Richard M. Ebeling recalls the world of 1952, when socialism seemed ascendant everywhere, summarizes Marx’s system of historical materialism and class struggle, and introduces Mises as one of its most formidable critics.
Marxism Unmasked: From Delusion to Destruction
Marxism Unmasked gathers nine lectures Ludwig von Mises delivered at the San Francisco Public Library in the summer of 1952, taken down in shorthand by Bettina Bien Greaves.
The first five lectures are philosophical, dismantling the Marxian claim that a person’s economic class dictates his very ideas, morality, and logic, and tracing how that notion fed class conflict, nationalism, and the modern cult of political violence. The final four turn to economics, explaining in plain language how saving, investment, and economic calculation create prosperity; how sound money differs from credit expansion and the boom-and-bust cycle; and how profit, loss, and private property steer production toward what people actually want.
The result is at once a demolition of Marxism “from delusion to destruction” and a lucid defense of the market economy—not because capitalists are admirable, Mises insists, but because free enterprise benefits mankind and safeguards liberty.
With an introduction by Richard M. Ebeling.
Mises opens the philosophical half of the course by arguing that Marx’s materialism—the claim that a person’s economic class shapes his very ideas and logic—dominates modern thought, and he begins to dismantle it.
Marx’s doctrine of class and class conflict: the claim that class interests determine how people think and set the classes in irreconcilable conflict—with Mises noting that Marx never actually defined what a class is.
The liberal ideal of the individual and rational, welfare-serving law, and a defense of the Industrial Revolution against the myth that early capitalism degraded the common man.
How Marxism claims that truth itself is attainable only in a classless society, and how the cult of “action” and violence—by way of Georges Sorel and French syndicalism—fed into Leninism, fascism, and Nazi racial doctrine.
Why Marxism spread so widely while going long unchallenged, how its slogans slipped into everyday speech, and the Marxian urge to “organize” society by treating individuals as raw material to be arranged.
