You really have to ignore the entire history of capitalist theory and history to pretend this is remotely a coherent take, besides the ancaps, social liberals are the most utopian of all liberal sects, they are willfully blind to the contradictions of class, property ownership, and the functions of the state
They fundamentally don’t understand the social basis for the ideology they claim to uphold, it was only with the rise of socialism that liberals began to construct these social fantasies of class harmony and submission under capitalism, in the old days they were more sober about this shit as Adam Smith readily admitted
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all
But avarice and ambition in the rich, in the poor the hatred of labour and the love of present ease and enjoyment, are the passions which prompt to invade property, passions much more steady in their operation, and much more universal in their influence. Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security. He is at all times surrounded by unknown enemies, whom, though he never provoked, he can never appease, and from whose injustice he can be protected only by the powerful arm of the civil magistrate continually held up to chastise it. The acquisition of valuable and extensive property, therefore, necessarily requires the establishment of civil government. Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the value of two or three days labour, civil government is not so necessary. (WN V.ii.2)
This is why I like Theories of Surplus Value so much. It was going to be volume 4 of Capital but Marx died before Volume 2 was even finished and Engels died before compiling volume 4 from Marx’s notes. Eventually Kautsky got a hold of these notes, but his edition of Theories of Surplus Value is no longer in print. Then Riazanov in the Soviet Union bought them from Germany just in time to avoid them getting burned by the nazis. He compiled them into a serviceable 3 volumes. Theories of Surplus Value is basically Marx going over all the famous European bourgeois political economists leading up to him. He goes over the French physiocrats. He goes over Adam Smith. He goes over Ricardo. He goes over Malthus. He goes over Mill. He builds an entire history of the concept of Surplus value (i.e. unpaid labor, i.e. exploitation) and how it was understood and misunderstood prior to his writing capital. I wish he had lived long enough to actually give us the full version. Marx’s take on Adam Smith is that he basically figured out surplus value, but couldn’t grapple with the concept properly, and thus “reverts” to being a “mere physiocrat” in much of his writing:
Quoting Marx talking about Adam Smith:
Adam Smith very acutely notes that the really great development of the productive power of
labour starts only from the moment when it is transformed into wage-labour, and the conditions of
labour confront it on the one hand as landed property and on the other as capital. The development of
the productive power of labour thus begins only under conditions in which the labourer himself can
no longer appropriate its result. It is therefore quite useless to investigate how this growth of
productive powers might have influenced or would influence “wages”, taken here as equal to the
product of labour, on the hypothesis that the product of labour (or the value of this product) belongedto the labourer himself.
Adam Smith is very copiously infected with the conceptions of the Physiocrats, and often whole strata
run through his work which belong to the Physiocrats and are in complete contradiction with the
views specifically advanced by him. This is so, for example, in the theory of rent, etc. For our
present purpose we can completely disregard these passages in his writings, which are not
characteristic of himself, but in which he is a mere Physiocrat.
Till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor. In this age of shepherds, if one man possessed 500 oxen, and another had none at all, unless there were some government to secure them to him, he would not be allowed to possess them.”
You really have to ignore the entire history of capitalist theory and history to pretend this is remotely a coherent take, besides the ancaps, social liberals are the most utopian of all liberal sects, they are willfully blind to the contradictions of class, property ownership, and the functions of the state
They fundamentally don’t understand the social basis for the ideology they claim to uphold, it was only with the rise of socialism that liberals began to construct these social fantasies of class harmony and submission under capitalism, in the old days they were more sober about this shit as Adam Smith readily admitted
regarding the Adam Smith quote, I love the number of Adam Smith quotes that sound like Marx quotes. you can really break a person’s brain with those.
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This is why I like Theories of Surplus Value so much. It was going to be volume 4 of Capital but Marx died before Volume 2 was even finished and Engels died before compiling volume 4 from Marx’s notes. Eventually Kautsky got a hold of these notes, but his edition of Theories of Surplus Value is no longer in print. Then Riazanov in the Soviet Union bought them from Germany just in time to avoid them getting burned by the nazis. He compiled them into a serviceable 3 volumes. Theories of Surplus Value is basically Marx going over all the famous European bourgeois political economists leading up to him. He goes over the French physiocrats. He goes over Adam Smith. He goes over Ricardo. He goes over Malthus. He goes over Mill. He builds an entire history of the concept of Surplus value (i.e. unpaid labor, i.e. exploitation) and how it was understood and misunderstood prior to his writing capital. I wish he had lived long enough to actually give us the full version. Marx’s take on Adam Smith is that he basically figured out surplus value, but couldn’t grapple with the concept properly, and thus “reverts” to being a “mere physiocrat” in much of his writing:
Quoting Marx talking about Adam Smith:
Adam Smith, “ Lectures on Jurisprudence” 1766