Comments Elsewhere

Matt,

If you want to claim that leftists are all anti-propertarian and liberals aren’t, I think you’re mistaken (for some reasons I’ll mention below). But whether that claim is mistaken or not, being opposed to private property is not the same thing as being opposed to wealth per se. The technically correct term for what you’re trying to capture is “communist,” not “leftist.”

There are leftists out there who have been opposed to wealth as such, or who claimed to view wealth as such as morally corrosive. (Tolstoy, in his old age, claimed to be one such thinker; although the preferences manifest in his actions were rather different from the preferences expressed in his writing.) But most of the thinkers identified as paradigmatic leftists didn’t think this or anything like it. They have usually thought that material wealth (comfort, health, good food, rewarding work, enjoyable leisure, etc.) was a good thing and professed a desire that everybody should have it as far as it’s possible.

It’s true that Marx and Trotsky and Chomsky oppose private property, or at least private property in land and the means of production. But they don’t oppose wealth. Their complaint against private property is that they (wrongly) think that it stands in the way of ensuring wealth for everybody and (wrongly) conclude that forcible collectivization of land and the means of production is a just way to solve this alleged problem. The idea is that this would end the artificial scarcity allegedly endemic to capitalist forms of production, and bring about an era of unprecedented prosperity.

As for Proudhon, he was not against private property. He was against one conception of private property based on grants of state privilege, and in favor of another based on possession and use. Benjamin Tucker, to take another example, also defended private property (while condemning state-granted monopoly).

And as for whether or not somebody has “enmity” against the actually existing wealthy, well, who cares? I take it that the issue here is philosophical principles, not loyalty or affection towards any particular group of people.

Right or wrong, all the folks I named, when they expressed enmity towards wealthy people, expressed it not because they were wealthy, but because they concluded that those people obtained their wealth illicitly, and did so in a way that unfairly hindered other people from gaining wealth. Depending on a thinker, their conclusion may be wise or foolish (I think Proudhon’s understanding of matters was much sounder than Marx’s), but in either case they aren’t coming down on wealth as such, just on what they (rightly or wrongly) regard as wealth acquired through injustice.