From Delusion to Destruction

BY LUDWIG VON MISES

With an Introduction by Richard M. Ebeling

Lecture Transcriptions by Bettina Bien Greaves

FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION

Irvington-on-Hudson, NY 10533

This book is published by the Foundation for Economic Education, a foundation established to study and advance the first principles of freedom.

©2006 Foundation for Economic Education. All rights reserved.

Frontispiece photograph of Ludwig von Mises courtesy of Richard M. Ebeling.

Printed in the United States of America

10 09 08 07 06 5 4 5 4 3 2 1

Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file with the Library of Congress

ISBN 1-57246-210-8

Foundation for Economic Education

30 S. Broadway

Irvington-on-Hudson, New York 10533

The lectures by Ludwig von Mises contained in Marxism Unmasked were delivered at the San Francisco Public Library, June 23–July 3, 1952, under the sponsorship of The Freeman magazine. They were taken down, word for word, in shorthand and transcribed by Mrs. Bettina Bien Greaves. She has very kindly made these lectures available to the Foundation for Economic Education for publication. Mrs. Greaves worked as a senior staff member at FEE for practically 50 years, only retiring in 1999. Along with her late husband, Percy L.

by Richard M. Ebeling

AUSTRIAN ECONOMIST LUDWIG VON MISES delivered these nine lectures, which we have titled Marxism Unmasked, from June 23 to July 3, 1952, in San Francisco at a seminar sponsored by The Freeman. Ahistory teacher who received a scholarship to attend the program later wrote to the magazine to say:

1 ST LECTURE

THE FIRST FIVE LECTURES IN THIS SERIES will be on philosophy, not on economics. Philosophy is important because everybody, whether or not he knows it, has a definite philosophy, and his philosophical ideas guide his actions.

2 ND LECTURE

MARX ASSUMED that “interests” were independent of human ideas and thoughts. He said that socialism was the ideal system for the proletariat. He said class interests determine the thinking of individuals and that this situation causes irreconcilable conflicts between the various classes. Marx then returned to the point at which he had started—namely, that socialism is the ideal state.

3 RD LECTURE

LIBERALS STRESSED THE IMPORTANCE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. The nineteenth-century liberals already considered the development of the individual the most important thing. “Individual and individualism” was the progressive and liberal slogan. Reactionaries had already attacked this position at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

4 TH LECTURE

MARXIAN DOCTRINE DOESN’T DENY THE POSSIBILITY OF ABSOLUTE TRUTH, but it maintains that absolute truth can be attained only in the classless society. Or in the proletarian class society.

5 TH LECTURE

6TH LECTURE