The long hair, the beard—it all makes sense. He was a hippy.
Karl Marx is usually viewed as the ultimate materialist, describing everything in brute physical and economic terms, while deriding intellectual, artistic, and philosophical and religious values as mere rationalizations for the economic status quo.
But we’ve already gotten hints that there is a kind of Romanticism lurking behind this materialist exterior. I’m referring to Romanticism in the philosophical sense: a longing to return to some imagined pure state of emotional freedom and communion with nature, unspoiled by the intellectual overgrowth of too much civilization. The unacknowledged influence of Romanticism on Marx is a major theme of Leszek Kołakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism.
Taking the Polish dissident philosopher as a guide, we have already puzzled over how it is that an ideology that claim to speak on behalf of industrial workers gave power to a bunch of intellectuals (and then, following the logic of absolute power, liquidated the intellectuals for the power-lust of a single ruler). But the biggest reason why Marxism was and remains more an ideology of the intellectuals than the workers is that its actual concerns are not material or economic, but spiritual and intellectual.
Marx’s big con was to describe his ideology as a form of materialism. Yet underneath all the talk about economics, underneath his insistence that the cultural “superstructure” of life is just determined by the brute materialist “base” of the means of production, Marx’s fundamental complaint against capitalism is a spiritual one.
I figured this out by reading Kołakowski’s explanation of what Marx meant by “alienation.”
“Alienation” is a term Marxists have thrown around for a long time, but I’ve never really understood what it means. And there’s good reason for that, because what it means is weird.
As I observed before, the subversive thing Kołakowski did in this book was to go back into the deep sources of Marxism and into Marx’s early writings, many of which had lapsed into obscurity and had relatively recently been dug up and brought back into print in the decades before he wrote Main Currents of Marxism. As I noted last time, the study of these early works was not exactly encouraged, at least not on his side of the Iron Curtain, because the Soviet regime had engaged in a major effort to dumb down Marxism and reduce it to a state-approved dogma.
It’s in some of these early works that Kołakowski finds what Marx meant by alienation, which illuminates his later writings in Capital.1 What he finds is that the root of Marx’s philosophy is a rejection of the division of labor as such.
At Reason, John Stossel recounts leftist billionaire Tom Steyer's despicable vendetta against scientist Roger Pielke, whom Steyer ultimately hounded out of a position he held at the University of Colorado for over 24 years.
"My views are entirely mainstream," says Pielke. "My work is cited by all three working groups of the IPCC. There's nothing contrarian."
Both Steyer and Pielke agree that "greenhouse gases warm the climate," but Pielke's sin was saying, "it's not the apocalypse."
Because of that, "the Center for American Progress decided to make me a target," he says.
...
Pielke didn't know who funded the smears until WikiLeaks revealed an email to Steyer from ThinkProgress' editor: "Thanks for your support of this work ... it's fair to say, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change."
Think about that.
"Progressive" activists are proud to stop a researcher from writing about what he knows.
Notably, Pielke was also attacked by the Obama White House itself, in a 3,000 word memo.
This should disturb anyone concerned about academic freedom, but conservatives have no business being smug now that we have a Republican President.
As I noted last week, the Trump Administration wants to subordinate all federal research grants to the whims of bureaucrats both before granting (with peer review becoming merely "advisory") and after (with grants being subject to cancellation at any time and at the whims of bureaucrats).
Rather than freeing scientists like Pielke even a little bit from political pressure, that measure will present them with the choice of forgoing all such money -- or parroting the line of the party in charge. It is not hard to see how much cheaper and easier it will be for busybodies like Steyer to manipulate "the science" to fit their preconceived narrative if the party they favor happens to be in charge. It is also all but impossible to imagine federal research money being well-spent going forward after the proposed changes.
As Stossel notes at the end of his piece, Steyer has a real chance of becoming California's next governor, thereby becoming a credible future presidential candidate. Imagine the damage he would be able to do -- now for free! -- to the career of any scientist whose findings or analysis he doesn't care to hear.
"In branding profits as excessive and penalising the efficient entrepreneurs by discriminatory taxation, people are injuring themselves. Taxing profits is tantamount to taxing success in best serving the public. The only goal of all production activities is to employ the factors of production in such a way that they render the highest possible output. The smaller the input required for the production of an article becomes, the more of the scarce factors of production is left for the production of other articles. But the better an entrepreneur succeeds in this regard, the more is he vilified and the more is he soaked by taxation. Increasing costs per unit of output, that is, waste, is praised as a virtue. ...
"All people, entrepreneurs as well as non-entrepreneurs, look askance upon any profits earned by other people. Envy is a common weakness of men. People are loath to acknowledge the fact that they themselves could have earned profits if they had displayed the same foresight and judgment the successful businessman did. Their resentment is the more violent, the more they are subconsciously aware of this fact.
"There would not be any profits but for the eagerness of the public to acquire the merchandise offered for sale by the successful entrepreneur. But the same people who scramble for these articles vilify the businessman and call his profit ill-got."
"[I]n the strict sense, there is simply no such a thing as a 'cost-push' inflation. Neither higher wages nor higher prices of oil, or perhaps of imports generally, can drive up the aggregate price of all goods unless the purchasers are given more money to buy them."
One of my favorite Hoppe pieces: “A Realistic Libertarianism,” LewRockwell.com (Sept. 30, 2013). I have never agreed that libertarians are left or right, that we are “orthogonal,” yet I have always sensed a closer affinity between conservativism and libertarianism than between modern American leftist/liberal/progressives and libertarianism.
Of course, all non-libertarians are in a sense statist and socialist (see quotes below). And as I noted in “What Libertarianism Is,” Hoppe, in his treatise A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (chapters 3–6), provides a systematic analysis of various forms of socialism: Socialism Russian-Style, Socialism Social-Democratic Style, the Socialism of Conservatism, and the Socialism of Social Engineering. In fact, recognizing the common elements of various forms of socialism and their distinction from libertarianism (capitalism), Hoppe incisively defines socialism as “an institutionalized interference with or aggression against private property and private property claims.” Ibid., p. 2 (emphasis added).1
But this does not mean that libertarianism is equidistant, so to speak, between left and right. In the past, I have described the modern American left and right this way: “liberals” are soft socialists. Conservatives are an incoherent hodgepodge of three mostly unrelated groups: moral majority/cultural conservatives, neocon warmongers/muscular Americanism, and free enterprise “Chamber of Commerce” types–the best of the bunch. In the era of Trump this may have shifted a bit but the point is the left seemed somewhat coherent but evil, socialism-lite; the right was an incoherent agglomeration of different factions, with some loose admiration of traditional and classical values, respect for free markets and capitalism, wariness of big government and respect for the Founders and the Constitution and its supposed limits on state power.2
But in his 2013 speech and article Hoppe notes that the right is essentially realistic, as libertarianism must also be, while the left is unrealistic and egalitarian.
As summarized for me by Grok:
The Right recognizes natural human inequalities and differences—physical, mental (cognitive abilities, talents, dispositions like intelligence, diligence, impulsivity), and social—as facts arising from both environmental and biological/physiological factors. People are also bound by blood, language, religion, customs, and geography. The Right accepts that different inputs naturally produce different outcomes (e.g., wealth, status, influence) and views this as normal. It generally favors laissez-faire—letting these differences play out without forced rectification.
The Left asserts fundamental human equality (“all men are created equal”). It downplays or denies significant mental differences, attributing observable disparities mostly to environment (which could be equalized) or luck. Any resulting inequalities in outcomes are seen as undeserved. The Left demands rectification—equalizing “stations in life” through compensation by the “lucky” to the “unlucky.” This requires ongoing intervention, as new differences constantly emerge.
Compatible with the Right: Libertarians can (and must, based on evidence) accept the Right’s empirical view of natural inequalities in abilities and outcomes. They endorse laissez-faire regarding voluntary, property-respecting interactions. The key caveat: Libertarians distinguish “natural” inequalities (from peaceful rules) from those stemming from aggression, fraud, or state privilege—the latter require restitution to victims, not egalitarian redistribution. This can sometimes increase inequality but restores justice.
Incompatible with the Left: The Left’s empirical denial of mental differences is refuted by experience and research—inequalities re-emerge despite interventions. More critically, its normative push for enforced equality violates private property (in body and goods) and requires a coercive power elite to perpetually “equalize,” creating a ruling class and unending conflict. This is anti-libertarian at its root, as true equality of outcome demands suppressing voluntary cooperation and property rights. Hoppe notes the Left’s egalitarianism serves as ideological cover for totalitarian control by elites and intellectuals.
Viewed this way, it is easy to see why we libertarians have more affinity for the right than with the unrealistic egalitarian left, which denies reality and real human differences. If only the right would learn their economics and value consistency a bit more… As Hoppe noted in The Property And Freedom Society—Reflections After Five Years:
This, then, was the ultimate reason for the breakup of the libertarian-conservative alliance accomplished with the John Randolph Club: that while the libertarians were willing to learn their cultural lesson the conservatives did not want to learn their economics.3
I used to hate the left-right classification, esp. for libertarians, as we are neither left nor right and in the end, all non-libertarians are one type of socialist-statist or another. However, there is a reason we have more affinity to the right than the left, and that is that the left is more egalitarian and unrealistic, and the right is more realistic in recognizing natural distinctions, hierarchies, and so on. So the left-libertarians tend to be libertines and hostile to rules and authority in general and are more egalitarian, and many of them are perhaps libertarians, if they really are, for wrong reasons: because they focus on personal “liberty” and “freedom from” restrictions even those imposed by private authority and hierarchies, custom and tradition etc. But in truth a private law would not be one where there is no law and no rules, just one where the state would not be permitted to coopt the natural order and where natural hierarchy, discrimination, laws, rules, elites, authority could re-emerge.
“socialism, by no means an invention of nineteenth century Marxism but much older, must be conceptualized as an institutionalized interference with or aggression against private property and private property claims. Capitalism, on the other hand, is a social system based on the explicit recognition of private property and of nonaggressive, contractual exchanges between private property owners. Implied in this remark, as will become clear in the course of this treatise, is the belief that there must then exist varying types and degrees of socialism and capitalism, i.e., varying degrees to which private property rights are respected or ignored. Societies are not simply capitalist or socialist. Indeed, all existing societies are socialist to some extent.” Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, ch. 1
“We have defined socialism as an institutionalized policy of redistribution of property titles. More precisely, it is a transfer of property titles from people who have actually put scarce means to some use or who have acquired them contractually from persons who have done so previously onto persons who have neither done anything with the things in question nor acquired them contractually.” Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, ch. 3
“To assure its very existence, any institution that enforces a socialist theory of property must rely on the continual threat of violence. Any such institution threatens people who are unwilling to accept its noncontractual appropriations of their natural property with physical assault, imprisonment, enslavement, or even death, and it must carry out such threats if necessary, in order to stay ‘trust-worthy” as the kind of institution that it is. Since one is dealing with an institution—an organization, that is, which performs these actions on a regular basis—it is almost self-explanatory that it refuses to call its own practice of doing things “aggression,” and instead adopts a different name for it, with neutral or possibly even positive connotations. In fact, its representatives might not even think that they themselves are aggressors when acting in the name of this organization. However, it is not names or terms that matter here or elsewhere, but what they really mean.132 Regarding the content of its actions, violence is the cornerstone of socialisms existence as an institution.
…
“It is not at all difficult to recognize the truth of this. In order to do so, it is only necessary to assume a boycott of any exchange-relation with the representatives of socialism because such an exchange, for whatever reasons, no longer seems profitable. It should be clear that in a social system based on the natural theory of property—under capitalism—anyone would have the right to boycott at any time, as long as he was indeed the person who appropriated the things concerned by using them before anyone else did or by acquiring them contractually from a previous owner. However much a person or institution might be affected by such a boycott, it would have to tolerate it and suffer silently, or else try to persuade the boycotter to give up his position by making a more lucrative offer to him. But it is not so with an institution that puts socialist ideas regarding property into effect. Try, for instance, to stop paying taxes or to make your future payments of taxes dependent on certain changes or improvements in the services that the institution offers in return for the taxes—it would fine, assault, imprison you, or perhaps do even worse things to you. Or to use another example, try to ignore this institution’s regulations or controls imposed on your property. Try, that is to say, to make the point that you did not consent to these limitations regarding the use of your property and that you would not invade the physical integrity of anyone else’s property by ignoring such impositions, and hence, that you have the right to secede from its jurisdiction, to “cancel your membership” so to speak, and from then on deal with it on equal footing, from one privileged institution to another. Again, assumedly without having aggressed against anyone through your secession, this institution would come and invade you and your property, and it would not hesitate to end your independence. As a matter of fact, if it did not do so, it would stop being what it is. It would abdicate and become a regular private property owner or a contractual association of such owners. Only because it does not so abdicate is there socialism at all. Indeed, and this is why the title of this chapter suggested that the question regarding the socio-psychological foundations of socialismis identical to that of the foundations of a state, if there were no institution enforcing socialistic ideas of property, there would be no room for a state, as a state is nothing else than an institution built on taxation and unsolicited, noncontractual interference with the use that private people can make of their natural property. There can be no socialism without a state, and as long as there is a state there is socialism. The state, then, is the very institution that puts socialism into action; and as socialism rests on aggressive violence directed against innocent victims, aggressive violence is the nature of any state.” Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, ch. 8
“The state is always socialistic, and socialism always implies a state.” Kinsella, Afterword, in Hoppe, The Great Fiction
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