Capitalism: The Revolutionary Liberal Alternative to Marxism
This page constitutes the ‘description’ of the Facebook Cause by the same name. Facebook Causes limit their descriptions to two-thousand words, a limit that this description surpasses. The title of this Cause comes from a tee shirt designed by a very talented libertarian from the state of Washington.
“The liberal revolution, in its support for laissez-faire capitalism, decentralisation, individualism, and Liberty, caused the most significant improvement to the human condition in the history of mankind.”
– Alexander S. Peak, 19 June 2007
Today, radical libertarianism is the standard-bearer of that movement.
“In contrast to the age-old institution of statism, of the political means, free-market capitalism arrived as a great revolutionary movement in the history of man. For it came into a world previously marked by despotism, by tyranny, by totalitarian control. Emerging first in the Italian city states free market capitalism arrived full scale with the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe, a revolution that brought about a remarkable release of creative energy and productive ability, an enormous increase of production. You can call that ‘greed’ if you wish; you can attack as ‘greed’ the desire of someone on a poverty level who wishes to better his lot.”
– Murray N. Rothbard, “A Future of Peace and Capitalism,” 1973
What we have today is not a free market, but rather what can be called neo-mercantilism or state capitalism.
“I’m very optimistic about the future of free-market capitalism. I’m not optimistic about the future of state capitalism—or rather, I am optimistic, because I think it will eventually come to an end.”
– Murray N. Rothbard, “A Future of Peace and Capitalism,” 1973
The free market lead to great advances for civilization, helping the proletariat emerge from the wretched state of the ancien régime. (It coincidentally also helped to free women and ethnic minorities from the thumb of oppression.)
“During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, indeed until the late nineteenth century, the mass of workers favored laissez-faire and the free competitive market as best for their wages and working conditions as workers, and for a cheap and widening range of consumer goods as consumers. Even the early trade unions, e.g., in Great Britain, were staunch believers in laissez-faire. New conservatives, spearheaded by Bismarck in Germany and Disraeli in Britain, weakened the libertarian will of the workers by shedding crocodile tears about the condition of the industrial labor force, and cartelizing and regulating industry, not accidentally hobbling efficient competition. Finally, in the early twentieth century, the new conservative ‘corporate state’—then and now the dominant political system in the Western world—incorporated ‘responsible’ and corporatist trade unions as junior partners to Big Government and favored big businesses in the new statist and corporatist decisionmaking system.”
– Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, 1973, Ch. 1, p. 11
To re-establish the systems of control that the classical liberalism had acted to destroy, statists had to con the people.
“For the masses now had to be convinced that tyranny was better than liberty, that a cartelized and privileged industrial feudalism was better for the consumers than a freely competitive market, that a cartelized monopoly was to be imposed in the name of antimonopoly, and that war and military aggrandizement for the benefit of the ruling elites was really in the interests of the conscripted, taxed, and often slaughtered public.
“…
“One of the ways that the new statist intellectuals did their work was to change the meaning of old labels, and therefore to manipulate in the minds of the public the emotional connotations attached to such labels. For example, the laissez-faire libertarians had long been known as ‘liberals,’ and the purest and most militant of them as ‘radicals’; they had also been known as ‘progressives’ because they were the ones in tune with industrial progress, the spread of liberty, and the rise in living standards of consumers. The new breed of statist academics and intellectuals appropriated to themselves the words ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive,’ and successfully managed to tar their laissez-faire opponents with the charge of being old-fashioned, ‘Neanderthal,’ and ‘reactionary.’ Even the name ‘conservative’ was pinned on the classical liberals. And, as we have seen, the new statists were able to appropriate the concept of ‘reason’ as well.
“If the laissez-faire liberals were confused by the new recrudescence of statism and mercantilism as “progressive” corporate statism, another reason for the decay of classical liberalism by the end of the nineteenth century was the growth of a peculiar new movement: socialism. Socialism began in the 1830s and expanded greatly after the 1880s. The peculiar thing about socialism was that it was a confused, hybrid movement, influenced by both the two great preexisting polar ideologies, liberalism and conservatism. From the classical liberals the socialists took a frank acceptance of industrialism and the Industrial Revolution, an early glorification of ‘science’ and ‘reason,’ and at least a rhetorical devotion to such classical liberal ideals as peace, individual freedom, and a rising standard of living. Indeed, the socialists, long before the much later corporatists, pioneered in a co-opting of science, reason, and industrialism. And the socialists not only adopted the classical liberal adherence to democracy, but topped it by calling for an ‘expanded democracy,’ in which ‘the people’ would run the economy—and each other.
“On the other hand, from the conservatives the socialists took a devotion to coercion and the statist means for trying to achieve these liberal goals. Industrial harmony and growth were to be achieved by aggrandizing the State into an all-powerful institution, ruling the economy and the society in the name of ‘science.’ A vanguard of technocrats was to assume all-powerful rule over everyone’s person and property in the name of the ‘people’ and of ‘democracy.’ Not content with the liberal achievement of reason and freedom for scientific research, the socialist State would install rule by the scientists of everyone else; not content with liberals setting the workers free to achieve undreamt-of prosperity, the socialist State would install rule by the workers of everyone else—or rather, rule by politicians, bureaucrats, and technocrats in their name. Not content with the liberal creed of equality of rights, of equality before the law, the socialist State would trample on such equality on behalf of the monstrous and impossible goal of equality or uniformity of results—or rather, would erect a new privileged elite, a new class, in the name of bringing about such an impossible equality.
“Socialism was a confused and hybrid movement because it tried to achieve the liberal goals of freedom, peace, and industrial harmony and growth—goals which can only be achieved through liberty and the separation of government from virtually everything—by imposing the old conservative means of statism, collectivism, and hierarchical privilege. It was a movement which could only fail, which indeed did fail miserably in those numerous countries where it attained power in the twentieth century, by bringing to the masses only unprecedented despotism, starvation, and grinding impoverishment.”
– Ibid., p. 11, 13-14
With this understanding, we thus see the importance of keeping this capitalist revolution alive.
For more information, please read the essay “Left and Right: The Prospect for Liberty” by Murray N. Rothbard (1965): http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?control=910
For an example of thought from exponents of the liberal revolution, be sure to read the following: http://tiger.towson.edu/~apeak1/writtenwork/declarationofindependence.html
Finally, for a better understanding on the philosophy of Liberty, the following flash page does an excellent job of exploring it and its implications: http://www.isil.org/resources/introduction.swf
There are ten “positions” of held by this Facebook Cause. They are as follows:
1. Free-market capitalism must be brought back, as both a popular philosophical model for prosperity, peace, and justice, and as a real and functioning system of voluntary interacting between consenting individuals.
2. Free market capitalism is a truly revolutionary approach to society, as it is an approach without central planners, but which rests upon the will of the people.
3. The natural right to the ownership of justly-acquired property is predicated on the axiom of self-ownership. Self-ownership was a rallying-cry of the American abolitionist movement, and the central argument to why slavery had to be abolished. Property is freedom.
4. Free-market capitalism is vastly misunderstood by the “left,” and has never truly been supported by the right. Hence the “left’s” penchant to oxymoronically conflate the free market with statism and the right’s proclivity to resort to protectionism and regulation.
5. Capitalism, as the test of time hath proven, is the only system that remains truly radical and revolutionary. This revolution must be kept alive.
6. The free market, from a practical standpoint, is the best possible system for the progress of mankind. It is, quite literally, in the proletariat’s distinct favour.
7. Centralisation of coercive authority can never be conducive to Liberty, nor to the advancement of mankind. All authority should be devolved back to the individuals that constitute society, and without whom society could not exist.
8. The most oppressed group under our current system, which collectivises authority for the will and benefit of the ruling class, is the individual, as the individual is the smallest group, and thus left most vulnerable by the rule of society’s managers and central planners.
9. Free market capitalism, unlike state capitalism and Marxist socialism, is the only movement advocating Power to the People.
10. Capitalism is inevitable.
