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... serve peace and law, yet the elected or unelected ruler's power must be restrained so that he does not abuse it against the ruled. In contrast to Marx's class struggle, this 'struggle between liberty and authority' (p 59) from Mill is more amiable. In the current era of democratic nations, however, since the ruled are also the rulers, the opposition no longer exists. People feel that all actions taken by the people's government will be good for the people, and hence they lose the old vigilance against the invasion of public power into their private spheres. The voice of the majority becomes the equivalent of the truth and justice.
Mill is worried that this majority voice will obstruct man's search for truth, the attaining of which is the goal of life. Truth is not reached once and then preserved for eternity, it is an organic being with a thousand facets whose survival requires continued inputs of each person's active mind. This truth is the individual treasure of each being, fitting perfectly to his taste and preferences; yet it is also a truth for the whole community, since it is only through the struggles of different truths that humanity as a whole reaches a higher truth-a higher level for the activation of the mind. As Mill writes, 'There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths and point out when what were once truths are true no longer' (p 71) If the majority religion is the only religion and taste the only taste, then people will no longer think but simply follow; society will be bogged into the swamp of mediocrity with a mind that is dead. Marx also feared the death of the mind, the mind of the creative worker. Despite the differences, both philosophers are concerned about the destruction of man's defining qualities.
To counter this, Mill proclaims that the only defense for 'interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection. ' (p 68). The government must be restrained in the sphere of public affairs, and individuals shall live as free as they want to following their individual passions. Marx and Mill both want to regain humanity. In one case, the enemy is the benumbing effects of majority rule, and man's mind for truth is debased forever into mediocrity, in the other case, the enemy comes from the benumbing effects of subjugation to the machine, and the man is turned from the master of production into the slaves of capital. The core difference between the two theories in practical operation arises from their different views on individuality (both systems serve individuals as their ends, however, individuality, allowing people to be different, are treated differently). For Mill, we must preserve individuality to bring truth (Chapter 3, On Liberty), but for Marx, the destruction of private property is the only task.
The communistic society will be a union in which man can '... hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner... ' (The German Ideology). This free life of a communist in communism is all good until one day the comrade does not want to be a communist anymore-but he must be one, there is no choice. In Communism, one does not have the individual liberty to have families, nor try to build a little store of private wealth.
On the other side, if someone in Mill's world decides to be a communist, he has the full right to do so. He can even segregate himself away with his friends and enjoy the life of a commune. In another word, Marxism can not destroy Mill's democracy-it will just be one of the many ways of thinking allowed by the system-but Mill's cry for diversity will destroy Marx's world within a second. Confronted with the above, Marx would reply like he did in the Jewish Question, that the so-called liberty and freedom of the capitalistic world are nothing other than man's desire to keep himself a self-sufficient nomad. As he writes, all the rights of man are simply 'the right to enjoy one's fortune and to dispose of it as one will; without regard for other men and independently of society. ' Marx will say that only seeing the superficial political liberation is not to see the deeper human liberation which could only be achieved with the abolition of private property. Marx might not be completely right, but he does stand at a higher ground than Mill in this analysis of property.
Mill in On Liberty is focused solely on avoiding the abuse of power through government, but he ignores the abuses that property owners are capable of against the property-less. In an agricultural society where everyone is equal and land unlimited, the government might be the only thing capable of suppressing individual liberty, but when one sees child-labor and 12 hour work day in modern industrial society, there is no doubt that capital could be a pitiless monster. Even when one ignores the industrial age, and tries to give Mill credit for drawing the best possible life for the pre-industrial man, one still can not avoid noticing the subjugation of the slaves, the suffering of the serfs, and all the other dark stories of the property-less in all the ages previous to the industrial one which Marx gives a full account of. Marx begins the second chapter by declaring that communists have no interests apart from the interests of the working class as a whole.
Communists are distinguished from other socialist parties by focusing solely on the common interests of all workers and not the interests of any single national movement. They appreciate the historical forces that compel the progress of their class and help lead the proletariat to fulfill their destiny. As Marx says, 'The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat'. Marx then responds to a number of criticisms from an imagined bourgeois interlocutor. He considers the charge that by wishing to abolish private property, the communist is destroying the 'ground work of all personal freedom, activity, and independence' (96). Marx responds by saying that wage labor does not properly create any property for the laborer.
It only creates capital, a property which works only to augment the exploitation of the worker. This property, this capital, is based on class antagonism. Having linked private property to class antagonism, Marx proceeds to investigate both antagonists with respect to their independence. Marx first notes that capital is a social product, that is, capital only exists within some social system. The result of this is that capital is not a...
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