Marxist Liberalism True Liberalism Through

Marxist Liberalism True Liberalism through the Eyes of a Marxist Marxism was born out of the disillusionment of Liberalism, and so it aims at disproving many of the most fundamental elements of Liberalism itself. The theories of great minds such as John Locke, an early proponent of the ideas of Liberalism, automatically evoke critique from the eyes of a Marxist. His views of innate individual rights and the importance of private property are at the center of much Marxist critique.

Despite the liberal view that everyone has certain inalienable and individual rights, Marxists believe that there are no innate natural rights ensuring individual liberty and that it is the work of the bourgeois to use this ideology instead to justify their own rights and behaviors. Another essential foundation for liberalism is the idea that private property is essential to improve oneself and show one's worth.

However, Marxists posit the quest for private property as a road to a life of slavery, desirous of property that one will never truly own nor does it hold any real significance. In his work the Second Treatise on Civil Government, John Locke explores the liberal belief that every human being is born with individual rights which ensure their freedom and happiness.

Locke defines the epitome of these individual rights as "a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they see fit," (Locke, 8). Law under liberal ideology then is formulated to protect each citizen from his or her natural individual rights becoming infringed upon. Each citizen should then lawfully be allowed his or her chance at happiness and the pursuit of wealth within their unique cultures and societies.

These rights, although they may be unlawfully infringed upon by tyrants and monarchies, are at the heart of each individual's existence and that government should protect and respect such rights. According to Locke and later liberal thought, "the natural liberty of man is to be free from any power on earth," (Locke, 17). However, Marxists hold a very different view on individual rights.

According to Marxist thought, these individual rights are merely a facade which cover the true nefarious intentions of the ruling class, "hence the illusion that the law is based on the will, and indeed on the will divorced from its real basis -- on free will," (Marx, 56). Marxists criticize the immense popularity of this liberal principle as a successful ploy of the bourgeois to keep the lower classes in a position of submission, while at the same time justifying their own actions and behaviors under the same stamp on approval.

Individual rights go hand in hand with the definition of the upper class, for it truly only the upper class which is allowed to practice those individual rights which they hold so dear, "he believes himself to be an individual only insofar as he is bourgeois," (Marx, 101). Another fundamental element of liberal theory and ideology is the right for each individual to pursue and hold private property.

According to Locke, each individual has the opportunity and the right to work to better oneself through the accumulation and improvement of their own private property, "it is allowed to be his goods who hath bestowed his labor upon it," (Locke, 21). This is also a crucial feature in the foundations of capitalism as well.

It ensures that as long as one works and labors hard enough, he or she will be entitled to a certain amount of private property to compensate for that labor, "As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property," (Locke, 22). It is with this idea that many societies have promised their underprivileged or poor the chance to rise above their inherited ranks and reach the American dream of turning rags to riches.

To a Marxist, this is close to blasphemy. They view the drive for private property as being the source of the perils seen in the capitalist structure. It provides the environment in which labor is divided as to attain more property, and therefore makes wage slaves out of laborers, "the division of labor and private property are, moreover, identical expressions," (Marx, 53). As the desire for private property grows, the bourgeois was formulated as the exploited those of the lower class to sustain and immense their wealth.

According to Karl Marx, this is "the contradiction between the individuality of each separate proletarian and labor, the condition of life forced upon him, becomes evident.