Book Reviews

Nevertheless, Isabel Paterson was right; Marx was a fool. In his The Trouble with Marx (Arling ton House, with an introduction by Gottfried Haberler, $5.00) , David McCord Wright doesn't quite put it that way. He limits himself to saying that Marxism is "scientifically mistaken," that it is "an extremely plausible· combina tion of all the most widely spread mistakes of nineteenth century culture," and that "the basic Marxist anaiysis is intellectual hokum." But when he is through with his devastating exposure of the fallacies that hide behind the Marxist-Leninist jargon - he calls it "scraping off the gobbledygook" - the Paterson ex cathedra verdict stands: Marx was a fool. The usual approach of those who seek to discredit Marx is to tackle him on the labor theory of value. But Professor Wright, after doff ing his cap to Bohm-Bawerk and the Austrian school for their work in showing that value is a subjec tive concept which must be quanti fied in the market, goes on to con sider the "overall outline of the l\Iarxian system." He reduces the economic and political elements of Marxism to the solemn labels that have so bemused our world: "eco nomic determinism," "the class struggle," "surplus value," "the industrial reserve army," "the fall ing rate of profit," "increasing misery of the proletariat," "with124 THE FREEMAN FebruarJd ering away of the state," and so forth and so on. But the labels, as Wright shows, are not true abstrac tions from reality. They distort a world in which things are not "de termined." To give truth to the labels, one would first have to change the human species into an animal that never was on land or sea.

People-Control Taking hold of Marxism at the utopian end, Wright begins his critique by riddling the idea that the state can ever "wither away." Lenin thought that, with the abo lition of classes and private prop erty, government would be reduced to th"e "administration of things." But it is not private property or the existence of classes that makes a state - i.e., a "power of suppres sion" -necessary. Government must be something more than the "ad ministration of things" for the simple reason that men disagree. Under Communism a Trotsky will want to push one program, a Stalin another. The virtue of capitalism is that it permits men to satisfy differing wants in the market place without killing each other. But un der Communism the wants of the administrators are sovereign whether the nonadministrators like it or not. Moreover, there are all the noneconomic desires of dif fering men to consider. How many wives shall a man have? Should adultery be punished? What abou1 idiots who persist in driving or the wrong side of the road? If B man has typhoid, should he bE quarantined? And what abou1 writers who dissent from prevail ing standards? If they advocatE assassination, and try to act UpOIJ their advocacy, should they bE jailed?

The questions can be multiplied endlessly. But they all terminate iIJ the same place: a "power of sup pression" must be located some where in society or what LeniIJ called the "elementary condition~ of social existence" will be re placed by primitive anarchy. III which case, of course, there will b€ no "things" - man-made goods a~ distinct from the roots and herb~ that may be found in nature - tc "administer." Poverty Can Be Avoided Since the state can't "wither away," the "dictatorship of thE proletariat" must hang on as long as Marxists are in control of hu TIlan effort. But the fact that Marxism can't bring utopia to thi~ earth does not in itself vitiate it as econQmic or social analysis of "what is." '\Vright goes on to show that the qualitative improvement of such things as machine tools, chemical processes, the use of fer tilizers in agriculture, the manage1968 "MARX WAS A FOOL" 125 ment of business, and the speeding of transportation and communica tions, all serve to increase the product of the individual labor hour, which means that there is more to be shared between the worker, the foreman, the stock holder, and the company president.

Because of this very obvious fact, the "inevitability" of the "falling rate of profit" simply evaporates. And because there is no necessi tous iron chain of events, the "class struggle" can be confined within relatively peace ful limits if not abolished. Since capitalism is inherently expansive as long as qualitative improvement in its machinery is a possibility, the "industrial reserve army" is no sword of Damocles. In good times it tends to give way to full employment. And the "increasing misery of the proletariat" is sta tistically refuted by the climb in the Gross National Product. Professor Wright is not a prop agandist, and he therefore admits that the market economy is not perfect. Not all businesses suc ceed, and the very fact that entre preneurs lack X-ray eyes means that discontinuities must appear from time to time. When a series of misj udgments about the future occurs, depression is possible. But the point is that communist com missars don't have X-ray eyes, either. Their mistakes go to the warehouses, and when mistakes ac cumulate with too great a frequen cy a political explosion can follow.

Class Contradictions Professor Wright eschews per sonalities in his book, for, as he puts it, his aim is to discuss the truth and usefulness "as science" (/f the ideas of Marx and Lenin. From this standpoint, he says, the private life of Marx "is as relevant as a psychoanalysis of Euclid would be to the truth of plane ge ometry." Nevertheless, he does consider it relevant to his argu ment to point out that Marx, En gels, and Lenin were all of bour geois origin. Their philosophies were not "conditioned" by their economic station in life. Marx was the son of a lawyer, Engels of a well-to-do manufacturer, Lenin of a district school superintendent. Their "alienation" derived not from economic causes but from psychological dissatisfactions that had nothing to do with "class." Marx encountered anti-Semitism in Berlin when he nloved to that city from the Rhineland to study law, but this did not turn him into a pro-S~mite. Indeed, he lived to say many nasty things about his own race. He proJected his spirit ual malaise upon history. And he spent the latter years of his life trying in vain to assemble objec tive evidence to validate the things 126 THE FREEMAN that he had laid down as "law" in the first volume of his Das Kapital.

Professor Wright thinks that "the frantic reading and little writing of Marx's later years rep resent the typical behavior of a man deeply worried about the va lidity of his own arguments and frantically trying to buttress them before he dared publication." Well, as Isabel Paterson might have said, it is the mark of a fool that he persists in throwing good mon ey after bad. Wright is too polite to say that Marx himself was a fraud. It is enough for him to say that the Marxist system is fraudu lent when it is presented as a sci ence. ~ ~ AND EVEN IF YOU DO by Joseph Wood Krutch (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1967) 341 pp., $6.50. Reviewed by Robert M. Thornton THE READERS of Dr. Krutch's earlier collection of essays, If You Don't Mind My Saying So, will appreciate the title of this new book-not to mention the contents which range from opinion polls, utopias, and Descartes to the im portance of the seed to civiliza tion, legs, and the weight of water colder than 39° Fahrenheit.

Krutch has written much about literature, drama, and nature, but for forty years he has been deeply interested in human nature and the human condition. "Gan anyone deny," he asks, "that for at leas1 a hundred years we have beeI1 prejudiced in favor of everythin~ -including economic determinism mechanistic behaviorism and rela tivism - which reduces the staturE of man until he ceases to be mar at all in any sense former human· ism would recognize." So moderr man suffers "from the sense 0: helpless futility when he thinks oj what he is - or has been persuadec to believe himself to be." Btl' paradoxically, in his role as tech nologist, man suffers "from delu sions of grandeur when he think: of what he can do." To escape from his predicament man should remember that h "needs not only to know but als ' to wonder and to love," as KrutcJ puts it. He will, perhaps, be les cocky about his powers over natur when in the expression of wonde he recognizes himself as a cre2 ture of a reality that far tran~ cends his finite comprehensior But the fact that he is· capable 0 these emotions should remind hin too, that man is neither mach in nor animal.

Krutch is wonderful tonic fa those who despair. Though yo may lose hope for the world, h writes, you need not lose hope i yourself. Do not say, "I will d what everybody else does becau~ there is no use trying to be an~ 1968 OTHER BOOKS 127 thing but rotten in a rotten 'so ciety." If necessary, be a lonely candle .which can throw its beams far in a darkling world. This is not only best for society but also the best and happiest course for the individual. If the world is hopeless, it is "wiser to see what one can do ahout oneself than to give up all hope of that also." Krutch offers an excellent cor rective for those who renounce personal integrity or personal hap .. piness and insist that our duty is to think primarily in terms of what can be done for society. "I came into this world," said Thoreau, "not primarily to make it better but to live in it, be it good or bad." There is something to be said for those who do their best even though they do not see at the moment just what practical good it is going to do for the com mon man. After all, writes Krutch, "the medieval monk did perform a service. Neither the God he served nor the learning he pre served counted for much in the world from which he retired. But he did exemplify in himself vir tues that might otherwise have ceased to exist entirely, and he did preserve learning that without him would have been lost."

Krutch never forces himself on his readers but, in his gentle way, he prods one to do his own think ing. If, as Opitz says, philosophy is more to be caught than taught, the bait offered by Joseph Wood Krutch is most alluring. ~ ~ LEFT LUGGAGE, A Caustic His tory of British Socialism from Marx to Wilson by C. Northcote Parkinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin· Company, 1967), $4.95, 236 pp. Reviewed by Robert M. Thornton FRANKLY, this book is dry reading in parts, for even the witty for mulator of "Parkinson's Law" cannot make British socialism an entertaining or inspiring subject. Dullness may be one of the rea sons for socialism's failure. All it now promises people, says Par kinson, is a classless society in which economic security is guar anteed by the state; where no one is to have anything that all can not have. A socialist society also dries up the sources of idealism, and idealism is necessary to a healthy, dynamic society. Men have been willing to lay down their lives for God or the emperor, for their regiment or for the flag, but you cannot expect such sac rificeon behalf of a higher stand ard of living.

A generation ago Robert A. Taft offered a similar criticism of a society too much concerned with things: "Before our system can claim success, it must not only 128 THE FREEMAN February create a people with a higher standard of living, but a people with a higher standard of char acter - character that must in clude religious faith, morality, ed ucated intelligence, self-restraint, and an ingrained demand for justice and unselfishness. . . . We cannot hope to achieve salvation by worshiping the god of the standard of living." In 1944, F.A. Hayek dedicated a book. to "The Socialists of All Parties," and warned his English friends that central planning is the road to serfdom. Parkinson, quoting liberally from Herbert Spencer's The Man vs. the State, tells us again that socialism and freedom are incompatible. For those who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear we have a recital of England's collectivist experiences to warn us again of the dangers in our present trend toward statism.

Another fatal error of socialism is its insistence that no one be allowed to enjoy the advantages of birth, upbringing, environment, intelligence, determination, hard wor;k, foresight, patience, thrift, and ambition. Then, as Joseph Wood Krutch has observed, about the only thing to strive for in such a society is power. The class less society produces only the bu reaucrat, the nonindividual casti gated by Parkinson in earlier books. But the good society needs such uncommon men and women, as Parkinson himself pointed out a couple of years ago in A Law unto Themsel1Jes (Boston, 1966). Without pathfinders and innova tors in the arts and in science as well as in business and industry a society will stagnate. To discour age the outstanding individuals and attempt to reduce them to the level of the great majority is to hurt everyone. Socialism, concludes Parkinson, is intellectually bankrupt. The thought has been put more thor oughly and profoundly by Mises, Hayek, and Ropke. But it doesn't hurt to add another volume to the growing stack of books which de molish socialist· theory and prac tice. ~ VOLUME 18, NO.3 the Freeman in this issue MARCH 1968 Y" Despite the heavy opposition they face, Henry Hazlitt suggests several areas where libertarians, working to gether, may succeed .p. 131 Y" And from Australia comes the help ful clue that reaching for the unat tainable often leads to success ........... p. 143 "" Not in open competition, but through strikes and other forms of violence are the real price wars waged ............ p. 144 Y" Professor Clarence Carson opens a new series describing the rise and fall of England as a world power, this chapter. covering the long centuries prior to the flowering· of freedom ............ p. 147 Y" A man of steel implores his col leagues to look to the market instead of "protectionism" for relief from problems plaguing the industry ............ p. 158 Y" Jasper Crane shares the experi ences of a lifetime working with tools and discovering their value to man ............ p. 160 ~ Dr. Sennholz examines the short run and long-run consequences of the older and the newer forms of govern mental intervention in human affairs ............ p. 166 "" Dean Paul Adams of Roberts Wes leyan College traces many of our pressing problems to a departure from the moral premise upon which the nation was founded p. 170 ~ The case for freedom is further substantiated by Dr. H. B. Phillips who formerly headed the Department of Mathematics at M.I.T p. 179 Y" A businessman from Guatemala of fers some sobering reflections on the problems of any New Society p. 182 y'" Dr. Howard Kershner explains how capitalization cures poverty ....p. 185 Y John Chamberlain critically ex· amines Eliot Janeway's The Econom ics of Crisis: War, Politics, and the Dollar p. lS6 ~ A Pride of Prejudices by The Wall Street Journal's editor, Vermont Roy ster, is highly commended by reviewer Thornton p. 189 Y' And Gordon Bleil looks to the ani mal kingdom with Konrad Lorenz On Aggression and Robert Ardrey on The Territorial Imperative p. 190 Anyone wishing to communicate with authors may send first-class mail in care of THE FREEMAN for forwarding.