Bringing Both Class and the State Back In: Toward a Marxist Freedom Approach to Political Economy

ABSTRACT

Freedom is a core value centralized in Marxism. When applied to the study of political economy, Marxist freedom focuses, in its ontological sense, on the elimination of all forms of class coercion so that public coordination of individual preferences will proceed in a cooperative way to improve material living standards, reduce the working day, and promote all-round development of personality for all members of society. In its epistemological sense, Marxist freedom stresses the importance of developing thorough theories of social class and the state, so that meaningful post-revolutionary institutional innovations can be implemented to facilitate the ontological task of eliminating all forms of class coercion. While classical Marxist theories of social class and the state provide great insights into the class bias of bourgeois approaches to political economy and the adverse impact of capitalist market economy on human freedom, they tend to be ambiguous about the distinction between the state class and privately propertied class. This theoretical deficiency in classical Marxism was evidenced by a lack of consistent effort to build workers’ democratic institutions in post-revolutionary Russia to thwart the rise of the state class in face of objective adversities.

KEYWORDS:

• Marxism
• freedom
• political economy
• the state
• social class

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Zhaochang Peng is Assistant Professor of Economics at Rollins College, USA. He studied International Relations in doctoral programs at Fudan University, China, and Cornell University, USA, and received his PhD in Economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. His current specialized research interests include political economy of social transformation, Chinese models of economic development, agroecology and food sovereignty, technological and institutional innovations, and growth, distribution, and poverty.

ORCID

Zhaochang Peng http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7931-0583