Giving Marx’s Critique of Law a Fair Trial: On Igor Shoikhedbrod’s Revisiting of Marx’s Critique of Liberalism and the Rule of Law

ABSTRACT

This article presents a critical examination of Igor Soikhedbrod’s Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights. We argue that the book presents an important criticism of antinomian forms of critical theory, which underplay the extent to which Marx engaged in an imminent critique of liberal societies, including the rule of law, and upheld that progressive advances enshrined in this rule should be carried over or sublated in a communist dispensation.

KEYWORDS:

• Marx
• law
• Shoikhedbrod
• critical theory

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism.

2 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 478.

3 Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism.

4 Cf. Marx’s comment on India: "The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked. They are the defenders of property, but did any revolutionary party ever originate agrarian revolutions like those in Bengal, in Madras, and in Bombay? Did they not, in India, to borrow an expression of. that great robber, Lord Clive himself, resort to atrocious extortion, when simple corruption could not keep pace with their rapacity? While they prated in Europe about the inviolable sanctity of the national debt, did they not confiscate in India the dividends of the rajahs, 171 who had invested their private savings in the Company’s own funds? While they combatted the French revolution under the pretext of defending “our holy religion”, did they not forbid, at the same time, Christianity to be propagated in India, and did they not, in order to make money out of the pilgrims streaming to the temples of Orissa and Bengal, take up the trade in the murder and prostitution perpetrated in the temple of juggernaut? These are the men of “Property, Order, Family, and Religion”.” Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India”.

5 See Neumann, “Change in the Function of Modern Law”, 39.

6 See eg Agamben, The Time that Remains.

7 Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”, 67.

8 See Neumann, “Approaches to the Study of Political Power”, 3–4; “The Change in the Function”, 63–64; “The Concept of Political Freedom”, 167–70.

9 Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question”, 43.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid., 35.

12 Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program”, 531.

13 “State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then withers away of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not ‘abolished’. It withers away”. Engels, Anti-Duhring, 333.

14 Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, 484.

15 Marx, “The Civil War in France”, 635.

16 Habermas, The Lure of Technocracy, 11.

17 Ibid., 81–82.

18 Fraser, “Behind Marx’s ‘Hidden Abode’”, 61.

19 According to Shoikhedbrod (155–59), Habermas’ depiction of capitalist markets as “media-steered subsystems” without intrinsic crisis potentials is sociologically deficient; his post-Weberian critique of Marx’s supposed commitment to a monologic social “totality” of associated producers, in which system and lifeworld would be seamlessly recoupled is overdrawn; and Habermas in addition fails to distinguish between non-capitalist forms of market and specifically capitalist markets wherein commodification is extended to labour, land, and money, as well as the private control of productive property, extending even to the supply of effectively unavoidable goods like electricity and (today) access to the internet.

20 Habermas, The Lure of Technocracy, 82.

21 Honneth, Freedom’s Right, 198.

22 Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity.

23 See esp. Scheuermann, Between the Norm and the Exception.