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Marxism and Freedom

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This is the founding document of Marxist-Humanism, written in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and before the great upheavals of the 1960's. Reading it is essential in understanding that time and why the revolutions of the masses failed during that period. What was missing from the intellectual movements influencing the masses at that point was not the "right plan", but the right philosophy of revolution which posits the masses as the agents in their own struggle for freedom.

The structure of the book is chronological, as the title states. Beginning from the period of the bourgeois revolutions, it leads up to the 1950's tracing how "post-Marx Marxism" lost its way in fetishizing vanguards, bureaucratic structures, and other un-dialectical constructs that they placed before the masses of oppressed people fighting for liberation. The main lesson of the book is not that intellectuals and Marxists need to come up with a means to create socialsim, but that the movement of the masses for liberation is socialism, and that one cannot substitute the actions of individuals from some vague collective determined from the top down.

In this age of capitalist crisis, this book needs to be seriously contemplated so that a new philosophy of liberation can lead humankind to cast off the shackles of capitalism.