"We need do no more than repeat: only under communism does the individual become himself and lead his own life"
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There is a deliberate bait-and-switch in Most's line: communism, the word his opponents hear as a synonym for regimentation, gets repackaged as the only route to authentic individuality. The repetition - "We need do no more than repeat" - is a street-corner flourish, a man used to hecklers insisting that the argument is settled, that the case has been made so often only bad faith could keep pretending it's unproven. It's not just persuasion; it's preemptive moral shaming.
Most is writing out of the late 19th century's furnace: industrial capitalism compressing workers into fungible parts, states policing dissent, radicals split between parliamentary socialism and insurgent anarchism. His claim hinges on a specific, incendiary definition of "himself". The liberal promise of selfhood - choose your job, buy your way into leisure, cultivate your private taste - is treated as a costume rented from the market. Under class society, you "lead your life" only within the narrow corridors that wages, landlords, bosses, and police permit.
The subtext is strategic: Most wants to steal the enemy's best rhetorical asset, freedom, and redeploy it as an indictment. Communism isn't portrayed as a sacrifice of the self for the collective, but as the collective arrangement that finally makes a self possible. It's utopian and combative at once: a vision of uncoerced life, delivered with the certainty of someone who believes the old world has already forfeited its right to define what a person is.
Most is writing out of the late 19th century's furnace: industrial capitalism compressing workers into fungible parts, states policing dissent, radicals split between parliamentary socialism and insurgent anarchism. His claim hinges on a specific, incendiary definition of "himself". The liberal promise of selfhood - choose your job, buy your way into leisure, cultivate your private taste - is treated as a costume rented from the market. Under class society, you "lead your life" only within the narrow corridors that wages, landlords, bosses, and police permit.
The subtext is strategic: Most wants to steal the enemy's best rhetorical asset, freedom, and redeploy it as an indictment. Communism isn't portrayed as a sacrifice of the self for the collective, but as the collective arrangement that finally makes a self possible. It's utopian and combative at once: a vision of uncoerced life, delivered with the certainty of someone who believes the old world has already forfeited its right to define what a person is.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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