Betrand Russell and Marxism
Bertrand Russell, that grand skeptic of our age, once said something heretical to both Marxist dogmatists and free-market fundamentalists: you can embrace dialectical materialism without submitting to Marxist economics or Marxist dictatorship. The method of dialectics is one thing, the dogma of class struggle and proletarian dictatorship quite another. Yet Marx and his disciples fused them together into a creed, as though the law of contradiction in nature somehow required gulags, commissars, and five-year plans. Russell’s brilliance was in spotting the divorce papers: you can keep the method, discard the dogma, and walk away with your intellectual integrity intact.
That is my creed. I am a dialectical materialist, yes—but I also believe in free minds and free markets. To the Marxist, that sounds like a contradiction. To the dialectician, it is obvious truth. Dialectical materialism is not a party line; it is a way of seeing. History moves through contradiction. Societies advance through struggle. Ideas generate their own negations. This method is universal, and it does not belong to Marx alone. One can wield it just as easily to defend the dynamism of markets as to critique them.
Because make no mistake: free markets are dialectical to their core. Prices dance in contradiction—supply versus demand, scarcity against desire. Every triumph summons its own defeat: the successful product calls forth its successor; the dominant firm attracts its own destroyers. The market is never still, never settled. It is a storm of innovation and destruction, the purest theater of dialectics humanity has ever created. Only those blinded by ideology—Marxists dreaming of equilibrium in state control, or conservatives pretending markets are static and “efficient”—fail to see that contradiction is the lifeblood of freedom.
But markets require something more than numbers and contracts. They require free minds. A market without intellectual liberty is a corpse. It is dissent that drives competition. It is heresy that drives invention. The entrepreneur is nothing if not a dialectician, negating what exists to create what does not. Censor thought, chain speech, enforce dogma, and you kill the very oxygen markets breathe. That is why Soviet economics was a fraud from the start: it proclaimed dialectics while silencing minds. It was a stillborn system, an economy of ghosts.
Here logical empiricism stands as the intellectual guardian of freedom. The empiricist says: cut away metaphysics, strip away unverifiable claims, test everything. Markets obey the same law. A product survives not because scripture blesses it, but because consumers choose it. A theory lives not because a party decrees it, but because evidence supports it. To be a logical empiricist is to live by the same rule as the free market: show me the results, or step aside.
So yes, I reject Marxist economic theory and its priestly obsession with “labor value.” I reject Marxist dictatorship and its sanctification of coercion. But I embrace dialectical materialism as a method and logical empiricism as an epistemology, and I defend free minds and free markets as their natural home. Russell saw the possibility of this divorce long ago. I claim it openly: dialectics without dogma, empiricism without metaphysics, freedom without chains.
Marx’s tragedy was to confuse method with destiny, and in that confusion, to turn a tool of reason into a catechism of oppression. The truth is otherwise. Dialectics belongs not to the commissar but to the marketplace, not to the party but to the individual mind. And there it will stay—restless, contradictory, alive.
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