Free Development Of The Ideal And The Reality - People And Socialism

The most attractive issue in human's existence is how to realize the freedom of life activities, so freedom has always been endowed with beautiful implications and lofty values.The most attractive goal in human's ideal is revealed by Marxism, namely, free development of each individual is the condition for the free development of all human beings.This definition is the inevitable conclusion drawn by Marxism. Marxism's interpretation about freedom is that, it is the inner needs of people's life activities, the ideal state of people's subsistence and living and die activities that people realize and appreciate their values. In this sense, as the inner needs of humans, free ideal is not something that cannot be reached, but rather, something that can be approached progressively through human activities. Furthermore, whether humans can approach their ideals progressively depends on the development of each individual's ability. Therefore, according to Marxism, the ultimate state of freedom is that each individual can develop himself or herself on the equal footing with the acknowledgment of different abilities. This ultimate state provides humans with a basic enlightenment on choosing a suitable development pattern in a specific historical period.Based on this conclusion, the theory about freedom defined by Marx revealed the logical consistency between socialism and human's free development in a deeper way. To be more specific, on one hand, socialism is what humans choose in a free fashion through their activities, on the other hand, logically, socialism should provide unprecedented material preconditions and social and historical conditions for human's free development. These social and historical conditions are as follows: in a socialist society, exploitation, suppression and social inequalities should be eliminated so that all the citizens can enjoy the same rights and interests in politics, economy, culture, etc. Evidently, Marx made the ultimate state of human's free development more concrete by pointing out that a socialrelationship based on equality should be established in a socialist society. In connection, Marx advocated that socialist society should adopt public ownership and planned economy. However, what has been proved is that when socialist countries build socialism according to Marx's scheme, both individual and overall freedoms of the human beings have not been developed as it should be. There are two reasons. One, the planned economy is not the right alternative for these backward socialist countries to develop their productivity. Two, the unitary public ownership and the planned economy that these countries pursue have hindered the development of individual abilities. But the development of individual's ability and bringing his or her potential into full play are the basic implications of human's free development.Historic experiences and lessons have taught Chinese socialists to choose socialist market economy as an ideal development pattern resolutely. People wish to expand material wealth fully and bring each individual's potential into full play through competition mechanism in the market economy. Market economy is the best development pattern ever both for the development of productivity and for the development of individual's ability. Naturally, market economy, in a general sense, will bring not only positive effects, but also negative influences.The combination of socialism and market economy will create a new development stage for the market economy. With its advanced philosophy about value, socialism will minimize the negative effects of the market economy to human's free development in a more reasonable and effective way. In this sense, the choice of the market economy in socialist countries have led human beings into a new historic period of free development.We are convinced that human's free development has accelerated in the socialist market economy.