What is the Marxist and liberal approach towards the state? On what grounds the theoretical differences between them are premised? Explain. (2025, 20 Marks)
Liberalism and Marxism are both children of capitalist modernity, yet they read its central institution in opposite ways. For liberals the state is a necessary, limited and reformable guardian of rights; for Marxists an organ of class domination destined to disappear. The quarrel lies in premises — what the individual is, what property does, how history moves.
The Liberal Approach
- Origin in consent: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) derives the state from a covenant for security; John Locke (Two Treatises of Government, 1689) makes it a trust for preserving “lives, liberties and estates”, forfeited if abused.
- Nature: a neutral umpire — Locke’s “known and indifferent judge” — checked by constitutionalism and the rule of law against tyranny.
- Functions vary: Adam Smith‘s minimal state; T. H. Green‘s positive state removing obstacles to self-realisation; John Rawls‘s difference principle (A Theory of Justice, 1971); Robert Nozick‘s return to the night-watchman.
- Change is incremental — rights widened through franchise, courts and legislation.
The Marxist Approach
- Origin in class division: Friedrich Engels (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884) ties the state’s birth to private property and irreconcilable antagonisms.
- Nature: part of the superstructure raised on the economic base; in Karl Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto (1848) its executive is “but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”. Equal law secures unequal property.
- Means: coercion — V. I. Lenin‘s “special bodies of armed men” — and ideology; Antonio Gramsci‘s hegemony and Nicos Poulantzas‘s relative autonomy refine, not abandon, the thesis.
- Future: the bourgeois state is smashed; the proletarian state withers away with classes.
The Grounds of Difference
| Ground | Liberal premise | Marxist premise |
|---|---|---|
| Ontology | Individual, prior to society | Class, formed in production |
| Human nature | Rational, self-interested, constant | Historically produced; alienated |
| Property | Natural right, shield of liberty | Relation of exploitation |
| Freedom | Absence of coercion | Material capacity |
| Method | Normative, contractarian | Historical materialism |
| Social base | Rising commercial middle class | Industrial working class |
- Ontology decides the rest. Liberals explain the state by what individuals want; Marx explains what individuals want by their place in production — “social being… determines their consciousness” (1859 Preface). A body composed of classes cannot be neutral among them.
- Rights: On the Jewish Question (1843) calls the rights of man those of “egoistic man”; Isaiah Berlin (“Two Concepts of Liberty”, 1958) retorts that freedom redefined as capacity licenses coercion.
- History: a lasting answer to a lasting predicament for liberals; for Marxists the product of a mode of production, therefore mortal — hence reform versus revolution.
- Social origins: liberalism voiced a bourgeoisie prising open feudal privilege; Marxism, workers whom formal openness left propertyless. Yet Marxism is not pessimistic — it expects domination itself to end.
Convergence
- Each pure form failed: laissez-faire neglected welfare and fed the 1930s crisis; command economies dulled incentives and built coercive states.
- Green’s new liberalism and Eduard Bernstein‘s revisionism met in the welfare state; Rawls’s distinction between liberty and its worth concedes that formal freedom is thin without resources.
- India pairs liberal Fundamental Rights with redistributive Directive Principles. In Property Owners Association v. State of Maharashtra (5 November 2024) a nine-judge bench held that not all private property is a “material resource of the community” under Article 39(b), refusing to constitutionalise either doctrine.
Conclusion
The differences rest on rival ontologies before any evidence: individual against class. Liberalism is right that power must be limited; Marxism that neutrality must be demonstrated, not assumed. The defensible state is Rawls’s social-liberal one — provided it keeps asking whom its neutrality serves.