Freedom

Also called “liberty”. Man’s relation to the objective world, breaking free from one’s chains and achieving emancipation. Freedom is not doing as one pleases, but subject to the constraints and limitations of the objective world. Man has the nature of pursuing emancipation, but man is a social animal; man himself and one’s activity are subject to the constraints of social conditions, and the degree to which man obtains freedom is limited by the development of the productive forces and the relations of production at the time. Freedom has two meanings, i.e., freedom in the philosophical sense and freedom in the political sense.

Philosophically, freedom refers to the knowledge of necessity and the reshaping of the objective world according to the laws of development of things. Engels said that freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. Freedom and necessity are a pair of categories in philosophy that reveals the dialectical relation between the human subject and the objective laws of development of things. In the history of philosophy, Spinoza clearly raised the question of freedom and necessity. He held that men are free only if they act rationally, that the degree of freedom depends on the degree of rational behavior, and tried to unite necessity and freedom. In The Correspondence, he pointed out that “I do not place freedom in free decision, but in free necessity.” However, the freedom he spoke of is not the knowledge of the laws of nature and its reshaping, but rather conforming to it in order to gain control over feelings and desires. From a purely speculative point of view, the German philosopher Hegel was “the first to give a true account of the relation between freedom and necessity.” In the Small Logic, he pointed out that “Freedom is essentially concrete, eternally determinate within itself, and thus necessary at the same time.” “When people speak of necessity, it is usually initially understood as just determination from without. This is a merely external necessity, however, not a genuinely inner necessity, for that is freedom.” “Necessity is blind only insofar as it is not comprehended” and freedom can only be attained if necessity is known.

Marxist philosophy has explained the dialectical relation of freedom and necessity, and holds that freedom and necessity are both opposite and unified. Necessity is an objective law independent of man’s subjective will; freedom is secondary, the knowledge by man of the laws of objective things in their practical activity. Before they know necessity, men can only be enslaved and bound by necessity. Only when they know and make use of necessity to consciously conquer nature and change society can they be free. Mao Zedong pointed out that freedom is the knowledge of necessity and the reshaping of the objective world. Freedom and necessity are interconnected, conditioned by each other, and, under certain conditions, transform into each other. Necessity is the objective basis on which freedom rests, and freedom cannot exist apart from necessity, but man can know necessity through practical activity and change necessity dynamically through the knowledge of objective laws. This is when “the blind, unrecognized necessity, the ‘self-referential necessity’, is transformed into the recognized ‘necessity of the self”. The result of men’s reshaping of the objective world is achieved in the constant mutual transformation of necessity and freedom. The degree to which man gains freedom from necessity is closely related to the level of development of the productive forces of society, the progress in science and technology, and the capacity of human thinking. Human freedom develops with the development of practice. Modern man has greater freedom than primitive man. Human history is a history of the constant leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. Metaphysicians placed necessity and freedom in an absolute opposition, or regarded human activity as completely subject to external necessity and denied that men can know and master objective laws, thus arrived at fatalism; or exaggerated the part played by freedom in the human activity and denied the determining and restraining part played by objective laws of nature and society on human knowledge, thus relapsed into voluntarism.

Politically, the word “liberty” originated from the Latin word libertas, which originally meant emancipation from restraint, extended to the right to conduct an activity according to one’s will in social relations, which is guaranteed or recognized by law, and usually refers to the freedom of the person, speech, belief and assembly. According to 19th century British philosopher J.S. Mill, civil liberty or social liberty is “the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over individual” (On Liberty). In the struggle against feudal absolutism, the bourgeois Enlightenment thinkers put forth that freedom is a natural and inalienable right, and established the right to freedom in law for the first time after the victory of the revolution. In 1789, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man proclaimed that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights” and affirmed that “liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not harm others.” In class society, the right to freedom is always bound up with the appropriation of the means of production and political domination, and can only be enjoyed by a part of the population. In different societies, freedom has different contents. In slave society, only slave-owners enjoyed freedom, and the masses of slaves were deprived of all freedom; in feudal society, politically and economically, only the feudal lords were free, and the masses of peasants were in the position of being oppressed and exploited, the freedom put forth in the period of bourgeois revolutions refers to the emancipation, politically and economically, from the feudal-despotic system, conquest of political power from the hands of the feudal lords and the establishment of a kingdom of freely competing capitals.

Marxism holds that freedom is not natural, that it is connected with the relations of production of society and has class nature. By freedom the bourgeoisie means only their freedom to employ and exploit. In Capital, Marx spoke of freedom “in the double sense that as a free man 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 necessary for the realization of his labor-power.” In the False Talk on Freedom, Lenin said: “Until classes are abolished, all talk about freedom and equality in general is self-deception, or else deception of the workers and of all who toil and are exploited by capital; in any case, it is a defense of the interests of the bourgeoisie.” Only in the socialist society in which private property is abolished and public property in the means of production and proletarian dictatorship are implemented, and the working people are the master in their own house, will they have freedom from exploitation and oppression and truly gain freedom of the person, speech, communication, press, assembly, association, procession, demonstration, religious belief, and other political, as well as social, behavioral freedoms such as free love. Freedom is not absolute, but relative. There is no absolute freedom without constraint. Marx had criticized the 19th-century anarchist Proudhon for his erroneous claim of “no parties, no power, absolute freedom for all men and citizens”. Only in the communist society, with the abolition and withering-away of classes, private property and the State, and only then can the “free and full development of every individual” be truly realized.

Under the socialist system, freedom is relative to law and discipline. Freedom and law and discipline are the two aspects of a contradictory unity, as they are both contradictory and unified. While the people enjoy a wide range of democracy and freedom, their acts must at the same time be bound by socialist laws and discipline; absolute freedom does not exist.