Rothbard on Marx
The other was the left-wing, relatively libertarian strand, exemplified in their different ways by Marx and Bakunin, revolutionary and far more interested in achieving the libertarian goals of liberalism and socialism; but especially the smashing of the state apparatus to achieve the “withering away of the State” and the “end of the exploitation of man by man.” Interestingly enough, the very Marxian phrase, the “replacement of the government by men by the administration of things,” can be traced, by a circuitous route, from the great French radical laissez-faire liberals of the early nineteenth century, Charles Comte (no relation to Auguste Comte) and Charles Dunoyer. And so, too, may the concept of the “class struggle”; except that for Dunoyer and Comte the inherently antithetical classes were not businessmen versus workers, but the producers in society (including free businessmen, workers, peasants, etc.) versus the exploiting classes constituting, and privileged by, the State apparatus.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard33.html
On Lenin:
The famous betrayal during World War I of the old ideals of revolutionary pacifism by the European Socialists, and even by the Marxists, should have come as no surprise; that each Socialist Party supported its “own” national government in the war (with the honorable exception of Eugene Victor Debs’s Socialist Party in the United States) was the final embodiment of the collapse of the classic Socialist Left. From then on, Socialists and quasi-Socialists joined Conservatives in a basic amalgam, accepting the state and the mixed economy (= neo-mercantilism = the welfare state = interventionism = state monopoly capitalism, merely synonyms for the same essential reality). It was in reaction to this collapse that Lenin broke out of the Second International to reestablish classic revolutionary Marxism in a revival of left socialism.
In fact, Lenin, almost without knowing it, accomplished more than this. It is common knowledge that “purifying” movements, eager to return to a classic purity shorn of recent corruptions, generally purify further than what had held true among the original classic sources. There were, indeed, marked “conservative” strains in the writings of Marx and Engels themselves which often justified the State, Western imperialism, and aggressive nationalism, and it was these motifs, in the ambivalent views of the masters on this subject, that provided the fodder for the later shift of the majority Marxists into the “social imperialist” camp. [9] Lenin’s camp turned more “left” than had Marx and Engels themselves. Lenin had a decidedly more revolutionary stance toward the State and consistently defended and supported movements of national liberation against imperialism. The Leninist shift was more “leftist” in other important senses as well. For while Marx had centered his attack on market capitalism per se, the major focus of Lenin’s concerns was on what he conceived to be the highest stages of capitalism: imperialism and monopoly. Hence Lenin’s focus, centering as it did in practice on State monopoly and imperialism rather than on laissez-faire capitalism, was in that way far more congenial to the Libertarian than that of Karl Marx.
On fascism:
Fascism and Nazism were the local culmination in domestic affairs of the modern drift toward right-wing collectivism. It has become customary among libertarians, as indeed among the Establishment of the West, to regard fascism and communism as fundamentally identical. But while both systems were indubitably collectivist, they differed greatly in their socioeconomic content. Communism was a genuine revolutionary movement that ruthlessly displaced and overthrew the old ruling elites, while fascism, on the contrary, cemented into power the old ruling classes. Hence, fascism was a counterrevolutionary movement that froze a set of monopoly privileges upon society; in short, fascism was the apotheosis of modern State monopoly capitalism.Here was the reason that fascism proved so attractive (which communism, of course, never did) to big business interests in the West – openly and unabashedly so in the 1920s and early 1930s.
On leninists, on New Deal:
The essence of the New Deal was seen, far more clearly than in the Conservative mythology, by the Leninist movement in the early 1930s; that is, until the mid-thirties, when the exigencies of Soviet foreign relations caused a sharp shift of the world communist line to “Popular Front” approval of the New Deal. Thus, in 1934, the British Leninist theoretician R. Palme Dutt published a brief but scathing analysis of the New Deal as “social fascism” – as the reality of fascism cloaked with a thin veneer of populist demagogy. No Conservative opponent has ever delivered a more vigorous or trenchant denunciation of the New Deal. The Roosevelt policy, wrote Dutt, was to “move to a form of dictatorship of a war-type”; the essential policies were to impose a State monopoly capitalism through the NRA, to subsidize business, banking, and agriculture through inflation and the partial expropriation of the mass of the people through lower real-wage rates and to the regulation and exploitation of labor by means of government-fixed wages and compulsory arbitration. When the New Deal, wrote Dutt, is stripped of its “social-reformist ‘progressive’ camouflage,” “the reality of the new Fascist type of system of concentrated State capitalism and industrial servitude remains,” including an implicit “advance to war.”
Why communism went wrong:
For, in every instance, the Leninists took power not in a developed capitalist country as Marx had wrongly predicted, but in a country suffering from the oppression of feudalism. Second, the Communists did not attempt to impose socialism upon the economy for many years after taking power; in Soviet Russia until Stalin’s forced collectivization of the early 1930s reversed the wisdom of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which Lenin’s favorite theoretician, Bukharin, would have extended onward towards a free market.
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