Locke and Marx: Private Property in "Second Treatise" and "Communist Manifesto"
The paper addresses the issue of the justification of private property and also compares and contrasts the role that private property plays in the theories of Locke and in his "Second Treatise" and Marx in his "Communist Manifesto". It asks whether individuals have a right to private property, or (which I think is the same thing) whether there are any good right-based arguments for private property. A right-based argument is an argument showing that an individual interest considered in itself; is sufficiently important from a moral point of view to justify holding people to be under a duty to promote it. So my question can be rephrased as follows. What individual interests are served by the existence of private property as opposed to some other sort of property regime (such as communism)? Are any of these interests so important from a moral point of view that they justify holding governments to be under a duty to promote, uphold, and protect property-owning? Or is it rather the case that, taken one by one, the interests which individuals have in the matter do not have this level of importance, and that these interests should be dealt with in the aggregate, in the form of utilitarian arguments about property institutions, rather t
Often the most Marx appears to be saying is that private property is doomed historically, that it is obsolescent, that it will eventually, under pressure, give way to social control. If there is an evaluative dimension, it may be nothing more substantial than a commitment to the value of historical progress: 'From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd [abgescbmacht] as private ownership of one man by another.' From this point of view, it is wrong to see Marx condemning the inevitability of propertylessness under capitalism. Nevertheless, even on this account, Marx is always prepared to get involved in moral polemics in a characteristic 'counter-punching' sort of way. If someone offers to defend private property on the sort of moral grounds that we have been considering, then Marx (as much as Proudhon) is ready to expose the contradictions and inconsistencies in that defense. That, I think, is the context of the challenge we are considering. (I should add that, on Marx's view of ideology, it is to be expected that the historically transient and contradictory character of a form of society like capitalism should be reflected in similar inconsistencies in the super structural ideas involved in its defense.) According to Locke, not only is government action constrained by special rights of private property, but those rights are themselves constrained by a deeper and, in the last resort, more powerful general right which each man has to the material necessities for his survival. This forms the basis of what one might refer to as entitlements of charity in Locke's system. Because it constrains the rights which constrain the activities of governments, it could be argued that its effect is to extend the realm of legitimate state action and to provide a justifying ground for redistributive activism in the economic sphere. Occasionally, Locke tries to argue that, given the circumstances of human life, this general right to subsistence actually generates the moral basis of particular private property rights. Marx argued in The Communist Manifesto there cannot be private property for anyone at all unless nine-tenths of the population is property less--then the possibility of a GR-based argument for private property, along the lines of the one we have attributed, is in danger. Any thesis about the inevitability of widespread propertylessness threatens the collapse of the sort of argument that Locke wants to put forward in favor of private property. It is the challenge laid down by Karl Ma
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1750
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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