All Things Marx and Socialism at Liberty Fund

Steve Horwitz

A couple of items at the Liberty Fund website that might be of interest to CP readers:

1. This month's "Liberty Matters" is on Marx, with the main essay by Virgil Storr, and responses by me, Dave Prychitko, and Pete Boettke, as well as David Hart of Liberty Fund.  General discussion will follow those responses.
2. I also have an Econlib feature this month discussing Mises's Socialism as it nears its 100th anniversary.

The piece on Socialism focuses on Mises's theory of social evolution, which relies on the centrality of the division of labor to generate peaceful cooperation. This move from violence to contract he later referred to as "The Law of Association," viewing it as an extension of Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage and trade. This point is nicely illustrated in the book's chapter on love and marriage.

This theme of the evolution from violence to contract is nicely illustrated in his chapter on “The Social Order and the Family.” There he contrasts the nature of marriage in “the age of violence” to marriage in “the age of contract.” Where marriage was a reflection of male power and where women were essentially the property of the men they married, marriage was a relationship characterized by both inequality and unhappiness, especially for women. Mises argues that the love and sexual components of marriage that we take for granted in the age of contract were not possible in an age of violence. Romantic love and marriage were largely distinct during this period, and only when marriage became about consent and contract between equals could loved-based marriage become a reality. Mises (page 78) puts it this way:

The characteristic of love, the overvaluing of the object, cannot exist when women occupy the position of contempt which they occupy under the principle of violence. For under this system she is merely a slave, but it is the nature of love to conceive her as a queen.

One of liberalism’s greatest accomplishments was the gradual extension of equal rights to all humans, and in treating women as equals under the law, liberalism advanced the feminist cause. Feminism understood as equality before the law is, he argues, “nothing more than a branch of the great liberal movement, which advocates peaceful and free evolution” (page 87). As women became the legal equals of men, and as marriage became contractual like so much else, love and sexual desire took their modern place in marriage.2 What is most striking about this argument is how far ahead of its time it was. Sociologists into the early 21st century were still making the argument that it was the liberal and market orders that enabled love to conquer marriage as if it were news. Mises saw this point almost a century earlier. This discussion has two purposes in Mises’s larger argument. First, it shows that capitalism and liberalism were responsible for many of the social advances of the modern era, rather than being the cause of any number of social problems. Second, it sets up his fear that socialism will return us to an age of violence and undo all of that progress.

Comments

[Roger D McKinney]

"One of liberalism’s greatest accomplishments was the gradual extension of equal rights to all humans..."

This was actually the work if Christianity over 1500 years according to Larry Siedentop in "Inventing the Individual." Christian individualism was so radical it took the church centuries to transform culture and institutions. Geert Hofstede and others demonstrate the importance of individualism to economic development, though they have cause and effect reversed. Also, Helmut Schoeck shows the importance of individualism as the opposite of envy and its necessity in economic growth. Schoeck shows that only Christianity suppressed envy enough for individualism to flower and people to prosper.

I summarize these guys and more in "God is a Capitalist" available on Amazon with a review on my blog rdmckinney.blogspot.com

[Roger D McKinney]

The Liberty Matters discussion is great, but misses the core of the problem - human nature. Marx clearly recognizes that something is wrong with humanity. It's the ancient problem of the origins of evil. The Greeks and Romans saw the problem as one of education. Marx and all socialists before him and after have blamed capitalism. Islam and Hinduism think education can perfect humanity in the same way. Only Judaism and Christianity have seen mankind as inherently flawed and no amount of education and no economic system can fix us. Everything Marx attributed to capitalism existed before capitalism and in all non-capitalist societies. The explosive growth in wealth that Marx attributes to capitalism happened only after Christianity tamed envy with the invention of political and economic individualism.

[Troy]

Roger is correct. At the heart of socialism is the moral opprobrium of private property, that profit is theft. This is incorrect. Elsewhere Roger correctly notes that the solution to envy, as demonstrated by Schoeck, is Christianity. Christianity asserts, under God, that private property should be protected. It follows that when one provides a product and solves his client's problem, the company makes a profit, as does the client, who would not engage in exchange if there was no value inherent in the transaction. Mises was correct, that socialism has no way of calculating the correct allocation of capital investment without prices, hence the need for the individual to make the time and place decisions as an entrepreneur as to how to effectively allocate scare resources for productive purposes.

[Ted Burczak]

I don't see any way to comment on the "Liberty Matters" site, so I'll comment here.
It appears as if the authors understand Marx's theory of exploitation to involve being "cheated" in exchange, to receive less than the value of one's marginal product. The problem with that is that Marx explicitly asserts, in Capital, that he assumes equal for equal in exchange. The problem of exploitation is not in "the market." It is that the hiring party owns the worker's time and all of the worker's product (which are separate issues from getting paid too little). Marx explicitly calls for the abolition of the wages system, not the abolition of low wages. Probably the labor theory of value obscures these points for most readers. And, probably, he could have made these points better with a labor theory of property (see David Ellerman).