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.
By ‘liberal values,’ I’m referring to the core Enlightenment goals of individual autonomy (Descartes), secularism and rationalism (Spinoza), labor theory of value (Locke/Smith/Ricardo) and universal human rights (Kant). Marx rejected the liberal state, private property, and the capitalist mode of production. But I’d argue he did so because he believed they were obstacles to those very values. Who is an individual when you’ve been commodified?
By socializing production, the individual doesn’t dissolve into the collective; but the material security is created for the individual to freely development themselves and provide to a social order.
You’re looking more at what the capitalists used to overthrow the aristocracy while entrenching their own rule here. Marx was an atheist, and built on the labor theory of value, for example. However, these liberal values were made with a mechanistic materialist outlook, not a dialectical materialist outlook, and as such could not actually stand for proletarian liberation.
Marxism is secular, has the labor theory of value, etc, but not because Marx was a staunch liberal and believed capitalism to not be capable of fulfilling these. Rather, he built upon what was already created to build new ideology.
Please read this definition https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/l/i.htm
“Liberalism is a word that means different things to different people, especially from country to country.”
Liberal values are the basis of Marx’s work. He, rightly in my opinion, thinks the liberal state cannot bring about those values for all people.
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.
Marx rejected liberal values of individualism and the free reign of private property, I’m not sure exactly what you’re including in “liberal values.”
By ‘liberal values,’ I’m referring to the core Enlightenment goals of individual autonomy (Descartes), secularism and rationalism (Spinoza), labor theory of value (Locke/Smith/Ricardo) and universal human rights (Kant). Marx rejected the liberal state, private property, and the capitalist mode of production. But I’d argue he did so because he believed they were obstacles to those very values. Who is an individual when you’ve been commodified?
By socializing production, the individual doesn’t dissolve into the collective; but the material security is created for the individual to freely development themselves and provide to a social order.
You’re looking more at what the capitalists used to overthrow the aristocracy while entrenching their own rule here. Marx was an atheist, and built on the labor theory of value, for example. However, these liberal values were made with a mechanistic materialist outlook, not a dialectical materialist outlook, and as such could not actually stand for proletarian liberation.
Marxism is secular, has the labor theory of value, etc, but not because Marx was a staunch liberal and believed capitalism to not be capable of fulfilling these. Rather, he built upon what was already created to build new ideology.