that
the new dominant class after the Industrial Revolution is the one made up by
the owners of capital, the bourgeoisie. But this deduction is wrong, plain
wrong. There is a logical fallacy here.
The logical
fallacy is to posit that if two events occur simultaneously, one must be the
consequence of the other. This logic reminds me of one of Husserl’s favourite
anecdotes: There is this man who drinks whisky and soda and it makes him sick,
then he takes gin and soda and he gets sick; then he takes vodka and soda and
he is sick, and he concludes that soda makes him sick. I don’t want to
denigrate Marx’s vast intelligence, but he is telling us that slave masters had
political power, they exploited their slaves and they got rich. Feudal lords
had political power, they exploited their serfs and they got rich. Capitalists
are rich, therefore they must exploit their workers, right? Hang on.
Capitalists have no political power. This surely must make a difference. Unlike
feudal lords and slave masters, capitalists cannot coerce anybody to work for
them, to consume their products, or to finance their endeavours. Marx feigns to
ignore that with the emergence of the industrial revolution came another
revolution, which redistributed power within society. It was the classical
liberal revolution in the 18th century and it changed radically the
political and legal environment. People were free to work where they wanted,
for whomever they wanted.
Marx pooh-poohs
the achievement of that revolution and what he refers to as “formal freedom.”
You know the argument that Marx belabours in The Capital: We say the
worker “agrees” to work for the capitalist because no policemen are dragging
him from his home to the factory, but this means only that “he is compelled by
social conditions”. In his treatise, 'The Poverty of Philosophy', Marx
writes “Indeed the individual considers as his own freedom the movement no
longer curbed or fettered by a common tie or by man, the movement of his
alienated life elements, like property, industry, religion…” And Marx adds: “In
reality, this is the perfection of his slavery and his inhumanity.” This is
rather poor philosophy on Marx’s part. Freedom is “the movement no
longer curbed” by other men, freedom is freedom of property, of
industry, of religion... There is none other. Take it away and you get
Stalinism.
The wealth of
kings, slave masters, feudal lords and all their lackeys, was acquired through
the exertion of violence, by way of military conquest, tax, confiscation,
enslavement.. But not necessarily the capitalists’ wealth. The capitalist makes
money, indeed, and for a few of them, that money may be numbered in billions,
but he is not an exploiter. The ownership of the means of production by itself
does not make anyone an exploiter. This is where Marx got it wrong. Making
money in a trade between consenting parties is not exploiting anyone; how could
it be ?
Marx was a
believer in property rights. It is because the worker’s work is his property
that Marx may conclude the worker is dispossessed of his remuneration. But
Marx’s crude materialism blinds his vision and prevents him from seeing that it
is not work that is remunerated, what is remunerated is work which is of
service to someone, and to someone who values this work enough to pay for
it. Work by itself is destructive. The Bible has already taught us that work is
a curse. (11) Paradoxically, the record of the
Marxist states proves my point. Armies of workers toiled literally like slaves
for dozens of years, not creating wealth, but actually destroying it. They
extracted perfectly good copper mineral and crude oil and turned it into
unusable electric wires and plastics. Economists have calculated that if all
the people in the
So it is not work
for which the capitalist pays, it is for the service the worker is rendering.
There are people who for whatever reason are able to render a great service to
a great number of buyers and they make bundles of money, and there are others
who have not found a way to prove their usefulness, resulting in differences of
revenues, sometimes very substantial ones. But the capitalist pays for all
services exactly the fair price, for if this were not so, the worker, in a
politically free society, could immediately check the classified ads to see
whether another employer offered a higher price for the same service, and if
that other employer could not be found, then it would be evidence that the
salary paid is exactly the fair and present value of the services rendered.
So if capitalists
pay fair wages and if workers are not exploited by their employer, who are the
exploiters? Who makes up the dominant class today? This question will become
clear if we bear in mind there are two ways to move goods in society: by the use of violence, which is the
political way and by trade and gifts, which is the economic way. (13) Capitalism is the use of trade and gifts, not
the use of politics, to distribute goods in society. All other regimes resort
to violence. Marx and Engels emphasise the point themselves. Feudalism and
slavery are based on state coercive powers. The results of their work are
simply confiscated from the workers, and if they do not like it and try to
escape, policemen and soldiers will drag them back to where they belong, so
they may continue to be exploited. Now is there not a class today, which uses
the powers of police and the army to confiscate the results of our labour? Is
there not a class today, which resorts to political constraint to acquire its
means of living?
Those who resort
to violence today to get their revenues, as the feudal lords did three hundred
years ago, are, of course, all state employees. They do not make money in
exchange for a service people find useful enough to pay for. State employees simply
collect the means they need through the use of violence, coercion, racket,
taxes (all these words being synonymous here). They form the new ruling
class. We are the oppressed. So it is obvious, my friends, that the class
struggle is not over. We are still face to face with our exploiters, class
against class.
The mystery is
why this exploitation by the ruling class of state employees and their lackeys
is not obvious to everyone. How come it lasts, how come the vast majority of
the population is not conscious of the oppression it is subjected to?
For it is true
that most people do not perceive taxation as robbery and government-imposed
regulations and controls as coercion. You meet people nowadays, who would take
out a gun and shoot a youth who is stealing a cassette player from their car,
and these same people allow the taxman to walk away with 50% of what they earn,
every month, year after year, during their entire lifetime. Furthermore, when
you assess how much you are robbed by the taxman, it is not just what you pay
today that you should take into account, but the compounded value of all what
you have paid since the VAT you incurred on your first ever purchase and the
income tax on your first salary, plus the opportunity cost of all the projects and
desires you could not fulfil with that money because it was taken away from
you. Try to work out what these numbers add up to for yourself and you’ll be
staggered.
Now the first
answer to the question of why we allow ourselves to be exploited seems to be
that the dominant class does not appear to be the wealthiest in society, and
the fact is it is not. So how come they exploit us, if they don’t make more money
than the richest amongst us?
Some people in
the new ruling class may not be rich, it is true, but neither were many slave
owners or feudal lords. Many lived no better and were much poorer even than
commoners, who were active in trade and other businesses. It is not the amount
of wealth that makes you a member of the exploiting class, but the way this
wealth, however modest, is acquired. It is not how much you earn, but how you
earn it, that qualifies exploitation. Do you make your money by political means
or economical means? Is it earned or is it extorted?
A pop star makes
a thousand times more money than a secretary in the European Union’s
I grant you that
some people who acquire their revenues through coercion may still render a
useful service. I am sure one finds learned professors in state universities
and dedicated practitioners in state hospitals. The feudal lord too offered the
services of justice, policing and defence to his serfs, the official church
provided education and social services… The question is: there is no way of
knowing how much these services offered by state employees are really worth.
Are they rendered in an optimal fashion? Do they correspond to the true needs
of the people? Because you are not free to pay for them (and often the
provision of these services is a monopoly protected by law), no one can tell
how useful the service really is, how much of this service would be needed and
at what price. More importantly, the end never justifies the means. As Albert
Camus used to say: “A political assassination is not a political act, it is an
assassination.” Likewise we may say: “Robbing the rich to assist the poor is
not assistance, it is robbery.”
You can test by
yourself how useful a profession is by the way you would like those engaged in
it to practice it. You want an airline pilot, a hairdresser, a lawyer, a cook,
a prostitute…, to be hard working, dedicated, and creative in their job, but
now think of customs officials. If you have to pay them at all, pay them for
doing nothing. In this way you would get better value than paying them for
interfering in your affairs. This is how useful these exploiters are to
society.
I must confess
that, among exploiters, I nourish a special aversion to customs officials, and
if I may pause here, I would like to tell you a story. It is about a tourist
who is visiting a foreign city. He notices an antique shop, and a very odd
small statue of a cat in the window. The tourist walks in and asks the price.
“The statue is only $100”, says the antique dealer, “but the story that goes
with the statue is $1,000”. “I don’t need the story”, the tourist shrugs, “I
want to bring a souvenir home, and this statue will do just fine.” “I’ll sell
it to you, but believe me”, warns the antique dealer, “you’ll soon come back
for the story”. The tourist leaves the shop, with the statue in his pocket. As
he is returning to his hotel, he notices a cat is following him. This is
unusual. He looks back again, and now four cats are on his tail, and soon
twenty cats. The tourist realises he cannot walk into the hotel with a herd of
cats behind him, so, as he is crossing a bridge, he throws the statue into the
river. Immediately, the whole army of cats jump from the bridge into the water
and drown. Flabbergasted by what has happened, the tourist pauses for a while.
Then he takes a sudden decision and retraces his steps to the shop. The antique
dealer wears an indulgent smile: “I see you are already coming back for the
story.” “No”, replies the tourist, “I would like to buy a statue of a customs
official.”
With the
transformation of society, the face of oppression changes to reflect different
circumstances. This is why we don’t readily recognise exploitation for what it
is. For instance, in most European countries, government bureaucrats are
employed for life. It is the rule in
This figure of
about 20% of the active population, by the way, is at the high end of the
proportion of feudal lords and the official clergy to the total population
during medieval times.
There seems to be
a natural law that prevents the ruling class from growing above that number of
20%. Ecology offers us many examples of such a fixed ratio between exploiters
and exploited, between the number of predators and their preys. Wolves, for
instance, feed on caribous. When the wolf population increases, they kill off
too many caribous; they go hungry, the weakest starve to death, and their total
population settles back to where it was.(15)
This analogy tells us that there is no difference in
nature between socialism and social-democracy. The difference is only in degree. In the
The political
environment however is changing before our eyes. Social-democratic economies
are not growing as steadily as they were, and joining the predators’ class is
seen as the short and safe way to make a living. Families want their daughters
to land a job at a Ministry; farmers demand subsidies; industrialists beg for
tariff protections; the elderly want higher pensions…
Every dominant
class throughout history has faced this demand from outsiders to share in the
loot. At first, the exploiters found ways to restrict entry. For instance, participation
in the class of feudal lords came by birth only. But sooner or later, the
dominant class had to give in to allies’ and dependants’ pressure.
The present
ruling class is even more vulnerable. It finds it impossible to restrain the
number of predators, as new entries are conferred not by birth, but by an
examination. This method of selecting predators on the basis of expertise was
what the Enlightenment considered its highest achievement: “La carrière
ouverte aux talents..” Not the
scions of ancient families, but the ablest citizens, whatever their social
origin, would rule the country. Of course, these new rulers, as they took over
public education, would make sure the curriculum would favour their own kin.
You seldom see an ambassador’s son working on a factory line, and there are not
many factory workers’ sons who make it to an ambassadorship. It is a defining
characteristic of a ruling class that it perpetuates itself through
generations. The problem for the present ruling class, however, as Marx anticipated,
is again technological innovation. As the economy evolves from the Machine Age
to the Information Age, it requires better qualified people, not illiterate
factory line workers. Information Age workers are people who have the capacity
to pass all the barriers for admission to the ruling class. So the number of
predators is swelling. It is the ruling class’ “internal contradiction.”
Of course, this
is not the only problem the exploiting class is facing. Its other worry is that
the ideology which supports its legitimacy, the Enlightenment philosophy, also
supports the political regime known as democracy.
Democracy’s
perversity is that it turns all of us into accomplices of the violence exerted
against society. We accept this violence inasmuch as we hope to become the
oppressors ourselves. In a feudal society, it is clear who are the oppressors
and who are the victims, because you are born into one camp or into the other,
as I mentioned earlier. You are born a slave or a serf, and all your life, you
remain an innocent victim of your oppressors.
The democratic
process blurs this line between villains and victims. It gives everyone an easy
chance to take part in oppression. Every time we cast our vote, we are
signifying that we wish to take control over part of the population, that we
want to impose upon these men and women our ideas and values and we want to
extort from them the financial means to achieve our own goals. Democracy is the
system that perverts every individual’s soul and turns every man and woman into
a racketeer.
With the
conjunction of democratic racketeering and an inflating ruling class, the
burden on the exploited masses is becoming unbearable. Exploitation is naked
and brutish. Even ideology soon will not be able to explain away why we are
ransomed.
Yet the ruling
class’ ideology has done a good job so far, when you think of it. It has made
us believe that without the state, roads would not be built, the poor would
starve in the streets, hospitals would not be funded, and no one would write
theatre plays any more… On radio and television channels, in the newspapers, at
schools and in universities, at churches, everywhere, we are told that democracy
is the only viable regime; that “social justice” is the common good; that it is
morally acceptable to coerce any individual if it is for the collective good;
that the end justifies the means; that there are experts up there in
government, who are taking care of our well-being, who know better than we do
what is good for us, if only we would let them…
Conservative
ideologues maintain that class struggle does not exist any longer, we are all
middle-class now… Leftist ideologues still believe in this idea that we are
exploited, but exploitation, they say, comes from the rich, from
multinationals, from Wall Street financiers and Swiss bankers... No one ever
mentions that the exploiters are the state bureaucracy and its lackeys, the
military-industrial complex, subsidised farmers and industrialists…, living off
funds extorted from the productive masses.
Such blindness is
amazing. On my left, you have a class of people with guns. They run the army,
the police and justice, they control the media through broadcasting licenses;
they exert censorship. All the means at their disposal come from taxation, your
revenues and savings extorted literally at gun point. (16)
On my right, you have multinationals and small entrepreneurs, productive
workers and creators... They bring you the food you consume, they build your
houses, they connect you to telephone networks and the internet, they supply
you with clothes, they manufacture your automobiles and your computers; they
are so afraid that you would stop buying their goods, which you can do at any
time, that they spend zillions advertising them on glossy paper and video
clips.
Now, who are the
exploiters? The people with guns, right, the people who offer you nothing you
wish to have, or they would have no need to confiscate your money in order to
produce it, the extortionists? Wrong. The exploiters are the capitalists!!
Isn’t it a feat of genius on the ideologues’ part that they have us believe the
exploiters are the producers, the creators, the providers, of the goods you
enjoy buying?
The bigger a lie,
the more completely it is believed. In a François Truffaut film, there is a
schoolboy who arrives late in class. He knows the teacher won’t believe a story
about trains running late, bus accidents, and the usual excuses. So he makes a
sad face and declares: “My mother has just died”. The whole school assembles
immediately and offers sympathy; no one suspects this tragic death could be a
lie. Political lies have to be so gross as to be believed. “Men can always be
blind to a thing, so long as it is big enough”, said G.K. Chesterton
Will oppression
last forever? Marx tells us ruling classes get overthrown when the productive
classes become conscious of their exploitation as a class. Class consciousness
can be raised by the action of an avant-garde, by people who are already
themselves class-conscious and who militate inside an organisation to lead the
productive masses towards their liberation. The conditions for this liberation
are fulfilled if, at the same time, a major technological revolution debases
the ruling class’ power.
A technological
revolution, as you are well aware, is in full swing. I don’t need to reiterate
to you, wired people, the many ways by which the information revolution is
shattering the nation-state. It is interesting, however, to note, as Lenin
pointed out, that the ruling class always co-operates unconsciously in its own
demise, this time by allowing such developments as higher education,
multiculturalism, globalisation, the internet…
Nevertheless,
don’t expect people who have enjoyed political power, privileges, life
employment…, to give it all away gracefully. Ruling classes of the world are
uniting to control our creative activities and our life, from banning
cryptography to persecuting drug users and producers. Ruling classes are
uniting to prevent tax avoidance; they call it “tax harmonisation”. Can you
imagine the directors of the largest oil companies or the largest airlines
getting together to decide on “price harmonisation”? Every trust buster would
be gunning at them. This is what exploitation is about. An exploiter makes his
laws and does not need to obey them. The defining characteristic of
exploitation is when people are not equal before the law. The master is not
subject to the same law as the slave. Governments do not apply their own laws,
whether it is gun control or price fixing. Expect the ruling classes to fight
back, because they will. Viciously.
Being a
libertarian, therefore, may become a dangerous occupation. It is nonetheless a
necessary one. Our libertarian mission, I believe, is to make the creators of
wealth and beauty, the entrepreneurs and the productive workers, aware of their
exploitation as a class. Our calling, as the libertarian vanguard of the
oppressed, is to denounce the oppressors and to deconstruct their ideology.
We can engage in
this endeavour with enthusiasm and optimism: The future is ours. Governments
will fight to retain their privileges, but our societies are becoming too
complex, too global, to be structured in any other form than
self-organisations. The economy and the arts require creators, not subjects.
They require “the free and equal association of producers”, sharing ideas and
trading services, co-operating without political interference. So, who needs a
state? All the signs tell us the big moment has arrived. This is it. The real
thing. The classless and stateless society is possible and it is near.
Let me give
Engels the last word:
“The state, therefore, has not existed from all
eternity. There have been societies which have managed without it, which had no
notion of the state or state power.…. The society which organises production
anew on the basis of the free and equal association of producers will put the
whole state machinery where it will then belong -- into the museum of
antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.” (17)
Thank you.
Text edited
and footnoted from a paper presented at the European Libertarian Seminar,
www.liberalia.com cmichel@cmichel.com
NOTES
(1) One of the founders of the Mont Pèlerin Society.
(2) Hans Hermann Hoppe, a disciple of Murray Rothbard, originally published
this article in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, vol. IX, N°2, Fall
1990. It was reprinted as Chapter 4 in his The Economics and Ethics of
Private Property, Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy,
(3) A
digital version of the Manifest may be found at http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
(4) A
digital version of the Origin may be found at http://csf.Colorado.EDU/psn/marx/Archive/1884/Family
(5) Pierre
Clastres, La Société contre l’Etat,
(6) This
institution of the state, which seems to so many anthropologists and historians
a progress towards a higher level of civilisation, was not at all perceived as
such by the Athenians. This is what Engels has to say about the Athenians’
reaction : "The Athenians … instituted a police force simultaneously with
their state. But this gendarmerie consisted of slaves. The free Athenian
considered police duty so degrading that he would rather be arrested by an
armed slave than himself have any hand in such despicable work. That was still
the old gentile spirit. The state could not exist without police, but the state
was still young and could not yet inspire enough moral respect to make
honourable an occupation which, to the older members of the gens,
necessarily appeared infamous."
(7) The
cancerous growth of the state ruling class tells us something about the often
discussed differences between classical liberals and libertarians.
Liberals are utopian, libertarians are realist. Liberals, such as Ayn Rand,
advocate a “minimal state”, they believe violence can be restrained.
Libertarians have learnt from past experiences, since the 19th
century, that once out of the box, violence can never be put back in. Why, in
fact, should we institutionalise even “a little violence” ? Libertarians are
not only realists, they are moralists too.
(8) For an
introduction to the study of ideologies, see http://www.aber.ac.uk/~dgc/marxism.html
(9) Karl
Marx, A Contribution To The Critique Of Hegel’s Philosophy Of Rights, http://csf.colorado.edu/cgi-bin/mfs/24/csf/web/psn/marx/Archive/1844-Hegel/index.html
(10) Karl
Marx, The Poverty Of Philosophy, http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/1847-pov.html.
The book is a stinging reply to Proudhon’s earlier treatise, Philosophy Of
Poverty.
(11) “By the
sweat of your brow, you will eat your food.” Book of Genesis, 3, 19
(12) The value of our work is not established by
ourselves, but always by others. It s what makes economic activity so humbling
and why intellectuals, who have an inflated notion of their worth after years
of studies, nourish such an aversion for the economy. See my How to Think About the Economy Today on www.liberalia.com
(13) Franz Oppenheimer, The State,
(I am quoting from memory; it seems I have lost my copy of the book).
(14) The
French state bureaucracy sets its own law. With its arrogance and
unaccountability, one can argue it functions less as a ruling class than as an
occupying army.
(15) For a
discussion of ecology and politics, see Davidson & Rees-Mogg, The
Sovereign Individual, Simon & Schuster, 1996
(16) If you
believe taxes are voluntary contributions, just stop paying them and wait to
see what happens.
(17) Friedrich Engels, Origin Of Property, op. cit. Most of the books
I have used for preparing this paper are published in French. A good
introduction in English to Marxist studies is Thomas Sowell’s Marxism,
Philosophy And Economics, Quill,
1986