Freedom

Freedom is the capacity to act in accordance with aims and interests, relying on a knowledge of objective necessity. In the history of social thought, the problem of freedom was traditionally reduced to the question of whether people have free will — in other words, whether their intentions and actions are governed by external circumstances. The materialist conception of history as held by Marxists rejects the idealist view of individual freedom as individual consciousness independent of objective circumstances. Marxism also opposes the metaphysical belief that there is an antithesis between freedom and necessity — a view that was widely held by philosophers and natural scientists of the 17th through 19th centuries. The Marxist conception of freedom in dialectical interaction with necessity is opposed to voluntarism, which asserts the arbitrary willfulness of human actions, and to fatalism, which regards actions as predetermined. Unlike the idealists, including Hegel and the existentialists, who limit the problem of freedom to the realm of consciousness, Marxism argues that without the possibility of realization, the consciousness of freedom is merely an illusion.

In their everyday activity people encounter not an abstract necessity but its concrete, historical embodiment in existing social and economic relations that determine the range of people’s interests, as well as in the material means for achieving desired goals. People are not free to choose the objective conditions in which they function, but they do possess a certain freedom in their choice of goals, since at any given moment there are usually several real possibilities of varying feasibility. Even when there is no alternative, people are in a position to forestall undesirable developments or hasten desirable ones. In addition, they are more or less free in their choice of the means for attaining a particular end. Thus, freedom is not absolute but relative, and it is made real through the choice of a definite plan of action. The degree of freedom increases as people grow more aware of their real possibilities, as they gain greater access to the means of attaining desired goals, and as their interests coincide more with the aspirations of many other people and especially with those of entire social classes, as well as with the objective trends of social progress.

See also

• Human rights