words, the state is never just a dominant private interest disguising itself as the public interest.4 It is a fully fledged actor in the market.
Paradoxically, this point makes Marx much more closely affiliated with the libertarians than we usually think. For libertarians also believe that the markets are manipulated by politicians and that therefore they must be liberated from this political control so that they can become efficient again. Destroying the state means preventing the mechanism whereby the market secretes the state like an oyster secretes a pearl. So libertarians don’t simply want to suppress the state, any more than Marx does. On the contrary: since politics tends always to rise again from its ashes, Hayek, for example, advocated that governments be placed under the supervision of higher structures, capable of imposing rules of free competition that must apply to all without distinction.
The only difference between Marx and libertarians is the structure that is to be responsible for regulating the market. For Hayek, it was to be an unelected ‘council of wise men’ presiding over executive and legislative power and which, in addition to being responsible for regulating the market, would also take pride in giving its opinion on moral issues (since the people must be ‘educated’ to freedom, according to the Austrian thinker, who never hid his sympathy for fascism despite his proclaimed love of freedom – or more paradoxically, because of it). For Marx, it was to be ‘popular councils’ endowed with the same powers (what would become the ‘Soviets’ in Lenin’s era). But even this doesn’t provide much ground for differentiating between Marxists and libertarians – or, at least, they failed equally: councils of elders and popular councils alike failed to do their job.
Bakunin had predicted that Marx’s passion for political organization would lead him to replace the bourgeois state with a ‘red bureaucracy’ that would be just as bad, and ultimately he was proved right. Under the yoke of Lenin and then Stalin, the fearsome fantasy of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ morphed into the infamous ‘Party’, a real state within the state that betrayed the trust of the proletarians it was supposed to serve; a tool of ‘democratic centralism’ in which centralism always trumped democracy.
But it is no unfair exaggeration to say that libertarianism has scarcely been more successful than Marxism in convincing people of the effectiveness of its system. Hayek’s recommendations have been followed around the world as, in what is known as ‘neoliberalism’, technocratic institutions everywhere have supplanted the general will: what are called ‘central banks’ (institutions against which libertarians are constantly railing, not realizing that they themselves invented them!), but also the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (all the presidents and governors of which are unelected).5 Not to mention ‘Supreme Courts’ (whose judges are also unelected) and various ‘Central Intelligence Agencies’ (whose leaders, once more, are unelected). The problem with all these institutions is that the personalities who head them up, without any popular supervision, must therefore be appointed by the most loyal and devoted representatives of the oligarchy. In the end, Hayek and his buddies in the neoliberal cadre of the Mont Pelerin Society will have served as nothing but useful idiots for big business (that is, unless they were in cahoots from the very start).
But then, if neither popular councils nor unelected technocrats can overcome the dysfunctions of the market, who on earth can? That’s where Bitcoin comes in, precisely because it seems to provide a solution to this impasse. It seems to be the missing piece that communism needed in order to carry out its ‘organized destruction’ of the state.
Notes
1 1. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition (London: Verso, 2010), 61.
2 2. In his 1878 book Anti-Duhring.
3 3. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 62.
4 4. See Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ [1843], translated by Annette John and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
5 5. The Fed was created in 1913, but did not achieve real independence until 1978, notably under the influence of the work of Milton Friedman, who was close to Hayek. The independence of the US Supreme Court is quite obviously of a different order, as an institution that precedes neoliberalism by two centuries. Marx, however, always held that the doctrine of the separation of powers that justified its existence represented the very birth of the bourgeois state.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
