Freedom and Negative Freedom:"

"Negative freedom means the lack of forces which prevent an individual from doing whatever they want; Positive freedom is the capacity of a person to determine the best course of action and the existence of opportunities for them to realise their full potential.

The overwhelmingly dominant tendency in the history of bourgeois society has been to open up negative freedom, by removing feudal and other reactionary constraints on freedom of action. ..."

I doubt the victims of genocide wanted to die, so clearly they were not granted "negative freedom" to avoid being killed.

As I understand the article "negative freedoms" appear to be freedom from coercion. This was supposed to be one of the first gains of the social evolution Marx was espousing. The KGB, Red Army, and others seemed to apply plenty of coercion. Then their empire collapsed. Just as Marx predicted for coercive capitalistic societies. Perhaps the issue is not the organization of the means of production but the coercion applied to create the organization. Early capitalism was pretty coercive, much less so now in the U.S. with mature regulatory processes in place to "restrict" everyone except Microsoft and other Bush Buddies.

China is a bit more perplexing. Are the Chinese people gaining more "negative freedoms" relative to where they started when the Communist Party took over?

My objection is that these articles are extremely and irreparably NPOV.

Well they are certainly written from a Marxist viewpoint. The terms seem fairly precisely defined and used. Many of the assertions and assumptions are explicitly stated. To me this would seem easier material to repair than much of what we produce as a first draft to start with ourselves. The "errors" are fairly obvious as they clash with our own bias.

<snip>

regards, Mike Irwin