Libertarians are Communists
I know why you feel it in your soul
What gets lost in the maelstrom of online debate about libertarians is not that these people are operationally leftists, which the right quickly identifies, but that their entire ideology is essentially identical to communism. At the fundamental level they share three things in common: (1) A utopian view of man. (2) The belief that a stateless society not only can exist but is preferable. (3) Atheism, or at least a practical philosophical materialism. In Christian terms, libertarians either reject a view of man as corrupted by original sin or posit instead that his enlightened “rational state” will allow him to be perfected as a species beyond his fallen nature. Putting the same thought less theologically, it is the belief that it is fitting for man and naturally possible for him to somehow resolve all disputes without resorting to force. Both formulations of this idea are anti-government in the sense that they believe the government is an immoral force of oppression against rightfully autonomous individuals. Libertarianism in practice functions therefore as an anti-civilizational force in the deepest sense.
People who went outside have all come to this conclusion, including every philosopher or statesman worth reading. In the American tradition, Hamilton’s observation that “men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious” led to Madison’s consequent conclusion that “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” And that, “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”1 To put it bluntly, the Moderns were right that man’s situation outside of government is dangerous and violent, while the Medievals and Ancients were right that government is the natural outgrowth of society given man’s social, political and moral nature. The Libertarians, though, deny both— and they do so by unwittingly making a series of radical, Marxist claims about man and the state.
Marx and the Raising of the ‘Communist Conscience’
Karl Marx does not enjoy a reputation for being very practical, though even he at least realized that force was going to be required to accomplish his goal of raising man to the moral state necessary to live in a truly communist society. Not that this kind of permanent transformation is even possible, but still- he understood that such a radical change must come violently. The Libertarian instead relies on the mystical market-force mojo magic of anarchic fields of dissociated men to spontaneously generate a coherent self-sustaining moral framework at the society-wide level without the use of law. They call this force the Non-Aggression Principle. Ask a libertarian to explain how this might come to be and either they can’t do it at all or you can pick apart the circular logic. This is really a problem with Kantian morality, but we need to get to Marx.
Marx believes that the communist conscience must be produced, as it is not possessed by man in capitalist society. As a materialist, he believes that consciousness itself is nothing more than the type of relation man has to his production and the social order that is produced from that system of production. Man at the beginning of history, or more characteristically, pre-historical man, is the closest thing to communist conscience until it is actually achieved. Man’s ability to make his life activity the object of his consciousness is the essence of man, hence Marx states “free conscious activity constitutes the species-character of man.”2 The progress of history and the development of society forces man to become alienated from his labor, this “Estranged labor” makes his work in life separate from his existence. Estranged labor is work for wages or sustenance instead of for the creative completion of his being. When work, the activity of life, is externalized, it must necessarily result in externalized property rights, meaning private property. Hence, Marx states that “private property is therefore the product… [and] necessary consequence of alienated labor…”
From this Marx understands that to change the relation between men you have to change their relation to property, or as he says, “their social existence determines their consciousness.” To change their relation to their property, you must reunite production with creativity, uncompelled by the necessities of life. The communist conscience must be built through the collective struggle to overcome private property, and in this sense “we call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” Marx believes philosophers cannot be passive observers but must be active participants in the class struggle, in fact they must ignite and lead it from the universities and elite class.
Marx states that “Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other… the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proleteriat.”3 The U.S.S.R’s formation was bloody and the Communists knew it would be so, and many have observed that such violence was not an aberration of communism as a theory but a direct result of Marx and Engels’ teachings. The class conflict that has been the engine of history is, in their eyes, reaching its final conclusion. The dictatorship of the revolution justifiably exists until all the classes and habits of the old world are forcibly excised from the population, which often means killing a lot of people in pursuance of such a goal- anyone unwilling to give up their religious identity, ethnic identity, and so on. This is the practicality of Marx showing through, which is predictably why libertarians have never won anything except degeneracy with their vaunted Non-Aggression Principle.
Once this impossible, utopian social state is achieved, which Marx believes can be achieved because he views man as material and therefore moldable, without a true teleological nature, the communist utopia will be actualized. Men would be no longer locked into a rigid and coercive social order that alienates them from their work or by definition from themselves. The communist utopia “thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”4 At this point “State interference in social relations becomes… superfluous, and then dies out of itself.”5 The state withers away as a result of the perfection of man’s consciousness. Man simply will never feel the need to violate the “rights” of another ever again.
Libertarianism relies on the same fundamentally utopian vision of man and the same end state of a stateless society. For the Libertarian, man is fundamentally defined by his reason, and he can be made into a nearly universally reasonable being, trusted to freely enter into contract for every social relationship — entirely liberated from law. The State, then, for the Libertarian just as for the Marxist, is nothing but the means of exploitation by a corrupt ruling class to steal the fruits of a underclass through the expropriation of their property. Libertarianism entirely does away with the Aristotelian or Thomistic framework of the proper role of the law as a teacher towards virtue, or even their understanding of the state as an organic manifestation of the community’s concerns for justice and need for protection. So too does libertarianism reject the understanding that Locke and Hobbes had of man’s limited rationality, and how this so often would create a state of war between men who lack a common law and judge to live under. Libertarianism hereby jettisons the long Western tradition of philosophy and instead turns to a morality based entirely on consent. This framework sees man, effectively, as a contract agent free to make contracts with other contract agents— it sees him as an economic being, not an ensouled human being.
Marx is honest about seeing man in this purely economic way because he rejects the idea that there is an unchanging human nature at all— he believes he can change man’s entire consciousness by changing his social relations to labor, and he thinks this will bring about a man without a self-identity apart from the society, fit for perfect communism. This man who wills only the general will, then, is fit for a totally communistic society and the dissolution of the state. The libertarian claim is even more difficult to make— that the dissolution of the state is perfectly compatible with a kind of Randian self interestedness that relies on near ubiquitous rationality. The Libertarian then sees man as without a natural inclination to sin and without a naturally sociality and therefore man is not naturally driven towards life in community. Libertarianism relies on the jettisoning of questions of right and justice from political life and substitutes them with a public “morality” based solely on consent and contract.
Utopian Problems
Libertarianism’s utopian goals create a serious problem even for advocates of the so-called “night watchmen state”, meaning a state where a government is kept around for the purposes of providing the police and military, with few or no other social roles. This view is only a meagre concession to reality in the midst of a fundamentally flawed system. Either libertarians who support this limited state admit that the concerns of the community for justice are real and legitimate, therefore conceding the legitimacy of the state to create laws and to steer public morals, or they reject it and are once again anarchists.
Libertarians make an artificial distinction between private force and public force, because it is easier for them to contextualize ‘private force’ as a response to the breach of contract in their self-invented realm of absolute property rights. This distinction is ultimately a rejection of law itself, as a concept. Aristotle would say that laws are just insofar as men have a natural political inclination— to live alongside others, with a concern for justice, or how to live well. Aquinas would say that human law is an attempt to teach and guide men to obey the natural law, discovered through discernment and philosophy through an interrogation of the natural inclinations of all men. Libertarianism rejects both of these views. The Libertarian sees the thought experiment of Plato’s Republic as an absurdity. What do you mean you’re searching for a best regime? All regimes are evil because they tax people and order society. What do you mean you are looking for justice? A figment of the non-material realm.
Before the civil war, groups led by William Llyod Garrison advocated disunion and encouraged their supporters to refuse voting or political office, because they could not stand to be morally culpable for slavery. In effect they argued to leave the slaves in chains as long as their own consciences were clear. Libertarians are the arch-Garrisonians of our time. In modern terms, it’s voting for a ‘3rd Party’, or letting the homeless fentanyl addict stay on the streets to OD because state action would be a use of force against a ‘sovereign citizen freely consenting’ to a pathetic death slumped over the sidewalk, covered in his own frozen piss and shit.
Even the Socratic equivalent of refusing to return a sword, which is property, to a man who has subsequently become mad. Libertarians constantly complain about the grave evils being done to the rights of convicted rapists and murderers because they’ve lost their rights to own a firearm. They wish to end the welfare state so that they can import millions of migrants without violating Friedman’s scared dictum, not the other way around.
The Libertarians arrive at these problems because their political goal is not the good of society, the peaceful political order, or a regime ordered towards virtue— the goal of Libertarianism is freedom for its own sake. In the same way, the Libertarians endanger whatever political coalition they have grafted onto because this goal actually has no reference at all for the life of any person, let alone the average one. The goal of conservatism, simply at the level of its own most basic articulation, is the idea that maintaining a public peace grounded in the order of law and traditional mores will lead to the kind of society most suitable for human happiness. What libertarians fail to realize is the enforcement of sound morality enables the reduction in the size of the state they so desperately desire. Instead, libertarianism’s goal is maximum freedom from laws in and of itself.
Ironically again, Marxism also sees itself as maximizing freedom— simply instead of the selfish freedom of the individual, Marxism thinks it is maximizing a more wholistic freedom found in the collective. However, the freedom of the collective essentially relies on a post-scarcity world where individuals are free to do as the please without the shackles of necessary work. It is a very atomized collective. At the same time, communists cognize the society above all else and seek to delegitimize the individual as a rightful entity with his own dignity, libertarians simply deny wholesale the ‘realness’ of any unchosen structure beyond the scale of the individual— the family, community, nation or state.
Anti-Civilizational Forces
Civilization is the natural (might I even say spontaneous) creation of man. The spontaneous order libertarians demand we let rise up by removing the state is the state. The state is natural to man, he seeks it and the community’s natural concern with virtue and justice develops into law and political life. What is necessary, is to identify moral truth and vigorously enforce it: in other words, law is just. The law is the real, actual manifestation of the fundamental and inseparable human desire of men to live in harmony with each other and the divine order, while recognizing men are not angels.
In contrast, the Communist, the Libertarian, and the Liberal all believe in nothing but an illusory end state and in their delusion they will be happy to ruin your life for their unachievable ideology. Men need enforceable laws to prosper physically and intellectually, which requires the ordering force of the city. The far left and Libertarian right effectively team up to promote the most vile vices for their causes and use human suffering as a tool to destroy you and anything good and noble. They are both on the side of social anarchy and therefore venerate and enlist criminals and degenerates for their goals (Solzhenitsyn).
It is a necessity of both projects which seeks the complete atomization of the individual. Once this is done, they are ready to be molded either into the good communist collectivist or the atomized contract agent. There must by design be little daylight between libertarians and communists because at bottom they seek the overturning of all standards of morality by refusing to allow the community to order society away from vice or towards the good.
In addition, both at a minimum require a post-scarcity environment for their utopia as there will always be conflict without it, and as long as there is conflict there will be violations of the communist Brotherhood of Man or the Non-Aggression Principle. But even in a post-scarcity world men would find things to fight over due to their obviously apparent flawed nature. In this way neither of these ideologies engage with the reality of life, that man is neither solely an individual or solely a communal being (Aristotle). The state will always come into being. Further discussions need not be had on such an obvious point, all arguments to the contrary are intellectual whirlpools which use dialectics to take philosophical thoughts to their extreme conclusions and confuse ordinary men.
When both ideologies make the same fundamental assumptions, their utopias look essentially the same. Both are at best momentarily stateless societies, operating solely on the basis of materialism, and each having claimed to overcome man’s nature itself. All is subordinated to economics. If either existed it would be the society of complete equality, as the social leveling of all would be compelled by the impossibility of enforcing social norms. There is no law and in this moment the moral capital built up by previous, better regimes has been wiped out by the promotion of vice. Vice naturally wins without reason, logos, the law, to restrain it. Vice and passion is but the baser half of man. What must follow in both would be a quick devolution into hedonistic pleasure before an orgasm of violence. Out comes the very worst of man, although according to them, who are we to judge? Like an observation of quantum phenomenon, as soon as the state might be observed it collapses. But unlike Quantum Mechanics, the observation always returns the same output: men organize and use force to establish order and promote the higher ends of life; they replicate the natural order of things in the world.
Libertarians and Marxists are practically aligned, as we have noted and as the right-wing has noted. In the area of economics Marxists have made somehow both significant progress in increasing the size of the welfare state and little ground against capitalism. Libertarians have made much ground in lowering taxes and little in ending the welfare state. Practically, libertarians and communists team up to obliterate order itself with the hopes of rebuilding the rubble of our civilization in their image. The paradox is that as the two movements trundle forth, they will look increasingly dissimilar. We, however, argue their end state is functionally the same, because they operate from the same ontological premises.
As we have demonstrated, both ideologies rely on a utopian view of man, the belief in the possibility and preferability of a stateless society, and philosophical materialism. They both end in a contemptable hedonistic and atomized existence. This means fundamentally they will be without the ordering force of reason and consequently both are anti-civilizational and occupy only the realm of ‘imagined republics.’ To attempt to realize them is to plunge mankind into violence and immorality.
We must take heart and uphold civilization by rejecting both communism and libertarianism, which are truly two sides of the same anti-civilizational coin. Their foundations are the same and their outcomes nearly identical. All the moaning and wailing to come from the ideologically offended will be an attempt to suck people into the Socratic Vortex. Communism and libertarianism are plug-n-play ideologies that play well with pseudointellectuals because they proclaim answers to all questions, but in reality break down at the first glimpse of reality.
Federalist 6 & 51
1844 Manuscripts, Estranged Labor (Incl. Next 3 Quotes)
Critique of the Gotha Program
The German Ideology, Theses on Feuerbach
Engels, Anti-Dühring
The word “Libertarian” was invented by a French communist to describe himself and his compatriots. It was imported to the US by a socialist. Libertarianism is literally a Marxist creation.
Massie is a disgusting pig.