Riposte  

Marxism of the Right?

by John Coleman

Libertarianism is not the "Marxism of the Right," as a critic has recently charged. In fact, it's not an ideology of any sort. Libertarians want people to run their own lives and society to run itself. By so limiting its scope, it makes itself compatible with many religions and philosophies.

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Many on the Web have begun to refer to the string of Lebanese beauties gracing the covers of magazines and newspapers across the United States as "protest babes." With a mix of determination, drop-dead good looks, hope, and excitement, these women (and their slightly less photogenic male counterparts) have come to represent what many are calling "the Arab Spring."

They are blossoms in the desert of a despotic region. They are the forerunners of an Arab renaissance that will finally, hopefully, bring liberation to the peoples of our oldest civilizations. They are flowers of hope — fragile, rich, colorful, beautiful, diverse — asserting themselves amongst the weeds of fascism and coerced privilege. They provide irrefutable proof, as so many did at Tiananmen Square and in the events that preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall, that if there is one thing more powerful than a wall or a tank or a tyrant it is the sheer force of human liberty, creativity, passion, and love — the same force that, seeping through the cracks of the Gulag walls, once led Alexander Solzhenitsyn to proclaim boldly:

One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.

The Iron Curtain subsequently collapsed under such a heavy truth — one, in fact, that had been captured two centuries earlier in a simple, universal, and revolutionary phrase: "All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. . . ."

Robert Locke recently argued in "The American Conservative" that libertarianism is the Marxism of the Right. He is wrong. Libertarianism, broadly defined, is nothing like Marxism. It is an intellectual and political movement, an anti-ideology that, having vanquished the two greatest ideological threats of the last century, is poised to affect political and philosophic movements across the spectrum of belief for centuries to come. And if the Arab spring is any indication, it is the intellectual and practical force that may finally drive democracy into the hearts of some of the most undemocratic nations on earth.

Locke's fundamental flaw in attacking what he defined as libertarianism lay in his understanding of both Marxism and libertarianism. One is an ideology, the other an anti-ideology. The distinction can be seen in analyzing the definition of ideology laid out in Peter Lawler's more thoughtful criticism of libertarianism and materialism, "Communism Today": "The name rightly given to specifically modern lies is ideologies. An ideology is a form of popular science, and so not a form of real science. It is a comprehensive and easy to understand account of all that exists. Ideologies are dogmas that fill the vacuum created by the discrediting of religious dogma . . . [They] are never personal; we aren't controlled by persons but forces — such as history or material forces or the economy or technology. . . [They] make us all seem more soulless and less truly free than we really are."

By Lawler's account, Marxism is a pure ideology. Libertarianism is not. In "History of Political Philosophy," Joseph Cropsey notes that "Marxism presents itself as a comprehensive account of human life, and not only of human life but of nature as well." And it is this distinction that first separates the two.

Marxism sought to combine the political, the natural, the human, the cultural, and the economic in one unified theory, and claimed that utopian governance and the conquest of nature (the end of history) were both possibilities once a fundamental understanding of this unified theory guided political action. But in elevating the abstraction of an impossibly fluid rationalistic philosophy over the reality of individual human life, he laid the foundation for the 20th century's greatest monstrosity: the communism of Stalin and Mao. Contradictions to the theory were not seen as disproof of Marx's formulation, they were seen as outliers to be slaughtered, obscured, and cleansed. Placing value only in the material progress of "mankind" and in the final liberation of human beings from the natural constraints of choice, Marxism became a real-world creed — a frightening manifestation of the republic of Plato — that was primarily dangerous because it transcended the abstract to become reality. Governments acted on these theories. People internalized them. And the world was transformed. But Locke would have us believe that libertarianism is cut from the same cloth:

"Free spirits, the ambitious, the ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole role of ethics and government (emphasis mine). Libertarianism offers its believers a clear conscience to do things society presently restrains, like make more money, have more sex, or take more drugs. It promises a consistent formula for ethics, a rigorous framework for policy analysis, a foundation in American history, and the application of capitalist efficiencies to the whole or society. . .

"This is no surprise, as libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism."

To be fair to Mr. Locke, his analysis continues for several pages, but it is here, in his initial formulation of both Marxism and libertarianism, that it runs wildly astray.

First, I find it hard to believe that anyone who has read Marx would actually define Marxism as "the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism"; but granting his case, I know of no one that would define libertarianism as the "delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism." At the very heart of libertarian belief is the idea that no one should run society, but that societies work best when communities, families, businesses, and individuals are free to run themselves within the confines of civility, and without the threat of violence for purely intellectual differences. Ideologues run societies; libertarians, as Hayek would admonish, demote these ideologues, relying on the passions and dreams of individuals rather than on the intellectual permutations and perversities of a distinguished few. And it is revealing that Locke cannot remove himself from a construct in which intellectual movements must be pure, and must force their beliefs on others. This is certainly the definition of ideology, but it is the primary point at which libertarianism separates from ideology.

Marxists need a top-down implementation of Marxism, in the form of communism, because the entire system relies upon impersonal forces trumping individual preferences. Just like fascism, it demands rigorous adherence to rules for the execution of its societal plan.

Libertarianism and classical liberalism, on the other hand, demand nothing of the sort, and this is primarily because the foundation of libertarianism is not a holistic philosophy of mankind. Hearkening back to Lawler's guidelines, it is not an "impersonal" system, but a hodgepodge, a political framework designed to safeguard the personal from the coercion of the few. Far from making each person feel "more soulless and less truly free than we really are," its essential dogmas — dignity, political autonomy, mutual respect — place liberty and humanity at the forefront of all human behavior, emphasizing the very basic fact that politics is not everything, and that a safe and civil society is merely a vehicle for deeper human development.

And while Locke would have us believe that libertarianism proposes a comprehensive program for government and ethics, nothing could be farther from the truth.

It is proper to note that libertarianism demands some level of political obeisance to individual preference; but it never proposes the kind of moral nihilism that Locke claims as its primary motive.

Again, if ideologies are holistic conceptions of humanity and nature, then libertarianism is the opposite. Recognizing the contradictions and individualistic longings within people, it attempts to create a political system in which one moral framework may win over another through persuasion rather than force. It recognizes that real differences in morality do exist, and that they are vitally important, to the point that they sometimes lead to violence and coercion; and it emphasizes a system that respects these differences in the hope that conflicts may be resolved nonviolently.

It is a political philosophy designed to protect personal philosophies. If you want further proof of its decentralized and wholly unideological formulation, try to find two people who define their libertarianism in the same way. They don't exist, which is why Locke was forced to establish a perverse straw man as his libertarianism instead of the diverse mosaic of beliefs and actions that has for centuries comprised the philosophies of free markets and small government.

Libertarianism is not an ideology because libertarians are content to make government smaller piece by piece. Those who love liberty do not have to agree on every issue of government or morality. They do not need armies or prison camps to win the war of ideas — they just need a few courageous men and women to step to the forefront when real ideologies and ideologues threaten to undermine human dignity. Despite their personal beliefs and political preferences, they refuse the government the right to degrade their souls and their rights in order to shape culture, government, or society to their liking.

Locke must resort to fear-mongering — invoking "Free spirits, the ambitious, the ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics" — because in the absence of such straw men his readers might see the real faces of libertarianism.

Not stereotypes, but people.

They might see Martin Luther King Jr. standing defiantly on the top step of the Lincoln Memorial and denying an ideology of racial hatred the right to crush his dream. They might see Patrick Henry, who coined the phrase "Give me liberty, or give me death!" planted in front of the House of Burgesses, shouting to his oppressors, "If this be treason . . . make the most of it!" They might see Gandhi passively enduring his own degradation or Christ professing, "Render unto Caesar what it Caesar's, and unto God what is God's" — because in a world destined to fall short of Utopia, He knew, as Solzhenitsyn did, that "one word of Truth might outweigh the whole world."

And they might see the same ageless struggle in the flawless visage of a Lebanese "protest babe." Because great ideas are not confined to so-called "great men," nor are they the product of universities or of political caucuses. They are the natural outgrowth of billions of human souls, young and old, thirsting for a birthright of freedom that has languished for centuries under those "who know better," longing for that moment when real human potential can be realized and unleashed.

In his essay, "Liberalism in the New Millennium," Mario Vargas Llosa wrote: "For liberals, the war for the progress of liberty in history is, above all else, an intellectual battle, a struggle of ideas. The Allies won the war against the Axis, but that military victory did little more than confirm the superiority of a vision of man and society that is broad, horizontal, pluralist, tolerant, and democratic over a vision that was narrow-minded, truncated, racist, discriminatory, and vertical. The disintegration of the Soviet empire before the democratic West validated the arguments of Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Popper, and Isaiah Berlin concerning the open society and the free economy, and invalidated the fatal arrogance of ideologues like Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, and Mao Zedong, who were convinced that they had unraveled the inflexible laws of history and interpreted them correctly with their proletarian dictatorships and economic centralism."

Libertarianism, at base, is not an ideology. It is the enemy of ideology, but like Marxism it has the power to change the world on the basis of a few basic ideas, and if small battles against the drug war and sodomy laws accompany the larger war on autocracy and state oppression, let that be the case. The price of liberty, after all, is vigilance — even in the smallest and most controversial of things.

Locke makes a number of good points about the dangers of materialism and moral relativism, but he would do well to address these issues separately and realize the more diverse nature of "libertarianism" — not a school of thought or political party, but a broad-based and hopeful core of ideas. Perhaps then, in his concern for what he terms "the Marxism of the Right," he would look around to see that the anti-ideology he describes was a social force of power, beauty, and strength long before Marx published his manifesto. It battled and outlasted his movement, and now, with its emphasis on the importance of human liberty regardless of race, culture, or creed, it is washing over yet another region in this — the slow awakening of a global spring.

© Copyright 2010, Liberty Foundation

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