THE CLASS STRUGGLE IS NOT OVER
Why Libertarians Should Read Marx And Engels ...
Account of the dinner-debate held on June 3, 2000 with Christian Michel
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 very 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 and Richard Wagner, one who dares to be heroic. No intellectual
today seems to me capable of conceiving a grand vision.
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
doing it 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
to 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 Europe can tell a
tale about these, too." (7)
[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, 10% cannot exploit 90%. 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 beaten."
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 number 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, he may not own
anything, he 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 workers 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 guy who drinks whisky and soda, and he gets drunk, then he takes
gin and soda, and he gets drunk, then he takes vodka and soda, and he gets
drunk, and he concludes that he gets drunk on soda. 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 malediction. (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 Soviet Union had stopped working and had been content to sell their vast
commodity resources without attempting to transform them, they would have been
far better off. Work has no value by itself. The value is in the service you
render to somebody. It so happens that in most instances you cannot be of
service to somebody without performing a certain amount of work, but Marx
confuses the end and the means. If someone could bring me clients whilst he
slept, I would pay him to sleep.
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. (12) 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 in Europe 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 for yourself 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 ruling 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 ?
Madonna makes a thousand times
more money than a secretary in the European Union’s Brussels bureaucracy, but
no one is forced to buy Madonna records or attend her concerts. Every single
penny, therefore, that Madonna gets is given to her, often enthusiastically, by
her fans. Every single penny the EU secretary gets in salary is extorted from
taxpayers.
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 France. When a talented young Frenchman is recruited by a state agency,
the whole of French society finds itself saddled with a legal obligation of 7
to 10 million dollars towards this new employee. This is how much it will cost
society on average to fund this person’s useless activity from the first
pay-check through retirement and until he dies. This 7 to 10 million dollars is
the capital the exploited class is forced to guarantee by law to each member
of the state exploiters’ class. And in France, there are more than 5 million of
them, some 20% of the active population. (13)
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 start to go hungry, the weakest starve to death, and
their total population settles back to where it was.(14)
This analogy tells us that
there is no difference in nature between socialism and social-democracy.
The difference is only in degree. In the USSR and everywhere in the socialist
world, the predators exterminated their prey, at least those who did not manage
to flee the country, so the predators ended up starving. Social-democratic
states were clever enough not to scare off all the "caribous" and
keep enough of them alive, so that the ruling class could prosper.
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.
Athens had to integrate its meteques, its resident aliens ; too many
colonials became Roman citizens (think of the Apostle Paul) ; in France, under
Louis XV, as state coffers were emptying, the King simply auctioned off access
to the noble ranks…
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 worker’s 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 suffer 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. (15)
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 television channels, 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.
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 own 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 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.” (16)
Thank you.
Text edited and annotated from a
paper presented at the European Libertarian Seminar, Copenhagen, 28 March 1998
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 (Boston, Kluwer Academic Publishers). I read this article
in a French translation by François Guillaumat, L'analyse de classe selon
Marx… et selon l'école autrichienne. A
digital version is available at http://myweb.worldnet.fr/ˆgirodou/libres.htm
(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, Paris, 1974 For an
English translation, see www.amazon.com Society Against State, Essays In
Political Anthropology.
(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) Franz Oppenheimer, The State, (I am quoting from memory, it
seems I have lost my copy of the book).
(13) The French state bureaucracy sets its own law. With its arrogance and
inaccountability, one can argue it functions less as a ruling class than as an
occupying army.
(14) For a discussion of ecology and politics, see Davidson & Rees-Mogg,
The Sovereign Individual, Simon & Schuster, 1996
(15) If you believe taxes are voluntary contributions, just stop paying them
and wait to see what happens.
(16) 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. It may be ordered through www.amazon.com
or http://laissezfaire.org
Back to the English-language section of bastiat.net.