The doctrine of the rights of man was faulty, according to Marx, because none of the supposed rights of man, 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the egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society; that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice. Thus man was not liberated from religion, he received religious liberty. He was not liberated from property, he received the liberty to own property. He was not liberated from the egoism of business, he received the liberty to engage in business.
For Marx, freedom of religion or the freedom to own property are hollow
freedoms, or at least grossly inadequate stepping stones to something better: “political emancipation itself is not human emancipation. [B]ourgeois ‘freedom of conscience’ is nothing but the toleration of all possible kinds of religious freedom of conscience, and that for its part [socialism] endeavors rather to liberate the conscience from the witchery of religion.” (Critique of the Gotha Program).
Rather than advocating freedom for all
people, liberals really value only the freedom of the ruling class of capitalist society.
Marx accuses the liberal tradition of slighting the social nature of man. “Liberty is, therefore, the right to do everything which does not harm others… It is a question of the liberty of man regarded as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself.” Marx elaborates: “The right of property, is, therefore, the right to enjoy one’s fortunes and dispose of it as he will; without regard for other men and independently of society… It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his
The Term Paper on Explaining Marx
In Karl Marx's early writing on "estranged labour" there is a clear and prevailing focus on the plight of the labourer. Marx's writing on estranged labour is and attempt to draw a stark distinction between property owners and workers. In the writing Marx argues that the worker becomes estranged from his labour because he is not the recipient of the product he creates. As a result labour is ...
own liberty.”(On the Jewish Question)
Marx’s solution, the route to human emancipation, was Communism, which would give people the freedom that bourgeois society denies them. Communism is, he explains, “the positive transcendence of private property, or human self-estrangement, and therefore the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man… the complete return of man to himself as a social being…” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844) Man feels that the more he gives of himself, the less he is, and the more alienated he has become. Marx did not deny the close connection between personal freedom and property rights. Rather, he accepted their connection, and denounced both as manifestations of what he called “bourgeois freedom.”
