 Revolutionaries often say things like this. It's a good slogan, but what does it mean? If they kill you, haven't they also taken your freedom? Are all these random minions any more free under a Scottish king than under an English one? Are you less free if your rulers were suits of armour and serve divinely ordained monarchs than if they were suits of, I don't know, whatever and serve the divinely ordained free market? The answer to these questions depends on your concept of freedom and whose freedom you care about. Marx took the radical approach of calling for the freedom of all human beings. In this he was opposed by almost all liberals and conservatives of his day who usually wanted to exclude people who were non-European, non-white, women, working class and so on. For Marx, freedom was at the core of what it means to be human and the only way for everyone to be free is through real democracy and socialism and this is not something that the apologists of capitalism can accept. But what is freedom anyway and why is it so important? Let's see what Marx has to say. Marx's concept of freedom is rooted in his views on consciousness. In the economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844 he writes that Man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. Conscious life activity directly distinguishes man from animal life activity. Only because of that is he a species being or rather he is a conscious being i.e. his own life is an object for him only because he is a species being. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Marx says this in later works as well including capital. For example in volume one of capital he writes that But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in the wax. Man not only affects a change of form in the materials of nature he also realizes his own purposes in those materials and this is a purpose he is conscious of. Apart from the exertion of the working organs a purposeful will is required for the entire duration of the work. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work and the way in which it has to be accomplished and the less therefore he enjoys it as the free play of his own physical and mental powers the closer his attention is forced to be. For Marx the labor process is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature the everlasting nature imposed condition of human existence and is common to all forms of society in which human beings live. Marx thinks that human beings unlike other animals have consciousness consciousness he thinks is unique to humans universal among them and distinctive of human beings as a species. Consciousness is an internal capacity that enables humans to reflect upon, deliberate on, direct and change their activities as needed. This capacity makes it possible for humans to consciously direct their own activity and this makes it possible for us to be free. At this point you might be thinking doesn't all of this presuppose some idea of an invariant human nature that Marx rejects? In the thesis on Feuerbach Marx famously criticizes Feuerbach for wanting to resolve the religious essence into the human essence. To do this he abstracts from society and history to find the origin of religious ideas in a static and a historical concept of the human essence. This becomes something that can be comprehended only as a genus as an internal dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals. Against this Marx argues that the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. The powers of consciousness that Marx thinks make freedom possible and important are not the kind of static and a historical property that thinkers like Feuerbach make use of. It is not some internal dumb generality. Marx distinguishes between human nature in general and human nature as historically modified in each epoch. For Marx, as we've said, consciousness is a kind of internal capacity that humans share. This capacity, however, is developed and expressed differently in different contexts and forms of society. Consciousness enables humans to be free, but only under the conditions that allow it. So, what does it mean to be free? For Marx, you are free in an activity if and only if you consciously self-direct that activity. This requires having both the right internal capacity, consciousness, and external conditions that allow you to use that consciousness to direct your activities. So, when people work for slave owners, overseers or bosses, they're not free because they can't control their activities themselves, just like you're not really free when you live under kings and queens, no matter which country they're from. Freedom is important, Marx thinks, for two reasons. Firstly, it's a particularly important and valuable mode of human development and flourishing. For more on that, see the previous video in this series. Secondly, freedom positively impacts the development of many other human powers. Unfree labor is, Marx writes, external to the worker, i.e. does not belong to his essential being. In such labor, the worker does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. It is therefore not voluntary, but forced. It is forced labor. The idea here is that when you carry an activity out freely, rather than being forced, you're able to enjoy it much more. When you are free, you're also able to develop the different powers you use in that activity much more than if you're not. This idea is supported by a number of psychological studies on autonomy, which show that the experience of self-direction has numerous benefits for human well-being and even for productivity. Furthermore, the benefits seem to hold across different societies, including ones which do not necessarily value self-direction explicitly. And look, you probably don't need science to tell you this. Lots of students, scientists, artists and small business owners work incredibly hard and love what they do. And one of the reasons why they love and prefer their jobs to ones that require less work is that they have more control over what they do and how. I think that pretty much any job I've ever had would have been much better if we didn't have a boss and could run the show ourselves. Freedom is a question of who's in control of your life. Do you control your activity, your life, or is it controlled by someone or something else? Now, if we're being honest with ourselves, we know that we're not all that free. We know that much of our lives is run by fear of bosses and governments. They decide the rules we have to follow, they change the rules when it suits them and they can get away with it, and they can punish us if and when we refuse to follow orders. If we don't follow orders at work, we can be demoted, have wages docked, be fired and so on. If we don't follow the laws of the state, we can be fined, imprisoned and worse. We're not free, at least not yet, but we can change that. And one of the things we need to change that is to understand what makes us unfree. As we'll see later, Marx argues that one of those things is capitalism. We can't just destroy economic structures. Any society needs to feed water and house its people. We need to replace these institutions with others, but with others. The utopian socialists thought that dreaming up a perfect new world and convincing people would be enough, especially those with lots of money and power. No need for class struggle, no need for revolution, no need to worry about fascism, backlashes and other reactionary violence. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels criticized the utopians because they lack a scientific understanding of capitalism, the society they want to replace. They therefore neglect the importance of class power and class struggle to changing society and think that appealing to kind-hearted capitalists will work to convince them to introduce socialism. As a result, the utopians' plans become unrealizable and they end up working against the only social force, the working class, able to take us to socialism. This idea is actually pretty intuitive. You often can't cure something if you don't have a diagnosis of it. If you don't know what the problem is, how can you find a solution for it? If we want to understand what a free society looks like, we first need to understand what makes us unfree. One of those things is capitalism. In this episode, we've seen how Marx thinks that free conscious activity constitutes the species' character of human beings. In the next, we'll see how capitalism's alienation tears this species' life away from us. In other words, we will see how we are made unfree by capitalism. Thank you for listening. Please like, share, subscribe for more of our stuff. Click on the notification bell if you want. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments and we'll try to answer them either there or in a Q&A video.