In one of Dr. Roderick T. Long’s lectures he stated that he liked to call the libertarian revolution a proletariat revolution. Whither he was serious about this statement or was saying it in tongue in cheek I do not know. However, it made me think: Is the libertarian revolution also a proletariat revolution? Really ponder this question.
You should post the source for reference. Pedantically, I am in partial agreement, but Marxism is bullshit.
Context is important here. Does Long support violent overthrow of the State, or does he consider the libertarian revolution to be led by people who have a greater “class consciousness” than others?
Well of course Marxism is a joke but is Dr. Long correct in his statement?
No. A libertarian revolution is political, it has nothing to do with economic class.
What about John Calhoun’s ‘Tax providers’ and ‘Tax consumers’?
Removing the State will fundamentally improve the lot of the working man.
See what I mean?
Rich and poor people compose both tax consumers and tax payers.
Government employees and the taxpayers.
In a sense, yes…
If you mean proletariat as the workers, not the poor class structure, then obvioulsy yes, the workers stand to benefit the greatest from a libertarian revolution, certainly there will be no minimum wage or forced insurance, but, the price drop and the stable free market currency will benefit them far more than the current systems…
If you mean the poor that live off welfare… no…
When I say proletariat I mean marginal workers.
Long was sort of being tongue in cheek, but basically the point is that there is no good reason why libertarianism can’t or shouldn’t be appealing to “the left”, if conceptualized in a certain way. The speech that the statement comes from is Long’s “Rothbard’s Left and Right, 40 Years Later” (which can be found at this very site), in which he is retrospectively trying to make the case for a “libertarian left” that does not have conservative connotations.
Long did have a joshing voice. However, I found it a very thought provoking lecture and that statement specifically a revolutionary one in my thought process.
I know Thomas Paine was a thorn in John Adams and Hamiltons heel due to Paine was all about the worker and wanted to take the revolution a step further and rid the aristocratic strangle hold on government agendas due to their powerful, including monetary, influences on governmental policies. Paine was looked down upon by many “high class” people due to his poor background and rough edged mannerism, but that’s part in measure why he had the pulse of the everyday man and woman and became the voice of the Revolution not only in America, but in France and almost Britain for he could write on-point to the laymen and so-called higher class intellectual alike. He knew cause he was one of them and was also able to mingle with the “higher class” as Franklin took him in and introduced him to numerous well-known people during that time for Paine before “Common Sense” was already showing his bravery and skill with the pen in some articles in Britain.
The French Revolution took heed of Paine’s calling and if you smelled like an aristocrat (maybe literally at times…lol) you were mobbed and potentially hung in the streets. The French didn’t have a reasoned debate on what the government would look like after monarchy fell. In a biography of Paine I have recently read the author made a good case that in America the revolution, aside from not taking that next step Paine wanted, it did adhere to rationalizing natural rights and thus became an argument at Conventions, Congress, via letters, individuals meeting, and books whereas the natural rights of the French sided with Rousseau’s sensibility and once that passion was unleashed no intellectual replacement surfaced, other than Bonaparts.
Is this similar to what you’re asking and discussing?
Well then yes, and Wilderness is exactly correct, Paine, if you examine all his work, was very anti aristocrat, he had even made the claim, and I would have to search the source so do not quote me yet, that the perfect republic would have no government (to this effect)…
Also I would like to add this from a very interesting article I found here at the Mises site by David Osterfeld (who currently contributes to the Mises Daily I noticed) in which he is in part critiquing an article that has a socialist/Marxist position:
"Since the Marxist views both the market and the state as nothing more than alternative methods by which the ruling class is able to dominate and exploit the rest of society, he is unable to distinguish between the market process itself, and the effect of government restrictions on the market. And this, in turn, means that the Marxist cannot distinguish between what is commonly referred to as capitalism, or a system of free trade, and mercantilism, or a system in which the operation of the market is impeded by extensive government restrictions for the benefit of the ruling group. It is important to realize that it is not simply that the Marxist does not distinguish between capitalism and mercantilism. It is that the Marxist paradigm quite literally renders him incapable of making such a distinction.
…In contrast, the strength of the liberal paradigm lies in precisely its ability to provide an analytical distinction between voluntarism and power, market, and government. This distinction has been at the center of liberal thought from its very inception. Adam Smith, for example, wrote his massive Wealth of N____ations specifically to refute the doctrine of mercantilism. Smith argues that under mercantilism monopolistic privileges were granted to a few favored firms, permitting them to sell at exorbitant prices, while tariffs were enacted to keep out foreign competitors. But if a nation were to eliminate imports it would need to have its own exclusive colonies in order to obtain raw materials. The power of the state, of course, was ideally suited to carve out and police the resulting colonial system. Smith charged that the mercantilist system not only hurt those in the colonies but the workers in the mother country as well. Its only beneficiaries, he says, were “the rich and powerful.” Permitting the colonists to buy only from merchants in the mother country enabled those merchants to sell at monopoly prices in the colonies. The colonists, therefore, were unable to pay for the administration of colonial government as well, so the workers in the home-country were heavily taxed to defray this cost, thereby perpetuating the profits of the state-favored merchants. The effect of mercantilism, said Smith, was that “the interest of one little order of men in one country” was promoted at the expense of “the interests of all other orders of men in that country and of all other orders of men in all other countries” (Smith 1776, p. 578). What Smith urged was the replacement of mercantilism by free trade. This, of course, would logically entail the abandonment of the entire colonial empire and Smith did not shrink from drawing that conclusion.
…While Mises sees peace as the necessary precondition for free trade, mercantilism, he says tersely, is “the philosophy of war.” Similarly, Murray Rothbard (1970, pp. 194-96) draws a sharp contrast between the market principle, personified by individual freedom, mutual harmony and peace, and the state, or “the hegemonic principle,” characterized by “coercion,” the “benefit of one group at the expense of another,” “caste conflict,” and “war.” Similarly, Milton Friedman is fond of drawing attention to the fact that while such policies as tariffs are “pro-business,” they are “anti-free trade.” The inability of the Marxist paradigm to distinguish between capitalism and mercantilism has resulted in an unfortunate terminological confusion which has meant that classical liberals and Marxists have often talked past one another when they were, in fact, in substantial agreement, at least on certain key issues regarding the state, such as its role in generating class conflict and turning trade into a situation in which one group benefits at the expense of another. This is precisely the case with Traders Versus the State. What the authors of Traders Versus the State condemn as “capitalism” is nearly identical to what liberals criticize as “mercantilism.”"
Government employees are a member of the so-called tax-paying class.
The entire idea of a proletariat revolution is very Manichaen, and Hegalian, and in this sense it is wrong because there are very rarely, esspecially with the fall of feudalism, clear-cut classes with their appropriate clear-cut interests.
I was also inspired by the lecture, at about the time that it initially was made.
The left is going to have to get over their distaste for private property for that to ever be a success.