Vol. 8.10, October 1975

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher		Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOLUME VIII, NO. 10	OCTOBER, 1975	US-ISSN0047-4517

THE SINAI TRAP

Super-K is back, and the Sinai Pact has received all the adulation that the Establishment, from President Ford on down, can bestow. We are once again being told that “peace” has been virtually achieved in the Middle East. For a small chunk of Sinai territory given back by Israel to Egypt, the United States has surrendered a great deal. How much precisely is not known, amid the raft of “secret” and quasi-secret assurances being given by the U.S. to Israel. One certain loss is $3 billion of U.S. taxpayer aid in one year, most of it to Israel, along with some non-military aid to Egypt. According to Jack Anderson, however, secret agreements push up the bill to the staggering sum of $15 billion!

The risk of war in the Middle East is further accelerated by the multi-billion dollar American-financed buildup of the Israeli war machine. But even more ominous is the famous agreement by the U.S. to supply 200 “technicians” on the front line to monitor an attack from either side. The admitted fact that the “technicians” will be CIA and, other U.S. intelligence agents—and the ominous parallel with our CIA “technicians” in Vietnam is laughed off as of no consequence. On the contrary, it means that U.S. government agents will be front-line hostages to any war that breaks out, thus insuring American entry into the next conflict, and the menace of a new World III. All this for a small chunk of the Sinai desert!

The only hopeful sign in the expected Congressional endorsement of the Pact is the strong and cogent opposition that developed to the measure; for once, Congress was not totally supine to the combined lobbying of the Administration and organized Zionism. In fact, a new and hopeful left-right coalition came together in the Senate against the Pact, including such liberal Democrats as Joseph Binden of Delaware and Dick Clark, majority leader Mike Mansfield of Montana, and old Rightists Carl Curtis and Roman Hruska of Nebraska. A new isolationist coalition seems to be in the making. Thus, liberal Democrat Senator James Abourezk of South Dakota warned that “the days should be over when the Secretary of State and the President can be allowed to shoot dice under a blanket, where they are the only ones allowed to see the dice. That kind of policy has cost us far too much in the past.”

The most effective opposition in Washington against the Sinai Pact came from former Undersecretary of State George Ball, never known for any isolationist or pro-Arab proclivities. Ball warned that, far from a step toward Mid-East peace, the Pact would be interpreted by the other Arab countries (let alone the Palestinians) as a sell-out, would bring war on the part of Syria and the others closer, and would make Israel more intrasigent, relieved as it is from pressure from its strongest Arab opponent. Ball concluded that the Pact has frozen “a situation that is inherently unstable and explosive, while engaging America more deeply as a guarantor.” At least there is a possibility that the organized opposition will slow down further American involvement in the Middle East. (See, for example, the articles by Leslie Gelb and by Bernard Gwertzman in the New York Times for Sept. 21 and October 7.)

One part of George Ball’s forecast has already come true: the Arab unity forged at Rabat in October, 1974 has already been shattered by the Sinai Pact. Syria has already taken the unprecedented step of openly denouncing Egypt on the floor of the United Nations. And Egypt has silenced the Voice of Palestine radio station in Cairo, operated by the PLO, and substituted its own pro-Kissinger propaganda for the Palestinian attacks on the Sinai agreement.

In retrospect, in fact, it is clear that the Sinai Pact was only the final step in the shattering of the Spirit of Rabat, in which all the Arab countries united behind the Palestine Liberation Organization. The support for the PLO by its old enemy King Hussein of Jordan, had been literally purchased by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia; Faisal, a conservative and no particular friend of the Palestinians, was moved by his long-standing and ever-increasing desire to recover Jerusalem for the Moslem religion. The critical change came with the assassination last winter of King Faisal, by yet another “lone nut”. (See the excellent article by Russell Stetler, “Whatever Happened to Arab Unity?” International Bulletin, Oct. 10, 1975). In the name of continuing Faisal’s policies, his successors have dropped the old cry of “Liberate Jerusalem” and have put up hundreds of millions to up-grade Hussein’s war machine, including jets and missiles. In a three-cornered deal, the Ford Administration drove through Congress a $350 million supply of 14 anti-aircraft missile systems to Jordan, to be paid for by Saudi Arabia. When some of the pro-Israeli bloc in Congress objected, the Ford Administration let it be known that Jordan was going to be on the American-Israeli side. Indeed, Hussein, in his tour of the United States last August, repeatedly assured reporters that the Palestinian guerrillas “will never be allowed to enter this country again.”

What’s next in the Middle East? The next sticking-point is Syria, far harder-nosed than Egypt, and co-belligerent in the October War of 1973. Israel is still sitting on a large chunk of the strategic Syrian Golan Heights, where Israeli artillery is within range of the Syrian capital of Damascus. Kissinger’s next task is to try to pressure Syria into negotiations with Israel and to concluding its own agreement with Israel—thereby isolating the Palestinians. Syria, feeling isolated by the Egyptian separate peace, has refused to negotiate on Golan, and has rejected all “partial” solutions to the Middle East. For its part, Israel has declared that it will not surrender Golan, and Kissinger has had the brass to hint at a meaningless three-kilometer withdrawal of Israel from the Golan front (less than two miles!) Syria’s President Hafez Assad bluntly told the New York Times, Sept. 28, that “If I held a referendum for my people on a three-kilometer withdrawal, it wouldn’t get ten votes. We can do without the three kilometers till the time Israel withdraws from all of Golan.” Furthermore, Assad declared once again on October 6 that he would not enter into negotiations on Golan unless there were simultaneous negotiations between Israel and the PLO—which Israel has shown no signs whatever of doing.

The UN peacekeeping force on the Golan expires on November 30, which may well prove a danger date in the Middle East. A key question is: will Syria, now again at odds with Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, agree to abandon the PLO in exchange for a possible Kissinger-induced Israeli agreement to withdraw from the Golan? It will be a test of Syria’s mettle. If such an agreement does take place, there will be short-run peace on both military fronts in the Middle East, but a continuing festering of the most Important problem in the area: the problem of the Palestinians.

IS THE GRASS ANY GREENER . . .?

Review of The Australian Alternative; by Laura and Odie B. Faulk, Arlington House, New Rochelle, N.Y. 1975. $7.95.

In both libertarian and conservative circles, it is not uncommon to hear people express their frustration with the political and social ills of America by threatening to escape to some other more congenial land—a favorite being Australia. Few Americans have actually been there, its distance and the cost of reaching it being a great barrier to tourism. But we have become familiar with it through novels and films; the sheep ranches, rough and tumble mining towns, incomparable beaches and surf, strange flora and fauna, mysterious aborigines, and the colorfully different yet familiarly Anglo-Saxon language and cultural heritage.

Prof. Odie Faulk of the Oklahoma State University and his wife and children decided to spend three months of his sabbatical leave touring the various provinces of Australia with the particular goal in mind of assessing whether emigration to the “Land Down Under” was a solution to any American’s unhappiness with his own society. Faulk is a conservative politically, and to some extent culturally as well. He is smugly happy to hear that an Australian politician advocating a modification of Australia’s policy of racial exclusion of Asian immigrants has been defeated for re-election, and he ominously warns that the Japanese seem to be increasingly active in economic penetration of the Australian market. At the same time he seems unaware that the high prices of all household appliances and automobiles, of which he complains, could be materially reduced by allowing even greater importation of such goods from Japan, or that Japan is probably destined to be the principal market for Australia’s food and mineral exports which complement so well the needs of Japan.

Written in the form of a travel diary, Faulk’s book contains a great deal of trivial comment—Australian restaurants don’t serve water with meals—alongside quick descriptions of the towns, scenery and more obvious mores of the natives (an uncommon amount of heavy drinking, says this near teetotaling Oklahoman). He also complains of the penetration of “plastic” American culture in the form of omnipresent American TV shows and movies, Col. Sanders and MacDonalds, Coke (perth vintage), and many other products, as well as of certain American service industries like the Mafia. At the same time he complains about the poor quality of Australian hotels, central heating and coffee. In other words, he is a rather typical tourist.

The value of this book may lie in the fact that the Faulks attempted to find out why Americans emigrated to Australia by interviewing informally as many as they could find. They discovered that most wished to escape from the normal ills of American urban society—racial tensions, crime, drug cultures, pollution, and the economic “rat race”. Most came from large urban cities—and most settled in Sydney, Melbourne or Adelaide where all the problems they sought to escape—except racial conflict—are also to be found. They have had to take a considerable drop in standard of living, capital accumulation is very difficult due to heavy taxation, and rampant inflation is above American levels. And racism is not entirely absent as both aborigines and other non-Caucasians are discriminated against in Australian society by either law or social custom. The Faulks found the little differences in Australian customs to be the most irritating: despite rumor to the contrary, Australians do not speak the same language as do most American. Faulk found that he was understood (the influence of TV) but could not always understand the local dialect. Despite the same nomenclature, Australian beef, milk, coffee, sausage, bologna and even water do not taste like their American namesakes; though he found Australian wines very palatable, he was stunned by the custom of serving spaghetti on toast for breakfast along with fried tomatoes.

The few Liberal American emigrants that Faulk found fled from the growing fascism of America, only to drop out of politics completely in their new homeland. Faulk makes no analysis of the Australian political scene other than to complain of lazy bureaucrats, high taxes, politicians’ antics, and the ominous presence of “bleeding heart liberals” who express concern over the government’s willingness to remove the aborigines from whatever lands suddenly attract the lust of business interests. But he is particularly bitter about the Australian’s lack of enthusiasm for hard work (farmers are excepted) and the evil power of unions in Australian society, a situation far worse than in the United States, and one which leads Faulk to predict that Australia will get more and more like England rather than like America in the future. Why an American college professor enjoying a sabbatical year off, in addition to the usual long vacation and short hours of that profession, should wax indignant over a common workingman’s desire for an annual month off and a forty hour week is something of a puzzle. But such attitudes are common among conservatives.

Prof. Faulk’s conclusion on Australia is that it may be a nice place to visit, but he wouldn’t want to live there. I think his conclusion is sound, that those wishing to escape the urban problems of America can do as well by simply moving into some smaller American city or more rural area. If they don’t like what they hear on TV each morning, shut it off. If they wish to escape the “rat race”, they can do so in greater comfort in many parts of the United States, and without the trauma of living in a foreign land and quite foreign culture. All the problems of America already exist in Australia; if their magnitude seems smaller, it is merely because they exist among 13 million rather than 220 million people Many of the new emigrants from America found no real solutions in Australia; many found only new problems; many carry problems around in their head. Though the Faulks were unaware of it, Australia has proven its right to be considered a society in the American pattern, not some provincial backwater. It has witnessed in the last year the founding of its first libertarian political party, The Workers’ Party, dedicated to the free mind, the free market and the free life – but not the free lunch. Any country needing a libertarian party, and spontaneously creating it, is not likely to be any better than our own, and may even be worse from a libertarian viewpoint. At least we Americans don’t pledge allegiance to a parasitical monarch, yet.

Any potential expatriates, or tourists will find this easy to read travelogue useful. But they should be warned that Prof. Faulk absolutely hated Hawaii, and therefore may just be extraordinarily hard to please.

Arab Wars

While attention in the Middle East continues to focus on Israel versus the Arabs, two little known inter-Arab conflicts are beginning to escalate into full-scale wars. At the western end of the Arab world, King Hassan II of Morocco has whipped up a bizarre “March of Conquest”, in which no less than 350,000 of his subjects are being mobilized to march southwestard into the Spanish Saharra, backed up by the Moroccan army. The Establishment press unsurprisingly misinterprets the Moroccan march as a nationalist grab for mere territory; as a New York Times correspondent puts it, the Moroccan “hearts appeared to be moved by a nationalist claim to a piece of territory, however barren and unpeopled.” (New York Times, Oct. 28, 1975).

The Sanish Sahara is not unpeopled (it has a population of 80,000), and it is certainly not “barren”; on the contrary, it has an enormous reserve of 1.7 billion tons of phosphates, so essential to the production of chemical fertilizers. If Morocco succeeds in grabbing the Spanish Sahara, it will then control over 80% of the world’s phosphates supply. The reason for Hassan’s haste at this time is that Spain has promised to leave its colony this year, and to hold a referendum among the populace. Most observers believe that three-quarters of the Spanish Saharans would vote for the territory’s independence movement, POLISARIO, a leftist movement whose guerrilla war has now forced Spain to abandon its colony. POLISARIO is allied to the Algerian government, a leftist regime, which, under Saharan independence, would be able to ship its iron ore directly from far western Algeria through the Spanish Sahara to the sea. This October, the World Court rejected Morocco’s dubious claim to the Spanish Sahara—hence the March. A war between Morocco on the one hand, and POLISARIO and Algeria on the other, is a distinct possibility.

In the meanwhile, at the other end of the Arab world, on the Arabian peninsula, Oman and neighboring South Yemen are virtually at war. Oman, a depsotic monarchy under the one-man rule of Sultan Qabus bin Said, has been unsucessfully trying to crush a leftist guerilla rebellion in its western province of Dhofar. The counter-guerrila war has been directed by a British general, with an officer corps of 200 members of Britain’s Green Beretish Special Air Services, and a few thousand Iranian “advisers”. Unable to stamp out the guerillas, Oman has begun to extend the war to the neighboring territory of leftist South Yemen, including an air strike on October 17. Particularly important is that Oman used TOW missiles against South Yemeni gun emplacments, the missiles having been delivered to Oman last February by good old Uncle Sam. Not only that: but the American squeeze against South Yemen has been increased by continuing negotiations with North Yemen to supply up to $100 million in arms, to be paid for by Saudi Arabia, in return for the termination of Soviet military contracts to the North Yemenis.

Favorable U.S. interest in Oman is due to its strategic location in control of the narrow strait of Hormuz, through which passes nearly half of the world’s oil; its hostile view of South Yemen, to its command of the Bab el-Mandeb straits entering the Red Sea.

(For information on the Spanish Sahara and Oman, see International Bulletin, Oct. 24, 1975. This excellent biweekly newsletter on foreign affairs can be obtained for only $8 a year, at P.O. Box 4400, Berkeley, Calif. 94704.)

Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

Encyclopedia of Pop Musfc and Jazz. At last—an encylopedia has been published that offers a storehouse of delight for a lifetime! It is Roger D. Kinkle, The Complete Encylcopedia of Popular Music and Jazz, 1900-1950 (4 volume set, Arlington House, 2644 pp., $75.00). Aided by the enthusiasm and vast knowledge of the subject of Arlington House publisher Neal McCaffrey, Kinkle’s encyclopedia is the result of a vast amount of knowledge and research. As Kinkle admits, the title is in a sense a misnomer, since Kinkle’s work follows the careers of the composers and musicians and jazz and pop down to 1974, provided that their careers were launched before 1950. Because of the time framework, Kinkle covers the Golden Age of pop and jazz, and happily omits the disintegration after the 1940’s into trivia and then into rock and roll.

Volume I is a year-by-year chronology, listing the major songs, Hollywood and Broadway musicals, and records, each year. It is clear from the chronology that popular songs reached its apogee during the 1920’s and 30’s, and then began their precipitate decline during and after World War II, fueled by the death of the great composers the victory on radio recordings of BMI over the superior composers of ASCAP, and the musicians’ strike during the war which, combined with a tax on dance halls, that killed the big bands. Volumes II and III are a marvelously comprehensive biography, arranged alphabetically, including composers, musicians, and vocalists, Volume II covering A through K, and Volume III, L through Z. The leading songs and records of each performer or composer are listed in the individual biography. Volume IV is a set of indexes and appendices, including the complete list of jazz poll and Academy Award winners; a list of all the principal record labels, by consecutive number; and complete alphabetical indexes by name, by song, and by musical, for the previous three volumes.

One of the things that struck me about the encyclopedia is how high a proportion of the great popular songs were written by a relative handful of songwriters. We all know about the top-ranking ones: Porter, Rogers and Hart, Gershwin, Berlin, Arlen, and Kern. But a surprisingly large proportion of great songs were written by composers now relatively forgotten: the Tilzer brothers, Albert and Harry; J. Fred Coots, Harry Woods, Harry Warren, Ralph Rainger, and others.

There are undoubtedly errors in this work, as Kinkle concedes, since there must be such in a mammoth tome of this type; but I must report that a diligent search over many happy hours of reading failed to find any. Once, I thought that the book had omitted the song “Treasure Island” (Joe Burke and Edgar Leslie, 1935). But then I found that I was wrong, since the title was “On Treasure Island.” The old song “Winter Time” is omitted, but, who knows?, it may have been composed before 1900.

And so, rush out and buy this book—a fitting monument to a great and vanished era in popular music. Sure, the price is steep, but consider this: (a) all encyclopedias are expensive, (b) the price is cheap when we consider that it can be amortized over a lifetime of delighted reference and reading; and (c) best of all, that the price of the four-volume work is only $15 (yes, that’s right, fifteen) if one joins the Nostalgia Book Club. For information, write the Nostaligia Book Club, 525 Main St., New Rochelle, N.Y. 10801

Jaws. dir. by Steven Spielberg, with Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfus, and Roy Scheider.

Jaws is a good, scary movie, no doubt about that. But it is hardly the best movie of all time, or even the scariest. And so that film hardly warrants its runaway best-seller status, the long lines at movie theaters throughout the country, and its rapid climb to the biggest box-office draw of all time. It is what used to be called “good hot weather fare”, and no more than that.

In the recent disaster genre, Jaws is better than “The Towering Inferno”, and far better than the turkey “Earthquake”, and is happily free of the, phony moralism of the earlier pictures. The highly touted shark scenes are indeed terrific: (whether they overrate the shark menace or not I leave to the shark specialists.) One problem is that there are several important clinkers in the movie, including especially its idiotic ending, which violates both the letter and the spirit of the Peter Benchley novel. More important is the uniformly poor quality of the acting, a flaw which we can lay straight at the door of young Spielberg. Roy Scheider is patently miscast in the important role of the sheriff; what kind of credible sheriff walks around with a perpetually gentle, hangdog expression? Richard Dreyfuss is not as obnoxious as in his central role in “The Apprenticeship of Buddy Kravitz”, but neither does he begin to come across as a young New England aristocrat. Another example of grievous miscasting by Spielberg.

But particularly unfortunate is what happened to Robert Shaw, one of the finest actors in motion pictures. The central role of the fanatical shark-killer Quint, as should have been clear from the novel, should be played with quietly controlled force, punctuated by bursts of passion. Instead. Shaw hams it up from the very beginning, destroying much of the point by making Quint a garrulous old fool instead of the best shark-hunter in the business. Again, such a misconception of the role is at least as much the director’s fault as Shaw’s, especially since Shaw is not usually given to chewing the proverbial carpet.

Tom Wolfe Rides Again. Several years ago, the brilliant and scintillating social critic Tom Wolfe demonstrated the power of the pen by single-handedly demolishing the now famous (as dubbed by Wolfe himself) phenomenon of “radical chic”. Now, in a book that essentially reprints his lengthy article in the April Harper’s, The Painted Word, Wolfe, with equal hilarity and wit, does a superb demolition job on modern art. In the course of his book, Wolfe gives us a history and sociology of the development of modern art, and exposes the fact that the Modern Art Emperor has no clothes. Can he single-handedly destroy modern art as he did radical chic? It is not likely, but at least we can hope. Surely, the pretentious pomposities and absurdities of modern art will never quite be the same again.

The War Between the Tates. We usually do not discuss fiction in this column, but we must break the mold to sing the praises of Alison Lurie’s witty, perceptive, and extremely well-written novel, now out in paperback. From her inside perch as a professor at Cornell, Mrs. Lurie offers us a brilliant dissection of the academic world, its attitudes, pomposities, and values—as set in the era of conflicting values and standards of the late 1960’s and early 70’s. It is a comedy of manners in the classic sense. Particularly perceptive and hilarious is Mrs. Lurie’s description of a faculty department meeting, in political science; in a few pages, she manages to Say it All about an institution (faculty meetings) in which an enormous amount of pretentious blather is habitually expended on petty and bureaucratic issues. A must!

Randian estheticians will doubtless balk at the admittedly antiromantic motif of the novel. There is no question about the fact that there are no heroes or heroines in the novel; everyone is an ass. But there is an important role in fiction for the realistic novel. At its best, the novel can capture an age or a way of life far more accurately than can the most thorough and sober historian. Randians deride the realistic novel as “journalistic”, but the journalist, trapped in mountains of mere fact, cannot step outside of the given historical concretes to capture the essence of the way people feel, think, or act in any given historical setting. The novelist can, however; Galsworthy’s Forsythe Saga, for example, so superbly captured on television a few years ago, gives us a far better idea of the way people felt and acted in Edwardian England than any historian can hope to do. Mrs. Lurie’s novel is the subset of the realistic novel known as the “comedy of manners”, in which nothing very tragic occurs, and the characters are treated amusedly but gently Jin contrast to the savage modern genre of “black” or absurdist comedy.) All in all, a penetrating and delightful book.

From The Old Curmudgeon

Psychobabble.

One good thing about being an older, as opposed to a younger, curmudgeon is that one has the privilege of seeing cultural fads go as well as arrive. The “psychobabble” of my younger days was pop-Freudianism, and one had to suffer through cocktail conversation about “Oedipus Complexes”, “repression”, and “transference.” Happily, Freudianism, once so triumphant, has seen better days, only to be replaced by the modern, more mindless, but more pervasive psychobabble derived from the so-called “human potential” movement. (For a scintillating dissection of the current mode, as well as older trends, and for the name of the syndrome, see R. D. Rosen, “Psychobabble,” New York Times, Oct. 31, 1975.)

The new psychobabble seems to be a blend of compulsive pshycho-confessionalism, “philosophical” hogwash, Eastern mysticism, pop psychojargon, and the reconstruction of one’s personality by an untrained but self-confident guru. It is particularly distressing to find so many libertarians, as well as the rest of society, falling for this irrational cretinism. In his humorous and astute article, Mr. Rosen indicates the difference from the older, Freudian pop-jargon: “The old Psychobabble, however, was really just the wholesale use of Freudian terms, less banter than a sort of intellectual one-upmanship. In post-World War H America, Freudian terminology was embraced by liberal magazines, novelists and enough of the middle class so that the growing demand for psychoanalysis easily outdistanced the supply of doctors.” In the new version, however, even the dubious intellectual content of Freudianism has disappeared, to be replaced by vague and ritualistic phrasemongering. Rosen tells the typical story of phychoanalyst confronting a patient engaged in the New Psychobabble. To every interpretation offered by the analyst, the patient responded “I hear you. I hear you.” The following dialogue ensued:

“‘I’m sorry,’ said the doctor. ‘I didn’t know you were a little deaf.’

‘I’m not. I hear you. It means I comprehend.’

‘Well, what do you comprehend?’

The patient paused. ‘Jesus,’ he replied. ‘I don’t know.’”

The psychobabble, as Rosen concludes, is a “set of repetitive verbal formalities” that “seem to free-float in some linguistic atmosphere.” They are also, one might add, close to gibberish. It is impossible, for example, to make any sense of most of the lucubrations of the latest super-guru, Werner Erhard, founder of Est, which has been lately sweeping the country and the libertarian movement. (See, for example, the expository and only mildly critical new book on all this by Adam Smith, and the refreshingly critical reporting of Esalen and Est by Annette Duffy in one of this summer’s issues of The Village Voice.) It is clear that amidst all the mindless concentration on one’s psyche—as filtered through the pseudo-philosophical jargon—the world of reality is left far behind. We are informed, for example, that “Werner hasn’t read anything in ten year”; apparently, facts, reality, knowledge of the world, only clutter up the psyche, which must be left free for the psychobabble.

Adam Smith tells us that Werner Erhard received the revelation for Est when it suddenly hit him one day that “Whatever is, is, and whatever isn’t, isn’t”. As Smith comments, “deep, deep.” One would think, indeed, that libertarians and ex-Randians have heard it all before: “Existence exists. A is A.” Indeed, in many ways Est and the other cults are a sort of village Randianism, that is, Randianism without its best aspect: systematic thought. What is left is the cult and the preferred panacea for all personal ills.

Hopefully, a reaction is setting in, as the Rosen and other articles attest. Particularly important is a devastating report on Est by an intrepid reporter who went through the entire Est training, including “graduate seminars”: Mark Brewer, “‘We’re Gonna Tear You Down and. Put You Back Together’”, Psychology Today (August, 1975). Mr. Brewer details the horrendous brainwashing techniques, accompanied, as usual, by severe sensory deprivation and authoritarian harassment, which results in “happy”, robotized subjects, ready to go – spout “philosophical” hogwash and to go out and gather more, unpaid volunteer-recruits for Est. The essence of the new message is that: “whatever you do is perfect, since you’re doing it”. Anything else is a “belief system” and therefore wrong. To “learn” this nonsense one has to be robotized and “ested”?! As Brewer concludes: “The use of brainwashing techniques, ostensibly to enhance people’s lives, becomes bizarre when the outcome is to create unpaid salesman. Smiling, they march out each week to share their brainwashed joys with friends, neighbors and coworkers, and they know that many will want to be sold. A friend of mine, an enthusiastic est graduate . . . until it all began to seem insidious, wistfully recalled the power of the training. They could’ve told me anything!’”

The horror is that so many libertarians could sit still long enough to be bulldozed in this manner, that they could submit themselves as fodder for authoritarian and brutal gurus.

Another important recent reaction to the psychobabble is a subtle, friendly but nonetheless devastating demolition of the quasi-Freudianism of Erik Erikson (the founder of the “identity crisis”) by Professor Frederick Crews (“American Prophet,” New York Review of Books, Oct. 16.) The backlash can come none too soon. More and more, it is becoming clear that these cults and fads can only sweep the country because most people lack a built-in b.s. detector or repellent (to paraphrase Hemingway.) A sufficient if not a necessary condition for such a repellent is a sense of humor, which is even more rare. Oh, H. L. Mencken, where are you now that we really need you? Can you imagine Mencken’s reaction, for example, to a new book by some cretinous adherent of the new movement, entitled, revealingly, It’s Me and I’m Here! Surely the proper response is something like: Who the hell cares?

Probably the screwiest of the new psycho-cults is “rolfing”—also used as an allied technique by many of the other cults—founded by one Ida Rolfe, in which the “therapist” punches, pummels, and generally hurts the patient, whose “life (but of course!) is changed” by “working through the pain.” Reminiscent, of course, of nothing so much as the old joke about a guy, when asked why he was hitting his head against a wall, replying: “because it feels so good when I stop.” What can anyone say about this lunacy except that it is better to be a rolfer than a rolfee? I can think, in fact, of a few people I would happily agree to “rolfe” for a very small fee.

In the meanwhile, lacking Mencken himself, we will have to peg along in his spirit, and hope that all this, too, shall pass. Mr. Rosen ends his article by pointing to the example of a friend of his, as a method of dealing with the hew psychobabble. When a girl asked him directly, “Are you getting your head together?” the friend replied: “Yes. I can feel it congealing.”

Class Analysis And Economic Systems

By David Osterfeld*

It is usually assumed that capitalism and socialism are diametrically opposed. This assumption is both true and false, for there are two mutually exclusive definitions of capitalism found in Marxist literature. On the one hand the term is used to denote production according to the dictates of the market, or in Marxist terminology, “commodity production.”¹ On the other, capitalism is defined in terms of class relations, i.e., ownership of the means of production by the “bourgeoisie” or ruling class. The former may be termed the economic definition and the latter the sociological definition. Marx apparently thought that the two were compatible and slides back and forth between the two without warning. However, if the economic definition is used, it follows that the less government control and manipulation of the market, the more capitalistic the society. This means that price controls, subsidies, licensing restrictions, etc., must be classified as anti-capitalistic since they constitute modifications or restrictions of the market. Since the state does not sell its services on the market, it is incompatible with the economic definition of capitalism. Not only is “state capitalism” a contradiction in terms, but it can readily be seen that taken to its logical extreme capitalism leads inexorably to anarchism.

But if the sociological definition is used, the state becomes perfectly compatible with capitalism, for whatever serves to entrency the bourgeois class, the owners of the means of production, in power is, ipso facto, “capitalistic.” Since Marx argued—however wrongly—that market competition would force the “rate of profit” to fall and ultimately to disappear altogether, the two definitions lead to mutually exclusive conclusions. Since the economic definition entails pure laissez faire, any government intervention to protect the interests of the bourgeoisie is anthema. But this is precisely the essential element when the sociological definition is used. Even though his economics may have been faulty, Marx saw that for the dominant economic class to entrench itself in power it must first be able to institutionalize its position, and this it can do only by obtaining control of the state. With the state behind them the bourgeoisie are then able to protect their positions from the threat of competition by establishing tariff barriers, licensing restrictions, and other statist measures. For Marx, the state is the principal instrument by which the dominant economic class is able to exploit the rest of society. Thus he writes that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Political power is defined as “the organized power of one class for oppressing another.” And even more clearly: “every class struggle is a political struggle.”² In short, while the state is incompatible with the economic definition, it is absolutely essential for the sociological one.

The inapplicability to the market of class analysis.

The utility of class analysis depends not only on a rigid social structure but, just as important, on whether the dominant class has obtained and/or is maintaining its position at the expense of, i.e., exploits, the other class(es) in the society. One conceivable socialist argument is that the two definitions may in fact be consistent if it can be shown that the operations of the market result in a stratified social structure where one class benefits itself at the expense of the other(s). Marx’s own economic analysis, however, precludes such an interpretation. Marx of course knew that for the capitalist to remain in business he must earn profit, or surplus value as he called it. But since all capitalists, he reasoned, are faced with the same task, they are forced by the laws of the market to compete against each other by lowering their prices and even, at times, by raising wages. The least efficient, usually the small-scale producers, are driven out of business. As Marx puts it, “one capitalist always kill many.” Capital becomes ever more centralized. The ranks of the proletariat swell from the increasing numbers of former bourgeoisie. Such is the process until finally, “this integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”³

Such is Marx’s analysis according to market criteria. The first thing to notice is that even according to Marx there is movement between classes, if only downward from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat. While this in itself would be enough to question the rigidity of the class structure under the market, Marx ignored the fact that just as there is movement downward, so there is movement upward, as the Fords, Rockefellers and numerous others less famous indicates. In short, far from a socially stratified society, the market is characterized by the perpetual movement between classes.

Further, far from benefitting themselves at the expense of others, the bourgeoisie can only maintain its position in a market society by serving others better than can anyone else. This, in fact, is implicit in Marx’s analysis: those who are able to stay in business can only do so on the market by offering higher wages to get better workers and by lowering their prices to attract more consumers. This is exactly why Marx felt the “rate of profit” would have to fall. While this would seem to demonstrate the irrelevance of class analysis for the market, one final argument might be that two or more capitalists could band together to form a monopoly, thereby both institutionalizing their position and benefitting themselves at the expense of others. The fallacy in this charge lies in the failure to realize that the elimination of the external market thereby precludes economic calculation within the firm. Since the monopoly would no longer be in a position to rationally allocate its specific factors, it would suffer severe losses and break apart.⁴

From the above it can be seen that there is no overlap whatsoever between the economic and sociological definitions: the former is incompatible with the state, the latter requires it; the former is characterized by movement between classes, the latter by social stratification; the former is premised on exchange for mutual benefit, the latter on exploitation. While it is fruitless to engage in arid debates over which definition is the “correct” one, it should be pointed out that the sociological definition is practically identical to what libertarians refer to as mercantilism. It should therefore not be surprising to find that, while running directly counter to Marxian economics on the one hand, there are on the other significant parallels between Marxism and libertarianism in the areas of class analysis and its correlary, imperialism.

Class Analysis.

While there is disagreement between libertarians and Marxists concerning the origins of the state, and while Marx’s class analysis is partially vitiated by his ideological tendency to equate the “whole bourgeoisie” with the ruling class,⁵ there is still much of value for libertarians—with the caveat that one is careful to distinguish between the two definitions of capitalism. What then emerges from the Marxian class analysis is an insightful dissection of traditional laissez-faire theory. Classical liberals had refrained from extending market analysis to its anarchist extreme and urged a “night watchman” state to maintain order and protect private property. But despite the shortcomings of Marxian economics, Marx realized that the position of the capitalist on the free market was always insecure. He also understood that since the first concern of the capitalist was to make money, he did not have any great attachment to the market as such. After all, freedom of competition meant that he could never relax. No sooner would he triumph over one competitor than he would be met by others intent upon cutting into his share of the market. Since this would force prices down, the capitalist could only preserve his profits by introducing new methods that would lower costs. But argued Marx, this would only temporarily preserve profits since all other competitors would soon follow suit. Hence. “this extra surplus-value vanishes so soon as the new method of production has become general . . . .”⁶ Marx completely misunderstood the nature of both interest and profit, and therefore erroneously believed that they could (and would) eventually disappear. But what he did clearly understand, however, was that while the capitalist desired to realize a profit, the rigors of the market meant that this was a difficult and perpetual struggle for an ever elusive object. Hence Marx noted that it was only natural for the capitalist to turn to the state which, with its monopoly on the use of force, could institutionalize his profits by implementing various statist measures to keep out competition and hold down wage rates.⁷ It is not surprising that the capitalists, as Marx notes, “all employ the powers of the State,” ranging from “brute force” to the granting of “exclusive monopolies,” for it is only by this means that they can “fix prices and plunder at will.” It is also quite understandable why Marx terms political power as “itself an economic power.”⁸

From this it can be seen that Marx did not succeed in demonstrating that wealth by itself confers power but the much different idea that wealth greatly facilitates the acquisition of power. The wealthy are able to use their wealth to obtain control of the state. Once in control, they are in a position to use the state to perpetuate their own position in the social hierarchy. Since he believed that the market would eliminate profit, it is the state, and not the market as assumed by most commentators, that is the principal vehicle for exploitation according to the logic of the Marxian system. Marx, in fact, is very clear on this point. In The German Ideology Marx and Engels define the state as “nothing more than the form of organization which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interest.” And in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx is severely critical of Hegel’s view of the bureaucracy as a universal class. For Marx the bureaucracy is, as Shlomo Avineri puts it, “an institutional license for sectional interests.” And in the 18th Brumaire Marx argues that the success of all previous revolutions depended on the acquisition of state power: “The parties that contended . . . for domination regarded the possession of this huge state ediface as the principal spoils of the victors.”⁹ In short, while Marx’s analysis is often muddled due in large part to his failure to recognize the incompatibility of his two definitions of capitalism, what emerges from a close reading of Marx is rather surprising: while wealth on the free market confers no power, the alliance of wealth with the state does divide society into antagonistic classes and enables the wealthy strata to maintain its position via the exploitation of others.

In pointing out the natural affinity between wealth and political power Marx demonstrated the naivete of the classical liberal ideal of limited-government capitalism. Since the state is the only vehicle for the institutionalization of profits, the night-watchman state, even if attained, would soon transform itself into the mercantilist state, and Lenin’s “personal link-up” between the bankers and the government officials marks precisely this transition. The realization that wealth does not confer power but does facilitate its acquisition has significant import for libertarians, for it means that the problem of power in society can only be handled by striking at its source: the state. There is, in other words, no half-way point between anarchism and mercantilism. Either the state is eliminated altogether or it will grow.

Imperialism.

While libertarians might benefit from a careful and selective reading of Marx, socialists might just as well profit from a study of the libertarian analysis of imperialism. The elements of the Hilferding-Lenin-Bukharin theory of capitalism imperialism are well know. Since the role of the state in the securing and policing of the colonial system is central,” it is the sociological, and not the economic, definition of capitalism that is used. It is not too surprising therefore that the communist theory of “capitalist” imperialism bears a striking similarity to the capitalist theory of mercantilist imperialism, for in actuality the two are referring to the same thing. In fact, there is probably no severer indictment of imperialism than that found in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Smith argues that under mercantilism, monopolistic privileges were granted to a few favored firms, permitting them to sell at exorbitant prices, while tariffs were enacted to keep out foreign competition. But if a nation were to eliminate imports it would have to have its own exclusive colonies in order to obtain raw materials. The power of the state, of course, was ideally suited to carve out and police the resulting colonial system.

Smith charged that the mercantilist system not only hurt those in the colonies but the workers in the mother country as well. Its only beneficiaries were “the rich and powerful.” Permitting the colonists to trade only with the mother-country enabled merchants to sell at monopoly prices in the colonies. The colonists, therefore, were unable to pay for the administration of colonial government as well, so the workers in the home-country were taxed to defray this cost, thereby perpetuating the profits of the merchants. Furthermore wages, said Smith, were kept low and prices high in the mother-country through the use of selective subsidies. The effect of mercantilism, said Smith was that “the interest of one little order of men in one country” was promoted at the expense of “the interest of all other orders of men in that country, and of all other orders of men in all other countries.”¹⁰

What Smith urged was the replacement of mercantilism by free trade. This, of course, would logically entail the abandonment of the entire colonial system and Smith doesn’t shrink from drawing that conclusion. One also finds similar statements in the writings of other proponents of the market such as Richard Cobden and John Bright as well as Herbert Spencer. Frederic Bastiat and others.¹¹

While the leninist and libertarian solutions for imperialism are manifestly dissimilar there are, however, marked similarities between their respective critiques of imperialism. By being careful to distinguish between the two definitions of capitalism not only can libertarians find much of value in such works as Lenin’s Imperialism, Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy, and Magdoff’s Age of Imperialism, but socialists can just as well benefit from a reading of such libertarian works on the subject as Mises’ Omnipotent Government or Robbins’ The Economic Causes of War.

Conclusion.

Marx had two mutually exclusive definitions of capitalism: an economic and a sociological. The failure to realize that Marx’s sociological definition was tantamount to what libertarians refer to as mercantilism meant that the two groups often talked past each other when, in fact, they were in basic agreement. While I do not want to exaggerate the similarities between libertarianism and Marxism and believe that on balance the areas of disagreement far outweigh those of agreement, I do feel that a re-reading of Marx, untangling the economic from the sociological definitions, can prove worthwhile for libertarians. After all, it is pointless to throw out the wheat with the chaff.

Footnotes

¹ On the role of “commodity production” in Marxist literature see P. C. Roberts and M. Stephenson, Marx’s Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis (Stanford, 1973).

² Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York, 1969), pp. 61, 73 and 95.

³ Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (New York, 1906), pp. 836-7.

⁴ Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State (Los Angeles, 1970), p. 585. For supporting empirical evidence see D. T. Armentano, The Myths of Antitrust (New Rochell, 1972), and A. S. Dewing, “A Statistical Test of the Success of Consolidation,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics (1921), pp. 84-94.

⁵ The “whole bourgeoisie” does not constitute the ruling class, but only that portion of it in a position to obtain economic benefits from the state. An obvious example is that while a tariff might benefit those in a business facing foreign competition, it would hurt those in the import-export businesses.

⁶ Marx, Capital, p. 350.

⁷ Note the similarity to A. J. Nock’s and F. Chodorov’s “law of parsimony.”

⁸ Marx, Capital, pp. 823-5.

⁹ First quote in Ralph Miliband, “Marx and the State,” Karl Marx Ed.: Tom Bottomore (Englewood Cliffs, 1973), p. 134, emphasis supplied; second quote from Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1972), p. 23; third quote in Miliband, p. 145.

¹⁰ Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Vol. II (New Rochelle, n.d.), pp. 207-62.

¹¹ Richard Cobden wrote in 1958 that “I am opposed to any armed intervention in the affairs of other countries. I am against any interference by the Government of one country in the affairs of another nation, even if it be confined to moral suasion. Nay, I go even further, and disapprove of the formation of a society or organization of any kind in England for the purpose of interfering in the internal affairs of other countries.” William Dawson, Richard Cobden and Foreign Policy, (New York, 1927), p. 108. Dawson himself summarizes Cobden’s position by saying that “Had he had his way England would not have had so much as a back garden of a colony . . . .”; p. 203. In 1867 John Bright, in a speech on the British colonies, remarked: “For my share, I want the population of these Provinces to do that which they believe to be the best for their own interests—remain in this country if they like . . . or become independent States if they like.” In James Sturgis, John Bright and the Empire (London. 1969), p. 101. Herbert Spence wrote that “great as are the evils entailed by government colonization upon both parent State and settlers, they look insignificant when compared with those it inflicts on the aborigines of the conquered countries.” Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (New York, 1892), p. 196. And Frederic Bastiat wrote: “We see government everywhere greatly preoccupied either in giving exchange special favors or with restricting it. To carry it beyond its natural limits, they seek after’ new outlets and colonies . . . This intervention of force in human affairs is always accompanied by countless evils.” Frederic Bastiat, Economic Harmonies (Princeton, 1964), p. 80.

* Mr. Osterfeld is a doctoral candidate in Political Theory at the University of Cincinnati. He plans to write a dissertation on “The Antecedents of Anarcho-Capitalism.”

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“Libertarian” SCI FI

A Review of Commune 2000 A.D., by Mack Reynolds. Bantam 1974. (A novel.)

“Robert Owen lives!”. This is the code phrase identifying members of conspiratorial group trying to overthrow the well-ordered and prosperous utopia of United America in 2000 A.D. The new Utopia began with the establishment of the Guaranteed Annual Income for all citizens. The bulk of the population being technologically unemployable, work is done by those who are chosen annually by computer analysis which decides who shall work, where and at what, based on the Ability Quotient of each citizen. The rest are free to pursue their hobbies and obsessions, drawing money as needed from their GAI. Automated cars, roads and food service, books on home screens by tapping a central data bank, legal use of soft drugs (hard drugs are suppressed), disposable clothing, home delivery of new household goods or clothing by pneumatic chute, and sexual freedom, sex of all kinds, casual, guiltless, loveless, all are the bread and circuses of the masses.

The heart of the new utopia is a data bank which has absorbed all the census, social welfare, police, medical and other governmental information, and the data contained in the libraries of Congress and the British Museum. All this is available at the touch of a button, and by adding school and work records, the managers of the economy can pinpoint any citizen’s Ability Quotient and command his talents for the benefit of the whole society. But while most accept this conscription as a reasonable and even desirable burden, rumors of increasingly widespread work-evasion lead the managerial elites, who are more or less permanently tenured (because they have tampered with the computer selector-evaluator), to send aspiring academics into the communes to find out what is happening. The hero is an unemployed ethnologist who is suddenly told that he is to write his dissertation on life in the communes, reporting back to his mentors (police agents) what he finds. He discovers that the communes—each set up by affinity groups such as lesbians, Amish, nudists, Hellenophilic athletes, etc.—are harboring work-dropouts who live on the surplus GAI of their fellow communards, and that they also fail to file accurate data annually into the central computer bank. As historian William Marina would put it, they are living in the interstices of the computer society. In fact, the hero is horrified to learn that a conspiratorial core within the communal societies have espoused some antisocial philosophy called “Anarchism” or “Libertarianism”. Yes! Robert Owen lives!

The resolution of the novel suggests further adventures ahead for the hero. As is so often the case with novels of this kind, the plot is mechanistic. The characterization one dimensional at best, and the motivation is not quite convincing. But equally disturbing are the ideological inadequacies of this allegedly “libertarian” novel. Isaac Asimov, insists that in reviewing science fiction, one criterion which must be applied is that the science be at the very least accurate, within the realm of the possible. If we apply the same standard to this novel we find that it is premised upon the belief that, within 25 years, the problem of scarcity will have been all but eliminated, and massive unemployment will be tolerable due to the surplus Of capital or goods produced through automation. Such a situation within 25 years, if ever, is simply not credible, and since it is the major premise of the novel, it weakens it fatally. The author has probably been reading Murray Bookchin’s writings on post-scaracity anarchism and has failed to recognize the fictional quality of his Utopian projections. Ayn Rand has proven the tremendous power of fiction in the promotion of libertarian philosophical principles; but we must retain some sense of responsibility in accepting allegedly libertarian fiction. Is it credible on its premises? Is it accurate in its principles? Is it compelling as literature? Does it enlighten the mind or move the heart? For Commune 2000 A.D., the verdict is “Not guilty”!

Arthur McRory*

*Mr. McRory is a long-time observer of the fiction scene.

Friedman And The Liberals

By Tibor R. Machan*

In his October 6, 1975, Newsweek column Milton Friedman delivered a view point on politics that should be of considerable interest to all who have concluded that liberty is the prime political value in a human community. In this column Friedman addresses the problem of busing. After a brief introduction he poses the question: “What is wrong?” He answers as follows:

. . . I submit that the answer is intolerance—not intolerance of whites for blacks, which surely exists, but intolerance of liberal reformers who “know” what is good for other people are prepared to force it on them, intolerance of liberal reformers who can and mostly do exercise choice among schools for their own children—by living in affluent suburbs or sending them to private schools—but refuse to grant a similar freedom of choice to the less fortunate parents who at present have no alternative to the public school. . . .

Friedman then goes on to emphasize his opposition to intolerance in the following passage:

No doubt, the violent reaction of whites to compulsory integration via forced busing partly reflects racial intolerance. However, true tolerance requires tolerance of what we regard as intolerance. It requires us to persuade, not force, to set an example, not retire to our cozy segregated (by income) existence while sending out the police, the National Guard and Federal marshals to force on others not the values we actually live by but values we believe others should live by . . . .

It is not my intention to comment on the above ideas. What I wish to do is to provide a contrasting view, offered by the late professor Leo Strauss, a view that will, I think, provide food for thought concerning the problems advocates of liberty face when they select the arguments by which they will give support to liberty.

In his book Natural Right and History (1953), Strauss offers the following reflections:

. . . (G)enerous liberals view the abandonment of natural right not only with placidity but with relief. They appear to believe that our inability to acquire any genuine knowledge of what is intrinsically good or right compels us to be tolerant of every opinion about good or right or to recognize all preferences or all “civilizations” as equally respectable. Only unlimited tolerance is in accordance with reason. But this leads to the admission of a rational or natural right of every preference that is tolerant of other preferences or, negatively expressed, of a rational or natural right to reject or condemn all intolerant or all “absolutist” positions. The latter must be condemned because they are based on a demonstrably false premise, namely, that men can know what is good. At the bottom of the passionate rejection of all “absolutes,” we discern the recognition of a natural right or, more precisely, of that particular interpretation of natural right according to which the only thing needful is respect for diversity or individuality. But there is a tension between the respect for diversity or individuality and the recognition of natural right. When liberals became impatient of the absolute limits to diversity or individuality, they had to make a choice between natural right and the uninhibited cultivation individuality. They chose the latter. Once this step was taken, tolerance appeared as a value or ideal among many, and not intrinsically superior to its opposite. In other words, intolerance appeared as a value equal in dignity to tolerance. But it is practically impossible to leave it at the equality of all preferences or choices. If the unequal rank of choices cannot be traced to the unequal rank of their objectives, it must be traced to the unequal rank of the acts of choosing; and this means eventually that genuine choice, as distinguished from spurious or despicable choice, is nothing but resolute or deadly serious decision. Such a decision, however, is akin to intolerance rather than to tolerance. Liberal relativism has its roots in the natural right tradition of tolerance or in the notion that everyone has a natural right to the pursuit of happiness as he understands happiness; but in itself it is a seminary of intolerance, (pp. 5-6)

I believe that Strauss shows in this passage that Milton Friedman and the modern liberals Friedman condemns start from a very similar point of view, namely skeptiscism about ethics (and values in general). Friedman happens to be a (classical) liberal and his preference lies with tolerance even of the intolerant. The supporters of busing, modern liberals, prefer other values. They are more intense, they focus on particular wrongs that are very difficult to deny, even while one is a skeptic on broader issues. So their choice is a “deadly serious” one, while Friedman’s is but a choice in support of abstract principle whose practical effects takes lengthy chains of reasoning to appreciate. The classical liberal confronted with the modern liberal ends condemned by the modern brother as callous. And if the classical liberal really has no better ground for his defense of liberty than his preference for tolerance, the intensity of the opposition from his brother will surely win within the realpolitik of a human community.

Intellectually, then, timidity in the defense of liberty is no virtue however much the practice of political tolerance requires support. That support is simply inadequate without a clear, unabashed affirmation of other, more basic values that can give such tolerance deadly serious backing.

* Dr. Machan teaches philosophy at State University College, Fredonia, N.Y., and is now a fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, Cal.