Dialectical Confusions

Will at AGTOR demolishes the libertarians in one fell visual swoop.

The New Internationalist, using an eerily similar strategy, provides the alternative.

Strangely, an interesting, if brief and a little too cordial, exchange occurs in the comments between said Will and a libertarian. Funnily enough, I think libertarians and Marxists have a lot in common - both (at their best obviously) take their political ideas seriously, approach them with intellectual rigour...and follow through to their conclusions, in a way mainstream liberals and social democrats might not.

Will mentions the libertarian thinker Robert Nozick, which reminded me of renowned Marxist (at least I think he's still a Marxist?) G.A. Cohen, who has engaged with Nozick's ideas quite a bit. As Cohen says in this interview:

"...the thing that I found disturbing was, quite simply, the challenging quality of Nozick’s arguments."

This was "disturbing" because, as the interview remarked:

"In the struggle by serfs against feudal lords who extracted labour from them with no contract or agreement, the slogan ‘The fruits of a person’s labour belong to himself or herself’ was an historically progressive one. The difficulty is that Marxists and other socialists have maintained that slogan into an era when different battles are on the agenda...You can reach libertarian conclusions by drawing out some of those implications and turning them into a reactionary theory."

The fundamental flaw of the libertarian analysis is its neglecting to question, and therefore failure to establish, the ethical foundations of private property itself - while libertarians cast an impressively critical eye on most matters, property is usually privileged by neglect, remaining unconsidered. This was brilliantly demonstrated by Cohen himself in the final chapter of History, Labour and Freedom, which I heartily recommend, manifesting as it does the author's usual intellectual rigour and integrity.