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.
When I say liberal values are the ‘basis’ of Marx’s work, I am not suggesting he was a ‘liberal reformer.’ I am arguing that Marx’s work is a dialectical sublation of liberalism. He takes the some of the liberal achievements (rationalism, the end of feudal bondage, and the Labor Theory of Value) and shows that they can only be fully realized by moving beyond the capitalist mode of production. He doesn’t reject the ‘Individual’ out of hand; he rejects the liberal version of the individual (the abstract citizen) to make way for the real individual (the species-being).
Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.
I wrote a full reply but realized none of it really matters until we get clarity on terms. What do you actually mean by liberal values, and which of those do you think are foundational to Marxism?
When I say liberal values, I mean things like: the primacy of private property; formal equality before the law regardless of material conditions; individual rights abstracted from real social relations; freedom of contract between unequal classes; the liberal state as a supposedly neutral arbiter standing above society; and “freedoms” of speech, press, and association that in practice follow ownership and class power, up to and including a legal system that treats rich and poor “equally” such as criminalizing both for sleeping under bridges. These are not accidental features of liberalism or it’s values but flow directly from its idealist foundations.
Liberalism begins from abstract ideas (rights, the individual, the citizen) and treats them as primary, as if they exist independently of history and material conditions. Marxism begins from the opposite direction: dialectical and historical materialism, which treats those liberal categories as historically specific social products tied to a particular mode of production. That is a fundamental theoretical clash.
Because of this, Marxism does not aim to complete or realize liberal values, but to explain why they arise under capitalism and why they cannot deliver real human emancipation. So before talking about “sublation” or continuity, we need to be clear whether liberalism is being treated as an ideal to be fulfilled, or as an ideological form to be scientifically analyzed and superseded.
I agree that the liberal state is a tool for class power and that formal equality is often just a mask for material exploitation.
When I say liberalism is the basis of Marx’s work, I am referring to its humanist core: the promise of individual autonomy and self-determination. With the exception of private property, the values you listed contain a seed of humanism that is currently restricted to a select few.
Nothing forces a value like autonomy to be contingent on private property. Marx shows that private property is exactly what prevents autonomy for the majority. By explaining why these values fail under capitalism, Marx is not dismissing them. He identifies the property relations that prevent human progress. He argues that to actually realize the individual rights liberalism promises, we must first abolish the class power used to protect them for the few.
Even more so, Marx took a core liberal value, the free development of the individual, and proved it is materially impossible to achieve under a system of private property. He analyzed liberalism by holding it to its own standards, showing that the very system it created could never fulfill the values it proclaimed. This is why I call it incomplete because it offers the legal form of freedom without the material content.
Marxism does not do away with the individual. It identifies the material conditions, the abolition of class, required for the individual to be truly autonomous. Marx does not throw away the promise of the Enlightenment. He offers the only material path to make it a reality for everyone.
P.S. I think treating liberal idealism and Marxist materialism as mutually exclusive is a bit non-dialectical. Liberalism was a material response to feudalism, not just a daydream. Likewise, Marx did not start from zero with a cold science of factories. He took the enlightenment goal of human dignity and used a materialist method to discover why that goal was being strangled. To Marx, ideas are themselves a material force once they have gripped the masses and formed a collective consciousness. To suggest Marx had no guiding ideas is just as one-sided as suggesting that liberal thinkers were fully divorced from the material world.
The problem with what you’re saying is that what you are calling liberalism’s “humanist core” is not something that ever existed independently of class power. Individual autonomy and self-determination under liberalism were always conditional on property, status, and imperial position. From its very inception, liberalism expanded alongside chattel slavery, colonial conquest, and the super-exploitation of the global South. That is not an accident or a betrayal of liberal values; it is how those values were historically instantiated. What you describe as a “seed of humanism” was in practice a humanist façade, autonomy for those of means, domination for everyone else.
Because of this, removing private property from liberal values does not “complete” liberalism; it dissolves it. Liberalism without private property, hyper-individualism, and abstract rights is no longer liberalism at all. It is something qualitatively different. Marx does not take liberal values and try to realize them more consistently; he explains why they arise under capitalism, why they take the abstract form they do, and why they systematically fail. He critiques, he does not inherit. Marx holding liberalism to its own standards is a method of exposure, not an endorsement of those standards as foundational.
Saying Marx’s work has liberalism as its “basis” confuses historical sequence with theoretical grounding. Liberalism emerges historically after feudalism; that does not make feudal ideology the core of liberal thought. In the same way, Marxism emerges after liberal capitalism; that does not make liberal values its foundation. Marx’s starting point is not Enlightenment ideals but material production, class relations, and the contradictions of political economy. Liberal categories appear in his work because they are the dominant ideological forms of bourgeois society, not because they are his normative anchors.
On the individual: Marx does not abolish individuality, but neither does he center it the way liberalism does. In Marxism, the individual is always socially constituted, and their development is subordinate to and dependent on collective conditions. Every major communist thinker after Marx is explicit on this point: the collective is primary, and individual flourishing follows from transformed social relations. Liberalism inverts this, treating society as a constraint on an already-formed individual. That difference is structural.
Finally, on idealism versus materialism: acknowledging that liberalism arose from material conditions does not make it materialist. Feudalism also arose from material conditions; that does not make the divine right of kings or the Mandate of Heaven materialist doctrines. Liberalism remains idealist because it treats ideas like rights, autonomy, and citizenship as primary and self-justifying, rather than as historically specific expressions of material relations. Marx’s point that ideas can become a material force once they grip the masses presupposes it. Ideas act materially because they are rooted in material conditions, not because they float free as universal values.
Marx did not derive his ideas on emancipation from liberalism’s promises. He explained why those promises existed, why they were necessarily hollow under capitalism, and why a completely different social foundation was required to move beyond them. Liberalism is the object of Marx’s critique, not the core of his worldview.
Also I never said Marx didn’t have guiding ideas they just weren’t liberal they were Hegelian.
“He takes the some of the liberal achievements (rationalism, the end of feudal bondage, and the Labor Theory of Value) and shows that they can only be fully realized by moving beyond the capitalist mode of production”
I thought that was pretty clear. The achievements are to be fully realized which cannot be done without overthrowing liberal democracy. The full realizations of achievements are mutually exclusive with the continued existence of libdem
That might not be what they meant though. That’s just how I read it.
There’s been a subtle shift in the conversation that’s worth flagging first. The discussion started out about liberal values being the basis of Marx’s work, but it’s now sliding into talking about historical achievements that occurred under liberalism. Those aren’t the same thing, and conflating them is what’s causing the confusion. I’m hoping clarifying that distinction will put the discussion back on track.
Marx does argue that certain historical developments associated with the bourgeois revolutions were real and necessary. The end of feudal bondage is the clearest example. But this wasn’t the realization of a liberal value in the abstract; it was the result of changing material conditions and class struggle, specifically the rising power of the bourgeoisie. Private property rights functioned as the ideological and legal form that allowed those new relations to consolidate themselves. The “achievement” flows from material forces, not from liberal ideals being progressively fulfilled.
The same applies to rationalism and similar developments. Rationalized law, administration, and production emerge because capitalism requires them, not because liberalism is steadily perfecting its values. Marx analyzes these phenomena to explain how capitalism works and why it historically replaces feudalism, not to endorse the liberal worldview that accompanies them.
The labor theory of value isn’t a liberal achievement at all. Marx takes it from classical political economy as a scientific tool in order to expose exploitation and demonstrate the limits of capitalism. There is nothing there to be “fully realized” under communism; it’s a means of critique, not a value.
Yes, liberal democracy has to be overthrown for genuine human emancipation, that doesn’t mean Marxism is the fulfillment of liberalism. Liberal values are ideological expressions of bourgeois class power; the historical achievements associated with liberalism arise from material conditions and class struggle.
The core of Marx work is dialectical and historical materialism from which all his analysis flows which is directly at odds with the idealism at the core of liberalism from which it gets it’s values.
Yeah, you’re right. You and other user must agree on terms and on what you already agree on first.
I saw they had a similar experience of talking past each other with cowbee. They might be a particularly articulate wrecker, but I didn’t want to jump straight there.
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.
“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.
When I say liberal values are the ‘basis’ of Marx’s work, I am not suggesting he was a ‘liberal reformer.’ I am arguing that Marx’s work is a dialectical sublation of liberalism. He takes the some of the liberal achievements (rationalism, the end of feudal bondage, and the Labor Theory of Value) and shows that they can only be fully realized by moving beyond the capitalist mode of production. He doesn’t reject the ‘Individual’ out of hand; he rejects the liberal version of the individual (the abstract citizen) to make way for the real individual (the species-being).
I wrote a full reply but realized none of it really matters until we get clarity on terms. What do you actually mean by liberal values, and which of those do you think are foundational to Marxism?
When I say liberal values, I mean things like: the primacy of private property; formal equality before the law regardless of material conditions; individual rights abstracted from real social relations; freedom of contract between unequal classes; the liberal state as a supposedly neutral arbiter standing above society; and “freedoms” of speech, press, and association that in practice follow ownership and class power, up to and including a legal system that treats rich and poor “equally” such as criminalizing both for sleeping under bridges. These are not accidental features of liberalism or it’s values but flow directly from its idealist foundations.
Liberalism begins from abstract ideas (rights, the individual, the citizen) and treats them as primary, as if they exist independently of history and material conditions. Marxism begins from the opposite direction: dialectical and historical materialism, which treats those liberal categories as historically specific social products tied to a particular mode of production. That is a fundamental theoretical clash.
Because of this, Marxism does not aim to complete or realize liberal values, but to explain why they arise under capitalism and why they cannot deliver real human emancipation. So before talking about “sublation” or continuity, we need to be clear whether liberalism is being treated as an ideal to be fulfilled, or as an ideological form to be scientifically analyzed and superseded.
I agree that the liberal state is a tool for class power and that formal equality is often just a mask for material exploitation.
When I say liberalism is the basis of Marx’s work, I am referring to its humanist core: the promise of individual autonomy and self-determination. With the exception of private property, the values you listed contain a seed of humanism that is currently restricted to a select few.
Nothing forces a value like autonomy to be contingent on private property. Marx shows that private property is exactly what prevents autonomy for the majority. By explaining why these values fail under capitalism, Marx is not dismissing them. He identifies the property relations that prevent human progress. He argues that to actually realize the individual rights liberalism promises, we must first abolish the class power used to protect them for the few.
Even more so, Marx took a core liberal value, the free development of the individual, and proved it is materially impossible to achieve under a system of private property. He analyzed liberalism by holding it to its own standards, showing that the very system it created could never fulfill the values it proclaimed. This is why I call it incomplete because it offers the legal form of freedom without the material content.
Marxism does not do away with the individual. It identifies the material conditions, the abolition of class, required for the individual to be truly autonomous. Marx does not throw away the promise of the Enlightenment. He offers the only material path to make it a reality for everyone.
P.S. I think treating liberal idealism and Marxist materialism as mutually exclusive is a bit non-dialectical. Liberalism was a material response to feudalism, not just a daydream. Likewise, Marx did not start from zero with a cold science of factories. He took the enlightenment goal of human dignity and used a materialist method to discover why that goal was being strangled. To Marx, ideas are themselves a material force once they have gripped the masses and formed a collective consciousness. To suggest Marx had no guiding ideas is just as one-sided as suggesting that liberal thinkers were fully divorced from the material world.
The problem with what you’re saying is that what you are calling liberalism’s “humanist core” is not something that ever existed independently of class power. Individual autonomy and self-determination under liberalism were always conditional on property, status, and imperial position. From its very inception, liberalism expanded alongside chattel slavery, colonial conquest, and the super-exploitation of the global South. That is not an accident or a betrayal of liberal values; it is how those values were historically instantiated. What you describe as a “seed of humanism” was in practice a humanist façade, autonomy for those of means, domination for everyone else.
Because of this, removing private property from liberal values does not “complete” liberalism; it dissolves it. Liberalism without private property, hyper-individualism, and abstract rights is no longer liberalism at all. It is something qualitatively different. Marx does not take liberal values and try to realize them more consistently; he explains why they arise under capitalism, why they take the abstract form they do, and why they systematically fail. He critiques, he does not inherit. Marx holding liberalism to its own standards is a method of exposure, not an endorsement of those standards as foundational.
Saying Marx’s work has liberalism as its “basis” confuses historical sequence with theoretical grounding. Liberalism emerges historically after feudalism; that does not make feudal ideology the core of liberal thought. In the same way, Marxism emerges after liberal capitalism; that does not make liberal values its foundation. Marx’s starting point is not Enlightenment ideals but material production, class relations, and the contradictions of political economy. Liberal categories appear in his work because they are the dominant ideological forms of bourgeois society, not because they are his normative anchors.
On the individual: Marx does not abolish individuality, but neither does he center it the way liberalism does. In Marxism, the individual is always socially constituted, and their development is subordinate to and dependent on collective conditions. Every major communist thinker after Marx is explicit on this point: the collective is primary, and individual flourishing follows from transformed social relations. Liberalism inverts this, treating society as a constraint on an already-formed individual. That difference is structural.
Finally, on idealism versus materialism: acknowledging that liberalism arose from material conditions does not make it materialist. Feudalism also arose from material conditions; that does not make the divine right of kings or the Mandate of Heaven materialist doctrines. Liberalism remains idealist because it treats ideas like rights, autonomy, and citizenship as primary and self-justifying, rather than as historically specific expressions of material relations. Marx’s point that ideas can become a material force once they grip the masses presupposes it. Ideas act materially because they are rooted in material conditions, not because they float free as universal values.
Marx did not derive his ideas on emancipation from liberalism’s promises. He explained why those promises existed, why they were necessarily hollow under capitalism, and why a completely different social foundation was required to move beyond them. Liberalism is the object of Marx’s critique, not the core of his worldview.
Also I never said Marx didn’t have guiding ideas they just weren’t liberal they were Hegelian.
“He takes the some of the liberal achievements (rationalism, the end of feudal bondage, and the Labor Theory of Value) and shows that they can only be fully realized by moving beyond the capitalist mode of production”
I thought that was pretty clear. The achievements are to be fully realized which cannot be done without overthrowing liberal democracy. The full realizations of achievements are mutually exclusive with the continued existence of libdem
That might not be what they meant though. That’s just how I read it.
There’s been a subtle shift in the conversation that’s worth flagging first. The discussion started out about liberal values being the basis of Marx’s work, but it’s now sliding into talking about historical achievements that occurred under liberalism. Those aren’t the same thing, and conflating them is what’s causing the confusion. I’m hoping clarifying that distinction will put the discussion back on track.
Marx does argue that certain historical developments associated with the bourgeois revolutions were real and necessary. The end of feudal bondage is the clearest example. But this wasn’t the realization of a liberal value in the abstract; it was the result of changing material conditions and class struggle, specifically the rising power of the bourgeoisie. Private property rights functioned as the ideological and legal form that allowed those new relations to consolidate themselves. The “achievement” flows from material forces, not from liberal ideals being progressively fulfilled.
The same applies to rationalism and similar developments. Rationalized law, administration, and production emerge because capitalism requires them, not because liberalism is steadily perfecting its values. Marx analyzes these phenomena to explain how capitalism works and why it historically replaces feudalism, not to endorse the liberal worldview that accompanies them.
The labor theory of value isn’t a liberal achievement at all. Marx takes it from classical political economy as a scientific tool in order to expose exploitation and demonstrate the limits of capitalism. There is nothing there to be “fully realized” under communism; it’s a means of critique, not a value.
Yes, liberal democracy has to be overthrown for genuine human emancipation, that doesn’t mean Marxism is the fulfillment of liberalism. Liberal values are ideological expressions of bourgeois class power; the historical achievements associated with liberalism arise from material conditions and class struggle.
The core of Marx work is dialectical and historical materialism from which all his analysis flows which is directly at odds with the idealism at the core of liberalism from which it gets it’s values.
Yeah, you’re right. You and other user must agree on terms and on what you already agree on first.
I saw they had a similar experience of talking past each other with cowbee. They might be a particularly articulate wrecker, but I didn’t want to jump straight there.
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.
I don’t disagree with any of this and I’m not sure what I said that would have made you think I did.