equality, liberty, security, and property: what's wrong with that?

Karl Marx’s ‘On the Jewish Question’ explores the limitations of political freedoms. His work compares human emancipation and political emancipation. He criticizes Bauer for treating human emancipation and political emancipation as the same thing. 

Marx argues that political emancipation for the Jewish community would simply regulate religion to a private manner in civil society. Marx summarizes his critique of regulating religion to civil society when saying, “the state may be a free state without man himself being a free man.” 

Marx draws a parallel between religion and other forms of discrimination. For example, he discussed the property requirement for voting being removed in America. This removal did not eliminate property inequality or the general inequality between non-landowners and landowners. While this was a political emancipation for non-landowners, it did not not result in human emancipation. He seems to suggest that political emancipation is a distracting goal because it produces a false sense of victory. 

Marx additionally argues that by regulating religion to a private manner the state does not truly recognize a person’s total identity and instead the government simply represents an abstract citizen. 

Marx continues describing the abstraction of man in political emancipation by describing how a “distinction is made between the rights of man and the rights of citizens.” Marx is concerned with the difference in rights attributed to man and citizen. To Marx, there should be no distinction as man is citizen and vice versa. 

Marx highlights the framing of rights—namely equality, liberty, security, and property—in the Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Marx believes that this document frames man as “wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice.” For example, liberty is the “power which man has to do everything which does not harm the rights of others” as defined in the Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Marx highlights how liberty is “not founded upon the relations between man and man but rather upon the separation of man from man.” 

Marx questions why the foundations of political community highlight the inherent opposition via self-interest between man rather than highlighting community. 

His concern with the separation of man from man in the framing of rights symbolizes his larger issue: political systems prioritize individualism and private interest instead of eliminating the structures which create conflict between men. While political emancipation grants formal rights, it does not necessarily transform the material and social conditions which determine the quality of life. These material and social conditions must be transformed for human emancipation. In his last sentence, Marx argues that human emancipation will require change “in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships.”