Curtis Yarvin has argued that libertarianism and Marxism are much closer than their supporters would like to admit. Most libertarians dismiss the claim immediately. After all, libertarianism emerged as one of the strongest intellectual opponents of socialism, central planning, and state power. At first glance, the comparison appears absurd.
Yet Yarvin may have identified something real.
In a recent post, Yarvin wrote:
“That’s why I’m a Carlylean/Ruskinite, not a Marxist/Rothbardian like Elon.
These are not my ideas. This is standard Carlyle or Ruskin from 150 years ago.
Once you pull the camera far back enough that communism and libertarianism look like cousins, you may be out of Plato’s cave.”
(Source: https://x.com/curtis_yarvin/status/2045170658481758326)
Most libertarians interpret this as little more than reactionary provocation. However, the statement raises a serious question. Why would someone who once moved within libertarian circles conclude that communism and libertarianism belong to the same intellectual family?
My answer is that Yarvin is both correct and mistaken.
He is correct that a significant current within contemporary Rothbardianism absorbed intellectual influences that originated outside the Austrian tradition. He is mistaken, however, about where those influences came from and about his own distance from them. The irony is that many of the tendencies Yarvin criticizes within libertarianism entered the movement through Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a thinker who also helped shape the intellectual environment from which neoreaction emerged.
The Austrian School developed as one of the most rigorously individualist traditions in modern social thought. From Carl Menger to Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, Austrian thinkers focused on human action, entrepreneurship, exchange and the limits of centralized knowledge. Their framework was methodological individualism. Social phenomena were explained through the actions of individuals rather than through classes, civilizations, cultures, or historical destinies.
Even when Rothbard expanded Austrian economics into ethics, history, and political theory, his analysis remained grounded in institutions, incentives, and economic causality. The state was criticized because it violated property rights, distorted prices, and disrupted voluntary cooperation. The focus remained action, exchange, and market coordination.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe represents a major turning point. Although Hoppe remained formally committed to Austrian economics, his work increasingly shifted attention away from entrepreneurship and market processes toward democracy, mass society, egalitarianism, cultural decline, social cohesion, intellectual classes, and civilizational decay. Economics remained present, but it no longer occupied the central role it held under Mises or Rothbard. Instead of merely extending Austrian economics, Hoppe transformed it into a broader critique of modern civilization.
This shift becomes easier to understand when one examines Hoppe’s intellectual origins. Before becoming a student of Rothbard, Hoppe studied under Jürgen Habermas at Frankfurt. While he ultimately rejected the egalitarian conclusions of the Frankfurt School, he retained many of its intellectual instincts. Like the critical theorists, he became interested in legitimacy, ideology, elite formation, social order, intellectual classes, and civilizational decline. The political conclusions were reversed, but the structure of the inquiry remained surprisingly familiar.
The same pattern appears in argumentation ethics. Hoppe often presents his theory as a uniquely libertarian foundation for property rights, yet its structure bears striking similarities to both Kantian ethics and Habermasian discourse ethics. Like Kant, Hoppe seeks universal norms grounded in rational consistency. Like Habermas, he derives legitimacy from the conditions necessary for communication itself. The conclusions are libertarian, but the philosophical architecture owes much to traditions that developed outside the Austrian School.
The consequences of this shift become visible in the political culture that emerged around Hoppe. Many Hoppeans continue to defend private property in theory, yet their practical concerns increasingly revolve around cultural homogeneity, moral order, immigration, degeneracy, community standards, and social exclusion. The language remains individualist, but the center of gravity shifts toward the community itself. Questions of who belongs, what behaviors should be tolerated, and which cultural norms ought to prevail become increasingly important. The result is that the community begins to function as a quasi-political actor, even though the rhetoric remains rooted in property rights and voluntary association.
There is also a deeper tension within Hoppe’s concept of covenant communities and the broader neoreactionary idea of privately governed territories operating as shareholder-owned firms. While presented as extensions of private property and voluntary association, these models risk reintroducing precisely the kind of collective abstraction that earlier individualist critics sought to overcome. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon raised a similar concern in his famous 1846 letter to Marx. Although he rejected capitalist property in its existing form, he was equally suspicious of “community” as a collective entity standing above individuals. His objection was not merely economic but methodological: once society, the community, the nation, or any collective body acquires an independent existence, individuals become subordinated to an abstraction. Proudhon preferred a society of contracts, associations, and reciprocal relations rather than a unified communal will imposed upon its members. From this perspective, covenant communities can become vulnerable to the same criticism. Even when entry is formally voluntary, the community itself increasingly appears as a collective actor with its own goals, norms, identity, and interests. Questions of property rights become secondary to questions of preserving the character of the community. The emphasis shifts from individual action toward the maintenance of a collective order. The same difficulty applies to Yarvin’s sovereign corporations. A shareholder-owned territory may replace democratic elections with corporate governance, but the fundamental issue remains. The territory is still governed as a single collective enterprise whose objectives are determined by a governing authority rather than emerging from the decentralized interactions of individuals. Political sovereignty is not abolished but reorganized. In this respect, Proudhon’s critique of community applies not only to Marxist collectivism but also to modern forms of communitarian libertarianism and neoreaction. Whether authority is exercised in the name of the proletariat, the nation, the covenant community, or the shareholders of a sovereign corporation, the danger remains the same: the elevation of a collective abstraction above the concrete individual.
This is where Yarvin’s criticism becomes understandable. When libertarianism ceases to speak primarily about entrepreneurship, competition, spontaneous order, and economic coordination, and begins speaking instead about civilizational decline, elite formation, social decay, and cultural management, it starts to resemble other grand theories of society. The resemblance is not to classical Marxism itself but to the broader post-Marxist tradition that emerged after the collapse of orthodox socialism.
Yet there is an even deeper irony that rarely enters discussions of Yarvin’s critique.
From a Rothbardian perspective, one could argue that both classical liberalism and classical economics were proto-Marxist traditions. This does not mean that Adam Smith, David Ricardo, or the nineteenth-century liberals secretly desired communism. It means that they developed theoretical frameworks that Marx would later radicalize and push toward revolutionary conclusions.
Rothbard’s history of economic thought repeatedly challenged the conventional narrative that Adam Smith founded sound economics. Instead, Rothbard argued that many of the key insights associated with Austrian economics already existed among the Scholastics, Cantillon, Turgot, and other pre-Smithian thinkers. Subjective value, entrepreneurship, dynamic market processes, and sophisticated monetary theory were already present long before Adam Smith appeared on the scene.
According to Rothbard’s interpretation, Smith did not advance this tradition so much as redirect it. He replaced subjective and entrepreneurial analysis with labor-cost theories of value and increasingly abstract long-run equilibrium models. Ricardo pushed these tendencies even further. The result was the emergence of classical economics as a distinct intellectual tradition increasingly focused on labor, production costs, aggregates, and historical tendencies rather than entrepreneurship and subjective valuation.
Marx inherited much of his analytical framework directly from Ricardo. The labor theory of value, exploitation theory, and important elements of class analysis were not Marx’s inventions. Marx radicalized concepts already present within classical political economy. From this perspective, Marxism can be viewed not as the opposite of classical economics but as one of its most radical descendants. Marx rebelled against classical liberalism while simultaneously inheriting many of its intellectual assumptions.
If Rothbard’s historical revisionism is taken seriously, an uncomfortable possibility emerges. The true divide in economic thought may not be between liberalism and socialism. The deeper divide may be between the Aristotelian-Scholastic-Austrian tradition and the Smithian-Ricardian-Marxian tradition. One tradition begins with subjective value, entrepreneurship, human action, and spontaneous order. The other begins with labor, classes, aggregates, and historical forces. Marx pushed the second tradition toward its revolutionary conclusion. The Austrians rejected the tradition altogether and attempted to recover the older intellectual path that had been abandoned.
This is where Samuel Edward Konkin III becomes particularly interesting.
Samuel Edward Konkin III arguably came closer than anyone else to following this logic to its conclusion. While Rothbard criticized Adam Smith and rehabilitated the Scholastics, Cantillon, and Turgot, he retained the language of capitalism and classical liberalism. Konkin increasingly abandoned both. He rejected the term capitalism because he believed it had been defined largely by its socialist critics and had become associated with state privilege, monopoly, corporate favoritism, and political influence.
For Konkin, the genuine market was not synonymous with capitalism. Markets existed before capitalism and would continue to exist after capitalism. What mattered was not the defense of a particular historical system but the defense of voluntary exchange itself. This is why he preferred terms such as “agorism” and “freed markets.” The market, in his view, was a process of human cooperation rather than an ideology.
The Yugoslav experience under Tito further complicates simplistic attempts to divide economic thought into rigid capitalist and socialist camps. Yugoslavia remained officially Marxist while increasingly relying upon market prices, profit-and-loss accounting, competition, and decentralized decision-making. Rothbard himself acknowledged that Yugoslavia had moved substantially away from Soviet-style central planning and toward a market-oriented system in which worker-owned enterprises interacted through market exchange. While Rothbard believed Yugoslavia was gradually evolving toward a freer market order, the case nevertheless demonstrates that Marxism has not always been synonymous with comprehensive state planning. Attempts to combine collective ownership with market coordination have existed within the Marxist tradition itself, however unstable or theoretically inconsistent Austrians may consider them.
This observation reinforces the deeper historical distinction. The fundamental divide is not always between markets and socialism, nor even between capitalism and Marxism. Rather, it is often the divide between traditions grounded in human action, subjective value, entrepreneurship, and spontaneous order, and traditions grounded in collective abstractions, labor theories of value, historical forces, and social engineering. The existence of market socialism, Titoism, worker cooperatives, and agorist critiques of capitalism suggests that ownership structures and market processes are analytically distinct questions that are too often conflated.
Whether one accepts Konkin’s conclusion or not, his position reveals a tension already present within Rothbard’s own historical work. If classical economics produced Marxism as one of its logical descendants, and if Austrian economics emerged partly as a rejection of classical economics, then the deepest conflict in economic thought may not be capitalism versus socialism at all. It may instead be the conflict between the subjective-value tradition and the labor-value tradition, between human action and historical determinism, between spontaneous order and social engineering.
Konkin’s distinction also highlights a curious point of agreement between two traditions usually regarded as complete opposites. Both Marxists and many anarcho-capitalists have often treated capitalism and the market as though they were synonymous. Marxists criticize “capitalism” while frequently treating markets as inseparable from capitalist property relations. Many anarcho-capitalists, by contrast, defend markets by defending “capitalism,” often using the two terms interchangeably. Yet these concepts are historically and analytically distinct. Markets long predate capitalism and have existed under a wide variety of ownership arrangements. Capitalism is one particular institutional framework; the market is a mechanism of voluntary exchange.
The market itself is older than all of these concepts.
Markets existed before capitalism.
Markets existed before socialism.
Markets existed before liberalism.
Markets existed before Marx.
The irony becomes even greater when Yarvin presents monarchy and centralized authority as solutions to modern problems.
For Yarvin, the problem resembles a resource curse. Just as countries rich in natural resources often suffer political and economic distortions, societies blessed with limitless artificial intelligence could find themselves overwhelmed by abundance. If machines perform nearly all productive labor, the traditional connection between work, discipline, social status, and economic contribution begins to dissolve.
This is why Yarvin rejected Universal High Income. He argued that distributing wealth to a population rendered economically unnecessary by automation would not solve the underlying problem. In weak states, he fears such policies would accelerate social decay rather than prevent it.
His proposed alternative is strikingly different from both socialism and libertarianism. Drawing inspiration from Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, Yarvin suggests that political authority may eventually need to restrict or discourage industrial mass production in certain sectors and deliberately preserve labor-intensive forms of production. Clothes, furniture, food preparation, craftsmanship, and other artisanal occupations could become protected spheres of human work, not because they are economically efficient, but because they create meaningful labor that matches human capacities and social needs.
In effect, Yarvin imagines a society in which production is consciously shaped to fit people rather than allowing technology to eliminate the need for people altogether. The goal is not maximum efficiency. The goal is the preservation of purpose, discipline, and social cohesion.
This position is important because it reveals that Yarvin’s disagreement with Elon Musk is not merely a disagreement about policy. It is a disagreement about political economy itself. Musk remains fundamentally committed to the liberal assumption that abundance is inherently desirable and that technological progress should proceed largely unhindered. Yarvin rejects this premise. Like Carlyle and Ruskin before him, he believes society may need to subordinate economic efficiency to broader social and civilizational objectives.
Yet this is precisely where Austrian economics reasserts its relevance. The central insight of Ludwig von Mises was never merely that socialism fails. It was that no centralized authority possesses the knowledge necessary to coordinate a complex society. Once political authorities begin deciding which industries should exist, which occupations should survive, which technologies should be restrained, and which forms of production are socially desirable, they confront the same knowledge problem that afflicts every form of economic planning. The objective may differ from socialism. The planner’s values may differ from those of a socialist bureaucrat. But the epistemic problem remains unchanged.
No planner possesses enough knowledge to replace this process.
This remains true regardless of the planner’s intentions.
It remains true regardless of the planner’s intelligence.
It remains true regardless of whether the planner is elected, appointed, hereditary, or artificial.
The calculation problem survives every institutional rearrangement.
This is why monarchism is far less distinct from communism than many reactionaries imagine.
Under communism, political authority claims ownership in the name of the collective.
Under monarchy, political authority claims ownership in the name of a dynasty.
The symbols differ.
Yarvin was right to sense that something in post-Rothbardian libertarianism sometimes resembles the old collectivist imagination. But he was wrong to locate this residue in Rothbard himself. Rothbard’s project was not a hidden form of Marxism. It was, at its best, an attempt to recover an older anti-statist, subjectivist, and market-centered tradition against both the classical labor theory of value and the modern administrative state.
The residue appears later, when libertarianism begins to think less in terms of individual action, exchange, and property, and more in terms of cultural wholes, civilizational management, social engineering, and purified communities. This is why Hoppe is the more revealing figure. Not because he is secretly a Marxist, and not because Habermas mechanically determines his thought, but because a certain post-Marxist structure remains visible in his way of framing politics. The revolutionary subject changes. The proletariat becomes the property-owning covenant community. Class consciousness becomes civilizational consciousness. The commune becomes the private covenant. The vocabulary changes, but the temptation remains the same: to imagine society as something that can be collectively disciplined into the right form.
That is precisely where Rothbard is stronger than both Yarvin and Hoppe. Rothbard does not need a sovereign CEO, a monarch, a national planner, or a culturally homogeneous community to make society intelligible. He begins from action, preference, exchange, ownership, and conflict. His anarchism is not a fantasy of collective harmony. It is a refusal to let any collective abstraction override the individual actor. In this sense, the Rothbardian answer to Yarvin is not to deny that libertarianism can be contaminated by collectivist residues. It is to say that Rothbardianism already contains the tools needed to identify and reject them.
Yarvin’s own solution repeats the problem in another form. His monarchy, like communism, wants to overcome the disorder of the market by replacing decentralized judgment with centralized command. Under communism, the planner claims to act for the people. Under monarchy, the sovereign claims to act for the realm. Under managerial technocracy, the expert claims to act for efficiency. Under AI governance, the machine may claim to act for optimization. The symbols differ, but the structural error remains: society is treated as if it could be known, owned, and directed from above.
This is why the Austrian critique still matters. The market is not merely a capitalist institution. It is a discovery process. It is the means by which dispersed knowledge, subjective valuations, entrepreneurial judgment, and real opportunity costs become socially visible. No king, party, bureaucracy, covenant community, or algorithm can replace that process without destroying the very information it needs to govern.
So yes, Yarvin was right that some libertarians carry residues they do not fully understand. But the residue is not Marx hiding inside Rothbard. It is the recurring desire to escape the burden of individualism by restoring a collective subject under a new name. Sometimes that subject is class. Sometimes it is the nation. Sometimes it is civilization. Sometimes it is the covenant community. Sometimes it is the sovereign corporation. The task of a serious Rothbardianism is not to baptize any of these abstractions as liberty, but to dissolve them back into the real units of social life: acting persons, voluntary exchange, property, association, and exit.
In that sense, Rothbard remains more radical than Yarvin, more individualist than Hoppe, and more anti-Marxist than many of his defenders. The real alternative to Marxist residue is not monarchy, reaction, or collective discipline. It is the free market understood in its deepest sense: not as a regime of capital over society, but as the spontaneous order of human action against every project that seeks to command it from above.
Leave a Reply