Karl Marx was born on May 5th, 1818 and died March 14th, 1883. Marx wrote the theses on Feuerbach, the German Ideology, and Wage, Labor, and capital. In this essay, I will try to examine the ideology of Karl Marx on the concept of freedom and what it truly means to be free in a society and the world. Furthermore, I will try to draw examples from the German ideology and Wage, Labor and Capital to support or contradict my own notion of freedom and to determine if the assumptions of Marx is correct or wrong. The German ideology written by Marx and Engels talk about how we as humans have separated ourselves from animals we began to produce our own mean of substance like food and fire and things like that and also how and what we produce. It also speaks about how far productiveness of a nation is shown through the division of labor. Max also talks about the bourgeoisies and the proletariats, the bourgeoisies were owners of the products, the means of production, distribution, and profit and the proletariats were the laborers. In this paper, I will address what Freedom meant to Karl Marx and analysis the ideas and theory on which he based his ideology on. I will also address the how the ruling class defines Freedom in a society and how the definition has changed with the ruling class. I propose that in a society in which people want to reach freedom and equality in a capitalist system can be achieved by creating new laws and renovate the division of labor to better suit everyone and create a community where freedom and equality reachable.
Most people agree that we need to improve our economic system somehow yet we are so keen to dismiss the ideas of the most famous and ambitious critic of capitalism Karl Marx because of today’s small and central ideas that if it isn’t capitalism then it’s wrong. American today tend to believe whatever they are told by the media outlet and by the internet. The internet has a lot of good stuff on it but most of the things on it is fake and made up or written by someone that has a bias against the person or organization they are writing about. The standard way of thinking about communism and its beliefs on freedom in the west is that communism is bad because it does not let people have free will, therefore, no one in that society is truly free. Many people assume that the communism of today was the communist ideology of the past but that is wrong. Communism in the past as written by Marx was twisted and changed by those that oppress others. In practice, his ideology has been twisted to create nasty dictatorships and disastrous economies. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t reject the ideologies of Karl Marx because we need his ideas and criticism of the ills of capitalism to better future.
Karl Marx believed in the equality for all individuals and also believed that this equality should be regulated by the governing body. Nonetheless, the communist party was a mainly an economic system which is a system that revolves around production, resource allocations and good distributions in a society or certain area. The theory behind Communism is that everyone in the society receives a benefit from what the society produces and everything that is produced in a society is shared equally among the citizens. In this position of analysis of the communist theory, two different conflicts arise due to the definition of freedom. The first conflict is that in a communist society the individual best interest is not that different from the society’s best interest and therefore the theory of having individual freedom cannot exist in the communist ideology. Therefore, with conflicts such as this Karl Marx was not correct with his assumptions that communism was the only way to become truly free because if his assumptions were correct everyone in a communist society would be rich and there would be no poor people in the community. In the German Ideology, it states that,
“Only in community [with others has each] individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. In the previous substitutes for the community, in the State, etc. personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed the relationships of the ruling class, and only insofar as they were individuals of this class” (Marx&Engels 78).
It is clearly seen that to be truly free you must be part of a community to be truly free and if you are not part of a community then freedom is just a concept. In the German Ideology, it states that for a person to have the personal freedom he/she must be a part of the ruling class such as government or business person etc. The ruling class is the class of people that control the material force of a society and the intellectual force of the society and the control and maintain the production and distribution of ideas for the time they rule. This ruling class will always exist because society will always have a need for a ruling class. “In the real community, the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association” meaning that only if a certain individual was able to obtain his freedom it would have only come out from the association with the ruling class (Marx&Engels 78). Now, this idea that freedom is not granted to those that are in a community is somewhat true because we are not truly free in any sort of government because we are regulated by laws. There is the ruling class telling people what not to do and what to do. The only freedom we truly feel is in our own communities where we somewhat have control of how we eat and how we live. People aren’t truly free because we depend on others to provide us with living, for example, we work for someone else. Not free labor but labor because we need the money to keep living in the house we live in or buy the stuff we need to live normal lives. If that job ceases to exist then we cannot function correctly and we will lose everything we have. In the German Ideology, it explains that for an individual to be truly free is to become a ruling member of a society. I think nowadays that ruling class is those people that have the most money because they control the stock markets, the for industry and clothes business and people in government. To really get yourself to that kind place is hard in society these days because there is not much opportunity to reach such a level if you don’t have the money to do so.
Marx was strongly in favor of individual freedom, freedom to do what a person wanted to do or become without any regulation. Marx expected that in a communist society would allow people to express many sides of their nature. Marx gives us an example of the German Ideology, Part I, where he wrote that in communism society, anyone can "in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wished, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic (Marx&Engels 22). He states that there was not a certain thing a person is committed to, that anyone can do anything they want and it will not affect their livelihood. He is saying that labels are what ties people down to a certain thing and in his communist ideals that that tie would be unknotted and every person talks participation at one time or another in every activity. In this ideology, he seems to say that people have the freedom to do whatever they want but will lead people to believe that communism should be all play and no work.
Marx claims that work is what makes us human but he disagrees with the way that capitalism is dealing with it because in today’s society the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In today’s society, a worker is expandable when there is no more of use for them especially when owners can reduce the amount of money they use to create produces by buying technologies that can do more work at a lesser price. Marx argued that in a capitalistic society workers were being alienated and their freedom was removed because they would work long hours for cheap wages. The alienation was between the works and the produces they made, under some capitalistic factories works would make things that they themselves could not afford because of such low wages (Marx). When people worked under a capitalistic system it starts to take its toll on people because it has aliened them from each other creating other problems. I agree with Marx on this claim because it is true, capitalist’s companies do exploit people in third world countries to make products that they cannot afford. They have workers that get paid pennies to make a shirt that then sells for twenty or thirty in America or Europe. This doesn’t seem fair to people that are tolling away making the shirt or jacket I am wearing. They lose their freedom and become alienated from the world because all they have to bring to the table is there labor and capitalist companies exploit that for their own benefits.
Of course, the capitalist would disagree with his claim that work is what makes a person really human and achieve true freedom but Marx argues that for a society to be truly human it must achieve a level of freedom to where all people are equal. Yet is always true that a man’s work is the embodiment of his soul because if a man makes something that he loves it comes from the heart and he is entitled to be happy with the production that he has made. It is always the case that if you create something with your own two hands that it feels better. Some readers might challenge my views that a person is what a person creates and makes with their own hands. After all, many capitalists believe that people should work harder to gain more freedom but it is not true because people cannot climb the latter because it is too steep. In a capitalist system, there is no chance for a poor person to climb up to the ranks because of unfair laws and such things. I believe that to really have a sense of freedom in a capitalist nation is to recreate laws that hinder people from working their way up.
Although, I agree with most of Marx ideology up to a point, I cannot accept his overall conclusion that the only way to achieve freedom is communism. Even communism has it faults due to the ways that people have twisted to their own agenda. Although I disagree with much of the communisms ideology, the concept of freedom that Marx thought of is good to move forward to achieve a better society where everyone is equal and free. Marx gives us a very wild range of examples of how capitalism is not all good and true, the examples that ills of capitalism and try to redefine it to better-fit others. I agree with the analyzes of the troubles of capitalism as in it system. Marx main idea I think is that he wants people to have a sense of being human and not just another laborer for others to exploit. He wants a world where everyone is free to choose to do whatever they wanted and not held doing a certain thing for the rest of their live. He wanted people to realize and stand up against inequality and show that they are human. We should all be Marxist in a sense that we should go out and try to solve the problems that we face and find a cure that really will work. Marx says in theses on Feuerbach 11 that “Philosophers until now have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”. we must change the world and think of better ideology and create a better world where we can all live freely and equally.