The great importance of Marxist philosophy lies in its equipping the working people with a knowledge of the laws of the development and transformation of the objective world. It is a powerful weapon in the struggle for the liberation of the working people from all forms of oppression, for the building of a new, free life.

But is human freedom possible? Is man capable of shaping his own fate? These questions have troubled people since ancient times, but no one could give a convincing answer.

Discussing the question of freedom, philosophers arrived at different but always in- correct conclusions.

Some of them adopted the fatalist viewpoint, which denied freedom. Fatalism expounds the eternal predestination of all man’s actions. Religious fatalism (the Moslem faith and Calvinism) declares that man’s will is predetermined by God. The old metaphysical materialists (such as Holbach) spoke of the necessity of nature, which, they alleged, bound man hand and foot and left him no freedom of action.

Many idealist trends, on the other hand, deny natural necessity, inasmuch as they de- rive the entire world from consciousness, from man’s will. They consider man to be completely free and go so far as to assert absolute absence of law. Such philosophical theories of freedom are representative of indeterminism, of which the “philosophy of existentialism” discussed earlier may serve as an example.

Of the pre-Marxian philosophers, Hegel produced the deepest solution of the prob- lem of freedom and necessity, but he developed it, like all his doctrine, on an idealist foundation. He tried to link freedom and necessity by defining freedom as recognition of necessity. But by necessity he understood the necessary development of the absolute idea, while freedom, according to his doctrine, was realised solely in the realm of the spirit. The basic fault of the doctrines of Hegel and all other idealists is that they conceive freedom solely as freedom in spirit, in consciousness, totally evading the question of the real conditions of human life. What is more, they speak invariably about freedom of the individual and ignore the question of the emancipation of the masses.

Dialectical materialism provides a scientific solution to the question of the relation of freedom and necessity. While it takes necessity as the basis, materialist dialectics at the same time acknowledges the possibility of human freedom. Man’s true freedom is not an imaginary independence of natural and social laws (no such independence is in fact possible). It lies in knowing these laws and in actions based on that knowledge.

People are not supernatural beings. They cannot overstep the bounds of natural laws any more than they can avoid breathing. Furthermore, people live in society, and cannot be immune from the operation of the laws of social living. They can neither arbitrarily revoke the existing laws of social development, nor introduce new ones.

But people can cognise the laws of nature and society and, knowing the nature and direction of their operation, they can utilise them in their own interests, put them to their own service.

Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism