The Essential Rothbard - Ludwig von Mises Institute

98 The Essential Rothbard
Rothbard broadens and extends his criticism of equality in
“Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor.” 255
Not only do biology and history make human beings inherently
different from one another, but the division of labor springs from
the fact that human beings vary in their abilities.
As we shall later see in the discussion of An Austrian Perspective
on the History of Economic Thought, 256 Rothbard was an exceptionally
keen critic of Marxism. Beginning with Marx’s juvenile Manuscripts
of 1844, 257 Marx and his successors have prated endlessly
about the supposed horrors of the division of labor. In a capitalist
economy, workers normally have only one specialty: plumbers, for
example, are usually not doctors as well. Does not this specialization
ensure that people in a capitalist economy are narrow and
stunted? But socialism will change all that. In the millennium to
come, everyone will be able freely to pursue a wide variety of
careers: “the free development of each will be the condition for the
free development of all.” 258
In response, Rothbard does not hesitate to call nonsense by its
name. The very phenomenon that Marx deplores, the division of
labor, is the condition of all civilized advance. Absent the division
of labor, with its attendant specialization, we would not inhabit the
utopia limned in the Manifesto259 and the Critique of the Gotha Programme;
260 we would instead quickly descend into barbarism.
255
“Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor,” in
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, pp. 247–303.
256
An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, 2 vols.
(1995; Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006).
257
Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
(Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961).
258
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Long,
1848), close of chap. 2.
259Ibid. 260Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (New York:
International Publishers, 1938).