I Self-ownership

1. In this chapter I argue that Marxist reliance on material super-abundance as the solution to social problems is connected with Marxist reluctance to effect an absolute break with certain radical bourgeois values. The ‘Marxist technological fix’ has served as a means of avoiding questions about justice which those who seek to carry the Marxist tradition forward cannot now conscionably ignore.

I shall call the bourgeois thought structure from which, so I claim, Marxism has failed to distinguish itself (sufficiently thoroughly), ‘leftwing libertarianism’. Since the meaning which I assign to that phrase is not the only one it could reasonably be thought to bear, I must explain how I shall use it here.

A libertarian, in the present sense, is one who affirms the principle of self-ownership, which occupies a prominent place in the ideology of capitalism. That principle says, as we have seen, that every person is morally entitled to full private property in his own person and powers.