Freedom on paper
On the axis: Political liberty · rights on paper
The law forbids no one to travel, study, or start a business, yet without money, health or connections none of it is within reach. Is the penniless person unfree, or merely unable? And does calling poverty a lack of freedom sharpen the idea of liberty, or dissolve it?
Justification
Formal liberty is worthless without the material conditions to exercise it: true emancipation requires overcoming alienation and the realm of necessity, so that the free development of each becomes the condition for the free development of all. A positive, real freedom, an effective capacity to act.
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; Capital, III; The Communist Manifesto
Justification
For Marx, private property in the means of production is no natural right but the very lever of exploitation: it is what allows the worker's surplus labour to be captured, so that distributive justice is won not by sharing better within that framework but by abolishing the framework. Yet he refuses to enshrine abstract equality as an ideal: a right that measures all men by the same standard remains an unequal right, since needs differ. Full communism therefore grounds distribution on need, beyond the horizon of right itself, which makes it a radical opposed to any legitimation of merit or of the market.
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.Critique of the Gotha Programme
Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) · Manifesto of the Communist Party, ch. 2 (abolition of private property)
Anchors: Marx · Berlin
leads to: Distributive justice (Equality against liberty?)