СЛОБОДА И ЈЕДНАКОСТ
FREEDOM AND EQUALITY

Summary/Abstract: The theoretical concept of freedom and equality is the integral part of the theory and practice of socialism, the position and role of man as and individual and citizen within it. The entire history of mankind is a struggle for freedom and equality. All significant philosophical systems contain in their essence the problems of freedom and equality. Marx has put the views on freedom and equality back into historical context and into the practice of ideological, class and political struggles by criticizing their metaphysical and bourgeois ideological meaning. He has emphasized that freedom is an act of self-determination and self-initiated activity of man. In that it is for the most part dependent on the historically constituted economic, political, cultural and social relations in which man does his everyday works, lives and thinks. As an act of self determination, freedom prerequisites liberation from domination and the ability of man to maintain his free (liberated) status. Equality does not merely mean an equal status in respect of the law, but equality in all rights and responsibilities, and even more than that: the equality of all actual opportunities for man to work and express himself, which is dependent on the institutions of society. The greatest contribution of Marxism to the concept of freedom and equality in their concrete and scientific meanings lies in the socialization of these phenomena and the underlining of their reality in regard to society and its political structure. Freedom and equality are in socialism confronted with the view that free and equal is that society in which there is no state imposed coercion, nor any political relations and activities, as well as the traditional views according to which these two phenomena originate in private ownership (i.e. property). Freedom means self-initiated creativity, also participation, engagement (involvement) and association in the activities of all within the autonomous and associated institutions, organized on a self-management and planned basis.

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