5. Marxism

Author(s):  
Will Kymlicka

This chapter examines Marxism as a normative political theory. It begins with a discussion of two strands of contemporary analytic Marxism’s critique of, and alternative to, liberal theories of justice. One strand rejects the very idea of justice. According to Marxists, justice seeks to mediate conflicts between individuals, whereas communism overcomes those conflicts, and hence overcomes the need for justice. The second strand shares liberalism’s emphasis on justice, but rejects the liberal belief that justice is compatible with private ownership of the means of production. Within this second strand, there is a division between those who criticize private property on the grounds of exploitation, and those who criticize it on the grounds of alienation. The chapter also explores non-Marxist conceptions of social democracy and social justice before concluding with an overview of the politics of Marxism.

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-124
Author(s):  
Stuart White

Recent years have seen a growth of interest in republicanism in academic political theory (Sandel, 1996; Pettit, 1997, 2012; Skinner, 1998; Honohan, 2002). There has also been a more modest growth of interest in “Property-Owning Democracy” (POD) as a form of economic organization, as advocated by John Rawls (Rawls, 1999). A POD is a market economy, with a significant role for private ownership of the means of production, but in which public authority is used to sustain an egalitarian distribution of productive assets so that market outcomes are more equal than is typical of a capitalist society. The categorisation of Rawls’s theory as “liberal”, combined with the tendency to see “liberalism” and “republicanism” as rival, even opposing schools of thought, might lead one to think that republicanism and POD stand in some kind of rival or antagonistic relationship.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Álvaro de Vita

AbstractThe study examines the contemporary normative debate on social justice from the perspective of the normative political theory of “egalitarian liberalism”. Contrary to an anti-egalitarian liberal political theory, or “libertarianism”, the argument is that a notion of “effective freedom”, and not negative freedom, is central to egalitarian liberalism. Additionally, in contrast to a theoretical current of egalitarianism known as “luck egalitarianism”, the article further argues that although egalitarian liberalism assigns special importance to individual responsibility, it does so (unlike luck egalitarianism) without implying any concession to the conservative critique of egalitarianism and the state’s redistributive action.


2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 64-87
Author(s):  
Volodymyr Reznik ◽  
Oleksandr Reznik

This article explores the sources of legitimacy of private property in the means of production in Ukraine. The conceptualization of legitimacy of private property was made by analyzing theoretical approaches to the study of the foundations of private property relations in Western countries. The application of these approaches tests economic utilitarian, psychological, and sociocultural explanations of legitimacy of large and small private enterprises and private land in the process of activation of post-communist transition of Ukrainian society. The basic hypothesis was that the process of legitimation of private property in the means of production proceeds by uniting utilitarian and psychological adaptation with sociocultural agreement of ideological attitudes. This hypothesis was verified with the help of created legitimacy indices by comparison of linear regressions and data of the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of Ukraine for 2013 and 2017. The results indicate that the hypothesis has been held true only concerning legitimacy of small private enterprises. They have acquired a moderate extent of legitimacy owing to the fact that besides the factors of adaptation, social recognition has increased at the expense of people who support the multiparty system and the liberal and mixed methods of regulation of the economy. In contrast, the existence of large private enterprises and private land has not acquired the corresponding sociocultural foundation.


Author(s):  
Ekaterina Pravilova

“Property rights” and “Russia” do not usually belong in the same sentence. Rather, our general image of the nation is of insecurity of private ownership and defenselessness in the face of the state. Many scholars have attributed Russia's long-term development problems to a failure to advance property rights for the modern age and blamed Russian intellectuals for their indifference to the issues of ownership. This book refutes this widely shared conventional wisdom and analyzes the emergence of Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Most importantly, the book shows the emergence of the new practices of owning “public things” in imperial Russia and the attempts of Russian intellectuals to reconcile the security of property with the ideals of the common good. The book analyzes how the belief that certain objects—rivers, forests, minerals, historical monuments, icons, and Russian literary classics—should accede to some kind of public status developed in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. Professional experts and liberal politicians advocated for a property reform that aimed at exempting public things from private ownership, while the tsars and the imperial government employed the rhetoric of protecting the sanctity of private property and resisted attempts at its limitation. Exploring the Russian ways of thinking about property, the book looks at problems of state reform and the formation of civil society, which, as the book argues, should be rethought as a process of constructing “the public” through the reform of property rights.


Author(s):  
Walter Rech

This chapter examines and contextualizes Sayyid Qutb’s doctrine of property and social justice, which he articulated at a time of deep social conflicts in Egypt. The chapter describes how Qutb, along with other writers concerned with economic inequality in the 1920s–40s such as Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949) and Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri (1895–1971), conceptualised private ownership as a form of power that must be limited by religious obligations and subordinated to the public good. The chapter further shows that Qutb made this notion of restrained property central to a broader theory of social justice and wealth redistribution by combining the social teachings of the Qur’an with the modern ideal of the centralized interventionist state. Arguably this endeavour to revitalise the Quranic roots of Islamic charity and simultaneously appropriate the discourse of modern statehood made Qutb’s position oscillate between legalism and anti-legalism.


1994 ◽  
Vol 140 ◽  
pp. 1105-1120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Solomon M. Karmel

The nascent stock and bond markets in the People's Republic of China have received considerable attention from the international media, yet the emergence of these markets is poorly understood. China's new “limited stock companies” increasingly answer to a variety of public and private lenders and spenders, who partially own and largely manage the means of production. The government sometimes decides which companies and managers will be rewarded with the benefits of incorporation, and it grabs a lion's share of the newly issued securities. But the result is a slow, government-led move towards a more capitalist form of management and ownership. This kind of jointly funded project – companies that merge public and private ownership, management and responsibility – may become the defining characteristic of China's emerging “capitalism with Chinese characteristics.”


2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gill Scott ◽  
Gerry Mooney

Drawing on current debates in social policy, this paper considers the extent to which social justice has and is informing social policy making in devolved Scotland. Relating to the work of social justice theorists Young, Fraser and Lister in particular, it critically examines some key Scottish social policy measures since 1999, considering some of the ways in which these have been constructed in terms of social justice and which make claims to the Scottish national. Through a focus on the issue of anti-poverty policies, the paper explores the ways in which the dominant policy approaches of the Scottish Government have reflected an uneven and tension-loaded balance between the enduring legacies of Scottish social democracy and the influences of neoliberal economics.


2021 ◽  
pp. 053901842110114
Author(s):  
Philipp Degens

This article explores the relation between ownership and sustainability on a conceptual level. It specifically examines different imaginaries of sustainable property by asking how private property rights and their restrictions are conceptualized as instruments for sustainability. To do so, conflicting notions of property that underlie Western jurisprudence and political theory are contrasted. This brings us to the identification of two major traditions in property thought that build on atomist or relational conceptions of society and property, respectively. Property might be conceived as an owner’s exclusive control over an object, or as a ‘bundle of rights’ that comprises entitlements, restrictions, and obligations to various actors. Largely within the paradigm of modernization as a trajectory of sustainability, these two fundamental traditions in property theory relate to different approaches to encode sustainability into property law: i) propertization, i.e. the extension of private property forms, as in the case of carbon emissions trading schemes; ii) the acknowledgment of social and environmental obligations inherent to property, illustrated by the social obligation norm in German law.


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