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Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society


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Marxism and liberalism


Jeffrey Friedman
Published online: 01 Sep 2008.

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

MARXISM AND LIBERALISM


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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

sence. In Walicki's view, then, Marx's critique of spontaneous eco-


nomic order assumes a pivotal role in his theory, and central economic
planning and its accompanying tyranny is revealed as being neither an
alien form grafted onto Marxism in the twentieth century nor as an
unfortunate imperative of the economics of socialism, but instead as
the very fulfillment of Marx's libertarian doctrine.
Kai Nielsen's essay, which contests the notion that Marxism must
reject the concept of morality, may be seen as complementing Wa-
licki's argument in two indirect senses. First, it explains how the indis-
putably moral concept of human freedom which is Walicki's topic
could have played a central role in a putatively scientific system of
thought; second, by situating Marx in the Enlightenment tradition of
seeking emancipation through reason, it shows why (a Hegelian ver-
sion of) human freedom did serve as Marx's goal, and perhaps even
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why Marx viewed submission to the "blind chance" of market forces


as particularly loathsome.
Chris Sciabarra then takes up the Utopian implications of the desire
to overcome such chance. It is Marx's utopianism that may reconcile
the contributions of David Felix on Marx and J. G. Merquior on Lu-
kacs—which seek, among other things, to identify religious elements
in Marxism—with the view of Marx as Enlightenment rationalist. For
it is in the identification of alienation from one's fellows and from so-
ciety or economy at large as the primary human problem, and in the
faith that that problem can be solved—even though the solution re-
quires human, not divine activity—that religion and rationalism may
merge in Marxism.
The concluding contributions of David L. Prychitko and Peter J.
Boettke maintain that socialism cannot possibly accomplish what
Marx wanted it to: both the abolition of human subjection to market
forces and the continuation of economic prosperity. For in attempting '
to achieve the latter, Prychitko contends, decentralist socialists must
back into private property and the market economy; the only way to
avoid that, though, is to centralize the economy and destroy its pro-
ductivity, as Boettke argues was the fate of the Bolsheviks under war
communism. The reason for this dilemma, they argue, is to be found
in the critique of the possibility of "socialist calculation" first broached
in 1920, which emphasizes the knowledge-generating qualities of mar-
kets based on private ownership. Thus, although Sciabarra's discussion
of Marx's Utopian epistemological assumptions immediately follows
Nielsen's because of its relationship to Marx as an "Enlightenment"
figure, it could as profitably be read as a preface to the later essays by
Prychitko and Boettke.
8 Critical Review • Fall 1988

Those contributors who challenge Marxism, then, rely on three


fundamental contentions. First is Walicki's objection to the loss of
negative freedom necessitated by Marxian socialism—a classic argu-
ment, but one that has probably never been so clearly tied to Marx's
texts themselves. Second is the Sciabarra-Prychitko-Boettke theme of
the economic chaos attendant upon the Marxian abolition of market
relations. If valid, this undermines the claim that Marxism secures
positive liberty, as does the point highlighted by Prychitko, that if the
market is to be eschewed, decentralized political structures must inevi-
tably give way to centralized decisionmaking—if any economic ac-
tivity is to occur. All of these arguments relate to consequences of so-
cialism, and thus may be thought to be irrelevant to Marxism in its late
twentieth-century incarnation as a form of cultural critique. But the
contributions of Paul Thomas and Sonia Kruks, who join Nielsen in
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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.

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