How Do Marx And Douglass Understand Freedom As Non Domination

Question 2 : ‘Marx and Douglass understand freedom to mean the same thing: freedom as non-domination’. Do you agree?

Both Douglass and Marx define freedom to be ‘freedom as non-dominion’, however, whether they mean the exact same is debatable when comparing their works. The divergence in political beliefs between the two resonate in their beliefs about freedom, with Marx being a Communist and Douglass being a Republican, nevertheless they both understand freedom to be non-domination, although they define freedom as different things, making me agree with the statement to a degree.

For both Marx and Douglass, freedom is understood to be about being free from dominion, however for Marx, it later becomes dependent on community and social co-operation

This makes Marx’s main focus economic freedom from the weight of capitalism on the shoulders of the working classes. He defined freedom as a person's capacity to exert conscious and logical control over both their

Marx's analysis of modern slavery was centred on the realisation that slaveowner capitalism was more dreadful than any other type of slavery that had ever existed. In his critiques of capitalism, Marx highlights the consequence of extreme labour to be alienation, with the main one being Alienation of Man from Man, which is made extremely evident in the slave trade, with non-white people becoming isolated from white people because of their labour. Similarly, Douglass found that the economic system of slavery, required the alienation of African Americans from their own identity to continue operating because the slaves could see how they were being oppressed but could not reject the only thing they knew. In Wage Labour and Capital, Karl Marx emphasises that the working class must be alienated from others, themselves, and their labour in order for the capitalist system to function and for the working class to remain unaware of the system they support. Despite having conflicting opinions on whether their respective economic systems can be perceived, Marx and Douglass both view their respective economic systems as unsustainable in their essays, Wage Labour and Capital and Life Narrative, respectively. Both Marx and Douglass saw an appeasement within their separate economic systems, with the inclusion of ‘holidays’ for slaves, in which they receive a brief