Julio Huato wrote:
> Also Engels, in Anti-Duhring, refers to this necessity/freedom
> contrast in very general terms, in reference to consciousness confined
> under alienated social life vs. consciousness under social life that
> is transparent, under the control of people. Engels takes Hegel's
> notion of freedom (as the insight into necessity) and stretches it to
> include the ability to exercise practical control over our social
> life. There, Engels refers to the pre-history of the human race, the
> era in which unbridled necessity prevails, in contrast with a future
> society in which humans fully control their products, processes, and
> relations, a society in harmony with nature (including our human
> nature).
I recently reproduced the passage from Anti-Duhring in which Engels identifies his and Marx's "historical materialist" idea of this particular idea of the relation of "freedom" to "necessity" with Hegel's.
The basis of thIs particular idea, however, is the ontological idea of objective and knowable ethical, intellectual and aesthetic principles and the anthropological idea of human beings as the beings able to develop the capacity to know these principles and actualize them in their activity, such actualization constituting what Hegel means by "objective freedom."
So the "necessity" involved in "freedom" elaborated in this way is the relation of fullly "free" activity to these "universal" principles. This is what is meant by Hegel's idea of human being as the potentially "Divine Being," i.e as "the unity of the universal and individual."
This is related to, but different from, meanings of "necessity" and "freedom" in the passage contrasting the "true realm of freedom" with "the realm of necessity" in "communism." There "necessity" means the inescapable necessity of instrumental activity (a "necessity" that, as Marx points out in the passage I quoted, exists in "all forms of society and under all possible modes of production").
In the form it takes in an ideal community, this activity also actualizes "universal" principles (and so requires the fully developed "powers" of "universally developed individuals"), but for a purpose external to the activity.
It is producing "means" for the "end in itself" activity that defines the "true realm of freedom" that fully actualizes universal intellectual, aesthetic and ethical principles, i.e the scientific and artistic activity whose "goods" - "truth" and "beauty" - constitute the communicative content of ideal relations of "mutual recognition" - the creation and appropriation of these "goods."
The direct labour performed by wage-labour in capitalism is "alienated" labour. Those who perform it are not themselves acting as "architects" - this is why "automatic machinery" can replace direct labour of this form According to Marx, however, such labour is positively developmental.
It eventually woks to develop the powers and will constitutive of the subjects able to imagine and undertake the kind of revolutionary praxis that then further develops their powers and will to the degree required to end their "alienated" relation to the human powers objectified in the "productive forces" developed within capitalism, i.e. required to "appropriate" these "productive forces."
These various ideas of "power" - as (1) the ontological idea of "being" as "power" in the sense of activities within internal relations (2) the ontological and anthropological ideas incorporated in Marx's idea of fully developed human "powers" as the powers required to actualize "the unity of the universal and individual" and (3) the idea of the successive varying forms of "power" relations (the relations of domination constitutive of slave labour, serf labour and wage labour) as internally related forms of domination through which "subjects" with fully developed "powers" in the second sense develop - constitute the "historical materialist" ideas of "power."
Ted