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.
…
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.

While reading any book, I tend to highlight parts that epitomize the author’s viewpoint. In reading Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, I found strong themes of socialism, social planning, nationalism, victimization similar to that preached by Democrats in America (anti-capitalist in nature), anti-communism in the form of socialism (both are collectivist), a Dawkin-esque hostility and rhetoricalism that stands in opposition to logically formatted argument (see Translator’s Note) and of course imperialism justified by Darwinian racial natural selection (eugenics), accompanied by an anti-individualism that is to be found in all socialist/communism/collectivist doctrines.

The thing that interested me was his socialism as a solution to the threat that he perceived in communism. Communism is anti-nationalist. It is an internationalist, globalist scheme. Hitler feared loss of the German identity to internationalism. For this reason he opposed communism.

It’s fair to say that Hitler felt so strongly about National Socialism because of the very real threat that communism had posed to Germany. Marxist Communism was anti-industry. Marx thought that “machines dehumanize” the workers. The threat was to de-industrialize Germany and leave it easy prey for neighboring imperialists.

Anyhow, here are a few bits and pieces from the book itself:

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
Even where he is discussing theoretical matters like ‘the state,’ ‘race,’ etc., he seldom pursues any logic inherent in the subject matter. He makes the most extraordinary allegations without so much as an attempt to prove them. Often there is no visible connection between one paragraph and the next. The logic is purely psychological: Hitler is fighting his persecutors, magnifying his person, creating a dream-world in which he can be an important figure.

P.23
The reason for this hostility, as we might almost call it, lies in the fear of a social group, which has but recently raised itself above the level of the manual worker, that it will sink back into the old despised class, or at least become identified with it. To this, in many cases, we must add the repugnant memory of the cultural poverty of this lower class, the frequent vulgarity of its social intercourse; the pretty bourgeois’ own position in society, however insignificant it may be, makes any contact with this outgrown stage of life and culture intolerable.

After the turn of the century, Vienna was, socially speaking, one of the most backward cities in Europe. Dazzling riches and loathsome poverty alternated sharply.

P.28
These people are the unfortunate victims of bad conditions!

P.41
I wrestled with my innermost soul: are these people human, worthy to belong to a great nation?

A painful question; for if it is answered in the affirmative, the struggle for my nationality really ceases to be worth the hardships and sacrifices which the best of us have to make for the sake of such scum; and if it is answered in the negative, our nation is pitifully poor in human beings.

P.43
If Social Democracy is opposed by a doctrine of greater truth, but equal brutality of methods, the latter will conquer, though this may require the bitterest struggle.

P.44
Terror at the place of employment, in the factory, in the meeting hall, and on the occasion of mass demonstrations will always be successful unless opposed by equal terror.

P.47
The individual worker, however, is never in a position to defend himself against the power of the great industrialist,

P.49
Less and less attention was paid to defending the real needs of the working class, and finally political expediency made it seem undesirable to relieve the social or cultural miseries of the broad masses at all, for otherwise there was a risk that these masses, satisfied in their desires, could no longer be used forever as docile shock troops.

P.50
Only our decadent metropolitan bohemians can feel at home in this maze of reasoning and cull an ‘inner experience’ from this dung-heap of literary dadaism, supported by the proverbial modesty of a section of our people who always detect profound wisdom in what is most incomprehensible to them personally.

P.52
There were few Jews in Linz. In the course of the centuries their outward appearance had become Europeanized and had taken on a human look; in fact, I even took them for Germans.

P.53
To me the whole thing seemed artificial.

P.55
It cost me the greatest inner soul struggles, and only after months of battle between my reason and my sentiments did my reason begin to emerge victorious.

P.56
Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity.

P.78
The Western democracy of today is the forerunner of Marxism which without it would not be thinkable.

P.87
This human error, as senseless as it is dangerous, will most readily be understood as soon as we compare democratic parliamentarianism with a truly Germanic democracy.

P.95
There can be no such thing as state authority as an end in itself, for, it there were, every tyranny in this world would be unassailable and sacred.

P.105
In order to maintain this requirement, every man must know that the new movement can offer the present nothing but honor and fame in posterity.1

1 (That the new movement can offer honor and fame in the eyes of posterity, but nothing in the present.)

P.107
Particularly the broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech.

P.142
They knew that the acquisition of new soil was possible only in the East, they saw the struggle that would be necessary and yet wanted peace at any price; for the watchword of German foreign policy had long ceased to be: preservation of the German nation by all methods; but rather: preservation of world peace by all means.

P.150
It is not a collection of economic contracting parties in a definite delimited living space for the fulfillment of economic tasks, but the organization of a community of physically and psychologically similar living beings for the better facilitation of the maintenance of their species and the achievement of the aim which has been allotted to this species by Providence. This and nothing else is the aim and meaning of a state.

It is one of the most ingenious tricks that was ever devised, to make this state sail under the flag of ‘religion,’ thus assuring it of the tolerance which the Aryan is always ready to accord a religious creed.

P.153
In 1914, as long as the German people though they were fighting for ideals, they stood firm; but as soon as they were told to fight for their daily bread, they preferred to give up the game.

P.156
bungling quackery.

P.173
The denial of this fact only proves the effrontery, and also the stupidity, of the liars.

P.182
In this connection, from the very beginning of the War and from top to bottom, such sins were committed that we were entitled to doubt whether so much absurdity could really be attributed to pure stupidity alone.

P.214
It is well known that none of the fears of this exalted corporation were later realized: the travelers in the trains of the new ‘steam horse’ did not get dizzy, the onlookers did not get sick, and the board fences to hide the new invention from sight were given up -

P.255
The right of personal freedom recedes before the duty to preserve the race.

P.299
for development requires willingness on the part of the individual to sacrifice himself for the community,

P.322
Consequently the question of regaining German power is not: How shall we manufacture arms? but: How shall we manufacture the spirit which enables a people to bear arms? If this spirit dominates a people, the will finds a thousand ways, every one of witch ends in a weapon! But give a coward ten pistols and if attacked he will not be able to fire a single shot.

P.342
If, however, in word and gesture, it uses the masses’ harshness of sentiment and expression, it will be rejected by the so-called intelligentsia as coarse and vulgar.

P.344
it rejects, in general and in its own inner structure, a principle of majority rule in which the leader is degraded to the level of a mere executant of other people’s will and opinion. In little as well as big things, the movement advocates the principle of a Germanic democracy: the leader is elected, but then enjoys unconditional authority.

P.477
Only in the rarest cases will a convinced Social Democrat or a fanatical Communist condescend to acquire a National Socialist pamphlet, let alone a book, to read it and from it gain an insight into our conception of life or to study the critique of his own.

P.482
Phooey, I say, and again phooey!

P.518
The first foundation for the creation of authority is always provided by popularity.

P.601
The National Socialist worker must know that the prosperity of the national economy means his own material happiness.
The National Socialist employer must know that the happiness and contentment of his workers is the premise for the existence and development of his own economic greatness.
National Socialist workers and National Socialist employers are both servants and guardians of the national community as a whole.

P.682
On the day when Marxism is smashed in Germany, her fetters will in truth be broken forever.