ABSTRACT
Marxists tend to argue that libertarians help themselves to a language of freedom that they do not deserve. Marxists view libertarianism as the principled defense of capitalism against not just revolutionary socialist, but also ameliorative, welfare-state criticisms of competitive markets. The central principle libertarians invoke is freedom. Marxists believe that libertarian claims about the voluntary nature of market transactions and especially the freedom of labor contracts conceal and mystify the real nature of capitalist society. There are three dimensions to these mistaken claims about freedom. Marxists argue that capitalist society affords neither the external freedom, nor the internal freedom, nor the political freedom that libertarians promise. External freedom of choice in a capitalist society conceals the way the working class is forced to consent to their domination by capitalists and the impersonal forces of the market. The inner freedom of living in a moral world of one’s own creation is belied by the fact that in capitalist societies workers are made to serve alien purposes, rather than their own. Marxists further reject libertarian claims that capitalism is a necessary condition for democracy. Marxists instead argue that the capitalist state is fundamentally anti-democratic, because its basic commitment is to preserving capitalist markets, not political democracy, and that libertarians give expression to this authoritarian set of priorities by making property morally and logically prior to political liberty.
