In Bertrand Russell’s short essay, Why I Am Not a Communist, Russell provides two objections to Marx. First, Marx was “muddle headed,” and secondly “his thinking was almost entirely inspired by hatred.”

Russell summarizes Marxism thus:

The doctrine of surplus value, which is supposed to demonstrate the exploitation of wage-earners under capitalism, is arrived at: (a) by surreptitiously accepting Malthus’s doctrine of population, which Marx and all his disciples explicitly repudiate; (b) by applying Ricardo’s theory of value to wages, but not to the prices of manufactured articles. He is entirely satisfied with the result, not because it is in accordance with the facts or because it is logically coherent, but because it is calculated to rouse fury in wage-earners.

Russell could have gone a bit further back to look at the foundation of Marx’s claims – i.e., the moral theory of desert – but he doesn’t do that. Why? Perhaps because Russell himself wants to retain the use of desert in his own moral and political theories.

Russell then identifies another problem thus:

The dictatorship of the proletariat therefore as conceived by Marx was not essentially anti-democratic. In the Russia of 1917, however, the proletariat was a small percentage of the population, the great majority being peasants. it was decreed that the Bolshevik party was the class-conscious part of the proletariat, and that a small committee of its leaders was the class-conscious part of the Bolshevik party. The dictatorship of the proletariat thus came to be the dictatorship of a small committee, and ultimately of one man – Stalin. As the sole class-conscious proletarian, Stalin condemned millions of peasants to death by starvation and millions of others to forced labour in concentration camps.
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But my objections to modern Communism go deeper than my objections to Marx. It is the abandonment of democracy that I find particularly disastrous.

The idea is that if a larger percent of the population consented to the policies, they would be justified. But the dictatorship of the majority, as history has shown us, can be just as murderous as a dictatorship of a minority.

The history of leftism could be described as one long struggle against acknowledging a single fact. Leftism wants to impose collectivism on the people. This necessarily involves the forced surrender of individual sovereignty to the collective authority. This much is good, to the leftist. Now he can take your wages and distribute your earnings according to his morality. He can tell you who to employ, how to employ them and who not to employ. He can dictate that the your child’s education conform to his morality. He can force you to participate in schemes which serve his conception of the greater good. The leftist is happy.

The problem arises when the collective authority deviates from the leftist’s conception of morality. Modern liberals and communitarians in America denounce constitutional impediments to the exercise of popular sovereignty and democracy. Then they turn around and invoke individual sovereignty when the majority deviates from their morality.

A typical example of this hypocrisy is the invocation of popular sovereignty in the service of universal health care, and the simultaneous invocation of  individual sovereignty when they attempt to combat referendums – the very epitome of popular sovereignty in action – which denied gays the right to marry.

The question for the leftist then is, how do we give collective authority to the majority without the majority abusing that authority? As I’ve argued before, it cannot be done. Once you’ve declared that “justice” is synonymous with the will of the majority; and “injustice” is synonymous with any act that deviates from the will of the majority, you’ve just justified any and all atrocities the majority can will itself to commit.

The collectivist, however, refuses to acknowledge the sovereignty of the individual. By this time, he probably knows in his heart that the collectivism will necessarily result in atrocity after atrocity after atrocity, but he thinks the benefits he derives from collectivism – primarily, coercive wealth redistribution and the ability to indoctrinate children in their beliefs – these benefits outweigh the risks.

And that is where individualists disagree. No benefits can justify collectivism. Even if torturing just one child could wipe out all illness social and physical for all eternity, it would not be justified. Justifying that which is intrinsically unjust is logically impossible.

Michael Sandel, the communitarian professor of philosophy at Harvard University, has a beginners level lecture series online.He covers the spectrum of moral philosophies and overall it’s a good series.

He is, however, a communitarian; communitarians define themselves roughly as “opposed to any variant of individualism.” They believe in group rights, not individual rights. As pluralists, they will respect your rights only in terms of your group membership.A horrid and oppressive ideology, if you ask me.

Anyway, watching the series I noticed that he is for the most part fair in his representation of libertarian philosophy. I did notice one “oops” moment, though. He mentioned almost as an aside that John Locke had contradicted himself by arguing for consent-based justice while at the same time allowing private property ownership. Sandel says, “This great theorist of consent came up with a theory of private property that didn’t require consent.” To Sandel, Locke has contradicted himself; Sandel refers to this as “the darker side of Locke.”

There is no contradiction. Locke didn’t demand that individuals secure the consent of others for everything they do; only acts which affect the property rights of others – property of self or property in land.

MEN being, as has been said, by nature all free equal, and independent. no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent…

Now, for Sandel’s implied claim of a contradiction to be meaningful, he would have to show that private property deprives others of their property somehow.

Now, I know what Sandel is thinking. All private property within a nation, to Sandel, belongs to everybody. When an individual claims part of it, he is depriving others of property without their consent. But that is nothing more than willful ignorance of Locke’s theory of ownership.

How could all the land within a nation belong to everybody in the first place? Did they mix their labor with the land? Then it’s theirs; and nobody else can claim it. The difference here is that Locke doesn’t recognize Sandel’s collectivization of the land in the first place. To Locke, the land is unowned. It has no owner, so when an individual mixes his labor with it and thereby claims it for himself, he has no deprived anybody of their land.

What I’d really like to see is Sandel’s argument for collective ownership of land that nobody has mixed their labor with.

Libertarianism, from A to Z by Jeffrey Miron

Jeffrey Miron is a professor of economics at Harvard University and an outspoken libertarian. His new book, Libertarianism from A to Z, has just come out and is available at Amazon.

There are many defenses of libertarian thought out there. I dare say libertarians do not need any more of those. (See: Lomasky’s Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community and Jan Narveson’s The Libertarian Idea)

Libertarianism, A to Z, is more of an exposition of applied libertarianism. Miron shows how libertarianism deals with problems as diverse as abortion, affirmative action, bank regulation, disaster relief, drug prohibition, drunk driving laws, false advertising, gun control, immigration, marriage, national defense, organ sales, paternalism, prostitution, public schools, religion and taxpayer subsidized sports stadiums, just to name a few.

Highly recommended reading for anybody who aspires to political literacy.