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Free Development of Man

The self-conscious, voluntary, and free development of human as a subject is the development of human as an end in itself and at its own disposal. Marx and Engels clearly put forth the viewpoint of human’s free development in The Communist Manifesto: “When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.” Political rule, in its original sense is the organized violence used by one class to oppress another. “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonism, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. This offers a brilliant description of the coincidence of social development and individual development, collective freedom and individual freedom in the future communist society, in which social freedom cannot be used to suppress individual freedom, nor can individual freedom be emphasized one-sidedly to the extent of hindering or undermining social freedom, and takes this as one of the fundamental differences between the new social union and the old society, which developed in class antagonism in the past; and also transcends the opposition between socialism and individualism in terms of value orientation, and distinguishes scientific socialism from anarchism, which absolutizes individual freedom, and focuses on measuring the level of development of the human subject as a whole from the degree of free development of individual subjects, holding that the free development of each individual precisely indicates that external forces have been harnessed by the autonomous activities of man, and that individuals as well as mankind as a whole have truly become masters of their own relations…

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