The Many Disguises of Socialism
In his book, Socialism, Ludwig von Mises warns about the threat posed by socialism to peaceful co-existence and to Western civilization. He highlights the “disastrous wars and revolutions, heinous mass murders and frightful catastrophes” that have been caused by socialist policies, a warning that was also sounded by Friedrich von Hayek in The Road to Serfdom.
Mises goes beyond warning about the destructive nature of socialism, going further to draw attention to what he considers “the main issue,” which he describes as “the desperate struggle of lovers of freedom, prosperity and civilization against the rising tide of totalitarian barbarism.” Socialism is destructive in itself, but more than that it fuels the “rising tide of totalitarian barbarism” through its many disguises. There is a persistent belief that socialism is an ideal worth pursuing if we could only work out just the right form that it should take. Part of Mises’s goal in Socialism is to explain the dangers of socialism and help readers to recognize socialism when they see it.
Among its many disguises, socialism cloaks itself in the mantle of ideals that many people value such as the ideals of justice and equality before the law. Speaking of the anthropomorphism that ascribes “justice” to the distribution of wealth that results from market interactions, Hayek in his essay “‘Social’ or Distributive Justice,” warns:
I believe that “social justice” will ultimately be recognized as a will-o’-the-wisp which has lured men to abandon many of the values which in the past have inspired the development of civilization.
Thus, the problem is not simply that many people are beguiled by socialism, but that this causes them to abandon the ideals which civilized societies once held. As Hayek writes in “The Origins and Effects of Our Morals”:
[I]t is no exaggeration to say that the central aim of socialism is to discredit those traditional morals which keep us alive.
The traditional principles of morality to which he refers, such as the concept of honesty, are associated with the cultural values of classical liberalism which are now under threat: freedom of contract, freedom of association, free speech, and the right to private property. By undermining these ideals, socialism undermines the very foundations of civilization.
In the contemporary context, the primary disguise of socialism is the ideal of equality. Thomas Sowell describes the tenets of socialism as “make believe equality”—the idea that we should create laws and policies that ensure we are, in fact, all equal—even though, as Murray Rothbard explains in Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature, seeking to make all people, in fact, equal would be a sinister Procrustean goal. As Sowell famously said, “No one is equal to anything. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.” Yet the concept of “equality” now provides cover for many socialist policies. Most notorious is the concept of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” DEI is based on theories of racial polylogism, which are explicated by reference to explicitly Marxist concepts. Indeed, this is one of the main methods by which Marxist ideals now proliferate—by being subsumed within the intellectual foundations of the latest iteration of socialism.
Marxist Foundations of DEI
In Socialism, Mises observes that the central doctrines of Marxism are widely accepted and used as the foundation for all manner of socialist ideologies. Mises explains: “At no point in history has a doctrine found such immediate and complete acceptance as that contained in [Marxism]. The magnitude and persistence of its success is commonly underestimated. This is due to the habit of applying the term Marxist exclusively to formal members of one or other of the self-styled Marxist parties, who are pledged to uphold word for word the doctrines of Marx and Engels” while overlooking the extent to which its core constructs have been used as the foundation for “equality” policies.
Equality policies often substitute the notion of racial conflict for Marxist notions of class conflict and disguise their Marxist roots by adopting words like “diversity, equity and inclusiveness” or the new terminology of “community, opportunity and belonging.” To illustrate the influence of Marxist thought on racial equality debates, a good example is one of the doctrines of Marxism described by Mises:
[Marxism] denied that Logic is universally valid for all mankind and for all ages…. Thought, it stated, was determined by the class of the thinkers; was in fact an “ideological superstructure” of their class interests. The type of reasoning which had refuted the socialist idea was “revealed” as “bourgeois” reasoning, an apology for Capitalism.
Following the same reasoning, critical race theories deny that logic is universally valid for all races. They substitute “race” for “class” directly mapping racial concerns onto Marxist class concerns. They declare that anything written by white people is about “white interests,” is based on “white reasoning,” and is, in fact, an apology for colonialism.
Just as Marxism claims “class conditions thought,” so they argue that race conditions thought. They say economics is “white,” having been “created” by white economists, therefore, black economists such as Thomas Sowell or Walter E. Williams are merely reflecting “white” economics and ought, therefore, to be disregarded by black readers. Their argument is that economics is based on “racist” reasoning which does not apply when racial minorities or their antiracist “allies” are in charge. Any counter arguments can, conveniently, be dismissed as “whiteness.” It follows that, just as—according to Marxism—the interests of the working class can never be unified with the interests of the bourgeoisie, so the interests of white and black can never be unified.
In thinking of strategies to unmask the many disguises of socialism, we should bear in mind Mises’s caution that we cannot oppose socialism by adopting all the same dogmas as the socialists. Doing so amounts to falling into the socialist trap. A good example of this trap is the attempt to challenge DEI by doing DEI “better,” or opposing the anti-discrimination principle by suggesting new or refined grounds for enforcing the anti-discrimination principle.
For example, some opponents of DEI argue that it is wrong to force an employer to hire anyone based on race, so their solution is to force the employer to hire based on merit. They fail to notice that, in both cases, the use of force has been invoked against the employer, or perhaps they think that as long as we cannot escape the use of state force it would be just as well to deploy that force in a more meritorious direction. They have forgotten the non-aggression standard that the use of state force is wrong. However unattainable that standard may now seem, especially as the size of the government workforce continues to grow, it should still be borne in mind as the goal towards which “lovers of freedom, prosperity and civilization,” as Mises put it, should continually strive.
Murray Rothbard also addresses this issue in For a New Liberty. He asks: “How can we get from here to there, from our current State-ridden and imperfect world to the great goal of liberty?”
He discusses the strategies adopted by Marxists, not, of course, because he agrees in any way with Marxist goals but “because [Marxists] have been thinking about strategy for radical social change longer than any group.” When an ideology becomes as pervasive as socialism now is, it cannot be countered without giving serious thought to the long term implications of immediate policy proposals.
This is often overlooked in the general excitement that we may—at long last—soon see the end of DEI. There is a tendency to suppose that if state tyranny must be deployed to get rid of the dastardly DEI, so be it. But seeing the end of DEI is not the ultimate goal—ending DEI is an important step towards the ultimate goal of liberty.
Rothbard argues that while there is an important role to be played by “gradual and ‘practical’ programs, programs that stand a good chance of immediate adoption, [we are often] in grave danger of completely losing sight of the ultimate objective, the libertarian goal.” In the context of the DEI debates, the goal of liberty lies in a defense of free speech, freedom of contract, freedom of association, and the right to private property.
This piece originally was posted by the Mises Institute.