Free or not

Marx held people were enslaved by societal conditions whereas Kant thought individuals were inherently free and the fault lay with individuals failing to exhibit courage. 

Which is correct?

Can we have a mixture of both?

Kant.  

Kant asserted that the moral law is one that we can self impose upon ourselves, made possible by our autonomy under his transcendent philosophical construct, consistent with the idea of free will. Hence it is that freedom we are free to exercise, notwithstanding for nature he posits a causal form of determinism. That is the idea that antecedent events determine outcomes. This casual form of determinism would also apply to humanity, except for the fact he introduces his transcendental construct. This is all tied up with the structure of Kant’s moral theory and belief in freedom, GOD, plus the immortality of the soul, which become the “postulates” of his ideas on practical reasoning.

His overarching view is that what is morally right or wrong can mostly only be assessed against those who are free agents. But this freedom can only apply if the cause for that action lies within that person, when they are free agents,      

But Kant’s view is where our actions arise as a naturally occurring phenomenon, in time, than it would be the result of some other cause occurring in a previous time, consistent with the idea of casual determinism.  

His idea in this matter arises from his attempt to link the Newtonian worldview expressed in his so called priori laws. That is his philosophical construct that every event relates to a cause which has begun in an earlier time. Hence, if that cause was an event occurring in time, then it must also have a cause beginning in a still earlier time and so on. He held that view applied to nature in the form of a deterministic causal chain that stretches backwards into the dim past to determine existential outcomes. He gets around this problem for humanity, by invoking the transcendental argument. Thus he introduces the idea of a kind of transcendental idealism which ensures one has the kind of freedom that ethically based existence demands. His system of reasoning and his categorical imperatives assume universality, which is not the case in term of human existence according to Nietzsche, who was highly critical of it.     

Marx.

Marx held that in order to achieve both a good and a just society, it is incumbent for a system to offer free development for each based on the reciprocal obligation that equally applies for all, as was incorporated into the Communist Manifesto.

This freedom could not be achieved under a capitalist system that would enslave those less influential and the poor to deprive them of a fair share of the wealth of production. He thought that capitalism results in poverty, via frequent crashes, structural unemployment, downward pressure on wages, etc. etc. so that an individual’s freedom to achieve self-realization for a large portion of the population was unattainable.