What is Freedom? (2018)

From the May 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

You haven’t any meaningful freedom except to sell your labour power. You sell your labour power to your employer for a wage/salary in order to live, because you are not the owner of the means of production, as the employer is. So, your wage slavery is your social existence. The employer does not get a wage or salary, they get a surplus value, profit. They have the freedom to buy living human energy, labour power. You haven’t real freedom of choice, such as to work according to your ability and to consume according to your needs.

Everywhere and in everything you are bounded in property relations. All the consumable wealth is produced socially, but what is produced is owned individually under the laws of the private property system. These individuals own and control the property relations backed by the fear of the political state, which will become defunct with the abolition of the private property system. The lawmakers and judges, whose role is to act on behalf of the ruling capitalist class, haven’t any freedom except within the exploitation and the private property system.

The cause of all this is wage slavery which has to be abolished. You haven’t any freedom to cross national borders without permission of the owners of the means of production. But capital has a freedom – the freedom of exploitation, to exploit human labour power across the world, irrespective of borders

Freedom is not an individual choice, it is a social matter, to be achieved through the class struggle to eliminate the class society of capitalism.

G. P.