No man combats freedom; at most he combats the freedom of others. Hence every kind of freedom has always existed, only at one time as a special privilege, at another as a universal right. 1
The language of right, or the “morality of Recht,”2 occupies a central place in the liberal philosophical tradition. As a political philosophy, liberalism lends itself to a range of perspectives that share an underlying normative commitment to the freedom and equality of individuals, whose dignity and moral worth are secured primarily through the device of rights.3 Whereas the classical liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries aimed at promoting unfettered market exchange and protecting private property within the bounds of a minimal state, modern or social liberalism is oriented towards securing individual rights within the parameters of a redistributive social state. Differences notwithstanding, it is commonplace to view Karl Marx’s critique of liberalism through his dismissal of rights as the manifestation of the estranged and egoistic individual of bourgeois society. According to an interpretation that is now widespread, Marx rejects the liberal conception of justice and sees rights only as a barrier to a richer conception of human freedom. This book challenges this prevailing orthodoxy concerning Marx’s treatment of right and reaffirms the relevance of his critique of liberal justice in a global political-economic context that is characterized by substantive inequities in the ownership and distribution of social wealth.
1.1 The Theoretical Background: Then and Now
It should be noted from the outset that the German word Recht4 can refer simultaneously to a system of law, a legal or moral right, and a standard of rightness or justice. Consequently, one should bear in mind the multiple meanings that Recht has in German and the challenges that this can pose for Anglo-American interpreters. I have intentionally opted to translate Recht as “right” because the concept carries an important normative dimension that is not captured by the ordinary sense of positively enacted law. The difference between a system of law and statutory laws corresponds to the distinction in German between Recht and Gesetz. A subsidiary distinction is made between Recht (a system of law/justice) and Rechte (rights). Notwithstanding difficulties of translation, the context should make it clear when Marx is referring to positive law (e.g. censorship legislation, the Prussian wood theft law, and the English Factory Acts), when he has in mind a system of law or justice (e.g. “bourgeois right”), and when he is thinking of the rights possessed by individuals within a system of law.
Leading political philosophers and Marxologists have long argued that Marx’s assessment of right and rights is consistently negative. This presumably explains why both would be abolished, along with capitalist private property and classes, when the ideal of human emancipation is realized in the future communist society.5 While scholars typically point to “On the Jewish Question” and the Critique of the Gotha Program as evidence for Marx’s antipathy towards juridical language, the prognosis that right will “wither away” received its most systematic elaboration in the work of the Soviet legal theorist Evgeny Pashukanis.6 Drawing on Marx’s analysis of the commodity form in Capital, Pashukanis argued that right is a distinctly capitalist phenomenon that originated in exchange relations between rival commodity owners in the market. Pashukanis concluded that the abolition of commodity exchange relations under communism would pave the way for the disappearance of right and the introduction of a purely technical form of regulation, the aim of which would be administrative efficiency.7
The negative depiction of right and its historical irrelevance in communist society was not confined to the Marxism of Evgeny Pashukanis. The ethical dimensions of Marx’s thought generated considerable interest among Anglo-American philosophers in the 1970s and 1980s, although much of the philosophical debate at the time centred on whether or not Marx considered capitalism unjust.8 As regards the future of right in communist society, the dominant interpretation has been that of Allen Wood, who infers that the end of class antagonisms in communist society would mean the disappearance of the state along with the juridical concepts of right and justice.9 Not long after Wood’s intervention, Steven Lukes inquired whether Marxists can consistently endorse the idea of human rights, and the answer to his query was resoundingly negative.10 The erudite ex-Marxist Leszek Kołakowski went further still by insisting that Marxist philosophy is inhospitable to the idea of human rights, because it is based on the view that human beings are social beings and that their value is not related to their personal lives but to their being members of a collective whole.11 Kołakowski followed in the familiar footsteps of prominent liberal philosophers such as Isaiah Berlin by drawing a seemingly unavoidable link between Marxist philosophy and socialist totalitarianism.12
To be sure, the stifling of civil rights and freedoms in the former Soviet Union and other state socialist regimes did much to discredit the emancipatory claims of Marxist theory, just as it dealt a heavy blow to socialist political practice.13 Since the collapse of state socialism, it has been fashionable to dismiss Marx’s critique of liberalism on the grounds that any conceivable alternative to capitalist democracy would result in some form of totalitarianism, while the origin of this totalitarianism is typically traced back to Marx’s contempt for liberal rights and the rule of law.14 Instead of examining the merits and limitations of Marx’s critique, the prevailing attitude among most of Marx’s critics has been that the debate has long since been settled and that Marx’s critique of liberalism was decisively discredited by the monstrous regimes that he helped inspire. The collapse of state socialism only emboldened champions of neoliberalism as they celebrated the “end of history.”15
Much has changed in the intervening years, and the end-of-history thesis is not as compelling as it once was, especially as capitalist democracies continue to recover from the after-effects of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. It is because Marx’s critique of liberalism has not been sufficiently theorized—either by its proponents or by its detractors—that the time is ripe for a reconsideration of his nuanced outlook on both right and rights. This task becomes all the more necessary as political theorists increasingly turn to the terrain of global justice and the discourse of socio-economic rights in confronting issues of poverty, economic inequality, and precariousness in a globalized political economy.16
In contrast to the time when Marxism was in disrepute and struggling to make itself relevant in academia, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in Marx’s work among political theorists.17 Among Anglo-American philosophers, G.A. Cohen was arguably the most influential in shifting Marxist theory in the direction of normative political philosophy, replacing Marx’s recourse to dialectics and his critique of political economy with an explicitly moral defence of socialist equality. In Cohen’s view, the turn to normative philosophy was necessary because Marx’s optimistic predictions about the inevitability of socialism were not borne out, which meant that socialist ideals required rigorous normative justification.18 Some scholars have sought to overcome the ethical dearth that Cohen and like-minded critics associated with classical Marxism—as a result of its self-understanding as a scientific theory averse to any kind of moralizing—by unearthing a distinctly Marxist approach to ethics.19 Other scholars, such as Jeffrey Reiman and Ian Hunt, have offered theoretical syntheses of Marx’s critique of capitalism and John Rawls’s theory of justice.20 These theoretical models were preceded by earlier attempts at elaborating arguments in support of socialist versions of legality and rights; it should be noted, however, that such attempts were generally pursued outside of, and often in critical response to, Marx’s theoretical framework, since it was assumed that his outlook did not leave room for juridical considerations in post-capitalist society.21
1.2 The Aims of this Book
While this book is framed in the spirit of bringing Marx to bear on the events of the twenty-first century, it does so by offering a reconstruction of Marx as a critic of liberalism whose social theory shows the movement beyond capitalism and the liberal conception of justice. Such a reconstruction should not be confused with an attempt to transform Marx into a conventional liberal or, for that matter, to interpret him as an early advocate of socialist egalitarianism.22 While Marx recognized the value of various liberal ideals (in particular, the opposition to autocracy and feudal privilege), he was adamant that the capitalist mode of production, together with its narrow horizon of rig...