Raya—On Freedom

Raya
"Marx's Humanism Today"
(pp. 63-76)

in Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium
ed. Erich Fromm
(1965)

[64] Marx concluded that only freely associated labor can abrogate the law of value; only "freely associated men" can strip fetishism from commodities.

[65]

At this moment in history, when established state powers claim "to practice" or to base themselves on Marxism, it is essential to re-establish what Marx himself meant by practice. It was freedom. The notion of freedom, always Marx's point of departure and of return, is concretized through a most painstaking and original analysis of the "inexorable laws" of capitalist development. This discloses how the proletariat, as "substance" (or mere object of a exploitative society) becomes "subject," i.e. revolts against the conditions of alienated labor, thereby achieving "the negation of the negation," or self-emancipation.

...

[68] Our generation should understand better than any previous generation that it is not a question of nationalized vs. private property. It is a question of freedom. Wherever and whenever freedom was limited, Marx struck out against the barrier, in practice and in theory. Thus, when classical political economists spoke of "free labor," by which they meant wage labor, Marx wrote caustically: "For them there was history, but history is no more."

...

[72] Marx's humanism was neither a rejection of idealism nor an acceptance of materialism, but the truth of both, and therefore a new unity. Marx's "collectivism" has, as its very soul, the individualistic element. That is why the young Marx felt compelled to separate himself from the "quite vulgar and unthinking communism which completely negates the personality of man." Because alienated labor was the essence of all that was perverse in capitalism, private or state, "organized" or "anarchic," Marx concluded his 1844 attack on capitalism with the statement that "communism, as such, is not the goal of human development, the form of human society." Freedom meant more, a great deal more, than the abolition of private property. Marx considered the abolition of private property to be only "the first transcendence." Full freedom demanded a second transcendence. ...

"Positive Humanism" begins "from itself" when mental and manual labor are reunited in what Marx calls the "all-rounded" individual. Surely our nuclear age should be oppressively aware that the division between mental and manual labor, which has been the underlying principle of all class societies, has reached

[73]

such monstrous proportions under capitalism that live antagonisms characterize not only production, but science itself. Marx anticipated the impasse of modern science when he wrote in 1844: "To have one basis for life and another for science is a priori a lie." We have been living this lie for one hundred and twenty years. The result is that the very survival of civilization as we have known it is at stake.