About Marx and Individual Liberties

[SacRedMan]

Someone sent this to me yesterday...


Marx attacked the substance of the revolutionary eighteenth century American and French political documents that proclaimed the fundamental "rights of man": liberty, equality, security, property, and the free exercise of religion. Marx objected that these alleged rights derive from a false conception of the human individual as unrelated to others, as having interests can be defined without reference to others, and as always potentially in conflict with others. The rights-bearing individual is an "isolated monad... withdrawn behind his private interests and whims and separated from the community." (Marx 1844, 146)

The right of property, Marx asserted, exemplifies the isolating and anti-social character of these alleged rights of man. On the one hand, the right of property is the right to keep others at a distance: the legal equivalent of a barbed wire fence. On the other hand, the right of property allows an owner to transfer his resources at his own pleasure and for his own gain, without regard even for the desperate need for those resources elsewhere.

Similarly, Marx held that the much-celebrated individual right to liberty reinforces selfishness. Those who are ascribed the right to do what they wish so long as they do not hurt others will perpetuate a culture of egoistic obsession. As for equality, the achievement of equal rights in a liberal state merely distracts people from noticing that their equality is purely formal: a society with formally equal rights will continue to be divided by huge inequalities in economic and political power. Finally, these so-called "natural" rights are in fact not natural to humans at all. They are simply the defining elements of the rules of the modern mode of production, perfectly suited to fit each individual into the capitalist machine.

I'm not really sure if it is false or something, so I hope someone can help me out with this.

[Lorax]

That all seems accurate to me, at least as far as what Marx was thinking in 1844. The quote is certainly accurate and is taken from On the Jewish Question.

[caramelpence]

These ideas are indeed derived from On The Jewish Question, and it would be worth giving that text a read. There are at least two different interpretations concerning Marx's attitude towards rights. The first is broadly consistent with what that person has argued, in that, according to this interpretation, Marx believes that rights both reflect and perpetuate a society in which human beings are unable to attain genuine community or fully exercise their inherent sociability, because the meaning of a right is that it is a legal and discursive device that involves human beings making aggressive claims against each other and seeking to construct clear boundaries between themselves and others in order to defend their own abilities and goods. This is true, on this account, not only of the right to private property but also of other rights and the rights that are embodied in theories of distributive justice, e.g. the right to a basic income. A communist society would therefore be a society without rights, not in the sense that human beings would no longer have access to the goods that many rights are designed to protect, such as freedom of speech, or in the sense that Marx did not see these goods as important, but in the sense that it would no longer be necessary for these goods to be protected through the device of a right, that is, it would no longer be necessary for individuals to make aggressive claims against each other, because they would no longer live in a society grounded in social conflict and alienation. The second interpretation of what Marx argues in On The Jewish Question is that he does not believe that rights as such support or reflect an atomized and conflictual society but believes that this is true only of the rights that dominate political discourse and legal practice in actual capitalist societies, especially the right to private property, and that a communist society would still have rights, in the sense that it would still be appropriate for individuals to make claims in relation to society and other individuals, about what they are entitled to do or have, but communist society would use rights to protect different abilities and goods compared to capitalism, and would protect in content those goods that are protected only formally under capitalism, such as freedom of speech.

What these interpretations have in common is that they both recognize that Marx was not opposed to human beings having the ability to speak freely, amongst other abilities that are associated with liberty under capitalism and are protected through rights, and so if anyone is arguing that Marx dismissed the liberal conception of liberty or that he was a proto-totalitarian, they sadly don't know what they're talking about. Marx's understanding of rights points towards the more complex and wide-ranging issue of the relationship between Marxism and the Enlightenment, and it seems right to argue on the basis of On The Jewish Question that Marx's thought was both inspired by and a reaction to the Enlightenment, and liberalism in particular, insofar as Marx believed that a communist society would extend liberal achievements such as freedom of speech and individuality at the same time as rectifying the atomizing and alienating elements of the liberal order through the re-assertion of community and sociability. In Hegelian terms, Marx's projects represents the struggle to overcome the differentiated disunity that characterizes the liberal order and to achieve differentiated unity, whereby human beings can express their particularity whilst also recognizing themselves in others and avoiding a situation in which other human beings come to constitute "The Other".

If you want an academic insight into some of these issues then try and check out Buchanan's Marx and Justice (http://books.google.com/books?id=j1AOAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false) and especially Chapter 4.

[bezdomni]

I'm not really sure if it is false or something

You are not sure if Marx actually thought that, or if this idea about human rights is correct?

He did in fact write this, as others have pointed out.

If your problem is in the reasoning behind it, then explain in more detail what you think is wrong with the idea.

[SacRedMan]

You are not sure if Marx actually thought that, or if this idea about human rights is correct?

He did in fact write this, as others have pointed out.

If your problem is in the reasoning behind it, then explain in more detail what you think is wrong with the idea.

Never mind actually. Didn't read it quite well, due to lack of English vocabulairy.