Locke vs. Marx: Comparing Conceptions of Freedom

Introduction: Two Ideological Pillars of the Modern World

Monticello, the mansion that Thomas Jefferson designed in the hills of Virginia near the state university that he founded, has three portraits on the wall of his study that have remained there for 200 years. These portraits depict three writers: Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke. Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and acquired the Louisiana Purchase from the French, referred to these three as "the greatest men who ever lived." Lockean reasoning is reflected in the Declaration, where Jefferson asserts that we hold life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be self-evident truths. A similar reverence was afforded Karl Marx in the Soviet Union, where many streets and several smaller cities were named after Marx and his fellow communist Friedrich Engels. One could argue that the primary ideologies of the twentieth century were those of Locke and Marx, as they were the muses that prescribed guiding principles for that century's two most powerful nations.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the premise that "the conceptions of freedom put forward by John Locke and Karl Marx are utterly incompatible." The null hypothesis is that they are not incompatible; the essay will then review arguments bearing on that compatibility.

Locke's Concept of Negative Freedom and Natural Rights

In popular rhetoric, the United States during the Cold War era was referred to as the "free world." This idea is predicated on the definition of freedom most popular among Locke-inspired classical liberals, who believed in the maintenance of what Isaiah Berlin calls negative freedom — the right to be left alone by those exercising political power. This idea is grounded in Locke's concept of freedom. It is the preservation of this freedom that is the chief end of a government established in a Hobbesian state of nature. Locke's idea is that government is the will of society, rather than a political apparatus within society that exerts power and influence as an independent organization. In this respect, he is not unlike Marx in his initial naivety about the state.

Locke saw negative freedom as among the original and natural rights of man, endowed by his creator. Rather than granting men these freedoms, Locke believed that government exists in order to secure them. From this he derives the notion that laws are limited by design: the power ceded to the government exists only insofar as it retains utility in protecting natural rights, the basis of which are property rights.

Locke on Property: Labor, Frontier, and the Commons

Locke begins the chapter of the Second Treatise on Government dealing with property by saying: "I shall endeavour to show how men might come to have a property in several parts of that which God gave to mankind in common, and that without any express compact of all the commoners." Locke maintains that God — whom we can assume to be all-powerful and the original owner of all property — gave the world to mankind, but implies that this gift, although given to man in common, necessitates division. This necessity is mandated by the nature of consumption, which extinguishes common property as its benefits are transferred to the individual. Locke puts this more eloquently: "The fruit or venison which nourishes the wild Indian, who knows no enclosure, and is still a tenant in common, must be his, and so his — i.e., a part of him — that another can no longer have any right to it before it can do him any good for the support of his life." (Locke, Chapter 5)

Much of what Locke goes on to say about property is predicated on the existence of a frontier or a commons. In this, he lays himself open to the informed criticisms of Marxist opponents, and it falls to classical and neo-classical liberals to explain why the individual ownership of property is a more fitting liberty than its collective maintenance by a state apparatus entrusted with its stewardship. Locke claims that "the 'labour' being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others." (Locke, Chapter 5) A Marxist critical theorist would claim that in a world defined by scarcity, men are born empty-handed and that labourers are effectively robbed of what they create, even within a free-market capitalist society. Such theorists distinguish between personal property (such as an apple or a sweater) and capital capable of generating income (such as a lake or a factory).

However, Locke addresses these questions when speaking of the property of servants: "By making an explicit consent of every commoner necessary to any one's appropriating to himself any part of what is given in common. Children or servants could not cut the meat which their father or master had provided for them in common without assigning to every one his peculiar part." (Locke, Chapter 5) Here we see that Lockean freedom is not only individualistic but contractarian as well. Locke's philosophy is predicated on the abundance of the frontier; Marx's invokes the limitations of a finite number of wealth-producing enterprises held by the bourgeoisie. Locke claims that "as much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property." Although it could be said that in the Marxist world no such frontier exists, we cannot claim that Marx and Locke held comparable views of such an entity.

Conclusion: Incompatibility of Lockean and Marxist Freedom

At times, Marxist doctrine sounds deceptively like the liberalism that is its stated opponent — the same liberalism inspired by Locke and clarified by other philosophers such as Hume and Smith. According to Marx, "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." This sounds remarkably like Herbert Spencer's law of equal freedoms: "Each man should be free to act as he chooses, provided he trenches not on the equal freedom of each other man to act as he chooses." (Herbert Spencer, Social Statics)

However, Marx goes on to condemn property, stating: "The right of property is, therefore, the right to enjoy one's fortune and dispose of it as one 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 own liberty." (Marx, On the Jewish Question) This distinction reveals the deep structural difference between the two thinkers: what appears to be a shared commitment to non-interference dissolves once property enters the picture.

This is where Marx and Locke are opposites. Locke's system, in which freedom is guaranteed, is predicated on the existence of property, whereas Marx believes that the existence of private property precludes "true" freedom. Although it can be said that Marx's view of property deals more aptly with the concerns of industrial society, this can largely be attributed to the fact that Locke and Marx were far from contemporaries. Locke's philosophy was destined to inspire the liberalism that Marxist philosophies later took as their primary target.

The best examples of these competing nineteenth-century economic theories can be seen in the works of Henry George — a populist who wished to ensure plurality by limiting the ability of property owners to hoard natural resources — and Herbert Spencer, an English sociologist who incorporated Darwinism into his defenses of what is now termed classical liberalism and famously advocated "the right to ignore the state." Taken together, these thinkers illustrate that the tension between Lockean and Marxist conceptions of freedom was not merely abstract: it shaped the central political debates of the modern era.