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Early Secular Communism by Murray N. Rothbard

June 19, 2012 Leave a comment Go to comments
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This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995), volume 2, chapter 9: “Roots of Marxism: Messianic Communism,” section 2, “Secularized Millennial Communism: Mably and Morelly.” An MP3 audio file of chapter 9, narrated by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download.

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English: This image of a young Murray Rothbard...

English: This image of a young Murray Rothbard, originally published by the Mises Institute here, has been released under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

During the havoc and upheaval of the French Revolution, the communist creed, as well as millennial prophecies, again popped up as a glorious goal for mankind, but this time the major emphasis was a secular context. But the new secular communist prophets were faced with a grave problem: What will be the agency for this social change? In short, religious chiliasts never had problems about agency, i.e., how this mighty change would come about. The agent would be the hand of Providence, specifically either the Second Advent of JesusChrist (for premillennialists), or designated prophets or vanguard groups who would establish the millennium in anticipation of Jesus’s eventual return (for postmillennialists).

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King Bockelson and Thomas Müntzer were examples of the latter. But if the Christian millennialists possessed the assurance of the hand of Divine Providence inevitably achieving their goal, how could secularists command the same certainty and self-confidence? It looked as if they would have to fall back on mere education and exhortation.

The secularist task was made more difficult by the fact that religious millennialists looked to the end of history and the achievement of their goal by means of a bloody apocalypse. The final reign of millennial peace and harmony could only be achieved in the course of a period known as “the tribulation,” the final war of good against evil, the final triumph over the Antichrist.[1] All of which meant that if the secular communists wished to emulate their Christian forbears, they would have to achieve their goal by bloody revolution – always difficult at best. It is no accident, therefore, that the heady days of the French Revolution would give rise to such revolutionary hopes and aspirations.

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The first secularized communists appeared in the shape of two isolated individuals in mid-18th century France. The works of these two men would later burgeon into an activist revolutionary movement amidst the hothouse atmosphere and the sudden upheavals of the French Revolution. One was the aristocrat Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709–85), the elder brother of the laissez-faire liberal philosopher Etienne Bonnot de Condillac. In contrast to his brother the distinguished philosopher, Mably devoted himself to being a lifelong writer on a large variety of subjects.[2] A man whose works, as Alexander Gray wittily writes, “are deplorably numerous and extensive.” Mably’s prolix and confused writings were astoundingly popular in his day, his entire collected works, ranging from 12 to 26 volumes, being published in four different editions within a few years of his death.

Mably’s main focus was to insist that all men are “perfectly” equal and uniform, that all men are one and the same everywhere. He professed to discern this alleged truth in the laws of nature. Thus, in his chief work Doutes proposes (1786), an attack on the libertarian natural rights theory of Mercier de la Rivière, Mably presumes to interpret the voice of Nature: “Nature says to us … I love you equally.”[3]

As in the case of most communists after him, Mably found himself confronted with one of the great problems of communism: if all property is owned in common and each person is equal, then the incentive to work is negative, since only the common store will benefit and not the individual worker in question. Mably in particular had to confront this problem, since he also maintained that man’s natural and original state was communism, and that private property arose to spoil matters precisely because of the indolence of some who wished to live at the expense of others.[4]

Mably’s proposed solutions……………….

EXCERPT

via Early Secular Communism by Murray N. Rothbard.

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