Empancipation: an individual or collective idea

Marx’s typical seat at the table is far left, off to the side, perhaps labeled with terms like “radical” or “extremist”. Generally, far left ideas often resemble collective movements that prioritize communities, common well-fare and stray far from concepts of self-interest or individualism. It would be wrong to define leftist parties or ideologies with ideas of the individual since they are associated with liberal capitalist agendas. For this reason, I find an interesting nuance to Marx's emancipation argument in balancing self and collective interests.

Marx emphasizes the purpose of human nature as engaging with others socially and pursuing interests that are not just your own to be a “species-being”, which he explains when discussing the nature of man, “man is only living and acting authentically when he lives and acts deliberatively as a ‘species-being’ that is, as a social being” (35). In support of this, he details how a civil society in which we are under political emancipation but not human emancipation, is a society in which men are treated like means. Marx even says civil society provides bonds between men that only consist of natural necessity, private interest, property protection and egoistic persons (43). Ultimately, he is very clear that a civil society is a way of isolating man and withdrawing him from the community that his very being is meant to be part of - without the state. Therefore, true freedom seems to be the liberty that one derives from human emancipation. 


Interestingly, I find the motivation of why humans should want to be truly free very self-motivated. The idea of self-interest being a reason for seeking emancipation is contradictory to Marx’s core claims that the very fault of liberal states and civil societies is their pursuit of self-interest. Marx writes, “Man, in his most intimate reality, in civil society, is a profane being,” (34), profane because of man’s egoism - which Marx explains is the problem with the state. However, I find tension in how to understand men seeking human emancipation without egoism, for is it not one’s individual self interest that motivates them to want to have true freedom? I wonder what one derives from true freedom? I presume, power, I presume, autonomy and likely egoism. To embody ideals of emancipation and the true identity of communism, to be co-owners of society with individuals not defined by society or class, is it possible that one must still be motivated by their very own self interest to seek such emancipation? 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We're all separate but equal

During my tutorial with Dylan yesterday, he brought up the SCOTUS case Brown vs. Board of Education in our discussion of a minimal state. Whilst reading Marx, I realized that both the legal implication (state according rights to individuals) and the societal implication (abolishment of the 'separate but equal' doctrine) of the case are relevant to the claims Marx is making.  Marx delineates between two societies -- political and civil -- and further between the two lives one leads in each -- public and private. In a political society, man is entitled to the liberties given to him by the state, and considers himself a member of a functional community. Marx hints at the mirage of political society, writing that man is “the imaginary member of an imaginary sovereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and infused with an unreal universality” (34). In such a society, he leads a public life, one in which the state can establish political equality by abolishing “the distinctio...
Read more

What Brettschneider Ought to Admit: Democracy Is Substantive

Although Corey Brettschneider presents his value theory of democracy as a third way between pure proceduralism and outcome-based accounts, his framework collapses into substantivism. Despite insisting that democracy cannot be reduced to “procedure-independent evaluations of outcomes,”(2) he explicitly grounds democratic legitimacy in substantive rights that “limit those policy outcomes that would fail to respect citizens as rulers.” (20). Legitimacy therefore hinges not merely on fair participation but on conformity to three independently specified values—equality of interests, political autonomy, and reciprocity. These values operate as external normative standards against which democratic decisions are judged. Brettschneider treats policies such as ex post facto laws or vote buying as democratically illegitimate regardless of procedural authorization, making clear that outcomes remain subject to direct moral assessment. This is not procedural democracy supplemented by rights; it is ...
Read more

'Enough and as Good' for Whom?

 Both Hobbes and Locke describe a state of nature grounded in equality and natural law. Yet, they reach sharply different conclusions about property. Hobbes denies any possibility of owning property in the state of nature. Locke, by contrast, argues that individuals may aquire private property prior to any government by mixing their labor with common resources. By allowing pre-political appropriation, Locke commits himself to moral constraints on ownership.  Locke introduces these limits through two provisos. The Spoiling proviso requires that an individual only claim ownership over land/natural resources to what one can use before it spoils, critizicing waste as a violation of natural law: "Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy" (21). To me, this limit is relatively clear and intuitive.  More demanding, however, is Locke's second proviso, claiming that appropriation is only legitimate if "enough, and as good" is left in common for others. At first...
Read more