Reexamination of “Self-Ownership”Overcoming Nozick’s Challenge to Marx as Cohen’s Testimony

Marx’s allegation of exploitation in capitalist society presupposes the idea of self-ownership. However, unlike the concepts of self-ownership of classical liberalism and libertarianism with self-ownership as the natural right and moral principle, Marx recognizes the self-ownership of labor as a commodity under the conditions of capitalist production, and emphasizes its sociality, necessity, and historicity, which transcend the natural directness, supremacy and infinite eternity of the first two concepts of self-ownership. Thus, Nozick’s challenge to Marx based on the concepts of self-ownership of classical liberalism and libertarianism, that is, the contradiction between Marx’s support for redistribution and his self-ownership presupposition, does not make Marx as vulnerable as Cohen argues.