Ian Welsh

This is the third in the series:

1) Freedom Under Capitalism

2) Freedom Under Representative Democracy

Scholars often divide freedom into two types: negative and positive. Negative freedom is “freedom from”. From arbitrary search and self incrimination, for example. Freedom from is primarily about what other people, including the government, cannot do to you.

Positive freedom is the ability to do things: free speech and freedom to follow any religion are two of the positive freedoms enshrined in American Constitutional law (though freedom of expression is much violated in the practice, as opposed to principle.)

The preamble of the Declaration of Independence says that everyone has the inalienable right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Obviously, again, these principle are more theoretical than practical, given how busily the American government kills people. (Nothing is said in the preamble about these rights being only for Americans, indeed they are supposed to be for everyone.) And then there’s how many people America locks up, which isn’t exactly liberty.

No rights, positive or negative, to do or to be free of, are actually ordained by the Creator, nor are any of them inalienable. All of them exist exactly and only to the extent that one has the power to enforce them. The English Magna Carta, which gave nobles the right of jury trial was forced by the Barons on the King, not granted by the King out of some beneficience. Later expansions of the right to jury trial were won by Republican and Parliamentary powers, and indeed, right now the British government is removing the right to jury trial for most offenses, in part so that opposition to genocide can be quelled without juries refusing to convict, as they have done.

Israel’s lobby in Britain is more powerful than those who believe in jury trial. And power is all that matters when it comes to freedom and rights.

This is why the actual left is always concerned about restricting concentrations of power and wealth and why most modern liberals are fools, believing that rights can exist with concentrated. Older liberals were not so foolish, FDR knew, and so did Justice Brandeis:

“You can have a great concentration of wealth or you can have democracy. You can’t have both.”

You can have the form of democracy, as the US does. But not the reality.

But there is another type of freedom to. We touched on it when we discussed freedom under capitalism, but let’s revisit it.

Elon Musk has far more freedom to than anyone reading this post. So does Mark Zuckerberg. They have vast wealth, and money is, at its heart, the ability to tell other people what to do and to command the results of their labor. If either man wants to do something, they can get a thousand people to do it for them. If they want almost anything they can buy it. They never have to work for anyone else, and other than (sometimes, but not most of the time) obeying the law, there are few practical limits on what they can do.

Compared to them, or to top political leaders like Trump or Putin or Xi or even Starmer, you and I have no freedom to do things. We obey our lords and masters.

This is especially true under capitalism, because capitalism is a system in which the means of production are controlled by a very few people. Under feudalism or for hunter-gatherers, this was not the case. You had land. You had animals. You could take care of yourself. This isn’t to say such people free in all ways, just that they had a freedom we have mostly lost. Work for the lord for 60 days, give him his cut, and the rest of their time was theirs to do with as they saw fit.

To create capitalism required removing their land and animals and rights from them. In exchange, over time, they received other rights.

But as long as we must work for others, and do what they say, we are not and cannot be free in the sense of having “freedom to do”. Most our life is spent doing what others insist on.

To be free means an end to capitalism and a system where we can, hopefully as individuals, but more likely as small groups, provide most of our own needs and where we do not have to spend most of our time accepting orders from bosses.

This is one of the essential points of this series of essays and we’re working towards looking at what such a society would be like both in principle and in practice. But the bottom line is that if you must spend almost all your days working for someone else, you are not free. And if you cannot create, if you cannot do, you are not free, no matter how much “freedom from” you have—and in the West, we have less and less of that freedom from each year, with the rise of surveillance, the constant assaults on free speech, association, and due process. Almost every Western nation, it seems, is restricting due process and allowing people to be destroyed by administrative order, as for example when the Canadian truckers and opponents of genocide were de-banked and/or sanctioned, making it impossible for them to pay rent or even buy food.

We have very little real freedom. We find that out when we do something the government disapproves of, like saying “please don’t help Israel mass murder children, torture and rape.” We find that out when we realize that we spend 8 or more hours a day obeying a pin-headed boss, and that if we don’t, we’ll wind up homeless and starve.

Neither represenative democracy nor capitalism has worked, and while China is more generous now that most of the West and better run, they have not solved these problems either. Perhaps they will. Perhaps they’ll make that transition to true communism, the withering of the state, and the control of the means of production by the proletariat.

Maybe. But I doubt it. Not without a clear picture of what such freedom would look like. And that’s the real question, and the real problem.

So that’s what we’ll tackle.

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