Socialism and Freedom

The topic of freedom was raised recently when I was giving some talk in Peru. The students there were very interested in the question: “Does socialism require a surrender of individual freedom?” The right wing has managed – particularly in the United States, but also elsewhere – to appropriate the concept of freedom as its own and to use it as a weapon in class struggle against socialists who are supposedly about “un-freedom.” The subservience of the individual to state control imposed by socialism or communism is something to be avoided and evaded, they say, at all cost. My reply was that we should not give up on the idea of individual freedom as being part of what an emancipatory socialist project is about. In fact, we may want to put it central rather than peripheral. The achievement of individual liberties and freedoms is, I argued, a central aim of socialist emancipatory projects. But that achievement requires collectively building a society where each one of us has adequate life chances and life possibilities to realize each one of our own potentialities.

Marx had a few interesting things to say on this topic. One of them is that “the realm of freedom begins when the realm of necessity is left behind.” Freedom means nothing if you do not have enough to eat, if you are denied access to adequate healthcare, housing, transportation, education, and the like. The role of socialism is to provide those basic necessities, to fulfill those basic human needs so that then people are free to do exactly what they want. The endpoint of a socialist transition, and the endpoint of the construction of a communist society, is a world in which individual capacities and powers are liberated entirely from wants, needs, and other political and social constraints. Rather than conceding that the right wing has a monopoly over the notion of individual freedom, we need to reclaim the idea of freedom for socialism itself.

But Marx also pointed out that freedom is a double-edged sword. He has an interesting way of looking at this from the standpoint of the workers. Laborers in a capitalist society, he says, are free in a double sense. They can freely offer their labor power to whomsoever they want in the labor market. They can offer it on whatsoever conditions of contract they can freely negotiate. But they are at the same time un-free because they have been “freed” from any control over or access to the means of production. They have, therefore, to surrender their labor power to the capitalist in order to live.

This constitutes their double-edged freedom. For Marx this is the central contradiction of freedom under capitalism. In the chapter on the working day in Capital, he puts it this way: the capitalist is free to say to the laborer, “I want to employ you at the lowest wage possible for the largest number of hours possible doing exactly the work I specify. That is what I demand of you when I hire you.” And the capitalist is free to do that in a market society because, as we know, market society is about bidding about this and bidding about that. On the other hand, the worker is also free to say, “You don’t have a right to make me work 14 hours a day. You don’t have a right to do anything you like with my labor power, particularly if that shortens my life and endangers my health and well-being. I am only willing to do a fair day’s work at a fair day’s wage.”

Given the nature of a market society, both the capitalist and the worker are right in terms of ehat they are demanding. So, says Marx, they are both equally right by the law of exchanges that dominate in the market. Between equal rights, he then says, force decides. Class struggle between capital and labor decides the issue. The outcome rests on the power relation between capital and labor which can at some point turn coercive and violent. The struggle between capital and labor is really what is involved in the determination of how long the worker must work for a day, what the wage will be, and what the conditions of labor will be like. The capitalist is free to maximize the rate of exploitation of the workers under the law of exchanges while the worker is free to resist. The collision between the two freedoms is built into capitalism on a daily basis.

This idea of freedom as a double-edged sword is very important to look at in more detail. One of the best elaborations on the topic is an essay by an economic historian called Karl Polanyi, who wrote a book called The Great Transformation. Now, Polanyi was not a Marxist. He may have read some Marx, but he did not subscribe to the Marxist view of things. But he evidently thought long and hard about this question of rights and the question of freedom under capitalism. In The Great Transformation he says that there are good forms of freedom and bad forms of freedom. Among the bad forms of freedom that he listed were the freedoms to exploit one’s fellows without limit; the freedom to make inordinate gains without commensurate service to the community; the freedom to keep technological inventions from being used for public benefit; the freedom to profit from public calamities or naturally induced calamities, some of which are secretly engineered for private advantage (an idea that Naomi Klein discusses in her work on “disaster capitalism” in The Shock Doctrine). But, Polanyi continues, the market economy under which these freedoms throve also produced freedoms we prize highly: freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to chose one’s own job. While we may cherish these freedoms for their own sake – and I think many of us still do, even those of us in the Marxist camp (including me) – they are, to a large extent, byproducts of the same economy that is also responsible for the evil freedoms.

Polanyi’s answer to this duality makes for some very strange reading, given the current hegemony of neoliberal thinking and the way in which freedom is presented to us by existing political power. He writes about it this way: “The passing of the market economy.”- that is, getting beyond the market economy – “can become the beginning of an era of unprecedented freedom.“ Now, that’s a pretty shocking statement – to say that the real freedom begins after we leave the market economy behind. He continues:

Juridical and actual freedom can be made more wider and more general than ever before. Regulation and control can achieve freedom not only for the few, but for all – freedom not as an appurtenance of privilege, tainted at the source, but as a prescriptive right, extending far beyond the narrow confines of the political sphere into the intimate organization of society itself.  Thus, will old freedoms and civic rights be added to the fund of new freedoms generated by the leisure and security that industrial society offers to all. Such a society can afford to be both just and free.

Now, this idea of a society based upon justice and freedom, justice and liberty, seems to me to have been the political agenda of the student movement of the 1960s and the so-called ’68 generation. There was a widespread demand for both justice and freedom: freedom from the coercion of the state, freedom from coercion imposed   by corporate capital, freedom from market’ coercions but also tempered by the demand for social justice. It was in this context that I wrote my first radical book, Social justice and the City. The capitalist political response to this in the 197os was interesting. It entailed working through these demands and, in effect, saying: “We give in to you on the freedoms (though with some caveats) but you forget the justice.” Giving in on the freedoms was circumscribed. It meant for the most part freedom of choice in the market.  The free market and freedom from state regulation were the answers to the question of freedom. But just forget about the justice. That would be delivered by market competition, which was supposedly so organized as to assure that everyone would get their just deserts.  The effect, however, was to unleash many of the evil freedoms (e.g., the exploitation of others) in the name of the virtuous freedoms.

This turn was something that Polanyi clearly recognized.  The passage to the future that he envisaged is blocked by a moral obstacle, he observed, and the moral obstacle was something which he called “liberal utopianism.”! think we still face the problems posed by this liberal utopianism. It’s an ideology which is pervasive in the media and in political discourses. The liberal utopianism of, say, the Democratic Party is one of the things that stands in the way of the achievement of real freedom. “Planning and control,” Polanyi wrote, “are being attacked as a denial of freedom.  Free enterprise and private ownership are declared to be the essentials of freedom. “This was what the main ideologists of the neoliberalism put forward. This is what Milton Friedman was about; this is what Hayek insisted — that the freedom of the individual from state domination can only be assured, they both said, in a society which is founded on private property rights and individual liberty in free and open markets.

“Planning and control, then, are attacked as a denial of freedom. Private ownership is declared to be the essential of freedom. No society built on any other foundation is said to deserve to be called `free.’ The freedom that regulation creates is denounced as un­freedom. The justice, liberty, and welfare it offers are decried as a camouflage of slavery.”

To me, this is one of the key issues of our time. Are we going to go beyond the limited freedoms of the market and market determi­nations and the regulation of our lives by the laws of supply and demand, what Marx called the laws of motion of capital, or are we going to accept, as Margaret Thatcher put it, that there is no alter­native? We become free of state control but slaves of the market. To this there is no alternative, beyond this there is no freedom. This is what the right wing preaches, and this is what many people have come to believe.

This is the paradox of our current situation: that in the name of freedom, we’ve actually adopted a liberal utopian ideology which is a barrier to the achievement of real freedom. I do not think it is a world of freedom when somebody who wants to get an education has to pay an immense amount of money for it and has student debt stretching way, way into their future. What we are talking about is debt peonage; what we are talking about is debt slavery and this is something which needs to be avoided and needs to be circumscribed. We should have free education; there should be no charge for that. The same should be true of healthcare, and the same should be true of a basic provision of housing. It should also be true for the basic elements of adequate nutrition.

If we look back many decades, we went from a world in the i 96os where there was social provision of housing to one where there is none. In Britain, for example, a large proportion of the housing pro­vision in the 196os was in the public sector; it was social housing.

When I was growing up, that social housing was the basic provision of a necessity at a reasonably low cost. Then Margaret Thatcher came along and privatized it all, and said, basically: “You will be much freer if you own your property and you can actually become part of a property-owning democracy.” And so, instead of 6o percent of the housing being in the public sector, we suddenly go to a situa­tion where only about zo percent — or maybe even less — of the housing is in the public sector. Housing becomes a commodity, and commodity then becomes a part of speculative activity. To the degree that it becomes a vehicle of speculation, the price of the property goes up, and you get a rising cost of housing with no actual increase in direct provision.

When I was a kid growing up, I was brought up in what might be called a respectable working-class community where there was home ownership. Most people in the working class did not have home ownership, but there was a segment of the working class that had home ownership, and I happened to be raised in a community of that kind. The house was viewed as a use value; that is, it was a place where we lived and did things — we never really discussed its exchange value. I saw some data recently that showed that the value of work­ing-class housing showed no shift at all over a hundred years or more, up until the 196os.

Then, in the 196os housing started to be viewed as an exchange value rather than a use value. People started to ask, “How valuable is this? Can we improve its value? If so, how do we improve its value?” Suddenly, exchange value considerations came in. Then along came Margaret Thatcher who said, “Okay, we’re going to privatize all of the social housing so everybody can participate in the housing market and start to benefit from rising exchange values.” The ques­tion of housing as an exchange value started to become significant.

One of the consequences of this is that those people in the lowest elements of the population from the standpoint of income found it harder and harder and harder to find a place to live. Instead of living in very central locations where they had easy access to job and employment opportunities, they were more and more expelled from the centers of cities and from the best locations and increasingly had to commute longer and longer distances to their work and to their jobs. By the time you get to the 199os, the house became an instru­ment of speculative gain. Under speculative pressures housing values increased often sharply (though also erratically). The aggregate result has been that many of the people in the lowest income levels of the population can’t find a place to live. We get the production of homelessness and a crisis of affordable housing.

When I was young, in socialist Britain, there were some homeless people around, but very few. But now, if you’re in London, or large cities of that kind, you find more and more homeless people on the street. In New York City we have 6o,000 homeless people. A large proportion of young kids are homeless, not in the sense that you see them on the streets, but they shift from one relative or friend to another sleeping on couches — “couch surfing” it is called. This is no way to create solidarious communities.

Today we see a great deal of building going on in cities across the world. But it’s speculative building; we’re actually building cities for people to speculate in and not cities for people to live in. And if we create cities for investment purposes rather than for living purposes, we get the kind of situation we see in New York City where there is a major crisis of affordable housing in the midst of a housing con­struction boom focused on the affluent market. You need at least a million dollars to get into that market. The mass of the population is badly served in terms of its use values of housing; it has very little access to adequate use values. At the same time, we are building large, huge, high-value apartments for the ultra-rich. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, had the ambition that every billionaire in the world would come and invest and have a big apart­ment on Park Avenue or somewhere like that. That, indeed, is what happened, so we find Arab sheikhs and billionaires from India or China or Russia, who don’t live in New York; they just come here maybe once or twice a year, and that’s it. This is no foundation for decent living arrangements in a decent living environment for the mass of the population.

We are building cities, building housing, in a way which provides tremendous freedom for the upper classes at the same time as it actually produces un-freedom for the rest of the population. This is what I think is meant when Marx made that famous comment: that the realm of necessity actually has to be overcome in order for the realm of freedom to be achieved. What we have right now in New York City is freedom of investment, freedom for the upper classes to choose where it is that they will live, and the mass of the population is then left with almost no choice whatsoever. This is the way in which market freedoms limit the possibilities, and from that stand­point, I think that the socialist perspective is to do as Polanyi suggests; that is, we collectivize the question of access to freedom, access to housing. We turn it away from being something which is simply in the market to being something in the public domain. Housing in the public domain is our slogan.

This is one of the basic ideas of socialism in the contemporary system — to put things in the public domain. I get some encourage­ment from the fact that the Labour Party in Britain — one of the few traditional parties which seems to have some vigorous democratic urgency about what it is up to — proposed that many areas in public life should be taken back from the market and brought back into the public domain — for example, transportation. If you say to anybody in Britain that private provision of transportation on the railways is producing a more efficient transport system, everybody in Britain will laugh at you. They know perfectly well what the consequences of privatization have been about. It’s been a disaster. It’s been a mess. It’s been uncoordinated. And the same thing applies to public trans­portation in cities. We also see the privatization of water supply, which is supposed to be good; but, on the other hand, what we find is, of course, that water is charged for. It’s a basic necessity; it should not be rendered through the market, you have to pay your water rate, and water provision has not been good.

Therefore, the Labour Party said, “Look, there are all these areas which are basic necessities for the population, and they should not be provided through the market. We’re going to stop this business of student loans; we’re going to stop this access to education through privatization; we’re going to actually move basic necessities being provided through the public domain.” There is an urge, I think, to say, “Let’s take these basic necessities and take them out of the market. Let’s provide them in a different way.” We can do that with education, we can do that with healthcare, we can do that with housing, and we should do it with basic food supplies. In fact, there have been experiments in some Latin American countries with pro­viding basic food supplies to lower income populations at a cut price. I don’t see any reason whatsoever why we shouldn’t have a basic food supply configuration for most people in the world today.

This is what it means when the realm of freedom is only possible when we have actually provided all of the basic necessities which we’ll need for everyone to lead a decent, adequate life. And that is the idea of freedom which a socialist society would pursue. But we need a collective way and a collective effort to do this. Alas, the Labour Party in Britain lost the election miserably. But I firmly believe the loss came not because of its progressive program (which commanded a lot of public support) but because of the failure of the Labour Party to be decisive regarding Brexit and the inability to deal with the mass media attack upon the Party for all sorts of other supposed failings.

Finally, one point. It is often said that in order to achieve social­ism, we have to surrender our individuality and we have to give up something. Well, to some degree, yes, that might be true; but there is, as Polanyi insisted, a greater freedom to be achieved when we go beyond the cruel realities of individualized market freedoms. I read Marx as saying the task is to maximize the realm of individual freedom, but that can only happen when the realm of necessity is taken care of. The task of a socialist society is not to regulate everything that goes on in society; not at all. The task of a socialist society is to make sure that all of the basic necessities are taken care of — freely provided — so that people can then do exactly what they want when they want.

It’s not only that individuals have access to the resources to do it, but they also have the time to do it. Freedom — free time — real free time — is something which is absolutely crucial to the idea of a socialist society. Genuinely free time for everyone to do whatever they like is the measure of what socialism aspires to. If you ask everybody right now, “How much free time do you have?” the typical answer is “I have almost no free time whatsoever. It’s all taken up with this, that, and everything else.” If real freedom is a world in which we have free time to do whatever we want, than the socialist emancipatory project proposes that as central to its political mission. This is something that we can and must all work towards.