When I say liberal values are the ‘basis’ of Marx’s work, I am not suggesting he was a ‘liberal reformer.’ I am arguing that Marx’s work is a dialectical sublation of liberalism. He takes the some of the liberal achievements (rationalism, the end of feudal bondage, and the Labor Theory of Value) and shows that they can only be fully realized by moving beyond the capitalist mode of production. He doesn’t reject the ‘Individual’ out of hand; he rejects the liberal version of the individual (the abstract citizen) to make way for the real individual (the species-being).
Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.
I wrote a full reply but realized none of it really matters until we get clarity on terms. What do you actually mean by liberal values, and which of those do you think are foundational to Marxism?
When I say liberal values, I mean things like: the primacy of private property; formal equality before the law regardless of material conditions; individual rights abstracted from real social relations; freedom of contract between unequal classes; the liberal state as a supposedly neutral arbiter standing above society; and “freedoms” of speech, press, and association that in practice follow ownership and class power, up to and including a legal system that treats rich and poor “equally” such as criminalizing both for sleeping under bridges. These are not accidental features of liberalism or it’s values but flow directly from its idealist foundations.
Liberalism begins from abstract ideas (rights, the individual, the citizen) and treats them as primary, as if they exist independently of history and material conditions. Marxism begins from the opposite direction: dialectical and historical materialism, which treats those liberal categories as historically specific social products tied to a particular mode of production. That is a fundamental theoretical clash.
Because of this, Marxism does not aim to complete or realize liberal values, but to explain why they arise under capitalism and why they cannot deliver real human emancipation. So before talking about “sublation” or continuity, we need to be clear whether liberalism is being treated as an ideal to be fulfilled, or as an ideological form to be scientifically analyzed and superseded.
I agree that the liberal state is a tool for class power and that formal equality is often just a mask for material exploitation.
When I say liberalism is the basis of Marx’s work, I am referring to its humanist core: the promise of individual autonomy and self-determination. With the exception of private property, the values you listed contain a seed of humanism that is currently restricted to a select few.
Nothing forces a value like autonomy to be contingent on private property. Marx shows that private property is exactly what prevents autonomy for the majority. By explaining why these values fail under capitalism, Marx is not dismissing them. He identifies the property relations that prevent human progress. He argues that to actually realize the individual rights liberalism promises, we must first abolish the class power used to protect them for the few.
Even more so, Marx took a core liberal value, the free development of the individual, and proved it is materially impossible to achieve under a system of private property. He analyzed liberalism by holding it to its own standards, showing that the very system it created could never fulfill the values it proclaimed. This is why I call it incomplete because it offers the legal form of freedom without the material content.
Marxism does not do away with the individual. It identifies the material conditions, the abolition of class, required for the individual to be truly autonomous. Marx does not throw away the promise of the Enlightenment. He offers the only material path to make it a reality for everyone.
P.S. I think treating liberal idealism and Marxist materialism as mutually exclusive is a bit non-dialectical. Liberalism was a material response to feudalism, not just a daydream. Likewise, Marx did not start from zero with a cold science of factories. He took the enlightenment goal of human dignity and used a materialist method to discover why that goal was being strangled. To Marx, ideas are themselves a material force once they have gripped the masses and formed a collective consciousness. To suggest Marx had no guiding ideas is just as one-sided as suggesting that liberal thinkers were fully divorced from the material world.
The problem with what you’re saying is that what you are calling liberalism’s “humanist core” is not something that ever existed independently of class power. Individual autonomy and self-determination under liberalism were always conditional on property, status, and imperial position. From its very inception, liberalism expanded alongside chattel slavery, colonial conquest, and the super-exploitation of the global South. That is not an accident or a betrayal of liberal values; it is how those values were historically instantiated. What you describe as a “seed of humanism” was in practice a humanist façade, autonomy for those of means, domination for everyone else.
Because of this, removing private property from liberal values does not “complete” liberalism; it dissolves it. Liberalism without private property, hyper-individualism, and abstract rights is no longer liberalism at all. It is something qualitatively different. Marx does not take liberal values and try to realize them more consistently; he explains why they arise under capitalism, why they take the abstract form they do, and why they systematically fail. He critiques, he does not inherit. Marx holding liberalism to its own standards is a method of exposure, not an endorsement of those standards as foundational.
Saying Marx’s work has liberalism as its “basis” confuses historical sequence with theoretical grounding. Liberalism emerges historically after feudalism; that does not make feudal ideology the core of liberal thought. In the same way, Marxism emerges after liberal capitalism; that does not make liberal values its foundation. Marx’s starting point is not Enlightenment ideals but material production, class relations, and the contradictions of political economy. Liberal categories appear in his work because they are the dominant ideological forms of bourgeois society, not because they are his normative anchors.
On the individual: Marx does not abolish individuality, but neither does he center it the way liberalism does. In Marxism, the individual is always socially constituted, and their development is subordinate to and dependent on collective conditions. Every major communist thinker after Marx is explicit on this point: the collective is primary, and individual flourishing follows from transformed social relations. Liberalism inverts this, treating society as a constraint on an already-formed individual. That difference is structural.
Finally, on idealism versus materialism: acknowledging that liberalism arose from material conditions does not make it materialist. Feudalism also arose from material conditions; that does not make the divine right of kings or the Mandate of Heaven materialist doctrines. Liberalism remains idealist because it treats ideas like rights, autonomy, and citizenship as primary and self-justifying, rather than as historically specific expressions of material relations. Marx’s point that ideas can become a material force once they grip the masses presupposes it. Ideas act materially because they are rooted in material conditions, not because they float free as universal values.
Marx did not derive his ideas on emancipation from liberalism’s promises. He explained why those promises existed, why they were necessarily hollow under capitalism, and why a completely different social foundation was required to move beyond them. Liberalism is the object of Marx’s critique, not the core of his worldview.
Also I never said Marx didn’t have guiding ideas they just weren’t liberal they were Hegelian.
I agree that liberalism has historically functioned as a facade for domination. But just as chemistry emerged from the quest of alchemy, Marxism identifies the germ of humanism within the chaff of the liberal state. I am not suggesting we complete liberalism, but that we realize its hollowed-out promises by stripping away its class-bound distortions. Just as liberalism sublated feudal honor into human dignity of the citizen, Marxism sublates the abstract citizen into the social individual. What is preserved isn’t always the core of the historical era, but what allows for the continual, universal, and material emancipation in ever widening circles from the political to the human. The extension of emancipation to all is his normative anchor.
Regarding the individual: simply inverting the liberal structure and placing the collective conditions where the individual used to be is a mechanical negation, not a dialectical synthesis. If the individual is merely subordinate to the collective conditions, alienation remains.
“The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances… forgets that it is men who change circumstances.” - Theses On Feuerbach
You cannot transform collective conditions without the development of individual class consciousness. These two are in a bidirectional, internal relationship. They sublate one another. The result is an association of free individuals who are conscious of their social nature, not cogs in a machine.
“Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.” - Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
You say that Marx’s guiding ideas were Hegelian, not liberal. But Hegel was the philosopher of the modern liberal subject. He didn’t seek to abolish the individual in favor of the collective; he sought to move the individual from an abstract freedom (the right to be left alone) to a concrete freedom (the power to act in a rational society). Marx is working within the tradition of human emancipation. He isn’t trying to subordinate the person to the collective; he is using Hegelian logic to find a material way to actually achieve the individual autonomy that Liberalism promised but could never deliver.
I am at peace with leaving the argument here: for Marx, the collective is the means, but the ‘complete return of man to himself’ is the end. To lose sight of that human end is to lose the very essence of the critique.
Honestly, I agree we should leave this here. You’re not engaging Marx’s body of work, you’re engaging in quote-stacking to defend a position that directly contradicts Marxism as a scientific framework. That’s the same method religious radicals use: isolate passages, abstract them from their material context, and retrofit them to a preconceived conclusion.
Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Chairman Mao all have writings on this. Marxism is grounded in dialectical and historical materialism, which leads to the opposite conclusion from what you’re arguing. Your position remains idealist, you start from abstract values (“humanism,” “autonomy,” “dignity”) and then try to read Marx backward through them. Marxism starts from material production, class relations, and social practice.
Emancipation is not a “liberal value.” Liberal values emerge from capitalism and express its internal logic. The system cannot be separated from its so-called ideals. The purpose of a system is what it actually does. Liberalism historically produced slavery, imperialism, enclosure, colonial genocide, and modern wage exploitation. “Autonomy” and “self-determination” are structurally impossible under liberalism, they are not its values, they are ideological justifications. The marxist project is to explain this contradiction, not spiritually redeem it.
You also misrepresent what I said about the individual and collective with the “cogs in a machine” framing. That’s liberal projection. Marxism does not erase individuality, it shows that individuality is socially produced and materially conditioned. The collective is not merely a neutral tool; it is the necessary foundation for any real individual development. Liberalism inverts this by treating society as secondary to an abstract subject.
Marx inherits dialectics from Hegel, but he decisively breaks with Hegel’s reconciliation of the individual with the bourgeois state. Hegel attempts to philosophically justify modern society. Marxism locates contradiction in material production and aims at abolishing bourgeois society altogether.
Marxism is not liberal humanism completed. Liberalism is bourgeois ideology. Communism is not the realization of liberal autonomy; it is the abolition of the social relations that made liberal autonomy necessary as an abstraction.
“He takes the some of the liberal achievements (rationalism, the end of feudal bondage, and the Labor Theory of Value) and shows that they can only be fully realized by moving beyond the capitalist mode of production”
I thought that was pretty clear. The achievements are to be fully realized which cannot be done without overthrowing liberal democracy. The full realizations of achievements are mutually exclusive with the continued existence of libdem
That might not be what they meant though. That’s just how I read it.
There’s been a subtle shift in the conversation that’s worth flagging first. The discussion started out about liberal values being the basis of Marx’s work, but it’s now sliding into talking about historical achievements that occurred under liberalism. Those aren’t the same thing, and conflating them is what’s causing the confusion. I’m hoping clarifying that distinction will put the discussion back on track.
Marx does argue that certain historical developments associated with the bourgeois revolutions were real and necessary. The end of feudal bondage is the clearest example. But this wasn’t the realization of a liberal value in the abstract; it was the result of changing material conditions and class struggle, specifically the rising power of the bourgeoisie. Private property rights functioned as the ideological and legal form that allowed those new relations to consolidate themselves. The “achievement” flows from material forces, not from liberal ideals being progressively fulfilled.
The same applies to rationalism and similar developments. Rationalized law, administration, and production emerge because capitalism requires them, not because liberalism is steadily perfecting its values. Marx analyzes these phenomena to explain how capitalism works and why it historically replaces feudalism, not to endorse the liberal worldview that accompanies them.
The labor theory of value isn’t a liberal achievement at all. Marx takes it from classical political economy as a scientific tool in order to expose exploitation and demonstrate the limits of capitalism. There is nothing there to be “fully realized” under communism; it’s a means of critique, not a value.
Yes, liberal democracy has to be overthrown for genuine human emancipation, that doesn’t mean Marxism is the fulfillment of liberalism. Liberal values are ideological expressions of bourgeois class power; the historical achievements associated with liberalism arise from material conditions and class struggle.
The core of Marx work is dialectical and historical materialism from which all his analysis flows which is directly at odds with the idealism at the core of liberalism from which it gets it’s values.
Yeah, you’re right. You and other user must agree on terms and on what you already agree on first.
I saw they had a similar experience of talking past each other with cowbee. They might be a particularly articulate wrecker, but I didn’t want to jump straight there.
When I say liberal values are the ‘basis’ of Marx’s work, I am not suggesting he was a ‘liberal reformer.’ I am arguing that Marx’s work is a dialectical sublation of liberalism. He takes the some of the liberal achievements (rationalism, the end of feudal bondage, and the Labor Theory of Value) and shows that they can only be fully realized by moving beyond the capitalist mode of production. He doesn’t reject the ‘Individual’ out of hand; he rejects the liberal version of the individual (the abstract citizen) to make way for the real individual (the species-being).
I wrote a full reply but realized none of it really matters until we get clarity on terms. What do you actually mean by liberal values, and which of those do you think are foundational to Marxism?
When I say liberal values, I mean things like: the primacy of private property; formal equality before the law regardless of material conditions; individual rights abstracted from real social relations; freedom of contract between unequal classes; the liberal state as a supposedly neutral arbiter standing above society; and “freedoms” of speech, press, and association that in practice follow ownership and class power, up to and including a legal system that treats rich and poor “equally” such as criminalizing both for sleeping under bridges. These are not accidental features of liberalism or it’s values but flow directly from its idealist foundations.
Liberalism begins from abstract ideas (rights, the individual, the citizen) and treats them as primary, as if they exist independently of history and material conditions. Marxism begins from the opposite direction: dialectical and historical materialism, which treats those liberal categories as historically specific social products tied to a particular mode of production. That is a fundamental theoretical clash.
Because of this, Marxism does not aim to complete or realize liberal values, but to explain why they arise under capitalism and why they cannot deliver real human emancipation. So before talking about “sublation” or continuity, we need to be clear whether liberalism is being treated as an ideal to be fulfilled, or as an ideological form to be scientifically analyzed and superseded.
I agree that the liberal state is a tool for class power and that formal equality is often just a mask for material exploitation.
When I say liberalism is the basis of Marx’s work, I am referring to its humanist core: the promise of individual autonomy and self-determination. With the exception of private property, the values you listed contain a seed of humanism that is currently restricted to a select few.
Nothing forces a value like autonomy to be contingent on private property. Marx shows that private property is exactly what prevents autonomy for the majority. By explaining why these values fail under capitalism, Marx is not dismissing them. He identifies the property relations that prevent human progress. He argues that to actually realize the individual rights liberalism promises, we must first abolish the class power used to protect them for the few.
Even more so, Marx took a core liberal value, the free development of the individual, and proved it is materially impossible to achieve under a system of private property. He analyzed liberalism by holding it to its own standards, showing that the very system it created could never fulfill the values it proclaimed. This is why I call it incomplete because it offers the legal form of freedom without the material content.
Marxism does not do away with the individual. It identifies the material conditions, the abolition of class, required for the individual to be truly autonomous. Marx does not throw away the promise of the Enlightenment. He offers the only material path to make it a reality for everyone.
P.S. I think treating liberal idealism and Marxist materialism as mutually exclusive is a bit non-dialectical. Liberalism was a material response to feudalism, not just a daydream. Likewise, Marx did not start from zero with a cold science of factories. He took the enlightenment goal of human dignity and used a materialist method to discover why that goal was being strangled. To Marx, ideas are themselves a material force once they have gripped the masses and formed a collective consciousness. To suggest Marx had no guiding ideas is just as one-sided as suggesting that liberal thinkers were fully divorced from the material world.
The problem with what you’re saying is that what you are calling liberalism’s “humanist core” is not something that ever existed independently of class power. Individual autonomy and self-determination under liberalism were always conditional on property, status, and imperial position. From its very inception, liberalism expanded alongside chattel slavery, colonial conquest, and the super-exploitation of the global South. That is not an accident or a betrayal of liberal values; it is how those values were historically instantiated. What you describe as a “seed of humanism” was in practice a humanist façade, autonomy for those of means, domination for everyone else.
Because of this, removing private property from liberal values does not “complete” liberalism; it dissolves it. Liberalism without private property, hyper-individualism, and abstract rights is no longer liberalism at all. It is something qualitatively different. Marx does not take liberal values and try to realize them more consistently; he explains why they arise under capitalism, why they take the abstract form they do, and why they systematically fail. He critiques, he does not inherit. Marx holding liberalism to its own standards is a method of exposure, not an endorsement of those standards as foundational.
Saying Marx’s work has liberalism as its “basis” confuses historical sequence with theoretical grounding. Liberalism emerges historically after feudalism; that does not make feudal ideology the core of liberal thought. In the same way, Marxism emerges after liberal capitalism; that does not make liberal values its foundation. Marx’s starting point is not Enlightenment ideals but material production, class relations, and the contradictions of political economy. Liberal categories appear in his work because they are the dominant ideological forms of bourgeois society, not because they are his normative anchors.
On the individual: Marx does not abolish individuality, but neither does he center it the way liberalism does. In Marxism, the individual is always socially constituted, and their development is subordinate to and dependent on collective conditions. Every major communist thinker after Marx is explicit on this point: the collective is primary, and individual flourishing follows from transformed social relations. Liberalism inverts this, treating society as a constraint on an already-formed individual. That difference is structural.
Finally, on idealism versus materialism: acknowledging that liberalism arose from material conditions does not make it materialist. Feudalism also arose from material conditions; that does not make the divine right of kings or the Mandate of Heaven materialist doctrines. Liberalism remains idealist because it treats ideas like rights, autonomy, and citizenship as primary and self-justifying, rather than as historically specific expressions of material relations. Marx’s point that ideas can become a material force once they grip the masses presupposes it. Ideas act materially because they are rooted in material conditions, not because they float free as universal values.
Marx did not derive his ideas on emancipation from liberalism’s promises. He explained why those promises existed, why they were necessarily hollow under capitalism, and why a completely different social foundation was required to move beyond them. Liberalism is the object of Marx’s critique, not the core of his worldview.
Also I never said Marx didn’t have guiding ideas they just weren’t liberal they were Hegelian.
I agree that liberalism has historically functioned as a facade for domination. But just as chemistry emerged from the quest of alchemy, Marxism identifies the germ of humanism within the chaff of the liberal state. I am not suggesting we complete liberalism, but that we realize its hollowed-out promises by stripping away its class-bound distortions. Just as liberalism sublated feudal honor into human dignity of the citizen, Marxism sublates the abstract citizen into the social individual. What is preserved isn’t always the core of the historical era, but what allows for the continual, universal, and material emancipation in ever widening circles from the political to the human. The extension of emancipation to all is his normative anchor.
Regarding the individual: simply inverting the liberal structure and placing the collective conditions where the individual used to be is a mechanical negation, not a dialectical synthesis. If the individual is merely subordinate to the collective conditions, alienation remains.
You cannot transform collective conditions without the development of individual class consciousness. These two are in a bidirectional, internal relationship. They sublate one another. The result is an association of free individuals who are conscious of their social nature, not cogs in a machine.
You say that Marx’s guiding ideas were Hegelian, not liberal. But Hegel was the philosopher of the modern liberal subject. He didn’t seek to abolish the individual in favor of the collective; he sought to move the individual from an abstract freedom (the right to be left alone) to a concrete freedom (the power to act in a rational society). Marx is working within the tradition of human emancipation. He isn’t trying to subordinate the person to the collective; he is using Hegelian logic to find a material way to actually achieve the individual autonomy that Liberalism promised but could never deliver.
I am at peace with leaving the argument here: for Marx, the collective is the means, but the ‘complete return of man to himself’ is the end. To lose sight of that human end is to lose the very essence of the critique.
Honestly, I agree we should leave this here. You’re not engaging Marx’s body of work, you’re engaging in quote-stacking to defend a position that directly contradicts Marxism as a scientific framework. That’s the same method religious radicals use: isolate passages, abstract them from their material context, and retrofit them to a preconceived conclusion.
Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Chairman Mao all have writings on this. Marxism is grounded in dialectical and historical materialism, which leads to the opposite conclusion from what you’re arguing. Your position remains idealist, you start from abstract values (“humanism,” “autonomy,” “dignity”) and then try to read Marx backward through them. Marxism starts from material production, class relations, and social practice.
Emancipation is not a “liberal value.” Liberal values emerge from capitalism and express its internal logic. The system cannot be separated from its so-called ideals. The purpose of a system is what it actually does. Liberalism historically produced slavery, imperialism, enclosure, colonial genocide, and modern wage exploitation. “Autonomy” and “self-determination” are structurally impossible under liberalism, they are not its values, they are ideological justifications. The marxist project is to explain this contradiction, not spiritually redeem it.
You also misrepresent what I said about the individual and collective with the “cogs in a machine” framing. That’s liberal projection. Marxism does not erase individuality, it shows that individuality is socially produced and materially conditioned. The collective is not merely a neutral tool; it is the necessary foundation for any real individual development. Liberalism inverts this by treating society as secondary to an abstract subject.
Marx inherits dialectics from Hegel, but he decisively breaks with Hegel’s reconciliation of the individual with the bourgeois state. Hegel attempts to philosophically justify modern society. Marxism locates contradiction in material production and aims at abolishing bourgeois society altogether.
Marxism is not liberal humanism completed. Liberalism is bourgeois ideology. Communism is not the realization of liberal autonomy; it is the abolition of the social relations that made liberal autonomy necessary as an abstraction.
“He takes the some of the liberal achievements (rationalism, the end of feudal bondage, and the Labor Theory of Value) and shows that they can only be fully realized by moving beyond the capitalist mode of production”
I thought that was pretty clear. The achievements are to be fully realized which cannot be done without overthrowing liberal democracy. The full realizations of achievements are mutually exclusive with the continued existence of libdem
That might not be what they meant though. That’s just how I read it.
There’s been a subtle shift in the conversation that’s worth flagging first. The discussion started out about liberal values being the basis of Marx’s work, but it’s now sliding into talking about historical achievements that occurred under liberalism. Those aren’t the same thing, and conflating them is what’s causing the confusion. I’m hoping clarifying that distinction will put the discussion back on track.
Marx does argue that certain historical developments associated with the bourgeois revolutions were real and necessary. The end of feudal bondage is the clearest example. But this wasn’t the realization of a liberal value in the abstract; it was the result of changing material conditions and class struggle, specifically the rising power of the bourgeoisie. Private property rights functioned as the ideological and legal form that allowed those new relations to consolidate themselves. The “achievement” flows from material forces, not from liberal ideals being progressively fulfilled.
The same applies to rationalism and similar developments. Rationalized law, administration, and production emerge because capitalism requires them, not because liberalism is steadily perfecting its values. Marx analyzes these phenomena to explain how capitalism works and why it historically replaces feudalism, not to endorse the liberal worldview that accompanies them.
The labor theory of value isn’t a liberal achievement at all. Marx takes it from classical political economy as a scientific tool in order to expose exploitation and demonstrate the limits of capitalism. There is nothing there to be “fully realized” under communism; it’s a means of critique, not a value.
Yes, liberal democracy has to be overthrown for genuine human emancipation, that doesn’t mean Marxism is the fulfillment of liberalism. Liberal values are ideological expressions of bourgeois class power; the historical achievements associated with liberalism arise from material conditions and class struggle.
The core of Marx work is dialectical and historical materialism from which all his analysis flows which is directly at odds with the idealism at the core of liberalism from which it gets it’s values.
Yeah, you’re right. You and other user must agree on terms and on what you already agree on first.
I saw they had a similar experience of talking past each other with cowbee. They might be a particularly articulate wrecker, but I didn’t want to jump straight there.