Rally of students at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India in 2016. They began with chants of “Red Salute” and “Long live revolution.” Students sang a song for Azadi (Arabic for “freedom”), demanding freedom from hunger, from money bags, from Hindu fascists, and from caste oppression. Toward the end they sang, “we will make the history and all your books filled with lies will be burnt to the ashes.”
Across the planet the masses—workers, students, soldiers, farm workers—are struggling for freedom from capitalist oppression. The masses want freedom from poverty, debt, police violence, racism, sexism, caste discrimination, pollution, unemployment and all the other miseries that capitalism forces on us.
Capitalism claims to provide freedom for everyone, although they really mean freedom for capitalists to exploit the working class. Freedom is a class question. That means that the more freedom there is for capitalists, the less the freedom of the masses.
Materialist Freedom
Freedom doesn’t just mean not having obstacles or limitations. In their book The German Ideology, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels explained the materialist conception of freedom. They wrote that freedom is power “over the circumstances and conditions in which an individual lives.”
This idea is based on the materialist principle that people are products of their circumstances. Our class, families, neighborhoods, our jobs, schools, the climate, the government, etc., make us what we are. The circumstances impose limitations on us but also make us able to do many things. Under capitalism the capitalists control the factories, transportation, government, the schools, the military, and the media, so they have far more power over our circumstances than we do. Many of the world’s workers don’t even have the power to feed themselves adequately, and we all depend on the wages we get from being exploited by capitalists.
The capitalists use their power to try to convince us with a massive campaign of deception not to fight them and their system. They promote racism, claim that better times are coming, or that it’s all the fault of immigrants, or more wealth for the rich will mean more jobs, and the rest of their lies. But we communists fight against these lies, showing that the masses can and will defeat their system with a communist revolution.
Freedom Requires Collective Action
People can get power over their circumstances by acting collectively. Many people working together can have the creativity and strength for tremendous accomplishments, but the survival of capitalism depends on limiting and controlling the collective power of the masses. Capitalists defeat mass movements that oppose the bosses’ crimes by lying about them, imposing pro-capitalist leaders on them, or smashing them by armed force.
Although capitalists have much more power than workers, their power is not unlimited. They constantly fight about how much of the labor that they steal from workers will go to the capitalists of each company, country or industry. These conflicts prevent capitalist unity and limit the power they have over their own circumstances. The economic crises and imperialist wars that necessarily result from the fights among capitalists themselves make the system uncontrollable. So even capitalists aren’t completely free under capitalism.
Communism is Real Collectivity
Marx and Engels pointed out that under communism, “the community of revolutionary proletarians … takes their conditions of existence and those of all members of society under their control.” Without capitalists, without a repressive government, without money or wages, collective humanity can decide how we use our labor, natural resources, and technology to meet everyone’s needs, direct our own future and provide lots of choices for individuals.
This kind of freedom wasn’t (and isn’t) possible under socialism, with its wages, inequalities, and life-long trades and professions that limit the kinds of work a person can do. Only the united action of the masses gives us the greatest power over the conditions and circumstances that make us what we are and provides the resources for individual development. Thus “personal freedom becomes possible only within the [communist] community,” Marx and Engels wrote, because “only within the community has each individual the means of cultivating his or her gifts in all directions.”
Mass Mobilization for Communism
Achieving communism will take a long, hard fight that can only be won by the revolutionary mass mobilization of the working class. But mass mobilization isn’t just the way to get to the goal of communism. Mass mobilization for communism gives workers the greatest possible power over our conditions and circumstances, and is thus a taste of working-class freedom itself. We won’t have freedom from exploitation, however, until we get rid of capitalism and build communism. Join us in the fight for workers’ freedom.