J. Reiman, MARXIAN LIBERALISM
What follows is a summary of the argument developed in my book, As Free and as Just as
Possible: The Theory of Marxian Liberalism (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012):
Marxian Liberalism is a theory of justice that results from combining certain liberal beliefs,
most importantly, that people have one natural right, the negative right not to be subject to
unwanted coercion from others, with some Marxian beliefs, most importantly, that private
ownership of means of production is coercive. Because private property is coercive, for it to be
legitimate, it must be consented to by all people who exist or will exist. Thus theoretical consent
(à la the original position) is necessary. (I argue that, in this case, theoretical consent is
morally equivalent to actual consent by analogy with cases in which we give medical attention
to an unconscious person who will otherwise die: while consent is necessary, actual consent to
the decision about property is impossible, the issue is of critical importance, and all we have to
go on are people’s general interests.) In Marxian Liberalism, theoretical consent takes place in a
Marxian-liberal original position in which the parties’ knowledge includes certain Marxian and
liberal beliefs. I contend that in the Marxian-liberal original position, parties will agree to a
state in which liberty is protected against unwanted coercion, and to an egalitarian form of
capitalism in which property is subject to the difference principle to make it compatible
with people’s right to liberty. This theory of justice is, then (in contrast to Left
Libertarianism), the product of one moral principle, plus some important factual claims.
The liberal beliefs that parties in the Marxian-liberal original position have are that
everyone has the natural negative right to liberty, that everyone has an interest in maximizing his
1
or her ability to act freely, that some right to private property is necessary for liberty, and that a
state is needed to protect liberty and property. The Marxian beliefs that the parties have are that
coercion can function structurally, that a moral version of the labor theory of value is necessary
to detect this coercion, and what I call “the fungibility of social and material subjugation.”
The liberal beliefs:
The natural negative right to liberty comes from Locke’s Second Treatise of
Government, but Marxian liberalism is not tied to any particular theory of this right. The right is
natural because it does not require others’ consent to exist; it is negative because it is a right to
non-interference, not to positive performance. It is an individual right to liberty because each
person has a separate nervous system and thus, no matter how social human beings are, they
suffer as individuals and thus can be oppressed as individuals. Without an individual right to
liberty, there is no guarantee against oppression.
I take it obvious that people have an interest in maximizing their ability to act on
their free choices.
The belief that a right to private property is necessary for liberty is based on the
historical fact that socialist and communist societies have been oppressive with stagnant
economies, and capitalist societies have generally protected freedom and increased people’s
material standard of living, thereby increasing the range of choices they can act upon. The
preference for private property over socialism or communism is equally an implication of the
Marxian belief that ownership of the means of production is the most consequential form of
power in modern societies, and thus dangerous to centralize and place under the control of a
single institution such as the state.
2
That a state is needed to protect freedom and property is based on the fact that both
freedom and property are coercive to others, and thus a coercive apparatus is needed to keep
them within the terms to which all people would rationally agree.
The Marxian beliefs:
That social coercion can function structurally is one of Marx’s greatest discoveries. It
is part of his critique of capitalism as coercive. This coercion is structural because it results
from the way the society structures the roles of property-owner and laborer, rather than from the
open use of violence. It is coercion because it is an unnecessary constraint on actions placed by
virtually everyone on everyone. Locke, Rousseau and Kant all saw private ownership as a limit
on liberty, but it was Marx saw it as coercion because of his dereified view of society. Because
structural coercion can work without overt violence once the needed social roles are in place, it
tends to be invisible. The invisibility of structural coercion is the core of ideology in
capitalism.
The moral version of the labor theory of value is necessary to test the justice of
alternative property regimes. For that, we need a measure of what people give and receive in an
economy that doesn’t presuppose any conception of property. Raw materials won’t do because
they are only given if owned. Talents aren’t given because they are not depleted in use. But
labor—time and effort—is life itself spent. Thus, we measure what is given and received in an
economy in terms of the amounts of labor-time (performed at average level of effort) that
different people put into social product. Inequalities in labor time are signs of social
subjugation, the way the economic system forces some people to work more for others than
those others work for them. This, by the way, is why Marxian liberalism joins Marx in rejecting
a moral distinction between the political and economic realms.
3
The fungibility of material and social subjugation is based on two aspects of Marxism:
The first aspect is Marx’s view that increasing material productivity was the condition
for the increasing freedom of the workers. It made possible a higher material standard of living
which enabled human beings to satisfy their expanding wants; and, it enabled human beings to
satisfy those wants with less and less labor, leading finally to “the true realm of freedom” beyond
the realm of necessary labor, though with that necessary labor as its basis. Thus heightened
material productivity provides what I call the material conditions of freedom. Since the lack of
these conditions limits freedom, I call that lack material subjugation. In the Communist
Manifesto and elsewhere, Marx recognized the enormous and unprecedented productivity of
capitalism.
The second aspect is Marx’s view of history as progressive. That view suggests that he
viewed history (prior to communism) as a series of trade-offs in which social subjugation was
worth tolerating in order to increase people’s material standard of living. This is all the more
evident if Marx is taken as subscribing to the view voiced by Engels, that the earliest societies
were characterized by a so-called primitive communism. Since those societies were more
egalitarian than the ones that followed, history could count as progressive only if those
subsequent societies with greater social subjugation were seen as trade-offs worth making in
order to reduce material subjugation. Marxian liberalism accepts such trade-offs since increases
in the material standard of living increase the range of choices that people can act on. Thus they
increase liberty. This gives us the fungibility of material and social subjugation….
…. and it opens the way to a deduction of the Rawls’s difference principle: This
principle holds that inequalities should be reduced to the minimum necessary to maximize the
absolute size of the worst-off social group’s lifetime share of socially produced goods. In light
4
of Rawls’s lexical difference principle, this is shorthand for maximizing the share of all groups
from the poorest on up. Rawls’s principle assumes an historical need (i.e., for the foreseeable
future, but not inherently necessary) for inequalities as incentives to higher productivity.
The deduction works as follows: The parties in the Marxian-Liberal original position
know that increasing their material standard of living increases their liberty. Thus, they would
find it rational to agree to some inequalities in exchanges of labor-time, that is, to some social
subjugation, if there were counterbalancing increases in their absolute material standard of
living. The parties know from history that socialist societies that insist broadly on equality in
exchanges of labor-time tend to have stagnant economies, and they know from history (and from
Marxism) that capitalist economies that allow inequalities of labor-time, primarily in the form of
incentives for more productive labor, tend to have extremely productive economies. Thus, they
know that societies that prohibit private ownership reduce social subjugation but do not
increase the material standard of living (at least once the shift from an agrarian to
industrial economy has taken place), and that societies that allow private ownership tend to
do the reverse.
For several reasons, the parties will believe that they better serve their interest in liberty by
raising their material standard of living than by minimizing social subjugation. First, they know
from history that increases in material standard of living tend to be cumulative over time.
Thus any rise in the material standard of living will normally raise the floor for all subsequent
generations. This means that everyone from now on benefits from raising the material standard
of living at any point, and it gives the parties an interest in an ongoing increase in the material
standard of living over time. Moreover, the parties also know that, at least for the foreseeable
future, even if social subjugation were eliminated, workers would still be required to work
5
to produce their material goods. That is, even if labor exchanges were made perfectly equal,
work would still be required. Workers’ lives would still be largely shaped by material
subjugation, with little appreciable gain. Thus it follows that increases in material standard of
living are likely to produce greater gains in freedom than reductions in social subjugation.
This point gains even more force from the natural right to liberty, since that right prohibits and
thus eliminates the worst features of serfdom and slavery.
Accordingly, parties in the Marxian-Liberal original position have an interest in giving
priority to increasing their material standard of living over reducing social subjugation.
They do not stop wanting to reduce social subjugation. Rather, it is rational for them to accept
the minimum amount of social subjugation needed to maximize their material standard of
living. This means they must maximize people’s shares in the products of others’ labor while
minimizing the degree to which they labor more for others than they get back in return.
Here, then, is a crucial difference between the thinking in the Marxian-Liberal original
position and what goes on in Rawls’s original position. In Rawls’s version, parties must
maximize the share of income for all, not knowing which one they will be. In the MarxianLiberal original position, parties must seek to maximize each person’s share of material goods
while minimizing the degree to which that person must do more labor for others than she gets
from them in return. The parties must do this for each, subject to the requirement of doing it for
all.
The only way to do this for all is to maximize the absolute share of material goods for each
person while not reducing the absolute share of material goods of anyone who has a smaller
share than that person. The reason is that if you increase one person’s share by reducing that of
someone with a smaller share than him, then you make the one with the reduced share labor even
6
more for others than others labor for her. And that means that you do not maximize everyone’s
share while minimizing social subjugation. Thus the parties must maximize the absolute
material standard of living for the whole society starting with the worst off people and moving
up through the other positions above it.
Translating social subjugation back into distributive inequalities (understood in terms of
labor-time), and material standard of living (understood in terms of goods), we can say that
parties in the Marxian-Liberal original position will find it rational to consent to distributive
inequalities if they are the smallest inequalities necessary to maximize everyone’s absolute share
of goods starting from the worst off and moving up. This standard is equivalent to Rawls’s
lexical difference principle, which calls for reducing inequalities to the minimum necessary to
maximize the absolute size of everyone’s lifetime share of socially produced goods, starting with
the worst-off social group and working up to the best off. Accordingly, people in the imaginary
Marxian-Liberal original position will consent to a right to property governed by Rawls’s
difference principle. This provides a deduction of the difference principle.
Note that, for Marxian Liberalism, the difference principle is more than a principle of
distributive justice. It is a principle for making the structural coercion built into the property
system such that people would consent to it. Thus it makes for a property system that, albeit
coercive, is compatible with the natural right to liberty.
Parties in the Marxian-Liberal original position will agree to the following three
principles of justice:
1. Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic
liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all, with the fair value of political
liberties guaranteed, in a democratic state.
7
2. Economic inequalities will be governed by the lexical difference principle understood
in terms of the moral version of the labor theory of value – with the proviso that workers
can trade increases in their material standard of living in exchange for reduced labor-time
compatible with efficient production.
3. All coercion not necessary for implementing the first and second principles (as well as
this third one) is prohibited.
Moreover, I argue that a perfectly egalitarian form of what is called “property-owning
democracy” is the ideal society for Marxian-Liberalism, in the Kantian sense of a regulative
ideal. We are to pursue it while taking advantage of the ability of capitalism to increase the
material conditions of freedom. Thus we are to aim at this form of society though we do not
know how perfectly we can realize it.
I contend that a property-owning democracy governed by the three principles of justice
mentioned above is truly liberal in that it allows no restrictions on freedom except those
necessary to protect or increase freedom. This applies to the political system via the first
principle of justice. The political is democratic, because democracy is the expression of people’s
liberty when it comes to collectively determining their destiny. Protection of liberty is applied to
the economic system by the difference principle, the second principle of justice. Due to the
third principle, there is no paternalism, and there are no victimless-crime laws. Because the
system is a property-owning democracy in which means of production are owned as equally as is
compatible with increasing the material standard of living, it is a society that is as free and as
just as possible.
8