For a long time, of course, American conservatism has had at least an implicit class conflict
as part of the narrative, this idea of taxpayers, patriots, traditional culture, businessmen
in many cases, consumers versus big government, in many cases foreigners, liberal culture,
Hollywood and so forth.
With the Tea Parties, we've seen this class analysis made more explicit, especially in
this very important work by Angela Cotavia. It was first this article in the American
Spectator on the ruling class versus the country class and it was made into a book. I recommend
everyone read the book. There's a lot of important insight in there and it's very
interesting and it's about, you know, it's kind of a conservative with many libertarian
leanings view of what's going on about how there's the country class, the common Americans,
in the Middle America in many cases would be the cultural geographic proxy versus the ruling class represented most by Democrats but also by Republican politicians and of course big government is seen as the enemy although there are interesting exceptions made at least implicitly concerning say the military which becomes relevant. Meanwhile in our society the left has also had something of an implicit class analysis. They see it as
is clearly about class conflict. It raises questions. Who are the 99%? Who are the 1%?
It can't be purely in terms of wealth because here we see these police are messing with these occupiers
and the police probably aren't in the top 1% in terms of wealth.
and it can't be purely in terms of wealth because so many fans of Occupy and so many
people that most occupiers probably see as comrades are in the top 1% economically themselves.
There's a group, the top 1% for the 99%, which underscores this interesting paradox.
And then of course, what about this guy? I mean, he says he's all for the 99% movement,
at least now he does, and a good number of occupiers though, not all of them, maybe not
even most of them, but a good number of them, not only kind of like him, but some of them
probably think that much of what their activism is about is defending elements of his agenda
against conservatives out of power. I mean this guy, not only is he the head of state,
which puts him I would think in the top 1% in some sense, but he's not a particularly
the egalitarian one either in terms of who his big supporters are.
We see these contradictions in the Occupy movement.
There was an informal poll in October which underscored this a little where about half
of the occupiers polled.
It's a small poll, it's not scientific, but about half of them said they'd reelect Obama.
Surely three-fourths of them supported tax increases and things like that which are governmental
but which they could say is still consistent with their idea of class analysis, but on
the other hand almost half of them thought that bailouts were necessary, which is kind
of an interesting point.
Not to be outdone, the Tea Party types are not devoid of contradictions themselves.
One poll that was more extensive I should say than the last poll found 70% of them were
opposed to cuts in Medicare or Social Security to balance the budget.
These are the largest elements of the entitlement state, the largest elements of the state,
the federal government, other than the military, which they're not really that much into cutting
either.
In many of these states, though I don't want to get into too many specifics, many of these
state elections, tea party types, are less likely to support Ron Paul than people who
hate the tea parties.
A couple of polls over a period of a year said that they like guys like Newt Gingrich.
It's hard to get more establishment than that. 57% like George W. Bush. I don't think even
George W. Bush likes George W. Bush at this point. And they tend to favor war. Coda Via
argues that the country class likes the military, but they think we can't have these endless
wars and nation building. I think that's just wishful thinking, because the polls still
They'll show that self-described Tea Party types are more against cutting and running than, say, the Obama voters, because you can't just go into Afghanistan and leave a mere 11 years later, that would be irresponsible.
Now, of course, there's some overlap, which is interesting, because these groups don't tend to like each other, even though I stole this, too, I don't believe in IP.
They overlap in theoretically resenting the bailouts, even if they disagree on what to do about it.
This guy, David Graeber, was one of the key planners early on in Occupy Wall Street.
And though I don't agree with his economics, to his credit, he at least doesn't like the state.
He doesn't think the answer is more government demanding national health care, stuff like that even.
He argues that the history of inequality and social oppression couldn't have existed if it weren't for the state, armies, prisons and police.
And interestingly, Cotavia makes the same point more or less.
In his book, whatever else government may be, it is inherently a factory of privilege and inequality.
And yet these two people on the two opposite sides of the spectrum are seen as opposites.
and even though one of them, one side says they claim to stand for 99%, the others say they claim to stand for the great majority, well if everyone hates the system then why do we still have it, you know?
Well, I agree with the occupiers and many of the Tea Party is in fact that the corporate state is real, that the average American is in many cases being shafted for big businesses and league with the state.
This is certainly true with finance and certainly the military industrial complex as Rothbard's
great book with a new introduction by Anthony Gregory, which I recommend you all read, as
he has demonstrated better than almost any new leftist.
And I think part of the confusion comes in the fact that the class analysis is there
on Left and Right, but they get it wrong. Marx was right that ideas shape institutions,
that oppression, however defined, requires some sort of ideological superstructure, and
he was right that all history involves class struggles, and at its best he identified the
state itself as the oppressor. He had some great things to say about the state, but then
On the other hand, he thought the state was simply the tool of the capitalists. I think
he wasn't always consistent. At one point he says, no credit is due to me, which I just
love taking out of context, but there's a context. He's saying no credit is due to me
for the basics of class theory. He says it goes back to bourgeois economists and scholars.
In fact, in the classical liberal tradition, we have a class analysis. Say, Jean-Baptiste
He's Say, who loved commerce, nevertheless thought nothing was worse than merchants using
the state to gain privilege at the expense of the little guy.
One of his followers, Blanqui, as Ralph Reiko mentions in his very important work on class
analysis, Reiko calls this probably the first economic history, or the first history of
economic thought rather, that there's always been class conflict, and this is 1837.
And of course in England, the Manchester School, Cobden and Bright, one of the three or four
victories of liberalism in the last millennium when we got something repealed that was important.
John Bright termed this in terms of classes, war of classes was the Corn Law struggle.
Classical liberals from Bastiat who saw the state as creating a plundering class and victims
of Plunder, John Calhoun who saw things in terms of tax eaters and taxpayers, William
Leggett the American poet who in the 1830s not only identified something akin to class
struggle but said if you doubt we have classes in America and he was a classical liberal
his view was we need a separation of economics and state, he said if you deny we have classes
like they do in feudalism just go to Wall Street, he said 180 years ago. And this goes
It goes back to the fact that, you know, long ago liberalism was against the state, which
as Rothbard identified in the 60s, was something that we could call conservative.
And over time the class struggle or class analysis became kind of like screwed up and
turned into progressivism in some countries and even worse, communism, state communism
and others, nothing worse than that.
The corruption of Western liberalism I think dovetails with the corruption of class analysis,
the confusion of the state as the tool of economic oppression and maybe we can capture
the state and use it against the plutocracy, which is the stupidest idea ever.
And then in rebellion against this kind of warped liberalism we had American conservatism
which explains their class analysis which is kind of like a mirror image and it's also
The relevance of this isn't exactly clear to me, but I like this picture because it's
just very, it's very, I mean it's real, this is how they did it before Hitler in America.
Of course Rothbard is the anatomy of the state, he gets it right like usual, you all know
that. But Hoppe, and Hoppe, speaking of taking things out of context, Hoppe says Marx is
Marx's argument about the state as the tool of the economic privileged elite to steal
from the rest of us, including workers and so forth, is legitimate. It's just that his
whole concept of production and profit is so messed up because the labor theory of value
He doesn't understand time preference, so Hoppe identifies confusion in economics being the
core confusion with Marxism. So we could say, of course, the real answer for the Tea Parties
and the occupiers is just to focus on what's good, the market defend that against the state,
but class analysis of our own kind, I think, needs some refining or at least we need to
We keep talking about it because I think that there are kind of problems raised or some
things to consider. One, this might seem like I'm straw manning, but I think it raises
an issue that simple enough at first, but it brings up other issues. I mean, who's
the ruling class? I guess there's a distinction to be made between the ruling class who actually
makes decisions and controls everything and then the parasitic class, which is more implied
by Calhoun's idea of tax eaters. But some people have argued that those on welfare are
somehow the enemy because they're net tax consumers. Well, I don't think this is the
best way to determine who's good and who's bad. Bill Kristol, I'm sure, is a net taxpayer.
He makes his money in the private sector calling for mass murder. That's his job. He writes
and he writes articles saying, let's go murder more people and so he doesn't commit aggression making his money but I think he's more part of the ruling class, at least more of a bad guy
and then the one confusion comes in seeing the middle class, it's very tempting to see it as the middle class are the victims, the super rich, we don't like them anyway because they got, even us libertarians want more money and they got all the money
they're probably stealing from us, the poor people, well they're not working
but the middle class, we're the victims except
as this Tea Party slogan, keep government out of my Medicare
underscores, not really, I mean so much of the entitlement state is at least
pays toward the middle class, Medicare, Social Security,
public education, unemployment insurance, most of welfare
perhaps goes to the middle class. Now there's this really crazy
Scholar, this Walter Black, or Walter Block I think, who's come up, he's come up in his
piece on punishment for a statism, the crime of statism, he talks about class analysis,
and he makes a very controversial point that politicians and the Fed chief are bad guys,
which thanks for that, but he also argues that private criminals are part of the ruling
I don't think they're part of the ruling class. I think they're obviously predatory. If they're part of the ruling class, I think police certainly would be, because they commit aggression, almost as a matter of course enforcing unjust laws.
And then there are other questions, are teachers part of the victim class, the ruling class, how much of what government officials whose jobs are not purely non-coercive, but somewhere in the middle, like what's going on, this left libertarian, Kevin Carson says that public teachers would basically be the same in a free market, but I have my doubts, maybe I'm more leftward on children, and then there's this Roderick Lange guy,
He explains how, on economics, a lot of confusion comes from left to right, depending on who we blame most, the state or the plutocracy,
and he comes up with five possibilities, and of course he doesn't even pick one of them, he picks one in the middle of two and three.
I think that the very notion of deciding who would be better off or worse off in the free market
is kind of difficult to know because we don't know what the free market would look like.
So it's not a rigorous point but it's almost like a calculation problem. Some people are
obviously bad. These guys are probably bad. I don't like him. That guy is being a jerk.
I think that we should go with what Lew Rockwell says, the enemy is always the state. And one
important point is there's no proxy for liberty. The whole attempt at class analysis shouldn't
be turned into like a class consciousness at the expense of looking at statism itself.
So it's hard to know which groups are most likely to be libertarians. We just got to
hate the government and hope for a free market where all interests will be harmonized. Thank
you very much.