Marx v Mises
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My oh my, whatever next, Sylvester the Cat to enter the fray with his latest cartoon “I hate Mises to pieces”???
Several years ago at the WSM forum, the theories of Mises and the so-called Anarcho-capitalists was completely unmasked and the floor was cleaned with their distorting theory including an ex-member of the SPGB which became one of his proponents. In several countries, they were used as Trojan horses, and the real conception of Anarchism has been distorted by them. They make me throw up, they are just a bunch of reactionary and recalcitrants anti-communists
We are still doing so.
You swept the floor with their own arguments
I have written to the Director of the American Institute for Economic Research, the organisation responsible for producing these videos which are doing the rounds on various FB forums, inviting him to contact the SPGB with a view to having a published debate between them and us. We shall what transpires
In the meantime here is a piece on why the AIER is publishing this material. One gets the feeling he knows very little about Marx or Marxism and is trying to cover up this lack of knowledge with suspiciously over-confident and questionable generalisations
He writes – “For my own part, I’ve been an anti-Marxist as long as I can remember but never bothered to look carefully at his writings.”
Kind of says it all really
Most anti-communists do not have a clue about socialism-communism and Marxism, and they have not read or studied anything about socialism and communism
This article from the AIER site seems a little more …er.. “scholarly” … than Jeffrey Tucker’s ( “For my own part, I’ve been an anti-Marxist as long as I can remember but never bothered to look carefully at his writings.”) although that’s not saying much
In the course of my life, I have met many anti-Marxist, anti-communists, renegades, and intellectuals who seem to describe Marx body of ideas, but in the end, most of them have ended defending capitalism, now they are called conservatives, in my times we used to call them reactionary which is the proper name
They can write a hundred books but their aim is to defend the capitalist mode of production,
Marx is the only individual until now who has been able to describe properly the capitalist mode of production, and the law of value and surplus-value, and they are not obsolete,
Marx ideas are more alive today than in prior epochs, there is not a replacement yet
My question has always has been: Why a worker must defend his/her own exploiter? That would be the same paradox which exists at the present time when workers are electing right-wingers or left-wingers populists, and millionaires to become their own leaders,
I have always remembered the particular case of my grandfather, he never read anything about Marx, he was not an intellectual, and he never wrote any books, but he knew that the Soviet Union was not a socialist country, and the knew the real character of WW2, and his only source of information was a shortwave radio, it does prove that intellectual education is not a guarantee for knowledge because thousands of peoples with PH degree are always defending the capitalist mode of production, and they do not have a clue of what socialism really is
It would be the same case of a socialist becoming a defender of the capitalist class, and I have seen many going into that route, sometimes those renegades become worst than their own real class enemy
Baron von Mises is often presented as a liberal but in fact he was an opponent of political democracy who favoured an authoritarian political regime, as exposed by Quinn Slobodian in his recent book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. In his review of it in the 19 August edition of the London Review of Books Alexander Zevin, basing himself on Slobodian, notes:
“In July 1927, the acquittal of three right-wing militia members for the murder of a war veteran and a child in a working-class district set off a general strike and demonstrations. Protesters put the Palace of Justice to the torch, and the police fired into the crowd, leaving 89 dead. ‘Friday’s putsch has cleansed the atmosphere like a thunderstorm,’ Mises wrote. ‘The street fight ended in complete victory for the police.’ He believed Mussolini’s victory had for the moment ‘saved European civilisation. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.’ Talk of workers’ ‘right to the street’ or of ‘universal, equal and direct voting rights’ was often, he believed, cover for ‘terror and intimidation’. By contrast, he insisted to a group of German industrialists in 1931 that ‘the capitalistic market economy is a democracy, in which every penny constitutes a vote.’ Elected by means of what he called a ‘consumer plebiscite’, the rich depended on the ‘will of the people as consumers’, even when their wealth was inherited, since it could ‘be preserved only by those who keep on earning it anew by satisfying the wishes of consumers’. In 1934 Mises joined the Patriotic Front, launched the year before to rally support for the Catholic conservative and nationalist regime of Engelbert Dollfuss, which banned the Nazi and Communist Parties and forged an alliance with Italy. In February, Dollfuss moved against the socialists, putting down a fitful uprising of workers in Linz, shelling Karl Marx Hof in Vienna, expelling the Social Democrats from parliament and passing a new corporatist constitution”
So, Von Mises’s opposition to socialism was not just on theoretical grounds but involved active support for moves to put down and destroy the workers movement in his native country while he lived there.
We should return the compliment (perhaps instead of engaging in endless arguments with his followers about the so-called “economic calculation” argument against socialism). In any event, his support for Mussolini and for the Dollfuss dictatorship in Austria is something we can point out.
There is a certain logic in his opposition to political democracy if, like him and fellow Austrian Baron von Hayek, you think that people vote with money when as consumers they decide what to buy.
And his followers follow the same path. They support and have supported all kind of reactionaries. right-wingers, and anti-communist governments and leaders
Here is some more on Mises’ views on fascism – and Hayek on Pinochet’s Chile
https://www.salon.com/2011/08/30/lind_libertariansim/
Although I see the Adam Smith Institute has critiqued this article here:
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/thinkpieces/do-libertarians-apologise-for-autocracy-2
This is of interest too
We should return the compliment (perhaps instead of engaging in endless arguments with his followers about the so-called “economic calculation” argument against socialism). In any event, his support for Mussolini and for the Dollfuss dictatorship in Austria is something we can point out.
And their support to the government of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and the support they are going to provide to the reactionary government of Brazil. I have known them for many years, and they can only fool the fools. There is no any need to go into intellectuals argumentation with them, the results of the implementation of their policies are what must be shown, the capitalist class love them, but the workers hate them
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