Property, Illusions and Alienation

Prompt: “Liberalism (or bourgeois liberty) cannot survive Marx’s critique.” Critically discuss this proposition.

In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx describes the post-capitalist society as being one where, “[a]ll that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life.”[1] Marx’s seminal critique of the liberal order confronted the un-freedom of labour under capitalism and traced how private property and the free market in an industrialised economy led to inequality and conflict. Marx did not entirely repudiate liberal values of equality or the pursuit of human flourishment. Rather, he exposed their shortcomings, and argued that they could never be fully achieved in a capitalist society. In this paper, I submit that the liberal conception of freedom is defeated by the explosive strength of Marx’s analysis of alienation and economic exploitation in the liberal political economy.

I begin by establishing the classical liberal constellation of freedom through two key principles and set forth the Hegelian project of freedom within civil society. With this, I offer the Marxian perspective on how these principles play out. Three distinct themes emerge as sources of contention: first, the mystifications of civil society; second, the relationship between rights and emancipation; finally, alienation.

Classical Liberalism and the Hegelian Civil Society

The cornerstone of liberalism is its pedestalisation of liberty as the ultimate aim of its ideology and organisation, which is most significantly realised through private property and free market with minimal government interference.[2] Isiah Berlin’s ‘negative liberty’ is crucial to liberal freedom in that it is the absence of external constraints that maximises an individual’s capacity to freely form associations and pursue individual goals.[3] The intervention of the state, legal systems, and civil society must all operate with the imperative of protecting people’s freedom, and go no further than that.

In the liberal tradition, private property is frequently presented as a form of liberty in itself because it enables individuals to use their time, capital, land, and labour as they see fit without private coercion.[4] It delimits boundaries between members of society to create realms of autonomy for each person which cannot be broached without consent. Extending beyond being one dimension of liberty, private property is liberty’s sine non qua.[5] Civil society becomes a space for peaceful coexistence where each one has legitimate political authority over their choices and property.

 For Hegel, civil society is a uniquely modern, liberal invention.[6] Where self-interested individuals have always existed, civil society for the first time naturalised the pursuit of personal ends. He regards private property as necessary to allow individuals to exercise freedom through action. Hegel optimistically emphasises how the mutual recognition of property between different individuals arises not out of antagonism, but reciprocity and the common will. He describes civil society as a simultaneous development of individualistic ambitions and a network of mutual interdependence.

With property rights comes the the exchange of goods and services through the dynamic free market. Adam Smith posits that under capitalism, each individual is “continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment” as permitted by their capital and property.[7] By entering into voluntary associations ratified by allegedly non-coercive economic contracts, agents of the free market are incentivised to labour conscientiously and innovate furiously. Classical liberals argue that the free market creates a society of growth, flourishing, and progress, since an individual’s gains and profits are directly yoked to their own contribution to the market. Their performance is strictly the result of autonomous decisions, and their benefits are protected by ensuring property rights for everyone.[8]

Hegel avows the free market’s ability to reconcile atomistic economic aspirations with social reciprocity. The division of labour facilitates independent actors to exchange their goods and services in the free market. In Philosophy of the Right, Hegel’s methodology begins with Ideas from the spirit that are then objectified as “right” social forms that embody freedom.[9] By his reading, the stated liberal definition of liberty is too negatively conceived to have a determinate effect on social reality. Its dearth of positive content paints other individuals as oppositional constraints to freedom. While retaining the value of liberal principles like private property and the free market, he radically reformulates the analysis which justified the liberal project to add reciprocal, harmonious social relations as a defining outcome of the liberal state. The dualism of self-interest and interdependence permits a social freedom wherein actors accomplish “being with oneself in another.”[10]

Confuting the liberal viewpoint, I argue that Marx empirically and analytically demonstrates that the structure of free markets post industrialisation incentivises the owners of the means of production to exploit their workers with low wages in order to maximise their profit margins.[11] The liberal value of individual growth, and conceiving others as possible constraints to profit and freedom erode the spirit of the collective  and encourage ruthless competition; social freedom of meaningful relations is impossible under capitalism. The same lack of regulation that liberals champion as freedom, translates into the vulnerable having no defence against the unfair contracts economic necessity forces individuals into. Since the liberal state banished the responsibility of negotiating social relations to the invisible hand of capitalism, and the self-interest of the bourgeoisie is legitimised as a valuable productive praxis, the avarice of the powerful minority trounces the needs of the dispensable workers on both fronts – economic and political.

Marx sees the liberal utopia of fair exchange between consenting individuals as a pipe dream in the face of a capitalist system which allows labour to be systematically devalued without governmental intervention.[12] I reconstruct his theoretical justification for this claim and assess why his logic holds up under scrutiny and in materiality through three themes, the first of which is objectification and the modern civil society.

Objectification and Ideology

 “Hegel starts from the state and makes man the subjectified state,” Marx accuses.[13] Whereas Hegel proclaims family and civil society are the product of an idea  – namely, the modern liberal state –  Marx insists that it is individuals and families that comprise the state.   The state objectifies individuals by presenting the abstract, mystical state as concrete. Family and civil society are the determinants of the state, but the illusions of bourgeois ideology reverse this equation, detach individual’s real conditions from themselves, and present them as determined by the mystical idea of the state. Marx’s transformative criticism inverts the Hegelian subject with its predicate to assert that freedom requires the dislocation of illusions and objectification that sustain bourgeois liberalism which serves the elite minority.

One can see how, by crafting the division of the public and private spheres, both Hegel and classical liberals explain away the contradiction between capitalist individualism and social freedom by relegating these conflicting forces to their own sphere. Neither classical liberals nor Hegel seriously grapple with the schizophrenia of such a social order. Marx applies pressure to this convenient scission in On The Jewish Question, showing how it hampers the people’s real engagement with emancipation, rendering freedom under liberalism a self-serving bourgeois myth.

Rights and Human Emancipation

Marx carried forth the logic that materiality brings ideas into existence to his critique of religion and private property by attending to the effects these phenomena produce, not simply their intellectual content. His bifurcation of “so-called” rights (which are liberal rights of equality) and those of citizens (which would be rights of human emancipation) in response to Bruno Bauer speaks to this continued concern with granular realities. Bauer claimed that it was illegitimate for Jews to seek equality and political emancipation without abdicating their Judaism. Marx contended that Bauer mischaracterised the Jewish demand for political equality as a demand for political privilege, misunderstanding the state as a secular apparatus that did not pursue particular material or Christian interests. This rendered the Jewish demand for recognition a demand for preferential treatment.

Marx demonstrated that the liberal state had not abolished religion by formally disengaging with it. The modern separation of the secular public and religious private wrought religiosity into civil society where anti-Semitism raged unchecked. Therefore, the “so-called rights of man” are the liberal rights which cling on to the synthetic division of public and private spaces that means little in material life.[14] Liberalism presupposed religion’s enduring presence by pre-emptively legislating ‘universal’ rights (“so-called” rights) against discrimination and to protect private property – as if it were a given that antagonistic social, economic, and religious positions framed reality.

The presumption, on the part of the secular state, that religion would persist despite any state-sponsorship points to the “existence of a defect” in the organisation of the liberal state itself.[15] Religion is a defensive response to material and social circumstances in the liberal capitalist state like poverty, contradiction, and violence; these tensions ought to be addressed by challenging liberalism’s tenets and reconfiguring society in such a way that there is no need for religion.

In other words, rather than lobbying for political recognition and equality, Marx rightly believed Jewish emancipation should command the total eradication of religion. Myopically inveighing the deficits of the secular state in providing religious freedom ignores the deficits of religion itself. Hence, even after hypothetically achieving liberalism’s political freedom in the public, Jew people’s freedom would continue to be constrained, albeit constrained in the private sphere, making the distinction between the spheres an empty mystification. Thus Marx states that “political emancipation is not the final and absolute form of human emancipation.”[16]

We can read Marx’s treatment of religion as theoretically analogous to his treatment of private property. According to Marx, property rights are rights of “the circumscribed individual, withdrawn into himself” who “dispose of it as one will; without regard for other men and independently of society. It is the right of self-interest.”[17] Marx’s analysis proves that private property is a vitiating force that fractures human relations by territorialising objects and construing ‘the other’ as minatory impediments to individual liberty. Liberalism promises everybody private property rights sans discrimination based on religion, race or caste and so on. Yet, these rights ignore the intrinsic immorality of private property, and these rights ignore how stratified class relations are an inevitability that is causing intense unfreedom. Similarly, politically safeguarding each group’s access to religion by equalising laws does not tend to the inherent failings of religion, nor does it eradicate religious prejudice in civil society because of the pre-existing power disparity between Jew people and Christians.

It becomes clear that the presumptive “so-called” universal rights further reinforce distinctions between the people and uphold oppressive institutions to sustain a liberal state embroiled in its own contradictions. The state’s classificatory function confines individuals to mystified categories of identity and ownership, or the private and public, all of which remain far removed from reality.

Alienation

For classical liberals, the market is the site of sovereign freedom and individual excellence. For Hegel, it is this, but also a site of sociality and reciprocal relations. The liberal development of the civil society authorises the market to synthesise the competing demands of self-interest and social dependence. It has its own internally regulating systems such as supply and demand, opportunity cost, and competition. Marx takes Hegel’s formulation of the civil society and market, but draws the opposite conclusion because he tends to the material trajectory markets have taken in liberal societies.

Marx declares that markets are not self-reflexive sites of liberation with individuals at their centre, which can resolve antagonistic competition without losing a spirit of community. Rather, markets have mutated into autonomous entities that reign over individuals, and not the other way around. Markets are sites of alienation. In the process of mystifying the market, “[p]olitical economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labour by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labour) and production.”[18]

Alienation stretches further than a psychic or cognitive sentiment. It is an objective fact inextricable from capitalism. There are four kinds of alienation propounded by Marxian analysis, the first of which is alienation from the product of labour. The individual worker is alienated from their product of labour as it is “an alien object exercising power over him” (74). Under capitalism, the means of production and privately owned by the bourgeoisie who employ labourers to produce for them, which is to say that workers do not own or have access to the product they sacrifice their time and efforts to make. Within the liberal state that glorifies private property, the product of the worker is instantly seized as the possession of the capitalist, and this transforms the product into a hostile, immolating loss of control.

The second instance of alienation is between the worker and their activity of labour. Marx reports alienated labour as one of “self-sacrifice, of mortification” that “belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.”[19] The worker has no liberty to produce what they desire to produce, authority over the act of production is relinquished to the possessive owner. There is no creative drive to bring something into existence that finds its realisation in this activity for it is the an activity of coercion which is only valuable to the worker as an instrument to stay alive – liberalism ignores the nature of labour and the coercive force of economic necessity. Freedom for willed actions is contained outside production. Consequently, the majority of human life is experienced as enslavement. The third instance of alienation is a culmination of the first two realities of the free market wherein individuals, whose lives are colonised by alien powers of the product and the labour, are alienated from themselves. The specific humanity of a person is reduced to a means for existence that is alien to the human spirit. The self is regarded as an alien, dehumanised, and instrumentalised. Lastly, capitalism alienates individuals from society. Social relations crumble when others can be perceived only as potentially useful, or threatening. The liberal state described earlier, where political emancipation differs from human emancipation, typifies political alienation from material truths. Where liberalism sees its state as the harmony of individual interests and the collective, Marx compellingly shows us how the liberal mystification of the state maintains the charade of ‘reconciliation’ instead of addressing the inescapable antagonisms of class conflict.

Conclusion

Bourgeois liberty cannot withstand Marxist critique. Anatole France writes, “liberal property rights meant that beggars and CEOs alike were allowed to buy mansions.”[20] However, like liberalism, Marxian theory is not a panacea for human emancipation. In his work, the productive (in a material as well as creative sense) capacity of humans is spotlighted as species-defining.[21] It figures as the root of all social formations, and therefore all human consciousness is reduced to production – there is little space for variable constraints on liberty like patriarchy or casteism. There seems to be a degree of class reductionism in the Marxist class revolution; eradicating class conflict will not eradicate all types of unfreedom. Nonetheless, Marx’s critique is certainly a radically more convincing political path to liberty than liberalism, paved with the reclamation of the human spirit and the necessary revival of the collective.

Works Cited

Berlin, Isaiah (1969): “Two Concepts of Liberty”. In: Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. (Online at: https://www.wiso.unihamburg.de/fileadmin/wiso_vwl/johannes/Ankuendigungen/Berlin_twoconcept sofliberty.pdf)

Gaus, Gerald, Shane D. Courtland, and David Schmidtz, “Liberalism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/liberalism/&gt;.

Gellner, E. (2006). Nations and nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hayek, F. A. (1960). The constitution of liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hegel, G. W. F., Dyde, S. W., & Oliver Wendell Holmes Collection (Library of Congress). (1896). Hegel’s philosophy of right. London: George Bell and Sons.

Locke, John (ed. Laslett, Peter): Two Treatises of Government

Marx, Karl. 2007. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Translated by Martin Milligan.

McManus, Matt, et al. “What Karl Marx Really Thought About Liberalism.” Jacobin, http://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/10/karl-marx-liberalism-rights-igor-shoikhedbrod-review

Smith, Adam, 1723-1790. (1994). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. New York :Modern Library,

---

[1] Marx, Communist Manifesto, 476.

               [2] Gaus et al, Liberalism, (The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy).

[3] Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford University Press).

[4] Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Ed, Lasslett, Peter).

[5] Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell).

[6] Hegel, Philosophy of Right (Cambridge University Press).

[7] Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1723.

[8] Lehto, A Consequentialist Defence of the Limited Welfare State (Helsinki University Press).  

[9] Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 4.

[10] Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 4.

[11] Marx, Economic and Political Manuscripts.

[12] Marx, Economic and Political Manuscripts.

[13] Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 20.

[14] Marx, On The Jewish Question, 42.

[15] Marx, On The Jewish Question, 31.

[16] Ibid, 32.

[17] Ibid, 42.

[18] Marx, Economic and Political Manuscripts, 73.

[19] Marx, Economic and Political Manuscripts, 74.

[20] Quoted by Matt Mcmanus, What Karl Marx Really Thought About Liberalism (Jacobin).

              [21] Shoikhedbrod Revisting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism (Palgrave).