Karl Marx And Liberal Democracy

Marx saw capital and liberal democracies as the fundamental reasons for the low standards of living and the low social conditions of workers. Karl Marx in particular is especially concerned with the political assumptions behind these two ideologies. According to him, these two types of government should be replaced by communism, since communism would provide a more equal and socially just society. Although this statement may seem unusual, since we tend to associate communism with Stalin and China, the type of communism implemented in these countries is different from the communism that Marx and Engels envisaged in their Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels’ vision of communism is based on the principle of equality among the people and freedom

Marx’s first criticisms are towards the concept of liberal democracy as defined by John Stuart Mill. Mill describes liberal democracy as a society in which the government promotes the common good of the citizens by recognizing the natural right of private property, the tendency towards market economies, and the equality in social and economic opportunities as well as in personal and civic liberties. (Mill, John Stuart. "On Liberty: Chapter 1.”). Marx believed instead that liberal democracy does not represent the best type of government since it does not correspond to a natural order but rather reflects a very human abstract view of society. Marx identifies two main “defects” in liberal democracy. Liberal democracy holds that all citizens are free and equal before politics and the law. Marx believes that this statement is partially correct. He asserts that liberal democracy makes men “politically emancipated” (Marx. “On the Jewish Question”, p. 51), but only at the political level, because at the civil level things are different. For Marx, a politically emancipated man is a person that enjoys all the rights of liberal democracy. At the civil level, men are not equal, since men are driven by competition and this leads citizens to seek their own advantages and to exploit others in order to achieve their objectives. In the end, men are not equal even in a liberal democracy.

It is based on the principle of equality of all citizens and on the power to the people, but these principles are not completely fair with respect to the citizens, and more importantly, they do not work in developed societies. Equality of all is magnificent in principle; nonetheless, it would not be fair, since it does not take into account the principle of meritocracy. Under Marx’s communism, people will not be rewarded for their merits, but everyone will have the same opportunities and enjoy the same benefits. The equality of opportunities that Marx suggests is moral since everyone should have the same opportunities to receive a good quality education, to be able to apply for a good job and receive adequate health care. However, in certain fields as labor, people should be able to succeed thanks to merit, not thanks to equality or recommendations. The best individual should be allowed to achieve the highest rank in his job; this achievement should not be equally reachable by the laziest workers. Moreover, since workers do not have an incentive to demonstrate their abilities and their intelligence, equality would make people stop working efficiently, and so the society would slow