The Evolution Of Marx’s Thought Of Freedom And Its Contemporary Situation

Since human history,the pursuit of freedom has become an eternal topic in the development of human society.From "exploring what is the origin of the world" to "paying attention to oneself",the process of philosophical sages always revolves around the two questions of "understanding of necessity and understanding of self".Freedom is the knowledge of necessity,and objective necessity is always a person who is constantly recognized and serves the practical subject with the improvement of the subject’s cognitive ability.It is precisely because people realize their self-value in the process of understanding and using objective laws that the methodology of dialectical materialism and historical materialism should be used to understand the problem of human freedom.The concept of Marx’s free thought can be interpreted from two aspects.On the one hand,from the perspective of philosophy,it refers to man’s understanding of necessity,and the practice of the subject can make full use of the law of natural necessity to serve the freedom and all-round development of man.On the other hand,from the perspective of political economy,it means to break the enslavement of capital to people and realize the control of people over capital.Marx’s understanding of freedom is combined with the concrete reality conditions,indicating that freedom can not only be a form of freedom in thought and concept,but also need to be linked with real people and society.The research content of this paper mainly studies Marx’s free thought in different periods from the perspective of "evolution".On the basis of synthesizing previous studies on Marx’s free thought,it highlights the philosophical dimension and political economy dimension of the evolution of Marx’s free thought,and interprets the complete state of the evolution of Marx’s free thought from rational freedom to free personality in the mature period.This study follows the logical end point of the evolution of Marx’s freedom thought,focuses on exploring the dialectical relationship between Marx’s freedom personality and individual freedom,and analyzes the mutual relationship between free time and human development space,free personality and human leisure realm from the perspective of dialectical materialism and historical materialism.With the changes of The Times,different schools of thought or social trend of thought in the West have different understandings and censure of Marx’s freedom thought.To sort out the censure,misunderstanding and distortion of Marx’s free thought by neo-Marxists,neoliberals,universal values and other schools or social trends in theory,has important theoretical enlightenment for actively responding to the "situation" of Marx’s free thought in post-modern times.In general,this paper studies the evolution of Marx’s free thought and its contemporary situation mainly in the three aspects of "evolution","circumstances" and "contemporary value" of Marx’s free thought.First,the "evolution" of Marx’s free thought experienced a development process from immature to mature.First of all,during the period from his Doctoral Thesis to Rheinische Zeitung,he was influenced by Western philosophy,especially Hegel,Powell,Feuerbach and others,and believed that human freedom is determined by self-consciousness,spirit and reason.Secondly,after experiencing the stage of material real interests in the Rheinische Zeitung period,Marx thought that it was necessary to search for the real reason of human slavery from the actual social and economic conditions.Finally,with Marx’s deeper understanding of civil society,he began to search for ways to realize freedom in real democratic countries.In the process of looking into the political rights and material interests of man,he further developed his materialist factors,and realized the "two changes" in thought with his genius "Feuerbach Theses" and "German Ideology",which also marked the maturity of Marx’s free thought.In his subsequent works,especially in the Economic Manuscripts of 1857-1858,Marx put forward the view of man’s free personality in terms of the "three forms" of social development.He believes that the free development of man eventually leads to the era of the higher form of freedom,namely the era of free personality,which is the era of the association of free men in communist society.In a word,the evolution of Marx’s free thought has experienced the evolution of rational freedom,human liberation,class characteristic freedom,practical materialism free thought and free personality.Second,Marx’s freedom thought faces the contemporary "situation" in the post-modern society.The most typical challenges and censure of Marx’s free thought are neo-Marxists,neo-liberals and the trend of universal values.First of all,neo-Marxists such as Frankfurt School attack the alienation phenomenon in capitalist society from the aspects of the overall criticism of cultural industry,the rationalization of communicative behavior,one-way society,mutual recognition theory and psychological alienation.On the one hand,they inherited Marx’s thought of alienation of labor,but on the other hand,they did not criticize the monopoly capital dominated by the logic of capital in capitalist society,and this kind of criticism did not touch the original practice and eventually became an abstract theoretical criticism.Secondly,Isaiah Berlin,the representative of liberal pluralism,starts from the differentiation of positive freedom and negative freedom.He believes that Marx’s free thought belongs to the category of positive freedom,which ignores individual freedom and easily forms a totalitarian and authoritarian society.Neoliberals Mises and Hayek inherited the concept of extreme individualism of classical liberalism,advocated absolute freedom of business and trade,and actively advocated the natural order of privatization,liberalization and marketization in the capitalist market.Hayek and others believed that the socialist system advocated by Marx could not realize individual freedom at all,and he believed that liberalism and socialism were opposing social forms,and "only the absolute freedom of individuals can conform to the principle of seeking advantages and avoiding disadvantages of people".Finally,the trend of universal values expands the value demands of western capitalist society such as "democracy,freedom,equality and fraternity" into "universal values" that all people should accept,and elevates this value system that only a few people can enjoy into a national ideology,and exports it in the form of "values diplomacy".In essence,the "universal value" of the West requires non-Western countries to identify with this form of power generated by capital in an attempt to achieve the purpose of monopoly capital globalization.Some liberals equate the freedom of socialist core values with the freedom embedded in the so-called "universal values" in the West,so as to achieve the purpose of dispelling the ideology of our socialist country.Third,study Marx’s freedom thought and its value orientation of contemporary circumstances.China is facing profound changes unseen in a century.In the international environment,the world’s diverse cultures are interacting with each other,and the world pattern is showing unilateralism and multilateralism.Sanctions and counter-sanctions;The zero-sum game and the new Cold War mentality are affecting the world economic development pattern,and the sense of powerlessness and confusion of mankind is becoming more and more apparent.The world pattern has great uncertainty and instability.Today,when the world situation,national conditions and the Party situation are undergoing profound changes,ideological work becomes particularly important.Studying the evolution process of Marx’s free thinking is conducive to alert against the crisis of neoliberalism ideology,respond to the misunderstanding and distortion of Marx’s free thought by various schools or social trends,help perspective the transformation of neoliberalism into consumerism disguised as value nihilism,help protect the community of human destiny,and collapse the theoretical system of neoliberalism’s capital logic.Responding to the contemporary situation facing Marx’s thought of freedom has important theoretical and practical enlightenment for correctly understanding the scientific connotation of freedom as the core value of socialism,the development concept of people first,the development road of Chinese modernization and the development direction of the community of human destiny.