The topic and the paper that I have chosen today, namely the organization of labor under socialism and what Marx and Engels had to say about it.
Two reasons. The first is that Marx and Engels were not only critics of capitalism, but they were also proponents of socialism.
and we must be alive too, we must be critical of, we must be evaluating not only the vast bulk of their work, which was criticism of capitalism, but we must as well be criticizing and looking at what they had to say about the socialist society that they foresaw.
What about the account of socialism that they give us?
So, since Marxian Socialism says that it will bring the emancipation of the working class, let's look at what Marx is offering to the working class, to the industrial proletariat.
What exactly are they supposed to get out of it, especially in the workplace?
And what criticisms can we offer about socialism in the workplace as they present it?
Now, this topic brings together a number of areas that have interested me for a long time.
I've written in the past about division of labor and the thought of Plato and Rousseau.
I've been interested in organizational matters with regard to various theoretical figures in Marxist movement.
I've also, in the past, delivered talks on Marxism.
And about a decade ago, I gave several summer seminars on the topic of Marx and Marxism.
And in the course of it, I received comments from colleagues and discovered that there are differences or it emphasized to me that there are differences in how people look at what socialism would be like in the workplace.
Some people see Marx as foreseeing, as portraying a liberated, undisciplined, unstructured workplace, indeed an almost bucolic, rustic utopia of some sort.
They tend to emphasize Marx's remarks in his early work, The German Ideology, where he speaks about doing one thing today and another tomorrow.
where he speaks in a single day of hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon,
raising cattle in the evening, and engaging in literary criticism after dinner
without at any time becoming, in a professional sense,
some sort of hunter by profession or fisherman by profession or literary critic or so forth.
And these scholars who think along these lines stress also remarks of Marx and Engels
about freely associated producers, free associations of producers being what the situation would be in the workplace.
Now, on the other hand, there were other scholars and I, at the time I was giving these seminars,
I counted myself among them and these point to passages in these scholars have a different emphasis
and point to passages in the Communist Manifesto, where Marx talks about labor armies
and giving a sense of military discipline and structure in the workplace.
These scholars would also point to and emphasize Engels' remarks in polemics that he had with a communistic anarchist at the time,
where Engels talks about the discipline of factory life, the discipline of work with large-scale machinery and so forth.
So this is a highly unliberated, a highly structured locale that Marx and Engels portray in these passages.
And Lenin, I think, is following Marx when in Lenin's famous work, The State and Revolution,
Lenin says, we want a socialist revolution with human nature as it is now.
Human nature that cannot dispense with subordination, with control, with managers.
This Lenin here is talking about the marks of discipline, the marks of authority.
Now, we have to ask ourselves in the light of these two contrasting portraits of what Marx might foresee in the workplace of socialism.
Do we have one set of scholars who is just completely right and the other wrong?
Were Marx and Engels confused, baffled, inconsistent themselves?
What exactly is going on here?
And this is the topic I have set to explore in the paper.
I think we need to set in our own minds clearly
at the outset what socialism is
when Marx and Engels are talking about it.
And I'm going to sketch that for you briefly.
It is clearly the end of production or exchange
for exchange that is production for sale or barter in the marketplace.
There's to be no exchange whatsoever of this commercial sort between individuals or firms at all.
There is to be no money whatsoever, no medium of exchange either.
There is to be no private property and assets, no private property and resources.
And as a consequence, Marx believes there will be no business cycles, no depressions and recessions, no booms and busts.
And as a consequence, he also thinks there will be no alienation.
What alienation is, is a very complex subject that I don't really have the time to get into.
It might come up in the panel or in questions and things like that.
But to give you some sense of it, Marx sees the market itself as a kind of alien force that exists outside of human beings, external to them.
They're not knowledgeable about its origins, its extent, the way it works.
They can't control it.
And somehow, through the next feature that I'm going to mention, they're going to bring it under control in socialism.
and that is through central planning.
Now, what this means is there's not going to be planning through a highly hampered market,
such as you see in Russia or China, but planning in natural terms,
planning without money or market information of any sort.
Engel says, for example, that under socialism,
Conscious organization on a planned basis will replace anarchy in social production.
Likewise, Marx speaks of a society organized as a conscious and planned association.
And Marx writes that the life process of society, which he says is based on the process of material production,
does not tear off its mystic veil.
That is to say, we can't really understand it.
We cannot get at its real essence until,
and we cannot end alienation as a consequence,
until freely associated men do the producing
and until these men regulate productive activities,
quote, in accordance with a settled plan.
Now, some of these phrases we should take apart
and look at.
Freely Associated Men, by freely we mean in Marx, not freedom in some classical liberal or libertarian sense, but rather as Paul Craig Roberts and Matthew Stevenson have correctly pointed out, freedom in control over external nature,
freedom in control over ourselves in a sense of rational planning by the state going on, and freedom that's based on a kind of knowledge and understanding of social necessity and essentially social science sorts of knowledge.
Freedom, thus, for Marx and Engels is a kind of mastery of one's fate over natural and social forces.
Now associated means to an extent it's pointing to the fact
that people are not independent autonomous agents out there,
but are dependent and integrated
in their interaction with one another.
And this is true enough, but I'm going to mention
as I go through this paper, how he sees this.
And I'm going to point to some metaphors
and models that Marx and Engels draw on,
metaphors of the military, metaphors of producers cooperatives,
metaphors of factory life or organization of firms.
So that will give you some sense of what socialism is
when Marx and Engels are talking about it.
Now, why won't socialism work?
I don't wanna go into this in great detail.
Some of the other speakers are gonna be bringing up some of this.
It's not the main thrust of my paper.
And Lew Rockwell in his opening remarks
gave you some summary of what Mises's critique was.
And my critique, following as well
along the lines of Mises and Hayek,
concentrates on four areas
that I'll just very briefly mention to you,
why socialism won't work.
First of all, because of the problem of property rights
and the incentives that are not present
or the disincentives that are there
when property rights are gotten rid of
or are so severely hampered and regulated
as they are in practice in existing socialist societies.
So socialist managers are gonna have the wrong incentives
and they can't have the right incentives
unless there are property rights there.
the incentives to act so that resources are efficiently used.
The second problem is the problem of complexity of information.
They can't gather the information that they need to have
in order to plan the economy.
They can't grasp that information
even if they could get a lot of it together
and they can't use it effectively
in the way that a capitalist entrepreneur
might be able to do so.
Then there's some problems of knowledge itself.
The kind of knowledge that's needed to make an economy run,
often lies in the hands of people
who are operating in the market.
They develop a kind of lay of the land knowledge
that can't be present to a central planner.
And lastly, there's a problem
that you might term the totalitarian problem.
Namely, if you put a lot of power in the hands of people
and tell them they can tell everybody in the society
what to do with their lives,
They tend to run away with that power and you can't really check it if they're going to really have the job, the function, the charge of running the economy.
And so you're setting yourself up for a tyranny, a despotism.
And that is the essential core criticism that has to be made of the socialist utopia that Marx and Engels suggest.
So the result is, the sum of all this, is that Marx's proposal, namely a moneyless
planned economy, is impossible, as Mises shows, and the countries that call
themselves socialists today, the really existing socialist societies as they're
called, are ultra interventionist economies, that is to say they're kind
of Super-Fascism.
They have a hopelessly hampered market.
They still have money of some sort,
even though Marx promised that that would go.
They still have labor markets of a sort.
They very much reliant on private plots
and agriculture to support them with food.
They require black markets, both in manufacturing and farming.
And they need the international prices
of the capitalist market
in order to even figure out what's going on
and what relative values are of any sort.
So that's socialism and what's wrong with it in a nutshell.
I'm gonna outline for you now what I'm gonna talk about
in terms of the organization of labor itself.
I think to see what Marx and Engels foresaw
for working men and women under socialism,
we have to look at several matters.
We have to look at authority and discipline in the workplace.
We have to look secondly at the division of labor.
What is Marx proposed to do about the division of labor,
a subject that he offers many criticisms
that vary across the course of his intellectual career.
We have to look at the payment for work.
Thirdly, the compensation that people have,
and the income that they will have.
Fourthly, I think we need to look at labor mobility.
Can people choose their occupation?
Can they move from one work setting to another and so forth?
I think in the case of Marx and Engels,
we have to look at an additional matter
that's related in different ways
to all of these things I've listed so far,
namely the setting in the countryside,
the setting in the city, changes that Marx proposes in this,
what criticisms do we have of them and so forth.
And then I will briefly look at these models that I mentioned,
namely producers cooperatives, factories, firms
and the military for what his view is
of the associated life that people would experience
in the workplace.
Okay, now I'm going to argue that Marx does not really see a liberated 1960s unstructured life for the worker in the workplace under Socialism.
He says it's going to be necessary under socialism to regulate labor time, how it's used, where it's allocated, and that means the people whose labor time we're talking about here.
He's going to have to distribute, he says, labor time among various production groups.
Groups. That means distribute people, send people, assign people where they're going to be going.
It says within the workshop, the iron law of proportionality is going to subject different
numbers of work people to different functions. So we're talking about here the impact of planning
and a Planned Economy itself on the lives of working men and women.
And Engels, I think, went most explicitly into this.
If people want a discussion of some sort,
we can talk about whether there is perhaps a difference
between Marx and Engels on this issue.
I don't think there is.
Engels in his polemics with various communist anarchists
asks them, how are they going to propose to run a ship, to run a factory, to run a railroad, without having some sort of deciding will, without having some sort of single management?
He says these communist anarchists do not tell us their answer.
And in a longer polemic, he proposes a hypothetical. He asks us to imagine, he asks us to bring up in our own minds the following.
Suppose that the socialist revolution has been successful. Suppose that the capitalists have been dispossessed.
Can you have organization without authority?
Can you have, given that the work of modern industry is complex,
given that it involves organized life,
can you have organization and complexity of this sort without authority?
Now, I just, as an aside, mentioned that as Misesians, we can say in a sense, yes, to the extent that the market is a kind of organization that doesn't have this sort of authority in its process and in the sense that prices bring about a kind of organization without authority in the sense that Marx and Engels are talking about.
but to continue with their hypothetical.
Engels takes the case of a cotton mill.
He says the machinery of the cotton mill has requirements.
People have to be there to oil it, to turn it on and so forth.
Decisions have to be made if things are breaking down
or as to whether certain cloth is coming out
at the quality that people want and so forth.
Workers have to show up at various times
in order to operate the machinery,
enough of them have to show up
in order that there'd be a compliment of work
that will make it operate properly.
Engel says that one may write on the gates of the factory,
abandon all autonomy, ye who enter here.
For say, a rewriting of a famous Latin tag.
but I think we can see that Engels is not offering the emancipated worker of socialism a free and easy liberated lifestyle in the factory and he goes on in discussing other examples such as railroads and ships on the high seas to state why he thinks that authority is necessary.
The Theory of Money and Credit The Theory of Money and Credit
And I think in many respects, if I may switch to another ideological movement, anyone who has experienced within the classical liberal or libertarian movement, persons who are anti-organization per se, who are decentralized in principle, who are devoted to autonomy above all else, sort of European greens,
Green political movement transformed into America, know how exasperating this mentality that Engels is talking about can be.
And some of you in the audience have had this experience or know about such people.
And we could perhaps sympathize with Engels when he writes in exasperation that these autonomists must be fools or traitors.
But I think we must stop short of embracing angles for important reasons.
He has sociological insights, but I don't think that they should be embraced without some important caveats.
He's framing his analysis in terms of authority, in terms of the sovereign will of managers, and in terms of subordination.
And this strain in Marxian thinking was highly influential and in the time during the early Soviet experience when there was a debate over one-man management, Lenin is so moved and draws on this strain in Marx's thought so extensively that he begins praising political dictatorships and for their positive of the past,
and the political dictatorships of the past for their positive contribution to human welfare and human well-being and I think we can see that that strain in Marxian thought has led to a certain comfort on the part of Marxian socialists with political dictatorships in socialist societies that operate in the name of Marx.
Classical liberals, in contrast, do not embrace and deplore despotism.
Classical liberals can discuss these same questions, these same cases that Engels brings up,
such as cotton mills, ships on the high seas, railroads, in terms of concepts of property rights,
In terms of contractual arrangements with clients, customers, employees, and so forth.
Without terming everything in terms of political power relations as it seems Marx and Engels must do.
Instead, classical liberals can talk in terms of human rights and contractual rights,
So what happens in the workplace in a liberal society, in contrast to a socialist society, is constrained by property rights, by contractual arrangements, it's also constrained, of course, by serving the market, the fact that contractual arrangements are tested in and are serving the market,
Clients, Customers and Employees.
The manager cannot simply reorganize
some workplace whimsically because of his authority
to return to the concept that Marx and Engels
are emphasizing here.
If a manager in a liberal society,
a capitalistic commercial society does so,
that manager will end up having the firm go bankrupt.
Now, Marx says that we have fundamentally two forms of social coordination, the market and planning.
He says in the Grundrisse, if you rob money of its social power, you must give that power to persons to exercise over other persons.
And I think in this passage, we really get a deep insight and a recognition that Marx himself realized that the choice is, as economist Gregory Grossman put it,
between gold and the sword as what will run, as what will drive the economy and the society.
Now Marx is going to argue that both gold, that is money, that is capitalism, that is the market, both gold and the sword, that is planning, that is the arm proletariat and so forth,
That both of these are coercive according to Marx, but that the economy of gold is anarchic and that the sword, that the command economy is orderly, rational and productive.
The Misesians, such as ourselves, are going to say, and I believe correctly, that the economy of gold is voluntary, that the sword is coercive,
that the life of the sword is chaotic and disorderly and that gold can bring about order, rationality, peace and production.
Now let me turn to the first of my topics, the division of labor.
Now, I think that Marx here is misunderstood because people dwell too much on the very, very eloquent, powerful, so-called humanistic Marxist passages of his early days.
And do not dwell enough on the subtle, reflective, mature Marx of capital.
Now, I am not one who likes to make a radical split, a radical difference between the younger and older Marx, but I think as well with any writer who writes for a long time,
who meditates on subjects such as this for a long time, you can see a definite evolution in Marx's thought.
By the time he comes to his mature conclusions in Das Kapital, he distinguishes between three things.
The social division of labor, in other words the occupations and jobs that need to be done and carried out in the economy and society.
And the division of labor within the workplace. How exactly is the assembly line set up?
where, you know, what is the secretary's job, what is the foreman's job, what is the person who turns the wrench that tightens the bolt, whatever, this sort of thing.
So the division of labor in the workplace, he radically separates off, and he says these are different in kind.
Now, this is in contrast to market economists, who I would say, since Adam Smith, would view the entire division of labor as of one piece, perhaps different in degree, but not different in kind, that the division of labor one sees in the factory or on the farm is a smaller scale version of the way labor gets divided throughout society.
And the last thing that Marx is distinguishing is the mode of production that is capitalistic or socialistic on which the society operates.
He would differentiate from the social division of labor itself.
So the difference we see in the mature Marx is that the younger Marx conflated, brought together all these things.
Socialism and the abolition of the division of labor, he grouped that together, together with abolition of private property, together with ending of alienation, together with a plan, no money and so forth.
All of that almost became one thing or different facets of one thing.
By the time he is a mature thinker, he has broken these out, made them more separate analytic concepts for him.
In Das Kapital, in Capital, Marx contends that a social division of labor is a feature of all sorts of societies and indicates that he expects that it would as well be a feature of a socialist society.
But the division of labor in the workplace that is found in capitalist factories, he says, is solely a feature of capitalist societies.
I think Marx would have to be disappointed to learn that such a division of labor, of course,
persists in the really existing socialist societies of our own present day.
But getting back to what he dreamed, he believes that it is capitalistic production that makes for detailed work
This is the sort of thing that Charlie Chaplin humorously Charlie Chaplin, of course, being a communist, humorously attacks in modern times the movie.
So it is this detailed work of capitalist society that degrades and injures the worker physically and intellectually, according to Marx.
Now there's going to be a difference as well in what the societal division of labor is under socialism as opposed to what it's been under capitalism.
One is the consequence of the anarchy of the market, the anarchy of production under the market.
Under socialism, the planners will be deciding what the occupations are, what the tasks are, what the jobs are that have to be accomplished.
And as some have argued, particularly Roberts and Stevenson, two men I mentioned earlier, perhaps Marx and the Marxians plan to escape the effects of detailed work on the workforce by deliberately planning things so that workers rotate through various jobs or have jobs that have a variety of experience to them.
I think there's something to this claim, this account that Roberts and Stevenson give, because indeed Marx speaks himself of how important change in activity is in pleasing the animal spirits of man, how this has been destroyed, this change in activity has been destroyed by the detailed work that capitalism mandates, he believes, and how socialism will bring back this change, this variety.
Okay, let's talk about payment for work. In Volume 1 of Capital, Marx says that how distribution, how distribution of wealth, how distribution of income takes place under socialism is going to vary according to the level of economic development that a society has attained.
He offers suggestion, namely labor vouchers in the period when full complete socialism, full complete communism has not yet been attained.
There are going to be labor time vouchers that are going to allow people to collect according to the labor time that they have put in.
in. And this of course, this labor planning itself will be centrally planned by the central
planners who are going to apportion labor time in order to make sure that various proportionalities
are there. This is mostly mumbo jumbo since we think it cannot be done and I think we've
seen in the various attempts, especially the so-called war communist period in the early
History of the Soviet Union to try it.
When they do reach the final higher, more abundant phase of communism, they're going
to give people access to consumer goods according to what I think is a rather problematical
standard people's needs, but that is not the situation that he proclaims in the early
Period of Socialism. It's not money. These labor vouchers will not circulate. And I think
we know from Mises' own criticism that without money, this proposal of Marx's will simply
be a catastrophe. And we know from the history of the Soviet Union, when they attempted a
moneyless catastrophe economy, they had famine, they had a complete lack of industrial goods,
and they had to revert in the new economic period in 1921 to a partial reintroduction of hampered prices, of a hampered use of money, of a hampered market, but no longer what Marx proclaimed what socialism would bring.
Let me talk about labor mobility.
Now, I think we have to understand here we're talking about occupational choice, moving from one job to another and so forth.
The view of Marx and his followers in the golden age of Marxism, so-called, that followed immediately after his death,
was that genuine full-fledged freedom of labor, freedom of occupational choice had vanished with the disappearance of craftsmen and independent farmers.
Independent farmers haven't yet disappeared. To some extent, craftsmen are coming back, but that's just sort of an empirical aside.
Full freedom of labor, according to these Marxists, is incompatible with organized, cooperative, productive endeavors, like industrial factories, large-scale farms, and so forth.
Carl Kautsky, who was the literary executor of Marx and Engels, writes,
It is true that in one respect the working man does enjoy freedom under the capitalist system.
If the work does not suit him, this is under capitalism, the work does not suit him in one factory, he is free to seek work in another.
He can change his employer. In a socialist community where all the means of production are in a single hand, there is but one employer.
To change is impossible. In this respect, the wage earner today has a certain freedom in comparison with the worker in a socialist society.
Now, Cotsky dismisses this loss of freedom as merely the loss of the freedom to choose one's master.
Bukharin, an important early Bolshevik leader who was executed by Stalin and has been rehabilitated recently, also follows Cotsky in this in dismissing this loss of freedom.
He says, in fact, that compulsory labor service and state assignments of workers to jobs is indicative of the organizational success and stability of proletarian rule.
Trotsky, I think, is the most eloquent in this regard in bringing out the effects of this control over employment on the lives of workers.
Trotsky says, when we say to the Turner, that's kind of a job, Ivanov, which is Smith in Russian, just a common name,
You are bound at once to work at the Sormovo factory. If you refuse, you will not receive your ration.
You cannot go to another factory, for all factories are in the hands of the state.
In other words, for the working man, under the socialism of the future and under the socialism of really existing socialist societies,
It's obey or starve. That is what emancipation of the worker amounts to.
Now what about town and country? Marx was one of the most anti-peasant thinkers in human history.
He did not see peasants or small holdings as anyway fitting with the course of progress.
They were standing a fort in the course of progress.
He saw the development of society as overwhelming there.
He believed that the march of capitalism itself was overcoming what he called the idiocy of rural life.
A phrase that the Bolsheviks themselves were to make much use of
as they themselves went after the peasants with sword and fire.
Large-scale production, Marx and Engels believe, is now everywhere on history's agenda.
And they believe wrongly that in their own time farm ownership was becoming increasingly concentrated.
Marx in his Inaugural Address to the First International says that would the capitalist farmers please hurry up and gather all the lands into a few hands so that the agrarian question would be simplified for the socialist movement.
August Bebel was to argue that small farmers were the most backward and therefore they should be the first to be expropriated.
Indeed, in his The Woman and Socialism, Baebel argues that the social stratum of the small farmers are required by human progress to cease to exist.
I think we can see that the liquidation of the kulaks as a class and Stalin's famine policy in the Ukraine in the 1930s are not exactly being called for directly here by these early Marxist theoreticians and politicians.
But the ideological family resemblance between this Bolshevik mentality of famine and sword against the kulaks is implicit in the attitude that we see here in Bebel.
The family resemblance is obvious.
So in the communist manifesto, labor armies in the countryside, expropriation of the land of the farmers,
Centrally Planned Agriculture, fusing of manufacturing and agricultural activities, and a planned mandatory abolition of differences through time, gradually over time, between the countryside and the town.
And I am running out of time.
A few words about some of these models, and then I will sum up.
The cooperative model, producer's cooperatives, I don't think that the sense that some have that Marx favored some sort of enterprise level cooperatives being the most important unit in the economy is at all correct.
Marx makes very clear that cooperatives, he's talking about a cooperative commonwealth, a completely nation level cooperative, which makes no sense.
When you're talking about expanding the notion of a co-op to a national level, you're not talking about a voluntary economic unit anymore.
You're talking about a planned state-like operation.
He indeed says that this cooperative life has to be fostered and sustained by the state, and it's really a metaphor and something he plans to have brought under a common plan and so forth.
It's one big giant cooperative and as a result all the problems that Mises brings out about planning, about economic calculation and so forth are going to come into place because there's not going to be a market for assets, for resources, there's going to be one big planning unit.
So any sense of enterprise level cooperatives, you should be disabused of that as what Marx foresees for the workers.
The factory or firm model. Now, Marx says that all of society, all of the economy should become like one giant factory.
He foresees under socialism one commanding will, like that of the conductor of an orchestra, he says, guiding the economy.
An economy that will consist not of fragmentary operations, but rather of the combined labor of a single workshop, extended to the national scale.
Marx believed erroneously that somehow we could abstract from the situation of a firm within the market
and carry factory-style planning and management that are indeed dictated by the circumstances on the market out into the entire economy and society.
And this is what the famous phrase, the administration of things that Marx talks about refers to.
I think here I need to mention that this model of the firm or the factory is where Marx takes his notion that he can solve the problem that he sees of degradation of the laborer's life in detail work.
or he can solve it because he looks at a factory or firm
where a manager can move people from one job to another
or say, well, you spent part of the day doing this,
now go do that.
And since he sees the whole society
and the whole economy in this way,
he thinks that he can in this manner introduce job rotation
and variation into the lives of workers.
To some extent, I think we have to realize where this project of job rotation is going to take the Marxists.
They're going to be moving people mandatorily from the shop floor into administration and back and forth.
I think there are going to be serious problems with that in terms of talents that are there in the workforce and so forth,
whether this will work over a long-term basis, whether the iron law of oligarchy will come in
and block such shifting back and forth from administration into subordination.
He wants to require scientists and artists to engage in mandatory physical labor.
He wants, if necessary, to compel each worker in society to perform undesirable dirty work in turn.
Some of these suggestions, this last one is actually Mabel, not Marx, but it's in keeping with the spirit of Marx's desire to bring together manual and mental labor.
I think here we can see the roots of the malice program of re-education of sending white collar workers, uppity urbanites, out to the countryside for rectification.
And lastly in connection with this factory or firm model, I want to mention a sort of a humorous note and that is that the example that Lenin finds most appropriate in suggesting what kind of factory or firm he has in mind moving to the national scale when the armed proletariat takes control of the economy is he says the whole national economy needs to be run along the lines of
of the Post Office.
So there is humor if you know where to look for it in this material.
I can't really go much into the military model, but I mentioned earlier that labor armies is something that Marx feels comfortable in talking about.
Lenin is calling throughout the very early days of Bolshevism for universal labor conscription or general labor conscription.
Trotsky indeed makes very plain that he sees it necessary to bring military discipline and structure and organization into such universal military conscription.
Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, all see the grain appropriation via expropriation that they used during this period, the early period of Soviet history to get farm goods from the countryside into the city or from the countryside into the army.
They see this continuing. They see this is an extension of military methods. They see this as staying on during peacetime and so forth.
So there is very much an authoritarian military model built into the notion of association and organization of labor and the workplace.
Let me just sum up by saying what the conclusion is that I have about life in the workplace for the worker under socialism.
In authority, we keep the dictates of large machinery, we keep the manager as boss, although there's some hints at some sort of very vague hints by Marx,
some sort of democratic oversight, which I think would be bound to be unsatisfactory.
There's going to be central planning and no money, Marx says, and Marx says this is rational.
Mises makes powerful, powerful arguments that it's impossible.
The result, then, we see is military state capitalism, a kind of super fascism.
The division of labor, it's going to remain, except for mandatory physical labor, plan, amalgamation of countryside and city, imposed scrambling of intellectual and manual work and so forth.
Labor Mobility, there's going to be less of it, and there's going to be a complete loss of freedom to vote with one's feet from one job to another.
I think the conclusion that we have to draw here is pretty bleak, even in Marx's own terms.
Marx says he's bringing emancipation of the working class.
and the Working Class. I say, Misesium say, he's bringing empowerment of the political bureaucratic class and insertment of the working class. Thank you very much.