Marx and Engels are often seen as being interchangeable and in absolute agreement about all topics. It is assumed there were no differences between them because they closely collaborated and indeed had plenty of agreements. Nonetheless, there were differences.
When it comes to the discussions you find about Freedom and Equality, it is usually said without much deliberation that M and E saw socialism as the true fulfillment of the ideals of the French revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy. This became something repeated throughout the history of the communist movement, shared by stalinists, trotskyists, Bernstein, Kautsky, even today in marxist-humanists, the Frankfurt school, and so on. Socialism naturally is a product of modernity, the enlightenment, liberalism.
The bourgeois revolutions overthrew the old class hierarchies between "freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman" and so on, but: "The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones."
And as the story goes, this bourgeois revolution did it under the banner "freedom, equality, solidarity". This apparently meant something very different for the bourgeois class and the proletarians. And still today, there is no consensus at all about these ideals taken as mere ideals. Domenico Losurdo in his encyclopedic "liberalism: a counter history" demonstrates the myriad conceptions, complexities and variations of the beloved liberal ideals, and gives the expected response at the end: these ideals have a truly liberatory core, must be, as always, dialectically purified and then finally can only truly be realized in socialism. Socialism is the true heir and torch-bearer of the promise of liberalism. It is the child of the bourgeois revolution and epoch, finally completing the promise of this great and noble enlightenment tradition.
But what was it that was established in these bourgeois revolutions and that still holds today? Not as mere ideals, but as they are actually implemented as a form of society?
This narrative, too, can be found in the fascist, revolutionary conservatives, and reactionary enemies of socialism and communism: Nietzsche, Spengler, Hitler, Heidegger, Evola, Junger, Mussolini, Gentile, Labriola, Croce, Schmitt. Fascists, in is widely recognized and proclaimed today, were enemies of liberty, equality, and international solidarity. Therefore, it is concluded that any criticism of these ideals must therefore be fascist by extension.
"It is characteristic of all these high-sounding phrases about liberation, freedom, etc., that it is always 'man' who is liberated." --Marx, criticizing the "true socialists" in the German Ideology.
'A rotten spirit is making itself felt in our Party in Germany, not so much among the masses as among the leaders (upper class and “workers”).
The compromise with the Lassalleans has led to compromise with other half-way elements too; in Berlin (e.g., Most) with Dühring and his “admirers,” but also with a whole gang of half-mature students and super-wise doctors who want to give socialism a “higher ideal” orientation, that is to say, to replace its materialistic basis (which demands serious objective study from anyone who tries to use it) by modern mythology with its goddesses of Justice, Freedom, Equality and Fraternity.'
--Marx to Frierich Adolph Sorge In Hoboken
Marx explains what freedom and equality are, and explains why they are necessary preconditions for capitalism:
"...in order that the owner of money may find labor-power on the market as a commodity, various conditions must first be fulfilled. In and for itself, the exchange of commodities implies no other relations of dependence than those which result from its own nature. On this assumption, labor-power can appear on the market as a commodity only if, and in so far as, its possessor, the individual whose labor-power it is, offers it for sale or sells it as a commodity. In order that its possessor may sell it as a commodity, he must have it at his disposal, he must be the FREE proprietor of his own labor-capacity, hence of his person. He and the owner of money meet in the market, and enter into relations with each other on a footing of EQUALITY as owners of commodities, with the sole difference that one is a buyer, the other a seller; both are therefore equal in the eyes of the law. For this relation to continue, the proprietor of labor-power must always sell it for a limited period only, for if he were to sell it in a lump, once and for all, he would be selling himself, converting himself from a free man into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a commodity. The worker constantly treat his labor-power as his own property, his own commodity, and he can do this only by placing it at the disposal of the buyer, i.e. handing it over to the buyer for him to consume, for a definite period of time, temporarily. In this way he manages both to alienate his labor-power and to avoid renouncing his rights of ownership over it.
The second essential condition which allows the owner of money to find labor-power in the market as a commodity is this: that the possessor of labor-power, instead of being able to sell commodities in which his labor has been objectified, must rather be compelled to offer for sale as a commodity that very labor-power which exists only in his living body.
In order that a man may be able to sell commodities other than his labor-power, he must of course possess means of production, such as raw materials, instruments of labor, etc. No boots can be made without leather. He requires also the means of subsistence. Nobody -- not even the practitioner of Zukunftsmusik ("music of the future", in other words castles in the air, of dreams which may or may not be realized) -- can live on the products of the future, or on use-values whose production has not yet been completed; just as on the first day of his appearance on the world's stage, man must still consume every day, before and while he produces. If products are produced as commodities, they must be sold after they have been produced, and they can only satisfy the producer's needs after they have been sold. The time necessary for the sale must be counted as well as the time of production.
For the transformation of money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must find the FREE worker available on the commodity-market; and this worker must be free in the double sense that as a free individual he can dispose of his labor-power as his own commodity, and that, on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale, i.e. he is rid of them, he is free of all the objects needed for the realization of his labor-power."
--Chapter 6, Das Kapital, "The Sale and Purchase of Labor-power"
"We are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the whole world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic workhouse... we have no desire to exchange freedom for equality. We are convinced that in no social order will personal freedom be so assured as in a society based upon communal ownership."--Marx and Engels
"The general interest is precisely the generality of self-seeking interests. Therefore, when the economic form, exchange, posits the all-sided equality of its subjects, then the content, the individual as well as the objective material which drives towards the exchange, is freedom. Equality and freedom are thus not only respected in exchange based on exchange values but, also, the exchange of exchange values is the productive, real basis of all equality and freedom. As pure ideas they are merely the idealized expressions of this basis; as developed in juridical, political, social relations, they are merely this basis to a higher power. And so it has been in history. Equality and freedom as developed to this extent are exactly the opposite of the freedom and equality in the world of antiquity, where developed exchange value was not their basis, but where, rather, the development of that basis destroyed them. Equality and freedom presuppose relations of production as yet unrealized in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages. Direct forced labor is the foundation of the ancient world; the community rests on this as its foundation; labor itself as a 'privilege', as still particularized, not yet generally producing exchange values, is the basis of the world of the Middle Ages. Labor is neither forced labor, nor, as in the second case, does it take place with respect to a common, higher unity (the guild)."
--Marx, Grundrisse, pg 245.
This is probably one of the most interesting quotes from Marx. It's interesting because it essentially explodes all the presuppositions people have about Marx and his criticisms:
"What this reveals, on the other side, is the foolishness of those socialists (namely the French, who want to depict socialism as the realization of the ideals of bourgeois society articulated by the French revolution) who demonstrate that exchange and exchange value etc. are originally (in time) or essentially (in their adequate form) a system of universal freedom and equality, but that they have been perverted by money, capital, etc. [23] Or, also, that history has so far failed in every attempt to implement them in their true manner, but that they have now, like Proudhon, discovered e.g. the real Jacob, and intend now to supply the genuine history of these relations in place of the fake. The proper reply to them is: that exchange value or, more precisely, the money system is in fact the system of equality and freedom, and that the disturbances which they encounter in the further development of the system are disturbances inherent in it, are merely the realization of equality and freedom, which prove to be inequality and unfreedom. It is just as pious as it is stupid to wish that exchange value would not develop into capital, nor labour which produces exchange value into wage labour. What divides these gentlemen from the bourgeois apologists is, on one side, their sensitivity to the contradictions included in the system; on the other, the utopian inability to grasp the necessary difference between the real and the ideal form of bourgeois society, which is the cause of their desire to undertake the superfluous business of realizing the ideal expression again, which is in fact only the inverted projection [Lichtbild] of this reality." (Grundrisse, MECW28: 180)
Mainly that Marxists who think freedom and equality haven't been realized are ignorant of Marx's actual arguments about capitalism, and they don't understand much about freedom and equality.
Some more Marx: "Since money is only the realization of exchange-value, and since the system of exchange values has realized itself only in a developed money system, or inversely, the money system can indeed only be the realization of this system of freedom and equality. {...} Finally, even equality now posits itself tangibly, in money as medium of circulation, where it appears now in one hand, now in another, and is indifferent to this appearance. Each appears towards the other as an owner of money, and, as regards the process of exchange, as money itself. Thus indifference and equal worthiness are expressly contained in the form of the thing. The particular natural difference which was contained in the commodity is extinguished, and constantly becomes extinguished by circulation. A worker who bus commodities for $3 appears to the seller in the same function, in the same equality -- in the form of $3 -- as the kind who does the same." (Grundrisse, pg. 246)
Engels in 1884, in origins of the family, state, private property goes on to summarize Morgan approvingly:
"And now, in conclusion, Morgan’s judgment of civilization:
Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations. A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man’s existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.
[Morgan, op. cit., p. 562.–Ed."
Marx and Engels both talk about socialist society as a "kingdom of freedom," as opposed to the "kingdom of necessity."
As for the quote about communism being the "kingdom of freedom", Marx has something else in mind. People are no longer ruled by the impersonal necessity of need, of having to labor for others, but overcome it through meeting their needs. Then they are not brought into economic relations of subservience due to impersonal forces.
"Orthodox Marxism" after Marx's death saw parliamentary democracy as a springboard for communist agitation and a motor by which either revolution or peaceful reform could be used to bring about socialism. Such orthodox Marxist thought has been practiced by the older Social Democratic Party in Germany - parliamentarism which later evolved in the participation of power and abandonment of Marx' criticism of capitalism.. The same is true with many Communist Parties in France or Italy..
There is nothing "orthodox" about the SPD. The doctrine of the SPD was not Marxism, but the Kautskyist distortion of Marxism going back to "The Class Struggle", a sort of "socialism in one country" before "socialism in one country", with money, markets, even mortgages etc.
And if goods are distributed on the basis of need, they can't be distributed democratically. You can serve need or 50%+1 vote, not both.
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