The Dialectic of Destruction

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Ludwin von Mises Institute:

 

Ludwin von Mises Institute

The Dialectic of Destruction

Mises Daily:Thursday, August 23, 2012 by Murray N. Rothbard

 

[This article is excerpted from volume 2, chapter 10 of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995). An MP3 audio file of this chapter, narrated by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download.]

Some might protest that, in our discussion of communism, we have not mentioned the feature that is generally considered the hallmark of that system: the slogan, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." This phrase seems to contradict our view that the essence of the communist society is a secularized religion rather than economics. The locus classicus, however, of Marx's proclamation of this well-known slogan of French socialism, was in the course of his vitriolic Critique of the Gotha Program in 1875, in which Marx denounced the Lassallean deviationists who were forming the new German Social Democratic Party. And it is clear from the context of his discussion that this slogan is of minor and peripheral importance to Marx. In point 3 of his Critique, Marx is denouncing the clause of the program calling for communization of property and "equitable distribution of the proceeds of labour." In the course of his discussion, Marx states that inequality of labor income is "inevitable in the first stage of communist society, … when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and the cultural development thereby determined." On the other hand, Marx goes on,

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of individuals read more http://mises.org/daily/6045/The-Dialectic-of-Destruction