Hence, the critique of capitalism must be an immanent critique. An immanent critique does not criticize a form of life in the name of an ideal that is imposed from the outside. Rather, an immanent critique locates a contradiction between the avowed principles of a form of life and the actual practice it legislates for itself. Accordingly, Marx seeks to show that the production of value under capitalism is at odds with the principles of freedom and equality that are made possible by the capitalist mode of production itself. In contrast to societies that require slavery or serfdom to function, wage labor under capitalism is historically the first social form which in principle recognizes that each one of us “owns” the time of our lives. Moreover, our lifetime is socially recognized as inherently “valuable,” insofar as we are compensated with a wage for the “cost” of our labor time, which is supposed to serve as a means for us to achieve the end of leading a free life. Yet the recognition of every person as an end in herself is necessarily contradicted by how we measure the value of our time under capitalism. Through the rights of the labor contract we recognize formally that the lifetime of every person is irreducibly her own and that it is inherently valuable. But by virtue of the same labor contract we still cannot treat our lives as ends in themselves, since our surplus of lifetime serves as a means for the end of accumulating surplus value in the form of capital.
The idea of the freedom and equality of all individuals is not a given intuition that has been available to human beings since the dawn of time; it is a fragile historical achievement that could not have gained a foothold in the first place without the advent of capitalism and liberalism. However, since Dean only ascribes negative significance to capitalism and liberalism, she must be assuming that the idea of general freedom and equality magically fell down from the skies to the working class. Like all vulgar materialists, Dean is the most naïve idealist, since she refuses to see that capitalism is a historical condition of possibility for the idea of universal freedom and equality to which she herself must appeal in her critique of capitalism.
Whether we are capitalists or workers, the cultivation of our abilities and the satisfaction of our needs have no inherent value; what matters is whether our abilities and needs can be exploited for the sake of profit.
To lead a free life, it is not enough that we are exempt from coercion and granted the liberty to make choices. Actual freedom requires that we participate in fundamental decisions regarding the purposes that determine our range of choices and for the sake of which we lead our lives. Moreover, since all forms of choice and decision are social, we must be able to affirm our participation in social institutions not as a means to our freedom but as the exercise of our freedom. In short, to achieve actual freedom we must recognize ourselves in the laws to which we are bound. This form of collective self-legislation does not require that I as an individual was part of originally instituting the laws, or that we actually vote about everything. However, we must be able to recognize the laws that govern our life as expressions of our own commitments and as in principle contestable or transformable through our democratic participation.
Marx’s work systematically demonstrates that the overcoming of capitalism requires the determinate negation of private property.
If there is buying and selling of commodities, there cannot be free association among the cooperatives, since they will be competing for profits rather than coordinating their interdependent production. To abolish buying and selling for profit is not to restrict our freedom (as Roberts has it) but to make possible coordination without domination.