Both James Madison and Karl Marx can be considered "democrats"; however both vastly differ on their theories and understanding of democracy and government on a wide spectrum of issues. If Karl Marx were to be asked his opinion of Madison's Federalist#10 in the post-Paris Commune time, one would be able to see the vast differences between their philosophies. While both Madison and Marx believe in democracy, both differ widely on their conceptions of the purpose of government, human nature, how to deal with divisions in society, and private property itself.
[...] Regarding alienation, Marx describes in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 how object which labor produces confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer a loss of reality” for the product produced as a result of one's own labor is not property that the person actually gets to keep and use, compared to Madison who apparently believes one's labor, which makes use of one's natural faculties, to be the source of one's private property. Marx cites this alienation and the resulting contradictions as why the labor produced by wage-labor is not the realization of man's faculties and truly his property. [...]
[...] It [the commune] wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor.” Marx and Madison both believe in people having the right to property that they have rightly earned through their own labor, but Marx states that bourgeois private property earned from wage-labor under capitalism is by no means rightfully earned private property. Faction Madison also discusses ‘faction', which he describes as groups of people united with a “common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Madison believes that controlling the effects of factions is one of the primary purposes of a government, as he believes the root causes of factions are irremovable” [15]. [...]
[...] Conclusion Marx on the whole believes in human nature being positive, and therefore government not to be under the reigns of ‘enlightened statesmen' as Madison believes but rather ought to be under the control of the people, that the fundamental forces causing faction, namely class division due to the division of property, are to eventually disintegrate, and that private property or ‘capital' earned through wage-labor as not being rightfully the property of the owner. Marx and Madison differ widely among numerous ideas regarding the purposes of the government, what role factions play in society, and over the nature of private property itself while also sharing several similarities. [...]
[...] England: Penguin Classics James Madison, Federalist Paper # Ibid. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978) Ibid. Ibid Ibid. Ibid. [...]
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