Not exactly sure where to post this because I definitely don't think I am all that well versed in philosophy. But since this is about philosophy, I'll post it here.
I've been thinking about determination a lot as I am doing my uni work from a material pov. The debate on determination has always seemed a bit silly to me as a marginalized person who has been assigned female at birth. The anxiety around freedom and the negative feelings towards determination have always felt like the anxious thoughts of white, privileged, Western men who can delude themselves into thinking that they are in fact free to choose whatever they want without it being conditioned by anything. It has also always felt like an inherently colonial outlook from the viewpoint of the colonizer. I am quite sure that existence being determined is something that has never been lost on the oppressed of the world due to them all feeling it in their skin from the day they are born.
What I think I understood today about this is the way in which the acceptance of determination is necessary for any kind of socialism to rise. Determination makes it clear that there needs to be negative freedoms for any kind of real freedom to materialize. This freedom comes in the form of structural things like the type of childcare that allows women to leave the domestic sphere and be more free in a real way instead of the magical liberal thinking of freedom where freedom can just be a choice with no ties to any material reality whatsoever.
Funnily enough the welfare state model in my own country was very much built around this negative freedom and it therefore enabled the type of life that expanded people's choices quite a bit. I still of course don't think that "socialism is when the government does stuff", but you do need to have a state organized in a way where things like this can be prioritized. Here it happened due to existing next to the Soviet Union.
The discourses of neoliberalism, however have taken the rotting corpse of the welfare state and spun all the values of it towards positive non-determined freedom. This becomes clear in the way participation, empowerment and freedom of choice are talked about today. Previously, people had a right to daycare for their children that then enabled them to participate. The participation was a result of the negative freedom provided by a structure.
Determination dictates a need for negative freedoms and creates true freedom. Liberal positive freedom is the freedom of the oppressor. Determination is not a bad word; it's just the way the world actually works. Once people accept that, it makes a case for socialism all on its own.