Scott Rubush write a reasonable piece on his self-named blog called Libertarianism and Marxism. I quite like the way Scott writes but I have to say he drives into several well worn potholes of misunderstanding when he mistakenly sees a confluence of views between Karl Marx and Dinesh D’Souza.
The notion that libertarians always disdain the ‘tried-and-true’ is his first misunderstanding. What libertarianism is based on is the rejection of the conservative and socialist predisposition to deference for deferences sake. Ours is the way that places civil society, and not state, at the centre of social interaction. We reject the nationalisation of private life. Yet civil society is not the product of our intellects but rather complex social evolutionary processes. Libertarians seek the solutions that emphasize free consent, binding contract and free association, all rooted in the ‘tried-and-true’ common law culture of the Anglosphere. It is only the state which can sweep away the ‘tried-and-true’ with the stroke of a pen, not libertarianism. What we reject is ‘traditions’ which have outlived their time, ‘tried-and-no-longer-true’, things like slavery, prohibiting women from owning property and legislated actions against consensual sexual practices like prostitution, homosexuality and other more unusual peccadillos.
The second misunderstanding is what D’Souza and Marx both said in the quoted passages. Whilst they both initially seem to confirm Rubush’s thesis, the last sentences in both of them illuminate why dialectical materialism is not the issue here at all because D’Souza and Marx have in fact drawn the opposite conclusions.
When Marx says in his well know remark “The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself”, he is arguing that the factory system of bourgeois collectivisation of the proletariat due to the advent of technologically derived mass production, makes the merging of society and state inevitable, thereby eliminating the raison d’etre of the bourgeoisie and resulting logically in a dictatorship of the proletariat which imposes social truth on all, leading to socialist ‘New Man’.
However when D’Souza says “So technology helped to free human beings from bondage, and that is a moral gain because it extends a cherished value: freedom”, he saying the exact opposite. His thesis is not that technology will collectivise us but rather that it will make the proletariat into the bourgeoisie… in other words, we are all de-collectivised middle class now. Technology frees us from an existence of collective tribal subsistence, allowing us to develop socially towards the more several existence of an extended de-collectivised civil order.
It is this extended order that allows morality, and not just collectivised force, to govern our actions. Man is still man but the idea that changing his circumstance makes no difference to his moral development is hard to support. Where is the Hottentot Aristotle? Where is the Nung Socrates? Where is the Inuit Aquinas? It is from a level of economic development driven by technology that permits us to spend less time shooting arrows at antelope and more time becoming more than just upright animals-that-survive.
That’s why his piece is fatally flawed. Rubush fails to see that whilst mankind’s nature may be essentially unchanging, his circumstances are not… and that is a non-trivial matter when it comes to allowing people to spend more time in non-utilitarian activities and less time just surviving.
Marx felt technology would turn society into a vast state-society based on ‘scientific socialist’ principles in which truth itself in collectively derived. D’Souza feels technology frees us to think and entertain such concepts as liberty itself.
