Karl Marx Was Right--Well, Sort of!

Part 9a in a series . . .

This two-part essay is the ninth in a series tracing historically the philosophic battle of ideas between the proponents and critics of what I consider to be the two core moral concepts in Western ethical discourse: self-interest and self-sacrifice. The first half of this essay on Marx will examine Marx’s analysis and assessment of classical liberalism, particularly its grounding of limited government and natural rights in the doctrine of self-interest. The second half of this essay (to be published separately in a couple of weeks) will examine Marx’s moral alternative to a society grounded in self-interest. I shall there demonstrate that Marxian communism was based on the collectivist idea of “species-being.”

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By the middle of the nineteenth century, after almost 2,500 years of philosophical and theological criticism, what Alexis de Tocqueville called the “doctrine of self-interest” (enlightened and rightly understood) finally gained a foothold in Western moral, political, and economic thought and practice. Thinkers and statesmen such as John Locke, Adam Smith, America’s founding fathers, and Tocqueville created a safe space in modern society for individuals to act relatively guilt-free in pursuit of their self-interest. Their explication and defense of self-interest was incomplete and flawed in certain decisive respects, but represented a near revolution in the history of moral thought and practice. To be liberated from the doctrine of self-sacrifice was, at the very least, a moment of great historical significance.

This new teaching provided the moral foundation for a more comprehensive political-economic theory that we know today as classical or Enlightenment liberalism, which reached its peak by the nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle. The classical-liberal ideal, which found its highest practical expression in Great Britain and the United States, promoted governments that might be described as Lilliputian because they were limited in their purposes and powers to protecting the natural and civil rights of individuals and not much more than that.

These new liberal or laissez-faire governments were supported by what I call the four pillars of a free society: 1) separation of economy and State; 2) separation of church and State; 3) separation of school and State; and 4) separation of culture and State. Though the proponents of the classical-liberal political system did not characterize their principles in these exact terms, they did achieve them effectually in practice. There was by the nineteenth century a de facto separation of economy, church, school, and culture from the State, which resulted in the creation of the greatest sphere of human freedom ever experienced by humankind.

Classical-liberal political philosophy culminated in what is sometimes called the Night Watchman form of government, which was wonderfully encapsulated in the following passage from A. J. P. Taylor’s history of early twentieth-century England. Taylor described life in England before the beginning of World War I in these highly attractive terms:

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the State, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. . . . Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the State who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: . . . less than 8 per cent of the national income. . . . [B]roadly speaking, the State acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

This new social-political-economic system, which was unprecedented in human affairs, caused an explosion in wealth creation. The era of laissez-faire capitalism liberated millions of individuals to pursue their self-interest without the permission of Church or State. By protecting private property, enforcing contracts, and otherwise leaving markets free, this system of free economic production and trade liberated individual ingenuity and incentivized the risk-taking necessary to build the modern world. The result was a stunning increase in human productivity, rapidly improving living conditions, and, ultimately, a transformation of the human condition.

The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the political revolution of the eighteenth led to the technological and then to the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution, spurred by the moral right of men to pursue their self-interest in a sphere of social, political, and economic freedom, completely shattered the way of life associated with the ancien regime. Individual initiative, technological innovation, and the freedom to produce and trade led to an economic revolution the likes of which the world had never seen. The invention of hundreds if not thousands of new technologies (e.g., the steam engine, the power loom, the Bessemer process for steel, and the telegraph to name just a few) revolutionized the human condition.

The result was an avalanche of affordable goods and services hitherto unknown or unavailable to the mass of men and women. This sheer abundance of material goods represented a revolution in the quality of daily life for tens of millions of people around the world. This surge in productivity translated almost immediately into improved living standards, lifting masses of formerly poor and desperate people out of the poverty that had defined the human experience for millennia. Real wages for workers in the United States and Great Britain skyrocketed upward over the century. A new middle class emerged in the nineteenth century that was granted unprecedented opportunities to improve the condition of their lives, and which achieved standards of living unimaginable to their grandparents.

The natural-rights republics and laissez-faire governments of the nineteenth century created spheres of freedom for tens of millions of people that were unmatched in human history. At no time and at no place in human history had more people been liberated to pursue their self-interest and to create unprecedented amounts of wealth for themselves and their families. Capitalism freed and elevated millions of people out of poverty and disease. This is an undeniable fact.

Even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels admitted in the Communist Manifesto (1848) that capitalism was the most productive and efficient economic system ever devised by man:

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

The problem with capitalism from their perspective is that it is immoral and unjust. Capitalism is grounded morally, they argued, in “naked self-interest,” in the “callous ‘cash payment,’” in the “icy water of egotistical calculation,” and in “naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” Capitalism is, in other words, the embodiment of the completed Thrasymachian regime.

Karl Marx Rethinks the World

This is the world into which Karl Marx (1818-1883) was born, and that he hated with every fiber of his being. Marx’s ideological and political goal was to destroy the classical-liberal world and to usher in a new kind of society and even a new human type.

In a remarkably short span of time, the philosophy of Karl Marx profoundly changed the course of human civilization. In fact, no system of ideas has transformed the world as quickly or as comprehensively as did the philosophy of Marx—not even the teachings of Jesus or Mohammed. At the height of political Marxism’s power and influence half the world was under its dominion, and the other half feared that it too would succumb to communist imperialism.

Many educated people tend to think of Marxism as primarily a “scientific” theory that attempts to describe the laws of economics and social organization, and which prophesizes the fall of capitalism and the triumph of socialism. Engels did claim for Marx that he was a “scientific” socialist. I do not think, however, that many people over the course of the last 150 years have been motivated to become socialists and communists by virtue of reading the interminably boring Das Kapital. Nor do I think Marx’s economic interpretation of history, his labor theory of value, or his theory of dialectical materialism have inspired men and women around the world to dedicate their lives to socialist revolution. There must be something much more powerful about Marxism that appeals to the moral views and psychology of certain kinds of people.

Let’s start with the obvious. Marxism’s promises were thoroughly “utopian” in scope—it promised to eliminate poverty, inequality, exploitation, class conflict, war, and alienation. Communism, Marx argued, would emancipate man from the “slavery” of capitalism and create a post-communist heaven of brotherly love on earth. Marxism therefore provided a kind of secular religion of hope and redemption in a world of declining religious faith.

Marx was also a master psychologist: He understood that there is a class of people in every society who, like himself, are motivated in their day-to-day lives by envy, resentment, and hatred. Such people always blame others for their condition and plight. Marxism speaks directly to such people. It comes to them as a gospel of anger, resentment, and victimhood. It tells such men why they suffer, and it tells them for whom they suffer. Marxism provides a kind of redemptive hope to those who are frustrated, impotent, angry, and unhappy.

But Marxism must be seen first and foremost as a moral theory. It is Marx’s moralism—his angry, spitting moralism and the allure it held for a certain kind of moral sensibility—that is the source of socialism’s greatest appeal. Coming to grips with the moral pathology that has driven so many people to Marxism is one of the great intellectual challenges of our time.

Marx’s political and economic philosophy is one of the most complex in the history of philosophic thought, but in the end the power of his thought can be reduced to his moral passions, and nowhere in his writings are those passions more on display than in his essay “On the Jewish Question,” which he published in 1843. Simply put, Marx’s moral passions can be reduced to what he hated and loved. Not to be banal, but at the highest level of abstraction, he obviously hated liberalism and capitalism and loved socialism and communism. But in his essay “On the Jewish Question,” Marx went beneath the surface of these moral-political-economic systems, and he there identified their deeper moral and even psychological foundations of capitalism and communism.

In a more fundamental sense, Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” is not primarily about Jews and Judaism, nor is it even about religion and its relationship to the State as its fundamental subject. “On the Jewish Question” is really about Marx’s understanding of what a free and liberal society is, why he was opposed to it, and what his alternative to it was.

Marx’s essay essentially reduces mankind’s fundamental moral alternative to the theme of this series of essays: selfishness versus selflessness. Like his Christian predecessors, Marx condemns selfishness and lauds selflessness (or, at least a form of it), but of course he does so from a non- if not an anti-Christian perspective. Marx was an atheist and therefore provided an entirely different foundation for and defense of selflessness. He viewed himself as a kind of secular Jesus, who hoped to eradicate selfishness from human nature and to restore man to his pre-Fall self.

In what follows, I shall examine Marx’s essay “On the Jewish Question” focusing on 1) his understanding of the core moral and political principles of classical liberalism; and 2) his critique of classical liberalism and its foundation in self-interest. In this second part of this essay to be published separately, I shall examine Marx’s his secular defense of selflessness and self-sacrifice, which serves as the moral foundation for his theory of socialism and communism. Marx’s argument is complex and deep, which means that I will have to work my way through the labyrinth before I get to the heart to the matter.

Marx’s Understanding of Classical Liberalism—Political Society

In 1843, a 25-year-old German “intellectual” named Karl Marx wrote and published an essay titled “On the Jewish Question.” The essay was written in response to two essays published by a fellow “Young Hegelian,” Bruno Bauer. Bauer’s essays—“The Jewish Question” and “The Capacity of the Present-Day Jews and Christians to Become Free”—issued three claims that captured Marx’s imagination: first, that German Jews must abandon their religious identity before they could be granted full political rights; second, that Christians must accept the full secularization of the Christian state; and third, that both Jews and Christians should abandon their religious beliefs to achieve true freedom, which could only be achieved in a secular state.

Bauer’s position, which was revolutionary for its time (at least in its European context), was viewed by Marx as radically insufficient. In fact, Marx viewed Bauer’s solution to the theological-political problem as not only too conservative but even as reactionary in the sense that it supported the liberal way of life, thus extending man’s physical and spiritual enslavement. Whereas Bauer viewed religion as the source of man’s alienation from his true self, Marx viewed the whole classical-liberal, moral-political-economic system as the ultimate source of man’s deepest alienation. From Marx’s perspective, Bauer’s position completed or perfected the classical-liberal world view, which Marx rejected entirely. Marx wanted to destroy the entire foundation and framework of the classical-liberal society.

Marx’s response to Bauer is built on an important distinction he drew between “political” and “human” emancipation. (I will discuss Marx’s notion of human emancipation in Part II of this essay.) For Marx, political emancipation means the implementation of two related principles: first, freedom from the State; and second, equality before the State. The first is what happens in liberal, political societies that strictly separate the State from religion, education, economics, and culture, etc. The second is what happens when the government of a free society grants citizenship and political rights to all individuals equally (e.g., the right to vote, to free speech and assembly, to practice religion freely, etc.), regardless of their private beliefs about matters such as religion, politics, or other cultural differences that divide people.

The result of implementing both principles in practice—principles that define the liberal political system—is that virtually all associational life becomes privatized. This means, for instance, that religion, education, economic activity, and cultural matters are removed in liberal society from their control by the public realm (i.e., from the control of government) to the sphere of private life in civil society, which, according to Marx, only exacerbates man’s alienation from his true communal self. In Marx’s words, the free and liberal society “allows private property, education, occupation, to act after their own fashion, namely as private property, education, occupation, and to manifest their particular nature.” This is what Marx hated the most about a free and liberal society. He despised the idea that human life would become privatized and that men would be motivated by their selfish desire to improve their lives and determine their own destinies. As we shall see, Marx wanted to create a society in which all men served the common good.

To see Marx’s broader point, let’s consider how he analyzed one of the four pillars of a free society. The principle and practice of separating Church and State, rather than abolishing religion, strengthens it by privatizing and therefore intensifying religious belief and practice. Political emancipation turns man in on himself and away from his fellow citizens. Marx made his point this way:

To be politically emancipated from religion is not to be finally and completely emancipated from religion, because political emancipation is not the final and absolute form of human emancipation.

The limits of political emancipation appear at once in the fact that the state can liberate itself from a constraint without man himself being really liberated; that a state may be a free state without man himself being a free man.

Marx uses the example of nineteenth-century America to support his point. Despite there being separation of church and State in the United States, “North America is,” according to Marx, “pre-eminently the country of religiosity.” In fact, in America, where the liberal-secular State has been brought to near perfection, religion is “fresh and vigorous.” In the United States, according to Marx, political emancipation (which means freedom from the State and freedom from one’s fellow citizens) has reached its highest or most complete level. For Marx, political emancipation is part of the problem and not a part of the solution.

Marx understood that the principle and practice of political emancipation—i.e., separation of church, school, economics, and culture from the State—was grounded on deeper moral principles. Indeed, very much to his credit, he saw better than most defenders of the classical-liberal tradition (including modern-day conservatives) what its deepest moral foundation was. Let us turn, then, to the deepest layer of Marx’s analysis of a free and liberal society.

Marx’s Understanding of Classical Liberalism—Natural Rights

Marx was correct to identify the doctrine of individual or natural rights as the basis of liberal political society. The liberal doctrine of rights or “man’s rights” is grounded, according to Marx, in the view that each individual is a “sovereign being, a supreme being” with rights granted neither by government nor by God, but by virtue of man’s existence and nature. Marx attributes the discovery of what he calls the “most authentic form” of natural rights—the “rights of man” as opposed to the “rights of the citizen”—to the “North Americans and the French.” In other words, the full doctrine of man’s rights was discovered and implemented during the back-to-back periods of the American and French revolutions. In one form or another, all citizens of all political societies through all time have had civil rights of one kind or another, but the doctrine of man’s natural rights was only recognized and implemented in the second half of the eighteenth century.

What, according to Marx, is the grounding for the doctrine of the universal rights of man? His answer to this question, while shocking to some American conservatives, has the virtue of being true or at least mostly true. The doctrine of the rights of man, Marx claimed, means the freedom and right of the individual to improve his life and to pursue his own happiness. Or, as Marx put it, they are the rights of “egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community.” In his clearest and strongest formulation of the rights of man, Marx wrote:

None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society; that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice.

Marx knew enough to know that the “supposed” rights of man are connected to the “egoistic” individual, who is a sovereign being living in civil society who has a right to live for himself free of the demands and commands of others. Marx’s understanding of man’s rights recognizes that each individual is the proper unit of moral sovereignty. This means that man—each man—has a right to exist for his own sake, for his own self-interest. That part Marx gets exactly right.

The problem with Marx’s understanding of the doctrine of natural rights is that he ultimately reduces it to a form of subjective grasping. It is not true that the liberal teaching of man’s rights leads to man living inside the four walls of his own soul without family, friends, colleagues, neighbors, and a broader community. Nor is it true that the liberal doctrine of rights leads to the “private caprice” of men grasping for what is not theirs by right (i.e., the license to gratify of one’s irrational emotions, feelings, urges, wishes, or whims at the expense of others).

Still, Marx’s description of the doctrine of man’s rights is mostly correct. In his discussion of man’s rights, Marx recognized three fundamental rights of nature: security, liberty, and property. His analysis of each is worth examining.

Marx defined the right to security in these terms:

Security is the supreme social concept of civil society; the concept of the police. The whole society exists only in order to guarantee for each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights and his property. . . . The concept of security is not enough to raise civil society above its egoism. Security is, rather, the assurance of its egoism.

The right to security, as Marx is using it here, is either the foundational or the culminating right. In many ways the right to security is similar to, or synonymous with, what the Declaration of Independence referred to as the right to life. The right to security is the right to have one’s life (including one’s liberty and property) protected from those who would impose on it, violate it, or seek to destroy it. The right to life or security is the right to take those actions necessary to sustain and enhance one’s life, and it’s the right to be secure in one’s liberty and property. There is no life without liberty and property and there is no liberty and property without security. To his partial credit, Marx then goes on to state an important moral truth (evaded by American conservatives), namely, that the doctrine of rights is grounded in self-interest and “egoism.” This is simply an observational and a philosophic fact, and Marx gets it right. The problem, of course, is that he (like American conservatives) renders a negative moral judgment on the related principles of self-interest and egoism.

Marx then defines the right to liberty:

Liberty is, therefore, the right to do everything which does not harm others. The limits within which each individual can act without harming others are determined by law, just as the boundary between two fields is marked by a stake. It is a question of the liberty of man regarded as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself. . . .

But liberty as a right of man is not founded upon the relations between man and man, but rather upon the separation of man from man. It is the right of such separation. The right of the circumscribed individual, withdrawn into himself.

Marx’s description and understanding of the right to liberty is reasonably accurate but not entirely. He recognizes correctly that the doctrine of rights provides men with both a license to act freely in civil society and a fence to protect them from those who would initiate force or fraud against their rights. The quotation above, while descriptively, ostensibly, and partially true, does distort the meaning of true liberty by suggesting that it simply, absolutely, and forever separates men as “isolated monads” who are trapped inside their bodies and minds unable to escape and freely associate with other men in material and spiritual trades for mutual gain. Marx also smuggles into his definition of the right to liberty a negative moral judgment because it permanently sunders “the relations between man and man.” We know Marx’s claim is demonstrably false. At the very least, the relations between men in a rights-protecting society are changed rather than sundered. In fact, the free association that comes with liberty only strengthens the relational bonds between individuals.

Finally, Marx defined property in this way:

The right to property is, therefore, the right to enjoy one’s fortune and to dispose of it as one will; without regard for other men and independently of society. It is the right of self-interest. This individual liberty, and its application, form the basis of civil society. It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty.

Marx’s description and understanding of the right to property is mostly correct, and it is certainly better than the definition of property offered by many twentieth- and twenty-first century American conservatives. The first three sentences of the above paragraph identify the necessary and related components of the right to property: self-interest, liberty, and ownership. The right to act in one’s self-interest is synonymous with the right to life (i.e., taking those actions necessary to sustain and enhance one’s life); the right to liberty is the right to freely choose and act (i.e., the “application”) absent the interference of others; and the right to ownership is the right to acquire, keep, use, and trade that which one has produced and earned in one form or another. The last sentence of this quotation is more ambiguous. The concept “rights” is only meaningful in the context of men living in a community with other men. Marx seems to be suggesting that in a free society that protects men’s individual rights, man’s liberty is limited by living with other men (and there is a sense in which that is true), but there is also a sense in which man’s liberty is realized by living with other men in a society that protects individuals rights. The fact of the matter is that man’s liberty is restricted and/or denied in an uncivil society that does not protect the rights to life, liberty, and property.

Overall, Marx’s understanding and description of the doctrine of man’s rights is remarkably accurate. In fact, he saw what most twentieth- and twenty-first century conservatives do not see or want to see: that man’s natural rights are grounded in the principles of individual sovereignty and “self-interest.” This is invariably and inescapably true. Ironically, it is Karl Marx who understood the true and proper moral foundations of a free society better than many of its self-proclaimed defenders. The problem with Marx’s view of man’s natural rights is that he thought such a principle led to the corruption and destruction of man’s true self.

Marx’s Critique of Liberal Political Society

Despite accurately identifying the fundamental principles and institutions of a free society, Marx was contemptuous of liberal political society, where government was strictly limited to the narrow sphere of protecting man’s natural rights and where individuals were free from each other and from government to pursue their happiness. In his various political writings, he attacked the “bourgeois-liberal” idea of freedom as being merely “negative” and “formal.”

The political emancipation that came with liberal society led to, Marx contended, a duality in human existence. Man wears two hats in liberal political society, according to Marx, that force a division in his soul: on the one hand, in the public sphere, man is and acts as a universal, communal, and abstract citizen of the political community, where he has abstract, equal rights and selflessly pursues the common good; on the other hand, in the private sphere, the man of civil society is a private, egoistic, particular, and atomized individual, who pursues his self-interest at the expense of the common good.

Marx describes man’s bifurcated life in a liberal political society in these terms:

Where the political state has attained to its full development, man leads, not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life, a double existence—celestial and terrestrial. He lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society where he acts simply as a private individual, treats other men as means, degrades himself to the role of a mere means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers.

Marx is here suggesting that in the most advanced liberal political society where the State has emancipated itself from regulating religion, education, culture, and the economy and where men have an illusory sense of community by virtue of sharing equal rights, man the citizen and communal being is subjugated to man the private individual who only seeks his immediate, low-rent self-interest. In other words, in liberal society, according to Marx, man is in the grips of a morally grotesque passion and is alienated from his true self, which is as a communal being. In liberal society, man’s soul becomes a slave to his “egoism.” Man in liberal society is “separated from the community, from himself and from other men.” The result is, according to Marx, the division of man’s soul in which he lives a “double existence” and there is a “conflict between the general interest and the private interest, the schism between the political state and civil society” that leads inevitably to the “bellum omnium contra omnes,” which is the war of all against all.

To his credit, Marx correctly identified the core principles and institutions of a free society, but he then went on to morally denounce those principles and institutions. Specifically, he rejected and condemned the free society’s core triad of principles and institutions: self-interest, individual rights, and limited government. Indeed, Marx was morally repulsed by liberal society and its underlying principles and institutions, particularly the principles of self-interest and egoism. Marx assessed the liberal society this way:

[E]goism, is the principle of civil society, and is revealed as such in its pure form as soon as civil society has fully engendered the political state. The god of practical need and self-interest is money.

The sign of the English pound, Deutsche Mark, French Franc, or U.S. dollar represented the ultimate symbol of self-interest and egoism for Marx. A free society grounded in the rights of individuals establishes “egoism and selfish need” in the place of man’s communal needs, and thus dissolves “the human world into a world of atomistic individuals.” In Marx’s caricature of liberal society, the individual is “corrupted, lost to himself, alienated, subjected to the rule of inhuman conditions and elements, by the whole organization our society.” In liberal society, the individual is “an alien being distinguished from the real man.”

Marx’s assessment of liberal society raises the obvious and related questions: who or what is the “real man” and what is the best kind of society for Marx?

I shall attempt to answer these questions in Part II of this essay.

**A reminder to readers: please know that I do not use footnotes or citations in my Substack essays. I do, however, attempt to identify the author of all quotations. All of the quotations and general references that I use are fully documented in my personal drafts, which will be made public on demand or when I publish these essays in book form.