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If people are to fully realise their capacity for achievement, this will need a freedom beyond the realm of economic necessity, where they can posit individual goals without commitment or obligation to others. This means that economically necessary activity will have to be carried out by individuals in full consciousness of their social relationships. This contrasts with capitalism’s all-consuming realm of economic necessity, which demands total supplication to the social of all who work in it, whilst making people feel more atomised and individualistic than ever before.
In a full-blown capitalist society, there are no choices, i.e. no space outside the realm of economic necessity in which to posit new goals. We have said that it is in the positing and subsequent realisation of new goals that our humanity lies. Therefore, to cease to posit new goals is to negate the feature that distinguishes man from the animals.
We are left with only one choice if we are to move beyond the all-pervasive realm of economic necessity. One choice only is possible if we are to retain our humanity. To make this choice is nothing more or less than an expression of our humanity. The choice is therefore, not an ethical one, it is a necessity.
However, we have said already that the genuine positing of a goal (in this case the realm of freedom) is dependent upon knowledge of the object (in this case socialised production in the realm of necessity) being at an appropriate level. Capitalism has provided us with the means to freedom from economic slavery even though the latent potential for that freedom is hidden from view.
Only with full and conscious knowledge of actually existing society will men and women be able to posit a new idea of freedom from economic necessity. By starting with the abstract and returning to the concrete we have shown that today’s increasingly atomised and individualistic society is founded upon ever more purely social relationships. This has to be brought to people’s attention as, on the surface, modern society appears wholly individualistic and society appears not to exist at all ("…there is no such thing as society").
The establishment of a true realm of freedom is dependent upon people’s consciousness of social relationships and obligations in the economic realm. Such a consciousness is a prerequisite to the rational regulation of our interchange with nature and, therefore, to the minimisation of the realm of necessity, leaving the maximum space for individuals to posit and choose their own goals – free of any obligation to others. Such a freedom from social obligation might well be described as asocialism, the antithesis of socialism and its concomitant social obligations feared by many as a threat to individual liberty. Understood in this sense, asocialism, the realm of freedom, offers the egotistical consciousness of individuals the only true and complete opportunity for development.
In the freedom to choose new goals, personal goals, brutalism (i.e. an animal-like state) will fall away and men and women will not only retain their humanity, they will attain a higher level of humanity. In a matter of a tiny handful of generations (in relative world historical terms) we have leaped from idiocy to the verge of a new universalism. The achievement of such a huge and world historical transformation depends on the understanding, by individuals, that their own best interests are served through the obligations to others in the social or public sphere of economic necessity. The ongoing challenge this sets is for social obligation to be reduced, in the non-economic sphere, to an insignificant residue that harks back in folk memory to a bygone age of social servitude.
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