“Proposals to transform the relations of the sexes have long gone hand in hand with plans for the socialization of the means of production”
I don’t get this; why does Mises think conventional family structures go hand in hand with capitalism? Hasn’t capitalism and freedom questioned artificial social norms and all that? I’ve noticed this in a couple of places in the more conservative part of the libertarian movement - it annoys me. It sounds like some sort of McCarthy era propaganda about how anyone who questions sexual/social norms of society must be a socialist.
Wasn’t it capitalism that has allowed women to work and all that?
The reason I’m a libertarian is because I believe in both social freedom and economic freedom. Liberty causes diversity; so why are some libertarians against it?
“Proposals to transform the relations of the sexes have long gone hand in hand with plans for the socialization of the means of production” doesn’t mean “conventional family structures go hand in hand with capitalism.” That statement means “generally speaking, people who want to transform the social relations of the sexes also want to socialize the means of production.”
You have to remember that Mises was a product of his time and that in his time, feminism, the gay rights movement, and other socially liberal causes often went hand-in-hand with Marxism.
Mises is referring to cultural Marxism, which is hand-in-glove with classical, or economic, Marxism. People are fiercely loyal to their pre-State institutions of Family and Creed, which makes even the proletariat extremely resistant to the State’s efforts to allocate resources. The Marxist aim is to break down Family and Creed leaving only the State. The ‘artificial social norms’ you question are founded on basic biology.
‘Proposals to transform the relations of the sexes have long gone hand in hand with plans for the socialization of the means of production’’
We have I think to take this at face value. They do tend to. Hayek says much the same thing and has an explanation. The reason being that the root attitude of socialism that of ‘constructivist rationalism’ is the same for radical social visions. There is no attack on social freedom. Indeed social freedom is necessary for the experimentation that makes progress. What is bad is trying to enforce a rationally designed moral code on all stifling progress.
''When the prophets and philosophers, from Moses to Plato and St
Augustine, from Rousseau to Marx and Freud, protested against
the prevailing morals, clearly none of them had any grasp of the
extent to which the practices which they condemned had made
possible the civilization of which they were part. They had no
conception that the system of competitive prices and remunerations
signalling to the individual what to do, had made possible that
extensive specialization by informing the individuals how best to
serve others of whose existence they might not know - and to use in
this opportunities of the availability of which they also had no direct
knowledge. Nor did they understand that those condemned moral
beliefs were less the effect than the cause of the evolution of the
market economy.
But the gravest deficiency of the older prophets was their belief
that the intuitively perceived ethical values, divined out of the depth
of man’s breast, were immutable and eternal. This prevented them
from recognizing that all rules of conduct served a particular kind of
order to society, and that, though such a society will find it necessary
to enforce its rules of conduct in order to protect itself against
disruption, it is not society with a given structure that creates the
rules appropriate to it, but the rules which have been practised by
a few and then imitated by many which created a social order of a
particular kind. Tradition is not something constant but the product
of a process of selection guided not by reason but by success. It
changes but can rarely be deliberately changed. Cultural selection is
not a rational process; it is not guided by but it creates reason.
The belief in the immutability and permanence of our moral rules
receives of course some support from the recognition that as little as
we have designed our whole moral system, is it in our power to
change it as a whole. We do not really understand how it maintains
the order of actions on which the co-ordination of the activities of
many millions depends. And since we owe the order of our society
to a tradition of rules which we only imperfectly understand, all
progress must be based on tradition. We must build on tradition and
can only tinker with its products. It is only by recognizing the
conflict between a given rule and the rest of our moral beliefs that
we can justify our rejection of an established rule. Even the success
of an innovation by a rule-breaker, and the trust of those who follow
him, has to be bought by the esteem he has earned by the scrupulous
observation of most of the existing rules. To become legitimized,
the new rules have to obtain the approval of society at large - not by
a formal vote, but by gradually spreading acceptance. And though
we must constantly re-examine our rules and be prepared to question
every single one of them, we can always do so only in terms of
their consistency or compatibility with the rest of the system from
the angle of their effectiveness in contributing to the formation of
the same kind of overall order of actions which all the other rules
serve. There is thus certainly room for improvement, but we
cannot redesign but only further evolve what we do not fully
comprehend.‘’
It seems to me that there is an easy explanation here. You can do what you want in your family life, and Mises isn’t particularly interested. What he’s talking about, as he says, is proposals to transform the relations of the sexes. He’s not talking about transformation in the relations that come about organically, not is he talking about capitalism leading to the invention of time-saving devices allowing both partners to work (prior that, it seems men had a comparative advantage in working and women in staying home, most of the time) - he’s talking about people who want to make those relations change and who want to make a political/social issue out of how people arrange their families. Such things do go hand in hand with socialism.
By the way, Mises had a lot of things to say about marriage and so forth that make it hard to maintain that he was a conservative on this issue. Regarding Rockwell - can you deny the historical accuracy of what he says? The free love movement took place on communes, and even today, it is empirically true (though not necessary) that most people who proclaim themselves interested in free love tend not to proclaim themselves interested in working long hours to pay for the families that they might accidentally produce in that manner. There are exceptions, but most of them don’t actually proclaim themselves - a rich executive who sneaks out to get a prostitute without his wife knowing is not a proponent of free love, exactly.
Actually, I always hear Marxists saying the same thing about their own ideas in regards to pre-state stuff. That’s why they all think primitive man was the most egalitarian and feminist. They think agriculture and industry in addition to the state creates inequality. What they hate even worse is “late-capitalism”! And people like Rousseau sang the praises of the irrationalism he associated with this group. anarcho-primitivists take this literally. And advocate blowing up anything that made man modern, statist, or dependent on technology and the division of labor that goes beyond tribalism.
Remember that the Marxists associate the state with capitalism, which is why they want a different type of state. It doesn’t make sense for them break things down to the current bourgeois state in existence. Also, you have to factor in their stated aim of the state withering away.
I think it is more a Social Democrat aim to reduce all human life to State involvement. But that is because they are Marxists who don’t want to shit or get off the pot.
I think Mises was not opposed to the equality aspect of feminism. He only tries to refute the polylogist aspect of some feminists. He seems to have a similar position to Ayn Rand. Ego and self-interest in the economy is great for all people. Including women.
from Socialism
“It is not exclusively to the interest of woman that she should succeed in this struggle; to contrast the interests of men and women, as extreme feminists try to do, is very foolish. All mankind would suffer if woman should fail to develop her ego and be unable to unite with man as equal, freeborn companions and comrades.”