Liberal Freedoms Were Won Despite, Not Because of, Capitalism
Leftists have often dismissed liberal freedoms as a justification for capitalist domination. This is wrong. Exploited and oppressed people across the globe fought for these rights against an illiberal elite.
The leader of the German Social Democratic Party, August Bebel, speaking at the party conference in Mainz, Germany. The SPD fought for liberal freedoms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Ullstein Bild via Getty Images)
What will communism be like? Anti- or at least nonliberal seems to be the consensus among sections of the Right and Left. The former fear that socialists are after their hard-won freedoms; the latter, harboring early-twentieth-century-inspired fantasies of revolutionary violence, see in liberalism nothing but an obstacle to political change. This construal of what is at stake in struggles for socialism has served to discredit the Left in the eyes of ordinary people, who hear in talk of breaking with liberalism a crypto-authoritarianism.
Are they right? In Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality and Rights, Igor Shoikhebrod seeks to move past the simplistic question of whether the author of Capital was “for or against” liberalism. Worse than misleading, this framing has had deleterious effects on our political imaginations.
Marx: For or Against Liberalism?
The dominant approach, according to Shoikhebrod, is to understand Karl Marx as rejecting liberal notions of rights because they presuppose “the estranged and egoistic individual of bourgeois society.” The liberal idea of justice should then be dispensed with because it is “a barrier to a richer conception of human freedom.” Properly understood, communism is beyond justice and rights, which anti-liberal Marxists see as an ideological justification of bourgeois oppression in the interest of the ruling class. Whatever communism turns out to be, it does away with the partisan and individualistic nature of the law under liberalism in favor of a radically distinct alternative. Having rid itself of scarcity, communist society would make private property rights and their pervasive influence on the legal system unnecessary.
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