Look, I said, and this is a direct quote: “Marxists have a bad answer (no market for anything).” You seem to have conceded that, in fact, there are plenty of Marxists who don’t want markets in anything (otherwise, who’s conducting this “vigorous debate” with anyone?). You seem to have conceded that, in fact, a perfectly reasonable reading of Marx is that he was against all markets (otherwise, why is it “arguable”?). You also, despite your later protestations that you aren’t conflating Marxists with socialists, used, as your sole point of evidence for how ignorant I was, a paper that positions itself firmly as “socialist.”

I don’t think that I said “everybody who has ever self-identified as a Marxist, even if they’re kind of not really the classical definition of the term, without fail, thinks that there should never be a market in anything.” I said that Marxists have an answer to the problem: no markets in anything. Are you denying that such an answer exists? Are you denying that in as much as anyone advances that answer, Marxists advance it? If not, what, precisely, is your point?

And my tone has been far less confrontational and snarky than yours has. I can’t believe that somebody who led off with name-calling, and has continued it since, is complaining about my use of the term “flatly.”

No, it’s not a “fall back position”, it’s the point I made to begin with. And no it’s not beside the point: it shows that your original, poorly informed generalisation about Marxism is untrue. I agree that none of this is earth-shatteringly important but if you really want to “drop it” why don’t you just admit you made a mistake, rather than trying to fudge the issue by blathering on at me for “conflating” things I haven’t? Anyway, I shall leave the matter there.

Now your fall back position is that there is “vigorous debate” among Marxists-who-differ-from-what-Marx-thought about whether markets ought to exist, and that it’s “arguable” whether Marx thought that markets shouldn’t. This is completely beside the point. I didn’t run over your dog, and I didn’t accuse you of running over anyone’s dog. What do you say we drop it?

Thanks for the reply and correction. And I mistyped “Avantis” for “Avant”; my apologies to her.

It seems to me that the concern about “allowing the state … to get away with a lot of shit that it couldn’t get away with if it had to do so directly” can in part be addressed by clearer lines restricting state authority, whether exercised directly or through proxies, and possibly by stricter penalties for crossing those lines. In practice this is of course quite difficult. To the extent libertarian theory has a unique solution, it’s in broadly reducing the scope of legitimate government activity. That makes it easier for outsiders to monitor the remaining legitimate activities, and makes it harder for the government to pretend one sort of activity (say, spying on political opponents) is really another (monitoring for drug trafficking).

To the extent that you do not share that belief, you are not a Marxist, however much you may draw inspiration from him in other areas. I am careful with my terminology—I do not use the term “Marxist” as a catch-all for every socialist/communitarian/whatever out there.

Cheers.

Michael, could you at least try to hide your ignorance of what Marxists think before spouting off about them? Cheers.

If by the ‘left’ you mean the crypto-neoconservatives of Harry’s Place then of course you are correct. As the vast majority of the posters there are part of the NuLabour Borg Collective they (implicitly) approve of the growth of the Secret State, as well as other related phenomena, such as the politicisation of the civil service, and the way in which once proud ‘liberal’ sections of the media (The Guardian, the BBC) have been brought into the NuLab orbit (and, hence, under NuLab control).

However, if by the ‘left’ you mean the anti-Blairite sections of the Labour Party (what’s left of it) the Global Justice movement (often wrongly termed ‘anti-globalisation’), and others in the ‘radical’, ‘anarchist’, ‘anti-corporate’ (or whatever you want to call it) tradition, then you are wrong: these people (and me) are deeply deeply concerned by the unprecedented assault on civil liberties that has taken place under Labour.

Speaking as someone on the UK left, then I’d say, yes, many of us are extremely concerned about the rise of the surveillance society. Some of us were even raising concerns about the proliferation of CCTV (which started under the Tories, not Labour, but no matter) before recent events led to Control Orders, ASBOS and ID Cards. You might, for example, want to take a look at the No 2 ID campaign.

The fact that it is an onstensibly left-wing party doing much of the damage to civil liberties in this country hasn’t stopped people getting pissed off about it.