Marx’s Critique of Liberalism

1. Marx on rights

On the Jewish Question (1843)

Use of Bruno Bauer’s critique of Jewish demands for civil or political freedom to criticise the liberal (bourgeois) conception of rights and the state

In so far as rights imply legal protection and enforcement, Marx’s criticisms of rights necessarily goes together with criticism of the state

Political emancipation falls short of genuine human emancipation (however great an advance it may otherwise be)

Types of rights

(1) ‘Rights of man’ – human rights - rights we possess in virtue of our humanity alone

Right to freedom of expression

Equality before the law

Security of person

Right to personal liberty

Right to private property

Right to freedom of conscience

(2) ‘Rights of citizenship’ – rights we possess only in virtue of being members of a political community

Right to political participation, especially right to vote

Both sets of rights abstract from particular, concrete differences between human beings, treating them instead as abstract ‘persons’ or ‘citizens’

I am apprehended as a universal person, in which [respect] all are identical. A human being counts as such because he is a human being, not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, Italian, etc. (PR § 209R)

Granted that civil or political emancipation – and separation of religion and the state - has become a reality (Marx this is the case in parts of North America), true human emancipation would still not have been achieved:

[P]olitical emancipation is not the completed, contradiction-free form of human emancipation. (MEPW 34)

Human beings remain self-alienated

Rights are a reflection of this alienation

Rights and alienation

The individual is divided into an abstract citizen, on the one hand, and a concrete person with particular beliefs, needs and interests, on the other

This division corresponds to division between political state and civil society

The perfected political state is essentially the species life of man in opposition to his material life. All presuppositions of this egoistic life are retained outside the sphere of the state in civil society, but as attributes of civil society. Where the political state has attained its true development, man leads – and not only in thought, in consciousness, but also in reality, in life – a double life, a heavenly one and an earthly one, a life in the political community, in which he counts as a communal being, and a life in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, views other people as means, debases himself to the status of a means, and becomes the plaything of alien forces. (EPW 36)

Civil society = form of society characterised by private ownership of the means of production and market for commodities

Commodity = object that satisfies a human need (or want) produced by human labour with a view to its exchange value rather than its use value

Human beings are conceived to be egoistic, isolated individuals, who treat each other merely as means to an end

The rights of man are those ‘of egoistic man, of the man who is separated from other men and from the community’. (MEPW 44)

Alienation in relation to other human beings and in relation to one’s own ‘species being’

The political state represents an illusory form of community or ‘species life’ akin to the idea of heaven

Analogy between the idea of civil or political equality and New Testament idea that all human beings are equal in the eyes of God

Secular state is the realisation of Christian ideas in a way that the Christian state – one in which Christianity is the state religion - is not

Divorced from his or her material conditions of life and individuality, the human being as citizen becomes

an imaginary member of an illusory sovereignty, is robbed of his actual individual life, and is filled with an unreal universality. (MEPW 36)

As bearers of rights protected and enforced by the state, individuals are, in reality, alienated from each other in the sense that a conflict of interests is presupposed

Right to property presupposes that others are a threat to one’s interests in so far as they concern either maintaining one’s possessions or increasing them:

It allows each man to find in the others not the actualisation, but much more the limit, of his freedom. (EPW 45)

Conflict and alienation are masked by the idea that at the level of the political state non-political differences (e.g. property rights, social rank, occupation) are irrelevant

The state in fact presupposes civil society - its existence is justified in terms of its status as an independent power that resolves the conflicting claims and harmonises the particular interests found in civil society

In this way, the state is reduced to a means and ‘the citizen is declared to be the servant of the egoistic man’. (MEPW 46)

In the absence of conflicting claims and interests, the state would lose its reason for being:

Nevertheless the state allows private property, education, occupation to function and affirm their particular nature in their own way, i.e. as private property, education, and occupation. Far from superseding these factual distinctions, the state’s existence presupposes them: it feels itself to be political state and can affirm its universality only in opposition to these factors. (MEPW 35)

Birth of modern state during the French Revolution therefore had to manifest itself in an ultimately futile attempt to suppress its presuppositions (e.g. religion, private property and private interest more generally)

See reference to permanent revolution (MEPW 38) – allusion to Hegel’s account of how ‘absolute freedom’ necessarily resulted in the French Revolutionary Terror

Self-alienation that manifests itself in notion of rights can only be overcome by establishing a form of community in which the following divisions are overcome:

(1) Between individual as abstract citizen and concrete individual,

(2) Between political state and civil society

Requires that human beings lead a genuine communal life as opposed to an unreal one

Their material and intellectual needs are met in a non-egoistic way through the community’s members freely cooperating in order to meet each other’s needs

Only when the actual individual man absorbs the abstract citizen of the state into himself and has become in his empirical life, in his individual labour, in his individual relationships a species-being, only when he has recognised and organised his ‘own forces’ as social forces and therefore no longer separates the social force from himself in the form of political force; only then is human emancipation completed. (MEPW 50)

In such a condition, both rights and a coercive state would no longer be necessary

2. Justice and exploitation

Distributive justice – each person should get what he or she is entitled to, or what is fair in the circumstances

Economic exploitation is morally wrong because it is unjust that some people should receive an income without working or one that is out of proportion to their contribution

Does Marx think that capitalism is exploitative and thus unjust in this sense?

Marx’s account of exploitation in the labour process

(1) Necessary labour time – consists of working time employed to produce value of the commodities that form the worker’s means of subsistence

(2) Surplus labour time – consists of working time used to produce value which exceeds that produced in the case of (1)

Worker works part of the day for himself in form of wages (1) and part of the day for the capitalist in form of surplus (2)

What the worker produces in the case of (2) is appropriated by the capitalist who does not produce anything

Capitalist seeks to appropriate all of (2) while keeping (1) to a minimum so as to maximise (2)

Thus worker produces value for which he receives no equivalent, while the capitalist receives something which is out of all proportion to his contribution to the production process

Moreover, since the worker does not own the means of production he must sell his labour to the capitalist

The worker is compelled to labour for a wage given threat of unemployment and, ultimately, threat of starvation

His labour is, therefore, not voluntary but coerced, forced labour. (MEPW 73)

Worker does not enter into a genuinely voluntary agreement with the capitalist

Rather, talk of ‘free labour’ conceals coercive nature of the relation that exists between labour and capital

Thus if exploitation consists in the following:

(1) Someone (the exploited) receiving no equivalent for at least part of what he or she has contributed, while someone else (the exploiter) receives something out of all proportion to what he or she has contributed to the same process

and/or

(2) Being forced to do something against one’s own will for the benefit of someone else

Then capitalism is exploitative and therefore unjust

3. Rights, exploitation and conflict

Capital, vol. 1, The Working Day. I. The Limits of the Working Day (1867)

Given the capitalist’s interest in maximising amount of surplus value (value exceeding value of the goods need to maintain worker), he also has an interest in

(1) extending the working day as much as possible or

(2) getting the workers to work more intensely and thus to produce more value in the same period of time or

(3) both (1) and (2)

The worker has an equal interest in working for as short a time as possible

The worker has full effective or legal ownership of his labour power unlike slaves (none of it) and serfs (only some of it)

Worker sells this labour power to the capitalist in return for a wage

Thus the capitalist becomes the owner of the worker’s labour power for a limited period of time

When interpreting the terms of the labour contract, the capitalist insists on his right to use what he owns as he sees fit by extending the working day or getting worker to work more intensely

Worker resists proposed extension of the working day by insisting on his right to maintain his ‘property’ in good order

Human relations viewed purely in terms of property rights

This conflict remains irresolvable within the framework of rights:

The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working day as long as possible … On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the worker maintains his right as a seller when he wishes to reduce the working day to a particular normal length. There is here therefore an antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange. Between equal rights, force decides.

Force can decide the matter in the following ways:

(1) The worker is forced by the threat of starvation to give in to the capitalist’s demands

(2) Conflict between collective labour (the working class) and collective capital decides the matter

The winning party is the one that is able to hold out the longest or to satisfy its demands by means of violence or the threat of it

(3) In case (2) the state may intervene in favour of one of the parties

In supporting capital, the state gives exploitation appearance of legitimacy and helps to make it possible

Thus celebration of rights fosters illusion that the state is above class interests

Rights are in fact ideological devices by means of which a given mode of production (here capitalism) preserves itself and a ruling class promotes its own interests

4. Justice and historical necessity

Capitalism is historically necessary as a precondition of communism

This is because its mode of production and corresponding social relations are the ones most favourable to the full development of the productive forces

Capitalist exploitation also creates the subjective conditions for revolutionary communism (the motivation to overthrow existing social relations and mode of production)

Since capitalism would not have been possible without capitalist exploitation, isn’t this exploitation just (in so far as it is necessary)?

Whether a given action, practise, law or institution is just or unjust depends on its relationship to the mode of production of which it is a part

If this mode of production furthers the development of the productive forces, an action, practise, law or institution based on it cannot be meaningfully criticised from an external standpoint

A standard of justice can only be applied to the mode of production from which its arises and to which it corresponds

Thus the relation of slave to master in ancient world and wage relation of capitalist to worker are just according to the only standards of justice that can be applied to them

There are no eternal rational principles or formal criteria of justice that could serve as an external standard

Or does Marx’s critique of capitalism depend on a communist conception of justice based on communist mode of production?

5. Communist justice

Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)

Two stages of communism

Stage 1 – Communism as it first emerges from capitalist society and is therefore partially shaped by this society

Cooperatively organised form of society with common ownership of means of production

After deductions (for education, health services, welfare etc.), each person receives a receipt stating how much labour he or she has contributed

He or she can then withdraw from society’s stores means of consumption of equal value measured in terms of labour

Each person has the equal right to goods in proportion to his or her contribution to society

This right is in effect still a ‘bourgeois’ right

It is unequal in so far as it does not take into considerations differences in health, strength, talents, people’s situations etc.

Right by its very nature involves the application of a general principle that requires treating individuals in some way abstractly

Stage 2 - People no longer insist on their entitlement to something in virtue of any contribution they have made to society

Distribution will be based on individual need and people will freely contribute whatever they can:

[O]nly then can the limited horizon of bourgeois right be wholly transcended, and society can ascribe on its banner: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!