One of the main obstacles for a libertarian, even left-libertarian, appreciation of Marxian analysis is the assumption that it necessarily denies any role for the individual to play in both material struggle and general social analysis, leaving that entirely to mass class concepts like the proletariat, lumpenproletariat, bourgeoisie, etc. In contrast, libertarians right and left tend to lean toward the view, articulated well by Karl Hess in his reading of both Ayn Rand and Emma Goldman, that history is less a struggle between classes and more a struggle of individuals against institutions, this in turn leading to general libertarian and specifically agorist class theories that center the use of state violence by individuals as the basis of class divisions. And yet, David Harvey points out in chapter one of his Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse, though Karl Marx sees “[t]he individual and individualism” as “by-products of the rise of a certain kind of society” and “Marxism, or any socialist line of thought derivative of Marx, is . . . seen as the mortal enemy of individual liberty and freedom,” the Marxist response is to ask:

If capital did come into being as the ‘natural’ consequence of such inalienable individual rights, then why do we live in a society characterized by wage slavery, the impoverishment of the mass of the people and the total and accepted violation of these supposed ‘inalienable’ rights by capital on a daily basis (particularly in the labor process)?

Further: “why do those who so loudly proclaim their belief in individual liberty and freedom so fiercely resist all collective attempts to construct a world in which the necessity that curbs that freedom is eradicated?” And while these libertarian class theories analysis certainly offer credible alternatives unto themselves as well as excellent critiques of structural Marxists like Louis Althusser and many doctrinarian Marxist-Leninists, they resist giving credit to the more complex and nuanced approaches that both Marx and many later (particularly democratic and anti-authoritarian) Marxists utilize in their materialist social analyses.

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