I agree that liberalism has historically functioned as a facade for domination. But just as chemistry emerged from the quest of alchemy, Marxism identifies the germ of humanism within the chaff of the liberal state. I am not suggesting we complete liberalism, but that we realize its hollowed-out promises by stripping away its class-bound distortions. Just as liberalism sublated feudal honor into human dignity of the citizen, Marxism sublates the abstract citizen into the social individual. What is preserved isn’t always the core of the historical era, but what allows for the continual, universal, and material emancipation in ever widening circles from the political to the human. The extension of emancipation to all is his normative anchor.

Regarding the individual: simply inverting the liberal structure and placing the collective conditions where the individual used to be is a mechanical negation, not a dialectical synthesis. If the individual is merely subordinate to the collective conditions, alienation remains.

“The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances… forgets that it is men who change circumstances.” - Theses On Feuerbach

You cannot transform collective conditions without the development of individual class consciousness. These two are in a bidirectional, internal relationship. They sublate one another. The result is an association of free individuals who are conscious of their social nature, not cogs in a machine.

“Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.” - Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

You say that Marx’s guiding ideas were Hegelian, not liberal. But Hegel was the philosopher of the modern liberal subject. He didn’t seek to abolish the individual in favor of the collective; he sought to move the individual from an abstract freedom (the right to be left alone) to a concrete freedom (the power to act in a rational society). Marx is working within the tradition of human emancipation. He isn’t trying to subordinate the person to the collective; he is using Hegelian logic to find a material way to actually achieve the individual autonomy that Liberalism promised but could never deliver.

I am at peace with leaving the argument here: for Marx, the collective is the means, but the ‘complete return of man to himself’ is the end. To lose sight of that human end is to lose the very essence of the critique.

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.

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.

– On The Jewish Question

I don’t disagree with any of this and I’m not sure what I said that would have made you think I did.

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.

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.

PS… Dig your username

“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.

Poor… And not normal poor, but wartime poor. It was invented by Heinz to sell beans in England.

Capitalism, (needlessly) increases competition for resources, access to markets, and even results in fierce competition over abstract things.

Because there is an increased competition for resources, resource hoarding increases as well. Managed release of those resources along with who deserves access to those resources is a political endeavor. Not at the level of the state, but when you end up having a laissiz-faire system, there is no state to prevent hoarding of necessities. And now a situation can emerge where one company hoards a necessary resource and manages its release to some and not others. They will have become the state.

Lol

I didn’t know there was a titular line in Star Wars.