Publication Details

Abstract

Freedom is a manifestation of Man’s intrinsic nature. By the arising of class society and state it acquires political character. Democracy is a form of governing, a form of political system as a whole. The relation of democracy and freedom in class society is various: it depends upon what class is in power. While bourgeois democracy hinders the real freedom, socialist democracy under the conditions of building-up socialism creates real preconditions for a manysided democratization of the society and a gradual dying out of state. Thus it approaches a real, unlimited by classes freedom, a classless society. The main precondition of man’s rule over mature, society and over himself in communism consists in a many-sided and free development of personality. The Marxist conception of freedom and democracy and their realization in the conditions of building-up real socialism was a target of unscrupulous attacks by the right-wing revisionists and anticommunists in the years of crisis, 1968—69. But in fact they aimed at replacing the socialist state by a bourgeois-liberal or bourgeoisdemocratic state — although outwardly they claimed a „better“, „more perfect“ socialism, a „socialism with human face“. They interpreted freedom prevailingly from the position of philosophical anthropology, existentialism, i. e. abstractly, in a metaphysical antagonism to inevitability. They considered socialist democracy, dictatorship of proletariat to be an obstacle and not inevitable precondition of the development of Man’s freedom and of socialist society.