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Tag Archives: Friedrich Engels

Collectivism Is Not the “Natural” State

03 Tuesday May 2022

Posted by pnoetx in Collectivism, Property Rights

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Aché, Capitalism, Collectivism, Covid-19, Friedrich Engels, Hunter-Gatherers, Manvir Singh, Noble Savage, Paraguay, Primitive Communism, Property Rights

There is a great myth that primitive man was some sort of “noble savage”, perfectly attuned to the natural environment and disposed to an egalitarian principle. All that, of course, is balderdash. A related myth is that primitive societies were essentially collectivist and that private property was largely an unrecognized institution. This is something I’ve heard too often from individuals wishing to characterize leftist ideals as natural and wholesome. So I welcomed a recent piece in Aeon called “Primitive Communism”, by Manvir Singh, which reviews evidence on a number of hunter-gatherer societies and cites several scholars on the subject of ownership and the distribution of goods among those peoples. A preponderance of the evidence suggests that private property and private rewards were (and are) quite common in primitive societies, and those practices predated agriculture.

The assertion that the advent of private property and trade was somehow unnatural for mankind, or even unjust, might owe its widespread acceptance to Friedrich Engels’ “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”. Singh summarizes one of the book’s primary arguments thusly:

“Once upon a time, private property was unknown. Food went to those in need. Everyone was cared for. Then agriculture arose and, with it, ownership over land, labour and wild resources. The organic community splintered under the weight of competition.”

While there were a few primitive societies in which economic output was shared, it is not clear whether any central authority was relied upon for determining the distribution of output. Instead, in those cases, sharing seems to have been a matter of social convention. Singh posits that interdependence played a major role in motivating output sharing, but mechanisms for dealing with interdependence differed in societies with stronger property rights, including voluntary sharing, which was often but not always based on reciprocity. Volunteerism still has a strong role in modern, developed economies, but for better or worse, social insurance is increasingly viewed as a function of the state, with its monopoly on legal coercion.

And how “natural” is social insurance? Not very in a world of extreme scarcity. One of the more interesting passages in Singh’s article has to do with the brutality of subsistence-level societies. The weak were often abandoned or killed, which Singh discusses in the context of the collectivist Aché people of Paraguay. This “culling” applied variously to orphans, the disabled, the unsightly, and the aged. It’s unclear whether these decisions were collective or left up to individual families. Noble savages indeed!

It’s astonishing how often Engels’ faulty premise is accepted as historical fact. The argument, however, often serves as a subtext for collectivist rationales in the modern era. As Singh says:

“For anyone hoping to critique existing institutions, primitive communism conveniently casts modern society as a perversion of a more prosocial human nature.”

I’m not sure whether it’s possible to marshall evidence that primitive societies with strong property rights were more successful than their collectivist counterparts. That would be a good topic of further research, but it would be tough to control for the difficulties posed by varying natural conditions faced by these societies.

On the other hand, suppose we stipulate that property rights developed as a consequence of, or in tandem with, organized production, as Engels would have had it. We’d have to categorize that development as a kind of technological breakthrough in its own right. By aligning incentives with production, property rights were critical to the phenomenal growth in prosperity the world has enjoyed over the past several centuries. Nevertheless, the evidence on primitive societies suggests that the alignment came more “naturally”.

It’s about time to put the fiction of “primitive communism” to rest. Private property was sensible for the denizens of most primitive societies. Even the most collectivist of the those societies made certain concessions to that reality. These facts comport with a view of property ownership as a natural right.

Socialist Supremacy’s Dark History of Culling the Race

26 Wednesday Feb 2020

Posted by pnoetx in racism, Socialism

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Adolph Hitler, Che Guevara, Class Struggle, Disparate impact, FEE, Fidel Castro, Foundation for Economic Education, Friedrich Engels, Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Liberalism Unrelinquished, Marion Tupy, National Socialism, racism, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Socialism

Can you think of a social philosophy steeped in many years of blame-making and hatred for “others”, including massive persecution, more than a passing flirtation with racism, and genocide. Why, that would be socialism! Marion Tupy’s 2017 article on racism and socialism at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) blog is a good reminder, just in case you know anyone having a romantic fascination with collectivist ideology. I know too many! And if they subscribe to the notion that socialism eschews racism, they are sadly mistaken. In fact, to put it kindly, socialists ultimately eschew anyone standing in their way. Here are a few excerpts from Tupy’s article:

“… Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who were both socialists and eugenicists, bemoaned the falling birthrates among so-called higher races in the New Statesman in 1913. They warned that ‘a new social order [would be] developed by one or other of the colored races, the Negro, the Kaffir or the Chinese’.

Che Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary and friend of the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, offered his views on race in his 1952 memoir The Motorcycle Diaries, writing, ‘The Negro is indolent and lazy and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent.’ …

In the New York Tribune in 1853, Karl Marx came close to advocating genocide, writing, “The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.” His friend and collaborator, Engels, was more explicit.

In 1849, Engels published an article in Marx’s newspaper, Neue Rheinische Zeitung. In it, Engels condemned the rural populations of the Austrian Empire for failing enthusiastically to partake in the revolution of 1848. …

‘The Austrian Germans and Magyars will be set free and wreak a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians,’ he continued. ‘The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.’

Here Engels clearly foreshadows the genocides of the 20th-century totalitarianism in general and the Soviet regime in particular. In fact, Joseph Stalin loved Engels’ article and commended it to his followers in The Foundations of Leninism in 1924. He then proceeded to suppress Soviet ethnic minorities, including the Jews, Crimean Tatars, and Ukrainians.”

As Tupy notes, socialists are given to dressing-up their repressions as “class struggles”, as opposed to racism when it suits them, ideological eliminationism, and genocidal paroxysm. And these fits have often had pronounced “disparate impacts” on ethnic, racial and national minorities. In this sense, Hitler, the national socialist was no exception. Again, from Tupy:

“Hitler’s hatred of the Jews, for example, was partly rooted in his belief that capitalism and international Jewry were two sides of the same coin. As he once famously asked, ‘How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?'”

Socialism is not an ideology of “kindness”. As a practical matter, it is an ideology of coercion, control, and extreme inequality of outcomes. It is antithetical to the ideal of personal liberty, not “liberal” in any real sense of the word. It should come as no surprise that the practitioners of socialism have indulged in virulent intolerance and racism. And it’s not simply a matter of “my way or the highway”. It’s often my way or death for those who don’t fall in line, and a highway to hell on earth for those who do.

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