Is Marx's Thought on Freedom Contradictory?

ABSTRACT

In The Longing for Total Revolution, Bernard Yack argued that Marx’s thought is plagued by a recurring contradiction. On the one hand, Marx criticized his Idealist predecessors for failing to get beyond the dichotomy between human freedom and natural necessity; and he identified labor, activity determined by the necessity of having to satisfy material needs, as the primary activity of human freedom. On the other hand, Marx’s account of what makes us distinctively human, as well as his view that capitalism dehumanizes workers, implicitly rely on the same dichotomy. However, while Yack identified a real tension in Marx’s writings, he overlooked the resources Marx has to escape it.

Keywords:

• freedom
• natural necessity
• left Kantianism
• Karl Marx
• Bernard Yack

Notes

1 Like Allen Wood, “I know of no text where Marx explicitly addresses the issue of free will and determinism, and doubt that he has any firm opinion on this issue” (Wood 1981, 112).

2 For further discussion of the idea that Hegel’s rational state offers a reconciliation of our material and spiritual nature, see Neuhouser 2000, ch. 5, and Neuhouser 2020.

3 In line with this thought, Hegel rejected the idea that love that does not involve the satisfaction of sexual needs is more free than love that does. On the contrary, “it is a further abstraction if the divine and substantial is separated from its existence [Dasein] in such a way that feeling [Empfindung] and the consciousness of spiritual unity are categorized [fixert] as what is falsely called Platonic love. This separation is associated with the monastic attitude which defines the moment of natural life [Lebendigkeit] as utterly negative and, by this very separation, endows it with infinite importance in itself” (Hegel [1820] 1991, §163).

4 As Hegel puts it, “‘I’ is at home in the world when it knows it, and even more so when it has comprehended it” (Hegel [1820] 1991, §4 Addition, 36). For discussion of the claim that being “at home in the world” requires adopting a more social outlook, see Hardimon 1994.

5 For related discussion of these issues, see Cohen 2009.

6 For arguments that the passage from the third volume of Capital does not represent a change of views on Marx’s part, see Klagge 1986, Sayers 2011, and James 2017. For my view that it does (though not in the way that is commonly supposed), see Kandiyali 2014 and 2017.

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