Volume 10, Issue 2, 2007
Manfred Baum
Pages 117-131
Freedom in Marx
Through a structural analysis of the concept of labor in the Paris Manuscripts and the Grundrisse, and in response to critics of Marx such as Hannah Arendt and Alfred Schmidt, the author argues that freedom in Marx is not simply freedom from labor or free time. In accordance with the essence of the human being as a working organism, the goal of the socialist revolution is also free labor. Finally, the transformation of the human being brought about by the development of labor
as poesis in turn entails the transformation of labor necessarily performed because of human dependence on nature.