Emancipation

Humans are born into slavery. Nature is humans’ essential antagonist. In order to discover and practice their humanity (that which distinguishes them from other animals), humans must continually free themselves from nature as their master.

Human society is the first revolt against natural slavery. The cooperation of each is the means by which we achieved the freedom of all. Only once human society had sufficiently afforded the freedom that comes with relative abundance could the surpluses of the many be used to secure the greater freedom for the few. This dispensible form of enslavement, that of humans by other humans, arises not as a consequence of inherent avaric, but from our prevailing technical immaturity.

Having developed the earliest methods of positive freedom (freedom to) primarily through subsequent re-organizations of the social division of labor, we gave rise to the necessity of negative freedom (freedom from). At once, humans had become a social species and an anti-social species.

Emancipation (complete freedom), thereby, cannot be had in the recognition of increasingly maximal negative rights, nor can it be assured by any positive rights acquired merely by the shifting of entitlement to this or that share of the social product. Rather, it can only be obtained through the conscious re-organization of social production in accordance with new productive forces, themselves consciously created towards those ends.