Karl Marx is a difficult thinker to talk about with any impartiality. If Plato is the paradigm of a philosopher who contemplated the world while struggling to change it, the signs of Marx’s influence are everywhere, for better and worse. This very ubiquity provokes intense passions. As far back as the early 20th century, in Liberal Socialism, left-wing philosopher Carlo Rosselli complained about the tendency of Marxists to cite the master in a scholastic, even creedal manner. Analytical Marxist G.A. Cohen often complained about “bullshit Marxism,” and was leery of the teleological and prophetic “obstetric” vision of history advanced, where the victory of the proletariat and the fall of capitalism were ordained as though by divine writ.
On the other side of things, liberal and conservative criticisms of Marx and Marxism have been ubiquitous, though the vast majority are more famous for their heat than their light. The tendency of some conservatives to see Marxism in everything leads one to the conclusion that, in fact, the Soviet Union must have won the Cold War and it wasn’t even particularly close. Right-wing gurus like Jordan Peterson naturally lead the pack in wild takes, veering close to outright calling Marx a Satanist in lieu of actually reading and responding to him. It must be said that there is something ironic about these, often very rich and very loud, characters who perennially present themselves as victims of silencing and attempted cancellation by “post-modern neo-Marxists.” The irony, of course, lies in the fact that Marx himself was repeatedly exiled, and spent years moving around Europe while reactionaries closed down his newspapers, censored his works, and spied on him. One suspects he’d have a thing or two to tell them about genuine persecution as opposed to a complex.
Marx was certainly not a comprehensive liberal and leveled many serious charges against bourgeois society. But he was far too intelligent and nuanced a thinker to indulge in mere rejection.
One of the thought-terminating cliches that has circulated in this jumble is the assertion that Marx and Marxism are fundamentally hostile towards, even antithetical to, liberalism. Like many historical distortions, this take owes a lot to the Cold War. Marx was presented as the archetype of the “closed” rather than open society, or an arch collectivist staunchly opposed to individualism. Even as the apostle of authoritarianism and statism, and general hater of freedom and apple pie. As I hope to show, many of the cliches don’t hold water. Marx was certainly not a comprehensive liberal and leveled many serious charges against bourgeois society. But he was far too intelligent and nuanced a thinker to indulge in mere rejection, and his social theory, grounded in historical materialism, led him to praise the many progressive and liberatory features of liberalism. Moreover, many of Marx’s charges against certain forms of liberalism are thoughtful and serious, even if there are areas where his own work is vulnerable to critique from a liberal standpoint.
Marx the Young Liberal Turned Radical
As Rodney Peffer notes in Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice, Marx began his intellectual career as a Young Hegelian and a young liberal, agitating fiercely for free expression and a republican system of government across the German states. While he would later become more critical of both Hegelianism and liberalism, Marx remained influenced by them throughout his productive life, and his mature works of political economy acknowledge serious debts to figures like Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Moreover, Marx remained fiercely committed to liberal aspirations for free expression, free assembly (especially important for organizing workers), participatory representative government, and of course universal suffrage. But he became decreasingly confident that bourgeois liberals could be counted on to uphold these principles where they conflicted with the interests of capitalists and capitalism.
Marx’s earliest substantial work on liberalism is a short but rich 1844 essay, “On the Jewish Question,” which remains controversial to this day for his use of antisemitic stereotypes (though Marx came from a Jewish family that had converted to Christianity in order to survive in the Prussian-annexed Rhineland, he always supported equal rights for Jews). The heart of the essay concerns debates about the nature of the emerging bourgeois social form, which young Hegelians like Bruno Bauer hoped would include a secular state committed to individual freedom for all. The Young Marx commends liberalism as a historical advance on reactionary authoritarianism, but is already skeptical that true freedom for all can be achieved in the liberal state.
The Young Marx commends liberalism as a historical advance on reactionary authoritarianism, but is already skeptical that true freedom for all can be achieved in the liberal state.
One of the reasons is that while the liberal state was predicated on the dissolution of formal distinctions of aristocratic rank and property, stark inequities in wealth and power retained their influence. In Marx’s own words:
Nevertheless, the political annulment of private property not only fails to abolish private property but even presupposes it. The state abolishes, in its own way, distinctions of birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it declares that birth, social rank, education, occupation, are non-political distinctions, when it proclaims, without regard to these distinction, that every member of the nation is an equal participant in national sovereignty, when it treats all elements of the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state. Nevertheless, the state allows private property, education, and occupation to act in their way—i.e., as private property, as education, as occupation, and to exert the influence of their special nature. Far from abolishing these real distinctions, the state only exists on the presupposition of their existence; it feels itself to be a political state and asserts its universality only in opposition to these elements of its being.
The deeper and more interesting critique Marx makes is one that will be picked up by generations of political theorists like Charles Taylor. This critique accuses liberalism of engendering an “atomistic” form of society. In “On the Jewish Question” and other early works, Marx makes clear that the liberal “rights of man” did secure basic freedoms for people that they lacked before. However, they also engendered an intensely insular and competitive conception of society, where each person was supposed to be free to the extent she was separated from and protected from other human beings by law. Moreover, liberals often failed to recognize how their social ideal itself required the coercive exercise of state power, precisely to create insulation around individuals to “free” them from one another. Later Marxist legal theorists like Michael Mandel will note a further paradox: that the rights against the state cherished by “don’t tread on me” style liberals are invariably secured through the state and its institutions (such as the legal system).
While liberals argue that there is a fundamental connection between property and freedom, Marx notes that under capitalism, many people don’t end up owning much in terms of meaningful property.
Private property provides a good example of these emergent tensions. Liberals often conceive property as a very basic right one possesses against the state, and the appropriation of private property is often presented as a paradigmatic example of state coercion. But this idea of property rights against the state runs into a very serious problem. Property is an eminently legal concept, requiring a state to create entitlements by law and to exercise coercion to exclude others from violating them. In this respect, property seems an awful lot like a creation of the state, requiring the threat of or actual violence to be efficacious. Marx recognized this in the early 1840s, as he witnessed the commons being appropriated by capital to be made more profitable, depriving German peasants of the firewood they relied on to maintain traditional ways of life. Moreover, while liberals argue that there is a fundamental connection between property and freedom, Marx notes that under capitalism, many people don’t end up owning much in terms of meaningful property.
Pro-capitalist liberal and libertarian thinkers have aimed to get around this problem in several ways. One (less than convincing, it must be said) route asserts that property is a “natural” right that precedes the existence of the state. This was the route taken, for example, by Robert Nozick in his pioneering Anarchy, State and Utopia. The problem is that the assertion of natural rights is often just that: an assertion that they exist. Nozick himself infamously failed to provide an argument for the existence of these natural rights, with his book declaring their necessity in its opening paragraph and largely leaving it at that. Contemporary rights theorists are often deeply skeptical of this move, wherein natural rights theorists simply help themselves to such a big assumption. As early as 1977, Ronald Dworkin rightly criticized Nozick for beginning the crucial argument too far along.
The other way pro-capitalist liberal and libertarian thinkers have tried to get around this is by biting the bullet on the origins of private property while still remaining normatively committed to it for reasons that don’t have to do with it being a “natural” right. This is the route that Hayek takes in The Constitution of Liberty, where property is regarded as a legal right that emerged through a long, “spontaneous,” process of organization by individuals and the state. While property is not a “natural” right—and even Hayek conceded there were moment where it could be abridged to provision minimal forms of welfare—it was nonetheless an important basis for economic prosperity and personal liberty. This route is far more convincing but runs into a dilemma by making the right to property less absolute than it once was. Since the argument for property is not absolute but rather based on its usefulness to economic growth and freedom, if one can empirically show that a more socialistic approach would secure flourishing and liberty more thoroughly, then that would seem to be the right thing to do according to this route’s own logic. In Socialism: A Logical Introduction,the logician Scott Sehon makes exactly this argument, pointing out that the more socialistic Nordic states are by many metrics better off, and freer, than the most militantly pro-capitalist countries.
Marx’s Mature Critique of Liberalism
Later in his career, Marx shifted from political bromides against liberal politics to a “critique” of the system of capitalist political economy, of which liberalism was an ideological expression. Many readers confuse this critique of political economy for a mere criticism of capitalism, and thereby misunderstand what Marx was attempting to accomplish in his late writings. This is a serious error.
The Late Marx shifted from political bromides against liberal politics to a “critique” of the system of capitalist political economy, of which liberalism was an ideological expression.
In Karl Marx, Allen Wood reminds us that Marx was a child of German idealism and was deeply influenced by figures like Hegel. His “critique” of capitalist political economy is not mere criticism, but instead an attempt to show how the historical emergence of capitalism as a social form engendered entirely new ways of thinking about the world. These were not simply false; the categories of capitalist political economy were often extremely helpful for understanding how the system worked on its own terms. The blind spot of the bourgeois political economists was assuming that these categories were transhistorical and eternal, rather than specific to the capitalist mode of production. Amongst other goals, Marx’s “critique” of bourgeois political economy tried to show the generative limitations of the categories of capitalist economic thought, while also insisting that they didn’t reflect the real world. The history of the real world demonstrates that economic systems change alongside the laws of motion which propel them.
Marx often proclaimed that these generative limitations were inexorably set by the conditions of the era. This was the basis for his extremely critical stance towards “utopian” socialists, who imagined that one could simply invent a new economic system in thought and then apply it to society. He mocked these utopian socialists for writing “recipe books for the cookshops of the future.” At the same time, Marx sneered in the face of pro-capitalists, whose limited understandings of the world were clearly set by their self-interest. Nowhere were these limitations on clearer display than in those liberal thinkers who failed to follow the logic of their own moral convictions when they troubled their commitment to capitalism. In Capital Volume I, Marx notes how liberal thinkers often insist on the importance of the division of powers and representative government. These are rightly intended as safeguards against arbitrary coercion and punishment. And yet, Marx notes that liberals have always failed to extend these concerns into the workplace, where capitalists act like a “private legislator” distributing rewards and punishments at will, while the workers have no meaningful protections or say. Marx again:
The factory code in which capital formulates, like a private legislator, and at his own good will, his autocracy over his workpeople, unaccompanied by that division of responsibility, in other matters so much approved of by the bourgeoisie, and unaccompanied by the still more approved representative system, this code is but the capitalistic caricature of that social regulation of the labour-process which becomes requisite in co-operation on a great scale, and in the employment in common, of instruments of labour and especially of machinery. The place of the slave-driver’s lash is taken by the overlooker’s book of penalties. All punishments naturally resolve themselves into fines and deductions from wages, and the law-giving talent of the factory Lycurgus so arranges matters, that a violation of his laws is, if possible, more profitable to him than the keeping of them.
This sharp critique has gained new currency today. Philosophers like Elizabeth Anderson have stressed how “private government” constitutes a form of unaccountable power. Liberals would never accept the state telling people when they have to wake up, when they can go to the bathroom, when they’re allowed to eat, what they’re allowed to say and when. And yet, Anderson points out that these and worse abuses are permitted day in and day out in the workplace. Even conservative thinkers like Sohrab Ahmari have acknowledged that “private power” often crushes liberty, and that ordinary workers have little if any recourse against it in contemporary American society.
Marx on the Continuation of Liberalism
Marx perennially stressed that liberalism was a necessary and indeed the highest form of society that humans have yet created. However, he hoped and often expected that it would one day be transcended.
As a historical materialist, Marx perennially stressed that liberalism was a necessary and indeed the highest form of society that humans have yet created. However, he hoped and often expected that it would one day be transcended, that we’d transition to a higher form of society which he variably called socialism or communism (though Marx wrote very little about what either would look like, and seems to have changed his mind on several occasions). This flows organically from his historical materialism, which precludes excess speculation about the kind of society to come. Nonetheless, Marx can be criticized for not always abiding by these restrictive principles and, if not writing recipe books for the cook shops of the future, at least describing the core ingredients that will go into a new society.
In their youthful work The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels call for a kind of democratic centralism, where a workers’ party will seize the state and centralize all the instruments of production in its hands. This advocacy of a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” as Marx later dubbed it in his Class Struggles in France 1848-1850, has been rightly criticized by generations of liberal thinkers, who see it as licensing the vanguardist authoritarianism of Marxism-Leninism. Marx himself seems to have changed his mind on this point. By 1871, when he published his pamphlet The Civil War in France, Marx was advocating for a hyper-democratic and decentralized kind of republican government committed to non-domination. Elected representatives would be directly accountable to their constituents, and liable to being recalled at will. The National Assembly would have certain organizing powers, but enormous responsibilities would be devolved to the local level so that all citizens participate directly in self-governance. These republican principles would naturally be extended into the workplace, as Bruno Leipold discusses in his new book Citizen Marx:
These descriptions of the relationship between workers and their capitalist employers in terms of despotism were entirely commonplace in Marx’s writings. The power enjoyed by individual capitalists mirrored, Marx argued, the arbitrary power enjoyed by absolute rulers over their subjects. Just as workers could have a ‘public despot’ in the political sphere, they were also confronted by ‘private despots’ in their workplace…Using the ‘extraordinary wealth of statistics, official reports, and pieces of press reportage’ he had gathered, Marx documented how the workers’ meager pay and long hours, their unsafe and unhealthy workplaces, their monotonous and intellectual unstimulating tasks, were compounded by the fact that the capitalist or ‘factory autocrat’ subjects him [the worker] during the labor process to the pettiest, most spiteful despotism.
One can be critical of Marx here, but from a very different liberal direction. Rather than advocating authoritarianism, one might rebut that his hyper-democratic republicanism would be too participatory for most people. Many of us don’t particularly want to be intensely involved in decision making at all levels, and this raises the Wildean objection that socialism would take up way too many evenings.
In one of his last mature works, The Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx chastises those, still a dime of dozen, who expected that a new socialist society would involve a millenarian, revolutionary, break with liberalism. As Igor Shoikhedbrod notes in Revisiting Karl Marx’s Critique of Liberalism, Marx reprimanded utopian socialists who thought that a new society would be absolutely different from the old. Marx noted that, for a historical materialist, change is always a process carried out over time. This meant that even a post-revolutionary socialist society would be “stamped” by many features of liberal “right”—including basic institutions and ethical practices. As Marx put it, what socialists would have to deal with was not a socialist or communist society “…as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”
Looking around at environmental decay, mass inequality, and political instability, it is hard to see how people can still abide by the conviction that capitalism is the best we can do. There are good reasons to be critical of Marx and Marxism. But the relentless hope that a better world is possible is not among them.
This strikes me as the correct way to understand any progressive social change. Marx’s wise charge can be applied to many progressive anti-liberals today, who imagine that a new society must entirely undo the old. That is vulgar idealism at every level. On the other hand, there are reasons to follow Marx in imagining that a more ethical society is on the horizon. Looking around at environmental decay, mass inequality, and political instability, it is hard to see how people can still abide by the conviction that capitalism is the best we can do. If that is the case, then the best we can do is not especially good. Indeed, the kind of capitalist realism that is so pervasive today often manifests as a pessimism about whether something better is even possible; this is quite a gloomy way of thinking about the world. There are good reasons to be critical of Marx and Marxism. But the relentless hope that a better world is possible is not among them.
Matt McManus is an Assistant Professor at Spelman College. He is the author of The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism and The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism amongst other books.
Image made using “Chemnitz karl marx monument,” by Velvet licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International; “Window and clock, Musée d’Orsay 10 April 2013,” by Derek Key licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic.
