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To cite this article: Jeffrey Friedman (1988) Marxism and liberalism, Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society, 2:4,
6-8, DOI: 10.1080/08913818808459536
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Jeffrey Friedman
Andrzej Walicki opens this special issue on Marx and Marxism with
an exhaustive discussion of the precise nature of Marx's version of in-
dividual freedom. Given the richness of Walicki's account, it might be
worth pointing out some of the arguments which bear directly on the
theme of Marxism's relation to liberalism. Walicki, accepting the basic
continuity of Marx's thought, contends that the despotic tendencies of
twentieth-century socialism are a logical though wholly unintended
product of ideas that undergird the entirety of Marx's corpus; thus, he
brings to even Marx's early writings profound criticisms of the form
of Marx's libertarianism. In effect, Marxism can be understood as a
source of "really existing" socialist despotism inasmuch as it offers a
socialist version of Rousseau's positive definition of freedom. Marx
advocates freedom from alienation, i.e., from the impersonal forces of
the market, rather than from the socially-induced selfish impulses that
Rousseau claims prevent people from pursuing the common good. In
neither case, however, is it the direct coercion of other human beings
which is held to be the enemy of freedom, but instead subtle cultural
forces which prevent human beings from being truly human—i.e., in
Rousseau's case, truly moral; in Marx's, truly self-creating.
On this reading, it is not just that Marx's libertarian-humanist
ideals are frustrated by the dynamics of really existing socialist prac-
tice: for by defining individual freedom in terms of the human species-
essence rather than individual, negative, "atomistic" liberty, Marx
made market exchange, or any spontaneous (undesigned) social order,
into an intolerable source of alienation from the libertarian human es-
6
Friedman • Marxism and Liberalism 7
sympathy with Marxism, underscore the fact that both classical and
Western Marxism do, after all, criticize capitalism—an economic sys-
tem, albeit one with great cultural consequences. For these criticisms
to have political significance—for them to be objections against not
the universal "human condition" but against changeable institutions—
they must at least implicitly propose an alternative to capitalism, no
matter how little attention that alternative has received in the Marxist,
and especially the Western Marxist, tradition. Without the premise of
feasible socialism, the neo-liberalism represented here argues, con-
demnations of the culture of capitalism may illuminate our situation,
but they do nothing to delegitimize it.