Under communism, Marx explained, people live liberated or completely unconstrained or completely unalienated lives. "Do you own thing" becomes the only remaining rule. So communism—which is communal only in the sense that the remaining necessary work is done by the community as opposed to any particular individual—is radical democracy or radical anarchism or radical liberation. It is not at all compatible with the love- and death-obsessed civilizations of the past, the cultural achievement of which, Marx thought, had already been commodified into insignificance by capitalism. Freedom is freedom from all the obsessions that plagued the repressed, scarcity-driven, stressed-out past. Freedom means that there’s NOTHING you really feel you HAVE to do. Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. And so to Carl (who had a great post on the thread below on Tocqueville) I say that I agree that Plato and Marx and Tocqueville all agree that the democratic dream of freedom from necessity is (as David Brooks says) the "paradise drive" that animates specifically democratic restlessness. We postmodern conservatives say that the natural limitations and direction we’ve been given are not only ineradicable by but actually quite good for us. We postmodern conservatives dissent from all forms of radical liberationism in being grateful for what we’ve been given and for, as a result, being stuck with virtue.
