Liberalism is all about individual “rights” and “freedoms”. Such as the right of the factory owner to exploit his workers or the freedom of the newspaper owner control the narrative. This is completely at odds with communism.
Marxism is also in favor the individual and their liberty, but not the liberty to dispossess another of those liberties. He doesn’t see the individual as a natural object, but a creation of social and historical conditions. By destroying the class system, it liberates the individual to pursue their aims when they wish.
[I]n communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
For Marx, the ‘Individual’ is not a finished product to be protected from society, but a potential to be realized through an equitable society.
Liberalism and “liberal values” are not the basis of Marx’s work at all, they are one of his main targets of critique. Marx doesn’t start from liberal individual rights and then argue they’re imperfectly realized. He argues those rights are themselves products of bourgeois society and function to mask class domination. Saying Marx supports “individual liberty” doesn’t make him a supporter of “liberal values”, because liberal liberty is abstract and formal, while Marx’s freedom is material and social. This second response just restates Marx’s view of the individual as socially produced, which is correct, but it is reinforcing Marx rejection of liberalism. Marx was never refining liberal values, he was explaining why they arise under capitalism and why they cannot deliver real human freedom.
When I say liberal values are the ‘basis’ of Marx’s work, I am not suggesting he was a ‘liberal reformer.’ I am arguing that Marx’s work is a dialectical sublation of liberalism. He takes the some of the liberal achievements (rationalism, the end of feudal bondage, and the Labor Theory of Value) and shows that they can only be fully realized by moving beyond the capitalist mode of production. He doesn’t reject the ‘Individual’ out of hand; he rejects the liberal version of the individual (the abstract citizen) to make way for the real individual (the species-being).
Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.
Liberalism is all about individual “rights” and “freedoms”. Such as the right of the factory owner to exploit his workers or the freedom of the newspaper owner control the narrative. This is completely at odds with communism.
Marxism is also in favor the individual and their liberty, but not the liberty to dispossess another of those liberties. He doesn’t see the individual as a natural object, but a creation of social and historical conditions. By destroying the class system, it liberates the individual to pursue their aims when they wish.
For Marx, the ‘Individual’ is not a finished product to be protected from society, but a potential to be realized through an equitable society.
PS… Dig your username
Liberalism and “liberal values” are not the basis of Marx’s work at all, they are one of his main targets of critique. Marx doesn’t start from liberal individual rights and then argue they’re imperfectly realized. He argues those rights are themselves products of bourgeois society and function to mask class domination. Saying Marx supports “individual liberty” doesn’t make him a supporter of “liberal values”, because liberal liberty is abstract and formal, while Marx’s freedom is material and social. This second response just restates Marx’s view of the individual as socially produced, which is correct, but it is reinforcing Marx rejection of liberalism. Marx was never refining liberal values, he was explaining why they arise under capitalism and why they cannot deliver real human freedom.
When I say liberal values are the ‘basis’ of Marx’s work, I am not suggesting he was a ‘liberal reformer.’ I am arguing that Marx’s work is a dialectical sublation of liberalism. He takes the some of the liberal achievements (rationalism, the end of feudal bondage, and the Labor Theory of Value) and shows that they can only be fully realized by moving beyond the capitalist mode of production. He doesn’t reject the ‘Individual’ out of hand; he rejects the liberal version of the individual (the abstract citizen) to make way for the real individual (the species-being).