this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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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.