The Personal Is the Economic

Lew Rockwell reports:

As the decades wore on, the opinions of the post-Marxist crowd didn’t change. They only began to wrap them in ever more turgid, gobbledygook. But the conclusion is always the same: we need collective action, which is a euphemism for the state. The goal is to strengthen the state, that is, make it more totalitarian.

In this view of the social order, individual action cannot be permitted to shape reality. Choice and freedom leads to conflict, abuse, exploitation, inequality, injustice, and every other evil you can name. Capitalists exploit workers, men dominate women, whites abuse blacks, the able-bodied erect barriers to the disabled, religious people marginalize non-believers, the rich kick the poor, and so on. This is their view of a world of freedom. The only way to keep this nightmare at bay is total control.

For this reason, reform cannot come through individual choices; society must be radically politicized in every respect, all the way down to relations between individuals. Every slight or unwelcome glance cries out for a gargantuan statist response. Every sign of marginalization is a signal for why we need a mammoth state to constantly rearrange and monitor social and economic relationships. And note that in this view, there is really no chance of finally eliminating the conflicts inherent in the structure of the world, so there is really no time at which this crowd believes that the state is big and intrusive enough. It must grow and grow forever.

A speech well worth your time.