On Freedom and Progress: Comparing Marx and Mill

Marx, K. German ideology. 1932. Accessed from: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm

Marx, K., The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, Edited by Robert C. Tucker. NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978.

Mill, J.S., The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XVIII. 1832. Accessed from: http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=233&chapter=16538&layout=html&Itemid=27

Mill, J.S. The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill On Liberty, The Subjection of Women & Utilitarianism.  NY: Modern Library, 2002.

Endnotes

1.) Oxford Dictionary, See http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/progress?q=progress.

2.) “Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist.” See Marx, K., The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, Edited by Robert C. Tucker. (NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), p.479. And Marx, p. 474. (Unless specified, Marx refers to this book).

3.) “Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthers form.” See Marx, p. 154.

4.) “The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that it is essential to educate the educator himself.” See Marx, p. 144.

5.) “Philosophy is the head of this emancipation and the proletariat is its heart.” See Marx, p. 64. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” See Marx, p. 145.

6.) “It is accordingly on this battle-field, almost solely, that the rights of individual against society have been asserted on board grounds of principle, and the claim of society to exercise authority over dissentients openly controverted. The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief.” See Mill, J.S. The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill On Liberty, The Subjection of Women & Utilitarianism. (NY: Modern Library, 2002), p.10.

7.) Mill, J.S., The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XVIII, 1832. Accessed from: http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=233&chapter=16538&layout=html&Itemid=27 (Unless specified, all reference of Mill refers to The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill).

8.) “The aim, therefore, of patriots was to set limits to the power which the ruler should be suffered to exercise over the community; and this limitation was what they meant by liberty.” See Mill, p. 4.

“a time, however, came, in the progress of human affairs, when men cease to think it a necessity of nature that their governors should be independent power, opposed in interest to themselves. It appeared to them much better that the various magistrates of the State should be their tenants or delegates, revocable at their pleasure.” See Mill, p. 5.

“What was now wanted was, that the rulers should be identified with the people; that their interest and will should be the interest and the will of the nation.” See Mill, p.5.

9.) Mill, p. 30.

10.) Mill, p. 30.

11.) Marx, p. 78.

12.) Marx, p. 72.

13.) Marx, p. 336.

14.) “Man makes his life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness… Conscious life-activity directly distinguishes man from animal life-activity. It is just because of this that he is a species being.” See Marx, p. 76.

15.) Mill, p. 6.

16.) Mill, p. 7.

17.) Principle of liberty requires: “first, the inward domain of consciousness… secondly,…requires liberty of tastes and pursuits…thirdly…freedom to unite.” See Mill, p. 14.

18.) “If the cultivation of the understanding consists in one thing more than in another, it is surely in learning the grounds of one’s own opinions. Whatever people believe, on subjects on which it is of the first importance to believe rightly, they ought to be able to defend against at least the common objections.” See Mill, p. 37.

19.) “As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them.” See Mill, p. 58.

20.) Mill, p. 60.

21.) “There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices, and set the example of more enlightened conduct, and better taste and sense in human life.” See Mill, p. 66.

22.) Marx, p. 25.

23.) Marx, p. 76-77.

24.) Marx, p. 72-74.

25.) “the law of servitude in marriage is a monstrous contradiction to all the principles of the modern world, and to all the experience through which those principles have been slowly and painfully worked out.” See Mill, p. 206.

26.) “And here, I believe, is the club of the feeligns of those men, who have a real antipathy to the equal freedom of women. I believe they are afraid, not lest women should be unwilling to marry…but lest they hould insist that marriage should be on equal conditions; lest all women of spiriot and capacity should prefer doing almost anything else, not in their own eyes degrading, rather than marry, when marrying is giving themselves a master, and a master too of all their earthly possessions.” See Mill, p. 151.

27.) Mill, p. 3.

28.) Marx, p. 131.

29.) Marx, K. German ideology, 1932. See http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm

30.) “No class in civil society can play this part unless it can arouse, in itself and in the masses, a moment of enthusiasm in which it associates and mingles with society at large, identifies itself with it, and is felt and recognized as the general representative of this society. Its aims and interests must genuinely be the aims and interests of society itself, of which it becomes in reality the social head and heart.” See Marx, p. 62.

“A class must be formed which has radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a spere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong in general” See Marx, p. 64.

31.) “The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.” See Marx, p. 485-6. Also Marx, p. 490.

32.) “The family is a school of despotism, in which the virtues of despotism, but also its vices, are largely nourished.” See Mill, p. 169.

33.) “The State, while it respects the liberty of each in what specially regards himself, is bound to maintain a vigilant control over his exercise of any power which it allows him to possess over others. This obligation is almost entirely disregarded in the case of the family relations, a case, in its direct influence on human happiness, more important than all others taken together.” See Mill, p.108.

34.) “I mean the suffrage… the right to share in the choice of those who are to exercise a public trust, is altogether a distinct thing from that of competing for the trust itself…. To have a voice in choosing those by whom one is to be governed, is a means of self-protection due to everyone, though he were to remain for ever excluded from the function of governing: all that women are considered fit to have a choice, may be presumed fromt the fact, that the law already gives it to women in the most important of all cases to themselves: for the choice of the man who is to government women to the end of life, is always supposed to be voluntarily made by herself.” See Mill, p. 177.

35.) Mill, p. 207.

36.) “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” See Marx, K. German ideology, 1932. See http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm

37.) What I refer to is the critical element of Marxism. Not only can it be easily applied to studies of comparative politics, but also to international relations (i.e. dependency theory by Immanuel Wallerstein).