Nick Hewlett, 'Karl Marx and the concept of freedom'

With regard to the notion of freedom, Marx is best known for explaining how capitalism and bourgeois rule prevent individuals and groups from seeking and achieving freedom. Moreover, bourgeois notions of ‘free competition’ in the market, bourgeois democracy, and the modern proletarian entering ‘freely’ into a contract with their employer all help prevent people achieving their full potential. This approach, associated in particular with Marx’s later writings, arguably has similarities with the liberal view that freedom is the absence of interference with what people wish to do; it is freedom from oppression and exploitation, which are particularly acute under capitalism. This can be described as negative freedom.

However, Marx (sometimes with Engels) also has a more positive concept of freedom, where freedom is about fulfillment of human potential. This happens via communism, which brings ‘the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man…[and it is] the true resolution of the conflict between existence and being…between freedom and necessity, between individual and species’ (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts [1844], Penguin, 1975, p.348). In The German Ideology [1846], Marx (with Engels) similarly describes freedom as the self-determination of human beings, which will be a collective
enterprise, for only ‘within the community has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions’ (vol I, IV, p.6). Over a decade later, freedom is similarly the ‘absolute working-out of [the individual’s] creative potentials’ (Grundrisse [1857], Pelican, 1973, p.488).

This raises two questions. First, can the two approaches to freedom (negative and positive) be reconciled; are they compatible? Second, are we in any case able to explore properly Marx’s ‘positive’ approach to freedom, given that according to him it would only be realised under communism, the nature of which he discusses relatively little?