I'm going to be talking about class conflict, classes and class conflict, in Marxism and in classical liberalism.
And it's clear enough that there are a few ideas that are as closely connected with Marxism as the idea of classes and class conflict.
Take that away from Marxism and it's hard to see how you would have a Marxist philosophy of history,
Hard to see how you would have some any Marxist theory of revolution.
Yet, as with so much in Marxism, when it comes to dealing with classes and class conflict,
we are faced in the corpus of Marxist writings with ambiguity and contradiction.
These are perhaps the most famous lines that Marx ever wrote.
The history from the Communist Manifesto, the history of all hitherto existing society, is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, listen to these pairs,
Freeman and slave, Patrician and plebeian,
Lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another.
Now, one thing that's clear from these contrasting pairs is that we're dealing, if we're dealing with classes, we are not dealing with classes in an economic sense,
because most of those categories are legal categories. Take, for instance, freemen and slave.
Not categories having to do with the process of production, but categories that are set up through some kind of legal definition.
In other words, there were classes, not in an economic sense, primarily, but classes primarily in a legal and political sense, what used to in Europe be called a states, a ta, or a stenda.
In 1927, 79 years after the publication of the manifesto, a prominent socialist theoretician, Karl Kautsky, noticed this fact.
Okay, so that's one thing that Marx says about classes. Here's another thing. And this comes not at the beginning, but towards the end of his career.
In the third and last volume of Capital, published posthumously in 1894, the last chapter of the third volume of Capital is entitled Classes.
Here, Marx states, the first question to be answered is this, what constitutes a class?
Okay, finally getting down to it. At first glance, he says, it would seem to be the identity of revenue and sources of revenue.
But this, he says, is inadequate, because from this standpoint, physicians and officials would also form two classes, and distinct classes would be yielded by, as he says, the infinite fragmentation of interest and rank into which the division of social labor splits laborers as well as capitalists and landlords.
The latter, for instance, into owners of vineyards, that would be a different class, farm owners would be a different class, owners of forests a different class, and so on.
At this point, there's a note by Engels, here the manuscript breaks off.
Now, as Mises used to say, it's not that Marx fell dead over the manuscript, you know, shot through the window or something.
He lived another 15 years, and yet there is nothing more concise or consistent, more unambiguous that he ever writes about classes.
So, whatever the debate about the defects of the Marxist view of classes, we are faced with this as a tool, a possible tool of social analysis.
Some idea of classes, some idea of class conflict, intelligent people find that interesting, attractive.
They have the sense, I think, that if you talk about conflicting classes and conflicting interests of classes,
there's perhaps more truth in that than there is on the editorial page of the New York Times,
you know, where everything is harmonious in society and everybody wants the good of everybody else.
leaders favor what's good for everyone, so people have a sense well with this
idea of classes you're getting perhaps to a more basic, you're unveiling some
kind of secret about society that has a tang of truth and reality about it, and
this is true, but what my thesis this morning is that we can have a theory of
classes, we can have a theory of class conflict, but one that has nothing to do
with Marx, one that in fact, antedated Marx, because the fact of the matter is that there
was a theory of class conflict developed by classical liberals before Marxism and on which
Marx himself drew. Now, I'm using this blackboard because there will be a number of probably
and the unfamiliar names I'm going to be using in the course of this morning.
I'm not sure whether you'll be able to see this too well.
Can't see it at all? I'm sorry, but perhaps other people...
Can you see this at all? So the first row sees it.
We have different classes here too.
I'll spell this out, Blanqui, B-L-A-N-Q-U-I, Adolf Blanqui was a protégé of Jean-Baptiste
Say, S-A-Y, and succeeded him as professor of political economy at a prestigious school
in Paris.
In what was probably the first history of economic thought, in 1837, 11 years before
the Communist Manifesto, this is what Blanqui says, in all the revolutions there have been
The Theory of Money and Credit
from between these groups he says so in one country the fruit of labor is taken
from the workmen by taxes under pretense of the welfare of the state in another by
privileges declaring labor a royal concession and making one pay dearly for
the right to devote himself to it the same abuse is reproduced under forms more
indirect but not less oppressive when by means of customs duties the state shares
with the privileged industries the benefits of the taxes imposed on non
Unprivileged Classes
But this is not something that was invented by Blanqui.
The idea of classes and class conflict in this sense was by his time, and certainly by Marx's time, a common place.
It was virtually a cliché of social science.
Marx and Engels were well aware of the existence of this earlier classical liberal idea of class conflicts.
Marx himself said in a letter,
No credit is due to me
for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them.
Long before me, bourgeois historians
had described the historical development
of this class struggle.
The two most important of the bourgeois historians that he mentions are
Augustin Thierry, T-H-I-E-R-R-Y
and Francois Guizot,
GUIZOT
Let me just stop a second.
I'm going to be mentioning other names.
I have on the board Comte, Charles Comte, Charles de Noyer.
And it might strike you, how come I've never heard of these people?
Good question.
What this reminds me of is what Florian Aftalion, a free market economist in Paris,
said in his introduction to the works of Bastiat.
He says Bastiat's name is unknown in France now and it's really rather strange that those like Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle and many others who preached the coming demise of capitalism, the immiseration of the working class, who were wrong, who were totally wrong in their predictions regarding the course of modern history, they are people whom undergraduates in America and Europe have to write term papers about every semester of their year in college.
And these other people like Bastiat and the people that I'm mentioning here, whose names you do not know, and whose names were not mentioned to you by your professors, were the ones who turned out to be right.
Were the ones who turned out to be right. So please bear with me if I come up with people who you might consider a little obscure.
The reason I'm delving into this is that, as I feel, they certainly were much more correct in their analysis of social reality than the Marxists, Gramsci, Lukács, Gramsci's mother-in-law, all the people on whom dissertations are being written every day of the year.
So Marx and Engels both conceded that they had drawn their idea of the class struggle from a previous generation of bourgeois historians in France.
And this was something that was talked about by the writers of the Second International, like Plakhanov and Lenin and so on.
They talked about this bourgeois or classical liberal background of Marxism.
Nowadays, if you look up John Elster's book, for instance, Thierry's name doesn't appear.
We have to go back to this period of the French Restoration and deal with Charles Comte, Charles
Du Noyer, two young intellectuals who founded a publication called the Censeur, the European
Censor, European, European Censor, not in the sense of censoring publications because they
themselves went to jail on behalf of their views because of the censorship at the time,
The Theory, who at that time was just about 20 years old, joined them. Together, in this magazine, for just a period of two years, from 1817 to 1819, they developed one of the most radical versions of classical liberal thought.
and this version of the classical liberal position then had repercussions in the liberal tradition up to Herbert Spencer, beyond Herbert Spencer
and also had its effect on Marxism through Henri de Saint-Simon who was associated with them for a brief period when he was a liberal
and then also through other channels through Marxism. So their views became very powerful and very influential.
There were many sources of their position, nobody, very few people invent things, there were sources.
Tracy, as in Dick Tracy, except this is destitute to Tracy, destitute to Tracy, was an important source.
It's a French philosopher and economist whose treatise on political economy, his friend Thomas Jefferson,
arranged to have translated and published in America before it was published in France.
This is what Trasi says. His definition of society is crucial.
Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges.
It is never anything else in any epoch of its duration.
And this is the greatest eulogy we can give to it, for exchange is an admirable transaction.
Contract parties always both gain. Consequently, society is an uninterrupted succession of
of Advantages, Unceasingly Renewed for All Its Members. Society is an unceasing series of exchanges both in material wealth and in immaterial wealth.
Comte de Noyer et Thierry were members of Tracy Salon, that is, he and his wife had a sort of years before the circle Bastiat conducted in Paris a gathering for young intellectuals.
Another influence was Benjamin Constant, great French liberal and really great theoretician in general who made the distinction between what modern civilization is like and how that is distinguished from ancient Greece and Rome.
So let's stop talking all the time about what was fitting for ancient Greece and Rome.
in Rome. And let's stop bringing up Plato as a model, let's stop talking about
Aristotelian politics, the polis and community and so on, because we live in a
totally different world. Okay, and other sources as well, but the chief
intellectual source of this movement that this magazine, the censure, is going
to be pushing was doubtless Jean-Baptiste Say, who's the second edition of whose
was a treaty of political economy, came out in 1814, just at the time, and 1817, the third edition, just at the time that these people,
Danouaille and Comte and Thierry, are looking for new ideas. These young intellectuals were again participants in Say's salon,
and Comte, Charles Comte, became the son-in-law of Say. Jean-Baptiste Say held that wealth is comprised of what has value,
and what has value that is based on utility. This is what he says, different
ways of producing all consist in taking a product in one state and putting it
into another state or condition in which it has more utility and value in one way
or another from the moment that one creates or augments the utility of
things one augments their value one is exercising an industry and one is
Producing Wealth. All those members of society, and this is that's the end of
his quotation, his position was that all those members of society who contribute
to the creation of values are productive members of society. And he put in at the
head of all of this the entrepreneur. Say was one of the first to realize the
boundless possibilities of a free economy, unlike the English economists at
the time, with the pessimistic tone that obtains in Ricardo and especially
The Productive Power of Industry is limited only by the ignorance and the bad administration of states. Spread enlightenment and improve governments, or rather prevent them from doing harm, and there will be no limit that can be assigned to the multiplication of wealth.
You see, the central insight, we are in a different world now. There is no limit. We have discovered the genie has come out of the bottle. We have discovered Aladdin's lamp.
And that is the productive forces of free competitive capitalism.
According to Say, however, there are categories of people who consume wealth rather than produce it.
He identified these unproductive classes. They were the reactionary classes, the army, the government, and the state-supported clergy.
He also recognized, however, that members of the industrious class, entrepreneurs and capitalists and merchants, can sometimes act as exploiters.
And that is when they go to the state for special privileges.
And there are quotations that could be brought up from Say on that.
That is, on the one hand, he recognizes that there exist these old reactionary classes
that live off the wealth produced by the creative classes.
People in the bloated army establishments, the state-supported priests, the state functionaries in general.
However, there are even people who appear to be industrious, who appear to be entrepreneurs.
When the point comes that they go over and snatch away privileges from the state,
they can be said to have passed into the category of the unproductive and the exploiting.
The achievement of Charles Comte of De Noyer and Thierry in their Censeurs or Opéennes was to have
to have taken the idea of Say and the other writers and to have made that into a militant political creed.
They call this creed industrialism. Industrialism was the name that they gave to it.
They take as their starting point man, who acts in order to satisfy his needs,
And they come to the conclusion the whole function and purpose of society is to create goods, values, utilities that satisfy the material and immaterial needs of man.
Very much of a praxeological position they have there.
There are three ways that a human being in acting can satisfy his needs.
Sometimes nature presents things spontaneously. That doesn't happen too often.
He can work and labor and use his skill in order to create values and utilities, or he can plunder the values and utilities that other people have created.
These are the only three ways. In a given society, a sharp distinction must be drawn between those who live by plunder and those who live by production.
Production, and this is, you might say, all of industrialism is already contained there.
They repeat this over and over again and there are different names that they use, they talk
about the plunderers, the devouring class, the consumers, the idlers, they talk about
the creative people, the producing people, the bees rather than the hornets, again and
again making this sharp distinction.
To attempt to live without producing is to live as savages.
Mises is another name that they give to plundering people, and as Comte says, a savage can be
found in rags or can be found in a beautiful embroidered suit, savage underneath if he
lives by plunder, a civilized man, whether he's in rags or in a nice suit, a civilized
man is a person who lives by production.
Now, this contrast of classes was embedded by the industrialists, by this industrialist doctrine, in an account of history, very much in the same way that Marxism is embedded in an account of history, they embedded their doctrine in a theory of historical development.
Basically, different societies can be characterized as plundering or productive, depending on what the main way of getting possession of wealth is.
So that the ancient Greeks, the Romans at the time of the Republic and the Empire, they were plundering societies.
Then, a time came when Germanic invasions occurred in Europe. A warrior barbarian elite
placed itself in control of the toiling peasantry of Europe and that also was a plundering age,
the age of feudalism. Throughout the Middle Ages, the nobility exploited not only the peasants
but as now the towns came into existence and you had merchants and you had artisans, exploited
them too in every way that they could. The noble's castle was nothing but a
thieves den, in the words of the sans ser. Then naturally I'm condensing this
very much. And the time came when the rapacious nobility was succeeded by the
equally rapacious kings. And this is a quotation from Charles
Charles Comte, whose thefts with violence, alterations of the coinage, bankruptcies,
confiscations, hindrances to industry, are the common stuff of the history of France.
As the producers in the towns produced more, more wealth was now available to be siphoned
off by the plundering classes.
Comte is especially bitter about royal manipulations of money and legal tender laws, and he quotes
This is a 17th century writer on how discountings enriched the men of money and finance at the expense of the public.
When we come to modern times, there are three main types of the idle classes.
Now, the Sancerre group, like classical liberals, from the beginning, from the Levellers in the 17th century, from Turgot and Bentham and through the 19th century, up to Mises and Rothbard, were pro-peace and emphasized peace, bitter opponents of militarism, of military establishments and of war.
These are the armies of Europe. It is massacres, rapes, pillages, conflagrations, vices and crimes, deprivation, ruin, enslavement of the peoples.
These armies have been the shame and scourge of civilization.
Who else are among the idols? They put in the monks.
The monks who spread the doctrine of apathy and idleness.
This is something I'll mention in a moment, the anti-clerical and anti-religious bias here,
which is very much conditioned by the times and the climate of thought.
The nobles, who are no longer able to live directly by robbing the industrious,
they now begin to fill government positions and live by a new form of tribute under the name of taxes.
I must confess, in reading these writers, I sometimes hear in the back of my mind the voice of Murray Rothbard saying some of these phrases.
lived under the name of a new form of tribute called taxes.
Who else among these, the idle class, the bourgeoisie,
who were industrious and then used their position to ennoble themselves.
He had a noble title, their business went to ruin,
they had finally to appeal for pensions and to be supported at the expense of the public.
And then finally, the governments themselves are,
and the personnel of the governments themselves belong to these new exploiting classes.
The class of contemporary exploiter that was explored by the industrialist writers more than any other was the government functionary.
As Charles Comte put it, what must never be lost sight of is that a public functionary in his capacity as functionary produces absolutely nothing.
On the contrary, he exists only on the products of the industrious class, and that he can consume nothing but what he has taken first from the producers.
True to their kind of economic interpretation of history, they explain the growth of government by the high salaries that are offered to government employees.
They contrast Europe with America. America, by the way, is always a favored industrialist country,
And it's a kind of a sign of a radical classical liberal, a kind of libertarian in the past,
that they were pro-American, not as Hayek says pro-British.
That really wasn't the dividing line between who really loved liberty and who did not,
but more the fact that they were pro-American.
And in America, he says, he's a friend, the friends of Jefferson, right?
There were no people who were friends of Jefferson.
In America, the President of the United States travels to his inauguration on a horse,
on horseback by himself, right? Times have changed. Nobody gets a true salary,
at most they get indemnified for their time and for their expenses. That's how it should be.
What is it like in France instead? He says in France we have enough people in the government
to govern 20 kingdoms, so overloaded with the government bureaucracies.
And as soon as the number of bureaucrats increases and the demand for jobs increases, we see two things happening.
One, the scope of government increases as a consequence of that, do you understand?
First, they get the jobs and then they have to look around for something to do.
So he says we find them now concerning themselves with the food supply, with medicine, with education, with libraries,
with everything that the people should be doing for themselves.
He talks also, by the way, about the psychic gains of governmental employment, the power of lording it over others, and many other points could be raised here, unfortunately,
Many other points could be raised here. Unfortunately, Evers took so much time with his talk before, virtually none left for myself.
But let me point out one interesting thing.
This also ties in with Marxism, because Marx has two ideas of what the state is.
One idea is the state is the governing body, is the executive committee of the ruling class.
You've got capitalists who pull the strings, right? That's the most common view of the class.
However, he has another view that he expresses sometimes, which emphasizes the expansion of the government and the power of the government's bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy. This is what Marx says in one of his works about the French government.
This executive power, France being the classic case of bureaucracy, this
executive power with its enormous bureaucracy and military organization,
with its ingenious state machinery embracing wide strata, with a host of
officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half a
million, this appalling parasitic body which enmeshes the body of
The French society like a net, and chokes all of its pores, spraying up in the days of the absolute monarchy.
Now that's his description of the government, that sounds very much like a classical liberal description of a bloated, overwrought government apparatus.
And Marx does talk that way sometimes.
And I don't want to say he got it directly from the industrialist writers because by his time it was a general cliché of classical liberal thought.
That the government and the government's bureaucracy has become a leviathan, has become a monster.
But nonetheless, it's interesting to see the parallels.
One might also mention that the industrialist writers or other parallels, there are classes and there's also class ideology.
They talk about ideas which are appropriate to the plundering classes.
There's false consciousness.
Sometimes the industrious classes take over or have instilled in them the ideas that really come from the plundering classes.
The Caesar and Pompey. Why do you think they're glorious?
The glorious ones are the people who fought for their freedom.
Okay, there's very much that could be said here.
and Thierry, remember Thierry again is the one that Marx said together with Guizot, it's from Thierry that he gets the idea of class conflict in history.
Thierry is part of the Sancerre group, he's a friend of theirs, he contributes as many articles as Compton de Noyer due to this magazine.
He's about, as I said, 22 years old and Thierry follows this industrialist philosophy.
And really you can find even more extreme laissez-faire remarks in Thierry's writings than perhaps even that of his friends.
He says, for instance, by the way, he comments on a book that Trossy put out.
You can see the Trossy whom I mentioned before.
Constant interrelations.
When the Say's third edition comes out, there's a two-part review of 120 pages in the censure.
So what we have here is a tight network of brilliant classical liberal theoreticians.
This is what Thierry says, what will happen eventually.
Industry, that means voluntary production, will divest power of its revenues by offering at less cost the services which power gets itself paid for.
It's interesting to consider what they might have thought might have been the limits of that divesting power of the services it pretends to give.
And then he says, what's the world going to look like? Federations will replace states.
The loose but indissoluble chains of interest will succeed the despotism of men and of the laws.
The tendency towards government, the first passion of the human race, will see to the free community
the requirement of civilized men. The era of empire is over, the era of association begins.
See, gradually, the old classes are going to become extinct, and everybody will be a producer.
There will be only producers.
A new world was being born, these men thought.
A new industrial man with a new psychology, a new social psychology appropriate to him, a new system of values.
There was a rupture, there was a hiatus, as they saw it.
This was the, you might say, the utopian period.
These were the Halcyon days, the beginning of the 19th century, when they thought that the world was going to get freer and freer.
They had science now in the form of economics, in the form of the political economy of say,
and the whole world was going to be changed along these lines.
There are many quotations here that I could give you concerning this.
And, if it should happen that, which will not happen, that they lost out in Europe, Thierry says, now, unlike the fighters of freedom of the past, who died and had to suffer defeat over the ages, over the centuries, now, now the seas are ours and beyond the seas America, so that the idea of freedom will never die, even if it's defeated in Europe.
Okay, one could reasonably critique this analysis as brilliant and suggestive and creative as it is, I think.
One thing that I would want to say is that by talking about production, by talking about creation,
they skew it a little bit because that then makes it possible for them to take off in their secular,
anti-religious way against religious people and monks and not make the distinction between those who are state-supported,
who, of course, belong to the idle and consuming classes, on the one hand,
the distinction between them and those who are supported by voluntary contributions,
as they do, for instance, with beggars and paupers also.
They put paupers in the category together with brigands and feudal lords and so on,
because they're not creative, because they are idle, but that's not really the point.
The question is whether somebody, whether these paupers are supported by voluntary charity, by voluntary exchange,
or if they're supported by taxes.
So in other words, by emphasizing production,
rather than voluntary exchange, there are problems that come in there.
Okay, well this was in the, about just before 1820,
and as time goes on in the 1820s, 1830s, things begin to change.
We have this masterful, liberating, militant philosophy,
but the carriers of that philosophy begin to accommodate themselves, especially after 1830.
In 1830, there's another revolution in France, and the old aristocratic classes are thrown out.
This is now called the bourgeois revolution, because there is a king, Louis Philippe,
But he surrounds himself with bankers, with businessmen, with merchants, and many people get the idea,
well, the old idle classes, the old rapacious exploiting classes, the church, the lords and so on, they're out.
And now we have the industrious ones, the ones that we all along said should be in power, they're in power.
Of course, this period of the July Monarchy, as it's called, the regime that's set up in 1830, is known as one of the most corrupt in the whole history of France.
These bankers and these businessmen who now took over France used it in the way that Say himself before had predicted and complained.
Namely, they pretend to be part of the industrious class, they pretend to be creative entrepreneurs.
What are they doing now, going to the state, asking for subsidies for their railroads, now the railroads are built with state subsidies, and more than anything else, and protective tariffs, it was a protectionist regime, and more than anything else, asking for government jobs.
Here's a quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville about this bourgeois republic, this July monarchy,
that finally Thierry and Comte and Dunway accepted. Some of them took jobs in the new monarchy.
See, these people have been pushing this radical class analysis before, now accommodating themselves to this regime.
The Middle Class, he says, entrenched itself in every vacant government job,
prodigiously augmented the number of such jobs, and accustomed itself to live almost as much upon the Treasury as upon its own industry.
In other words, during this period, those functionaries that the industrialists had been bitterly attacking now are increased many-fold.
Okay, this much more than could be said about this, but one thing I want to point out to you is that this is not the only instance in the history of classical liberalism of a theory of classes and a theory of class conflict analysis.
As a matter of fact, one might say that in America, a purer version of this theory was developed,
purer because they were not confused by the idea of inherited orders.
The upper estates, as they were called, and then finally the third estate, which existed in Europe.
In America, the connection between classes and government action, and especially the dispensing of government money,
was much clearer than it was in Europe.
You could talk about classes on the basis of heredity, style, lifestyle and so on.
Didn't exist in America.
So you had a clearer kind of situation there.
And in America such a tradition does develop.
From the time of John Taylor of Caroline through William Leggett and John C. Calhoun.
John Taylor and what you have there is the Jeffersonian tradition, Jacksonian tradition,
The Anti-Government Tradition and the tradition that's very jealous of the privileges that that central government is giving out to certain classes.
John Taylor of Caroline was outraged by what he saw as the betrayal of the American Revolution and the principles of the revolution.
By a new aristocracy, keeps using the term aristocracy, based on separate legal interests, as he called it.
Above all the bankers who are privileged to issue legal tender, issue phony paper that has the force of legal tender, new aristocracy based on the contractors who gain from the public improvements as they're called, the protected manufacturers, these are the new aristocrats in America.
The same view, three decades later, is presented in America in the 1830s by William Leggett.
Liberty Press has put out a collection of his essays from back then, which are wonderful.
If you want to see a real dyed-in-the-wool American libertarian, whose outrage of the Governor of New York has the nerve to declare a Thanksgiving Day.
Who the hell is he to tell us when we can give thanksgiving to God?
That should be done by our ministers, our priests, not by the governor of New York.
Hardcore, in many respects.
And especially on the favors given out by the government in the creation of a new aristocracy.
He says in Europe, you can go to a place in the area of Genoa where they have what they call the street of palaces.
Look at those beautiful palaces and you can tell they were built on the blood and bones of productive people, built by the aristocracy.
He says in America we have such places also, not for the kind of European aristocrats, but what he calls our scrip aristocracy, again the bankers and the people who are putting out paper money with the support of the state.
John C. Calhoun directs attention especially to the taxing and dispersing power of the government and says, when all is said and done, what is government about? Government collects money from some people, those are the people who pay taxes, disperses it to another set of people. And those are the two classes when all is said and done, that politics is about money.
The people who gain from taxes and the people who lose.
Murray Rothbard has emphasized the importance of John C. Calhoun.
This idea of classes and a class conflict again and again.
John Bright and Richard Cobden, when they're fighting to repeal the Corn Laws in England,
talk about the aristocracy as a class and the great proprietors of the soil.
The class that is exploiting the working productive classes of England and just as
with the industrialists who are the working classes everybody who produces
whether they're capitalists whether they're entrepreneurs merchants working
people everybody who produces values William Graham Sumner talks about the
plutocrats this is a term which was I think during the New Deal maybe the
progressive era era was debased because plutocrats meant not just anybody who's
is rich, but capitalists who use the state rather than the market to get what they want.
Again, constituting themselves into a class.
And all of these people are, by the way, I do motions now because I heard that it, as
with Governor Dukakis, put a little bit of life into my talks, and all of these writers
emphasize the exploiting character, especially in the military establishment.
They were the great anti-imperialists of their time.
We are exploited by many people.
And not least of them are the leeches in the armies and navies of the world.
Now, it seems to me that we're, in many respects, seeing a revival of this class conflict analysis.
I could mention to you various scholars.
Professor Skokpol, Theda Skokpol
of the University of Chicago, S-K-O-C-P-O-L,
edited a book called Significantly,
Bringing the State Back In.
Bringing the state back in when we are discussing classes
and the dynamics of social conflict.
Understand, bringing the state back in
as the instrument that creates classes by its very action.
and other scholars could be mentioned as well.
One thing I want to point out to you that from a scientific point of view it seems to
be undeniable
that this classical liberal theory
aside from everything else has a superiority over Marxism
in that it can explain much more than Marxism can explain. In particular
it can explain Marxist societies.
You understand? The Marxist theory cannot explain Marxist societies.
There aren't supposed to be any classes anymore.
Communism is the abolition of private property, Marx said, in so many words.
He said that.
Well, private property has been abolished.
It's clear enough that in some sense, whether you call them a stratum
rather than a class, in some sense there are classes
in all Marxist countries.
The classical liberal theory can explain that,
because it is control of the state power that creates classes there
as it does in relatively free market societies as well.
So that it seems to me that as Bill Evers said,
we are at a historic turning point.
Marxism seems to be dying as a philosophy.
Evidently, virtually no one who's not in the secret police
I learned from friends that Marxism, which at one time was going to be marching through the institutions of West Germany and France, it's dying there too.
It's in very bad repute in the academy. It's only in England and now belatedly in America and in institutions of higher learning that Marxism is experiencing a certain revival.
is experience a certain revival talk about cultural lag that's in theory in
practice they will be setting up a stock exchange in Budapest Bill Evers
mentioned as I'm glad to see that he notices headlines of newspapers at least
I mentioned that Gorbachev, at times, an end of collectivization, collectivization of land.
Well, you know, what was it all about then? What was it all about? Marxism in Russia.
And the end of collectivization of land, well, it's too bad, it's a little too late for 10 million people.
But still, certainly in the right direction, still, with the death philosophically and practically, one hopes, of Marxism, which really turned out to be what H.B. Acton called it, the illusion of the epoch, it was the illusion of the 20th century.
But with its death as we approach the 21st century, we should not lose track and give up the advantages that we can get from something like class conflict analysis to make us understand politics because class conflict analysis was not originally Marxist, predated Marxism and the classical liberal version of it can illuminate social reality quite well even today. Thank you.