Freedom as non-domination (2025)

From the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The historical influence of republicanism upon socialist thinking has been somewhat obscured, though recent works such as William Clare Roberts’ Marx’s Inferno and Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx have done much to help bring this relation back into the light. What is distinctive about the republican tradition is its conception of freedom, which differs from the one most commonly used today. Republican ideas about freedom were picked up and adapted by early socialists.

Freedom from and freedom to

Introductions to political or social freedom often start with Isaiah Berlin’s essay Two Concepts of Liberty. This article will follow the convention and begin here, not because there is anything uniquely faultless about Berlin’s essay, but because it has become the paradigmatic statement of the modern view of liberty. Berlin distinguishes between two ways of thinking about freedom, which he labels ‘positive’ and ‘negative’. In secondary texts this distinction is sometimes explained as being the difference between ‘freedom to’ and ‘freedom from’, but this does not really capture two distinct concepts just two different ways of talking about the same thing – for example, the ‘freedom to’ enjoy a quiet space is also at the same time the ‘freedom from’ the interference of noisy neighbours.

While freedom in the negative sense can straightforwardly be understood as an absence of constraint or interference, Berlin’s positive freedom is a little harder to pin down. If we think of positive freedom as being about self-mastery of our internal life, we still have something that can be collapsed into negative freedom. The mastery of physiological compulsion can still be thought of as the overcoming of interference or constraints, and so a type of negative freedom. Instead of being about self-mastery we can think of positive freedom as being about self-realisation and self-perfection. Positive freedom can be understood as overcoming the constraints or barriers that obstruct us from the realisation of our own full potential. Only by living the most fulfilling version of ourselves do we become truly free. On this account, freedom is not an absence but an end-state or achievement. As summarised by Quentin Skinner in A Third Concept of Liberty:

‘… what underlies these theories of positive liberty is the belief that human nature has an essence, and that we are free if and only if we succeed in realising that essence in our lives. This enables us to see that there will be as many different interpretations of positive liberty as there are different views about the moral character of humankind. Suppose you accept the Christian view that the essence of our nature is religious, and thus that we attain our highest ends if and only if we consecrate our lives to God. Then you will believe that, in the words of Thomas Cranmer, the service of God “is perfect freedom”. Or suppose you accept the Aristotelian argument that man is a political animal, the argument restated as a theory of freedom by Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future (1961). Then you will believe that, as Arendt maintains, “freedom . . . and politics coincide” and that “this freedom is primarily experienced in action”.’

Berlin, who was writing during the Cold War and in opposition to Stalinism, highlights how this positive conception of freedom could be open to abuse. It leaves itself open to paternalistic and authoritarian interpretations. If freedom amounts to the achievement of our true potential or real interests, the question arises as to what these ‘real’ interests really are. If real interests do not have to be something that an agent is conscious of then the coercive interference from a higher social power could be a way of forcing people to be free. Says Berlin:

‘… George Orwell is excellent on this. People say “I express your real wishes. You may think that you know what you want, but I, the Fuhrer, we the Party Central Committee, know you better than you know yourself, and provide you with what you would ask for if you recognised your “real” needs.’

This is not to say, as is sometimes claimed, that Berlin thought that every use of the concept of positive freedom was a concealed attempt at manipulation and that we should therefore only use the negative conception. His claim was that historically the positive conception had been misused more often and with more devastating results. The negative conception of freedom was also open to misuse:

‘…Negative liberty is twisted when I am told that liberty must be equal for the tigers and for the sheep and that this cannot be avoided even if it enables the former to eat the latter if coercion by the state is not to be used. Of course unlimited liberty for capitalists destroys the liberty of the workers, unlimited liberty for factory-owners or parents will allow children to be employed in the coal-mines. Certainly the weak must be protected against the strong, and liberty to that extent be curtailed. Negative liberty must be curtailed if positive liberty is to be sufficiently realised; there must be a balance between the two, about which no clear principles can be enunciated. Positive and negative liberty are both perfectly valid concepts, but it seems to me that historically more damage has been done by pseudo-positive than by pseudo-negative liberty in the modern world.’

Ancient Rome

Having a grasp of these two common ways of thinking about freedom we can now introduce a third conception, which is commonly referred to as ‘republican’ or ‘neo-roman’ freedom. This way of thinking about freedom has been bought back into the public consciousness largely thanks to the work of historian of ideas Quentin Skinner and the political philosopher Philip Pettit. It can be thought of as ‘freedom as non-domination’ or ‘freedom as independence’. This republican concept of freedom can be directly tracked back to the Digest of Roman law. Here it is stated that ‘the fundamental division within the law of persons is that all men and women are either free or are slaves’ and that ‘Slavery is an institution of the law of nations by which someone is, contrary to nature, subjected to the dominion of someone else’. From this we can get a definition of what it means to be a free person within a society. A free person is someone who is not under the dominion of anyone else and can act on their own accord. As Livy, the Roman historian who served as an inspiration for Machiavelli and other 16th century Florentine republicans, put it – to be free was ‘to be in your own power’ and not dependent on the will of anybody else.

The key difference between republican and negative freedom can be illustrated in this way: On the negative conception of freedom a slave who is not interfered with, and left to do as they please, is free. While on the republican conception what makes someone free is not the absence of interference but the absence of domination. Even though a slave may be left to go about as they please, at any point they could be interfered with according to the arbitrary whims of their master. The knowledge that arbitrary interference can be applied at any point is enough to be a restriction to liberty, behaviour and comment must continually be self-monitored so as to avoid the sanction of the master. On the republican account, freedom is a status relation within a society that makes it impossible to be the helpless victim of arbitrary interference. As Sidney wrote in his 1698 Discourses Concerning Government, ‘he is a slave who serves the best and gentlest man in the world, as well as he who serves the worst; and he does serve him if he must obey his commands, and depends upon his will.’

In the English Civil War, disputes between Crown and Parliament drew upon this language of dependency and dominion, drawing upon common-law texts which had their basis in the Roman Digest. The effect of Royal prerogative was that those living under the king were reduced to a state of servitude. This was not because of any actual or threatened interference, but because the continuation of rights and freedoms was dependent on the goodwill of the King, and this could be withdrawn at any point. It was this state of dependency, of being under the dominion of the King, that was the threat to freedom. When King Charles was executed, the charge was that he had ruled arbitrarily and so tyrannically. The Act that abolished the monarchy declared that the effect of prerogative had been ‘to oppress and impoverish and enslave the subject’.

As well as being central to the English revolution, these ideas would surface again a century later in the French and American revolutions. The central idea was that it was only possible to have individual freedom through being a citizen of a self-ruling republic. To live under the dependence of a monarch, or in the American case under a colonial power, is to be reduced to the status of a slave. This understanding of freedom as being a state of independence left some controversy as to the normative status of industrial production and wage labour in the early years of the American republic. Wage labour was seen as being a state of dependency and so a form of unfreedom which was degrading to the moral health of the nation. ‘Free labour’, either in the form of small-scale production where the producers also owned their means of production or that of independent homesteaders was seen as being more conducive to building a strong and resilient nation.

Freedom as emancipation

Reaction against revolutionary and democratic movements in France and America saw the development and spread of the idea of freedom as non-interference. This, together with the irresistible rise of international commerce with its permanent dependence on wage labour, saw a decline in republican ways of thinking about freedom by the late 18th century. The concept of negative freedom, in the form of voluntarist ideas about freedom of contract, was one that was more suitable for the needs of the capitalist class. Though republican ideas about freedom would continue to persist in the labour and nascent socialist movements.

‘Something of slavery still remains… something of freedom is yet to come’ wrote the labour republican Ira Steward in 1873. Early socialists would continue to use the language of ‘wage-slavery’, ‘self-emancipation’ and other tropes drawn from radical republican heritage.

But they did not just adopt republican ideas wholesale; they responded to and critiqued them. Republican language focussed on an undifferentiated ‘people’ as the basis for a self-governing republic, socialist language on the proletariat as the group-agent capable of changing society. The first English translation of Communist Manifesto was in a newspaper entitled The Red Republican, and here the difference between radical republican and socialist ideas can be seen in contrast side by side. Labour republicans, such as the Knights of Labor, sought to lessen the dependence of the working class through the development of workers co-ops, etc. Marx’s Capital can be understood as an intervention within the labour movement against the prominence of such ideas. Socialist critique argued that it was not enough for individual groups of workers to separately own their own enterprises, market competition would still present itself as a form of impersonal domination.

Understanding freedom as non-domination provides a rich foundation for criticising capitalist society. The formally ‘free’ contract that the wage labourer enters into turns out to be a one-way ticket into a relation of dependency. Employers impose the same kind of arbitrary interference upon workers as kings on their subjects. The importance of non-domination in the foundations of socialism is why it has to be a movement for collective self-emancipation and why authoritarian attempts to impose it on an unwilling or passive population would be doomed to failure. Rather than being the ‘real interests’ of the proletariat imposed by an authoritarian state, freedom as non-domination is a collective good. The extent to which it is achieved depends on the extent to which it has been secured for others.

DJP

The Meaning of Freedom (1989)

From the February 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is liberation? The words which need most careful use are, usually, those which are thought to be above it. In an essay on George Orwell published in 1948, George Woodcock remarks how Orwell continually talked of brotherhood, justice. decency and so on without ever giving specific meanings: they spoke for themselves. A minute's thought over the everyday corruptions of those terms will show that they do nothing of the kind. Freedom is another. Assumed to be self-explanatory, it is all things to all men: hope, delusion, inducement, trap. What became of "the Four Freedoms"? Freedom fighters, where are you now?

In fact, freedom by itself is an insignificant word. Its importance comes with its expansion — freedom from what, or to do which. Freedom from may be considerable: its range can cover merciful release from some private burden, to the abolition of a political restraint. Nevertheless, freedom in that sense remains negative and limited to shifting a particular evil. It is, of course, the most popular sense, and the argument is often made that to pile up these removals of restraint ("extending areas of freedom") must in the end lead to total and therefore positive social liberty.

The line drawn

However, the pursuit of the piecemeal does not work like that. The man who has obtained relief from a disability or restriction is simply released into the general slavery of his fellow-men. That is why rulers seldom mind, in the end, giving freedom from: liberation is a means of creating more slaves. The cracker-motto "freedoms" set out by Churchill and Roosevelt in the war were of this kind. Leaving aside that they were part of the sham currency of wartime promises and so unlikely to be taken seriously when the fever was over, it is worth observing that freedom from hunger and insecurity is had. more or less, by people in prison.

Nobody pretends that freedom from privation is worth having on such terms, but the terms accepted in ordinary life are often surprising. The usual paternalistic saying is that society can approve "liberty but not licence", and it is interesting that “licence" is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as excessive liberty". What is being said, therefore, is that you may have liberty but not too much. The line of excess is drawn, inevitably, by the ruling class: and the liberty thus prescribed is already restricted to the limits of freedom from. Thus, to suppose that slices of freedom can be gamed within capitalism and put together to make a free society is naive in the extreme.

Choice and responsibility

The context in which "freedom" takes on positive meaning is freedom to. Individually, innumerable extensions might be given: what they add up to socially is freedom to choose. This is the all—embracing denial made by the authoritarianism of a class-divided society. Under it, for the ruled, choice is directly refused or made impossible. One's station and way of life, loyalties, duties, means of expression are selected and hung on one. A free society is definable as such only in this way: in it. individual choice is sovereign.

All sovereignties have boundaries, however. The alternative point of view, the Stirnerite one which disfavours society itself for inhibiting the ego's absolute demands, is still practised by a number of anarchists whose cult it is never to answer letters or keep appointments as proof that they are free and spontaneous individuals not responsible to anyone. When the doctrine is stated like that, both its absurdity and its perniciousness are plainly visible: this is not freedom at all, because it depends on mutilating someone else's freedom. Freedom is relative always to the fact that we exist only as social creatures.

In simple everyday experience, every relationship or contract voluntarily made is a limitation on freedom. A person joining a political group or a recreational organization has "tied" him— or herself by the acceptance of obligations, including the recognition of rules and majority decisions.

The way to go

Freedom, then, means a state in which contracts are entered and obligations accepted, but by one's conscious choice not a predetermined one. The comparison to be made is between a free society and the authoritarian system where the obligations remain while somebody else imposes the choice. What must be recognized, however, is that the obligations are there in both cases. Indeed, freedom implies responsibility where servitude does not; having the choices imposed and the decisions made for one is tolerable to many people because it is easy. Part of the tyranny of capitalism is to make a virtue of that kind of mental laziness and extol bromides like "liberty not licence" to try and keep responsible thought in check.

Given comprehension of what freedom is, how is the free society obtained? The lack of freedom is not just a question of holding wrong outlooks. It derives from material conditions as much as from legal and moral restraint. The irony of the old saying that everyone is free to dine at the Savoy has innumerable applications. A poor or ill-educated person is not free to choose his work, or where he will live, or even whom he will mix with. Financial worries, insecurities, hostile circumstances of all kinds are obstructions to freedom.

But it does not follow that reforms of circumstances are the answer. That takes us back to the realm of freedom from, where capitalism's nature is to turn apparent gains into equivalent losses; at this, you can't win. The creation of a free society can be accomplished only by changing the structure of society. The disabilities and oppressions which are everywhere are aspects and consequences of the basic enslavement by capitalism, the class-ownership of the means of living. To replace them with freedom of choice and make responsibility instead of imposition the keystone of social life, common ownership is the prerequisite.

Freedom is the natural — and immediate — concomitant of the establishment of socialism. Nor is any abstract judicial freedom meant. The economic condition of socialism, production for use. means free access by everyone to the material wealth of society. That is emancipation. and from it arises the freedom to choose the sort of life one wants.

Letter: Socialism and the fundamentals of Anarchism. (1926)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have received the following letter in criticism of our article on Socialism and Parliamentary Action which appeared in the March issue. Our answer to Mr. Beer follows his letter.

Non-Governmentalism.

Concerning your reply to an article (Socialism and Parliamentary Action) for March last, while complimenting the S.S. for being the only paper to which we can refer for a clear exposition of the fundamentals of Socialism, I contend that you are exceedingly biassed in so far as Anarchism is concerned. You mislead your readers into thinking that the Leninists, together with the admirers of G. A. Aldred and other such like gentry are Anarchists because they may happen to advocate violence. Do not these people also advocate the Dictatorship of the Proletariat? And is this not Parliamentarism in its most despotic form? Have you never read literature by Socialists who have also advocated violence? And would you call them Anarchists because they have done so? Certainly not. It is simply their opinion of a method whereby they can accomplish their objective. I have often noticed statements to the effect in the S.S. that the time is ripe for Socialism, but the reason we have not got it is because the people neither understand or want it; but when the people do want it they will have it, and not until then. This is just what applies to Anarchism. You say that we have no alternative to Parliamentary action. Our alternative is simply to make our own contracts instead of other people making them for us; and to resist taxation because we object to paying the salaries of the officials by whom, and the machinery by which we are ground to powder. As far as our method is concerned, for now it is sufficient for us to advocate Anarchism. When a sufficient number of people understand, it is they who will determine their method, as conditions and circumstances are continually changing. Come, let’s straiten ourselves out. Why not, instead of attacking methods of individuals, start discussing the fundamentals of the Philosophy of Anarchism?

(1) Has Society any more right to dominate the Individual than the Individual has to dominate Society?

(2) Does Society know better than me how I prefer to enjoy myself?

(3) Does not Socialism imply two classes : the Governing and the Governed?

(4) To whom does the product of a man’s labour belong?

To the above question I may add that if you answer it as a Socialist it is due to the fact that you fail to understand the exchange of equivalents.

(5) Has Society any more right to exploit the Individual than the Individual, or a set of Individuals, have to exploit Society ?

(6) Does not Socialism, Communism, Toryism, Trade Unionism, etc., stand for the subordination of the Individual to Society ?

(7) Can there be freedom in Society whilst not even one man in Society has the liberty to think, speak, and act in accordance with his own desires, so long as he does not infringe upon the liberty of another?

(8) Is not the goal of human happiness, Liberty ?

P.S.—I regret lack of space. I hope you will publish this in full. If you are prepared to go deeper into this matter, say so in your reply. If it is not published, you need not make any explanation, as I shall know.

Yours for Liberty,

A. E. Beer.

Deptford, S.E.

Our Reply.

The reference to violence in the above letter is no answer to our position. Violence has been advocated and used by defenders of capitalism of all types, conservative and reformist. That is true. The special kinds of violence advocated and used by Anarchists we have shown to be not only useless but thoroughly dangerous to a working class struggling for emancipation. The advocacy of barricades by our March correspondent showed the futility of the opponents of political action, and the above letter offers no alternative to the policy of the conquest of political power. The opposition to political action is an Anarchist attitude, whatever the Anti-Politicals may call themselves.

Our correspondent’s objection to paying for the cost of governments “to grind us to powder,” is not a working-class objection. As our March article showed, the working class do not pay for the cost of government. The workers receive on the average just enough to live on, and the capitalists therefore must pay (out of the surplus extracted from the workers) for the cost of government and officialdom. Hence their cry of “economy.”

The numbered questions asked by Mr. Beer are answered under the same number :—

(1) Rights depend upon power to enforce them. Society is compelled to act against the individual whose actions interfere with the well-being of the mass. But the class-divided society of to-day involves the mass being subjected by the few. A Socialist society means that the population will have interests in common, and the opportunity of dominating will have passed with the passing of property and class rule.

(2) Mr. Beer quite possibly knows best how he prefers to enjoy himself, but, in doing so, as an individualist, he may quite possibly make it impossible for others to enjoy themselves. The capitalist enjoying himself in his own way spells misery for millions.

(3) To ask such a question as whether Socialism implies two classes, governed and governing—implies complete ignorance of Socialism. Socialism means common ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution, and, therefore, the abolition of classes. Full and real democratic control under Socialism also implies the absence of classes.

(4) Asking to whom does the product of a man’s labour belong implies that we are living in an economic world where an individual produces something by himself. Modern industry is co-operative, and any article is the result of the combined and cooperative labours of many workers. Today the product of the workers’ labour belongs legally to the employer; in a Socialist society the product will be used and enjoyed by the wealth producers alone, as there will be no owning or employing class to exploit the workers.

(5) This question ignores social evolution altogether. Exploitation depends upon suitable economic conditions, and until they have arisen it is not possible. The words right and rights are used by our critic, but never defined. “The right” to exploit is useless unless the power to exploit is supplied by the existence of an owning and non-owning class side by side, so that those without property are compelled to produce for the owners and to the owner’s advantage. Exploitation was once necessary to the evolution of society, but it has carried us so far that it has now become a hindrance and a menace to the further evolution of society.

(6) Society, embracing all the individuals within it as an organic whole, is obviously paramount in those affairs that concern society as a whole as against the individual. A class-divided society does not involve questions of the individual versus society, but members of one class versus members of the other. A society of common interests like Socialism would be paramount in those affairs that concerned the social body. The affairs that are purely personal and do not involve social relations would be the concern of the individual alone.

(7) Freedom of speech and action are obviously limited under Capitalism in order to maintain Capitalist Class rule. They fear the spread of revolutionary knowledge. A Socialist system in its very nature would make for the free expression of the individual in his thoughts and actions as long as the individual did not become a danger to the lives and liberties of his fellows.

(8) Is Liberty the goal of human happiness? The use of sentimental expressions in common use and misuse may mean a thousand and one things. Anarchists and other dodgers of economic evolution like to talk in these phrases, as it sounds well and idealistic. But what do they mean? You might reverse the question and ask : Is happiness the goal of liberty? Happiness and liberty are both conditioned on economic life, and the economic evolution has made possible (although not actual) happiness for all. Liberty for the mass is certainly impossible in a slave society such as chattel slavery, feudalism or capitalism. Abstract liberty means nothing. Economic freedom is the key to the situation, and until it is won by the workers all political and other so-called liberties remain merely the privileges granted to slaves, privileges arising out of economic development. When economic freedom is won by the coming of Socialism, the other liberties will follow. But absolute liberty, such as Kropotkin talks of, for the individual is impossible outside of a desert island, where it becomes liberty to go insane or die. Social freedom made possible for the worker by social growth and economic development will be a freedom invested with meaning by the possibilities that an advanced social world will usher in for each and all. In conclusion, we would say that these questions are suitable to an age of individualist thought, and apparently the questioner never thinks of what is made necessary by evolution, but simply disregards the needs of the situation and the possibilities at hand. He seems to think it is sufficient to think out some abstract principles of “right” and “justice,” and to concern himself with the individual, forgetting the inter-dependence of each worker resulting from social production.

Adolph Kohn

Moonshine. (1923)

From the September 1923 issue of the Socialist Standard

  “Only under an individualistic system can we each enjoy the fullest liberty, and the public be well served.”.—Lord Leverhulme, "Reynolds,” 1/4/1923.

Sounds plausible, if you are in the habit of shutting your eyes, opening your mouth—then swallowing. What is Liberty? We may see more clearly its relative meaning if we examine the composition of this somewhat mysterious body of people, “The Public.” Who are they? Lord Leverhulme is one, the ex-Service mendicant.is another, the strumpit of the wealthy idler with £20,000 worth of jewellery hung around her body, and the daughter of the underworld selling her sex for bread; the teeming millions of propertyless labour power sellers, and the small minority who own their means of livelihood; all are comprised within our Lord’s ambiguity, “The Public.” Stripped of its cant and examined in the light of reality, "serving the public” merely means that Leverhulme's trust, like any other capitalist concern, employs workers to produce wealth because the value of their total output exceeds in large proportion the value of the wages paid to those required to produce such wealth. Neither capitalists nor shareholders render "service” in such production, they may depart to any part of the earth their pleasure takes them, and never see or know the source of their profits and dividends; all the operations necessary will proceed as per usual, carried on in every department by the workers. The master class are only concerned with serving their own ends. They will destroy wealth or restrict its production if it enhances their profit, or employ you in the production of death dealing aeroplanes, bullets and poison gas (with which the workers have been "well served”) for the same reason as Lord Sunlight, exploitation with the object of profit. To tell you, dependent as you are for your existence, upon those who own the earth and its resources, that you “enjoy the fullest liberty,” is evidence of the contempt your masters have for you. The dictionary describes a slave as: “One whose person and services are wholly at the disposal and under the control of another ” (Lloyds).

How fitting such a description is to the worker of to-day—and yet! he would be provoked to indignation at the appellation “slave,” for he has no chains, he can go to his job in the morning (when he’s got one to go to), and he can go home (!) at night; and when his master hasn’t any further use for him, he can go to that nasty place the Christians tell us about. And this he calls “Liberty,” not because he is a cynic, or has seen the grim humour of it all, but because his masters have taught him to believe it is the birthright of Britons, “who never, never, will be slaves.” From the days of those Christian humbugs, the Liberal Cotton Lords, who fought against the introduction of the Factory Acts in order to retain the “Liberty” to work children to death, to the modern vampires of imperialistic exploitation, “Liberty” has ever been the cry of our rulers, ’tis but the cry for “ Liberty ” to exploit and plunder the workers. Clear your mental vision by a study of Socialism, then the verbiage of such as Leverhulme will be rated by you at its clap-trap worth. You cannot have “Liberty” within a system that enslaves you, neither can it be benevolently bestowed upon you. “Know ye this, who would be free must strike the blow.”

W. E. MacHaffie

The Meaning of Freedom (1973)

From the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is liberation? The words which need most careful use are, usually, those which are thought to be above it. In an essay on George Orwell published in 1948, George Woodcock remarks how Orwell continually talked of brotherhood, justice, decency and so on without ever giving specific meanings: they spoke for themselves. A minute’s thought over the everyday corruptions of those terms will show that they do nothing of the kind. Freedom is another. Assumed to be self-explanatory, it is all things to all men: hope, delusion, inducement, trap. What became of “the Four Freedoms”? Freedom fighters, where are you now?

In fact, freedom by itself is an insignificant word. Its importance comes with its expansion — freedom from what, or to do which. Freedom from may be considerable; its range can cover merciful release from some private burden, to the abolition of a political restraint. Nevertheless, freedom in that sense remains negative and limited to shifting a particular evil. It is, of course, the most popular sense, and the argument is often made that to pile up these removals of restraint (“extending areas of freedom”) must in the end lead to total and therefore positive social liberty.

The Line Drawn

However, the pursuit of the piecemeal does not work like that. The man who has obtained relief from a disability or restriction is simply released into the general slavery of his fellow-men. That is why rulers seldom mind, in the end, giving freedom from: liberation is a means of creating more slaves. The cracker-motto “freedoms” set out by Churchill and Roosevelt in the war were of this kind. Leaving aside that they were part of the sham currency of wartime promises and so unlikely to be taken seriously when the fever was over, it is worth observing that freedom from hunger and insecurity is had, more or less, by people in prison. In the days of mass unemployment, down-and-outs frequently committed minor offences to get regular food and beds for the winter.

Nobody pretends that freedom from privation is worth having on such terms, but the terms accepted in ordinary life are often surprising. The usual paternalistic saying is that society can approve “liberty but not licence”, and it is interesting that “licence” is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “excessive liberty”. What is being said, therefore, is that you may have liberty but not too much. The line of excess is drawn, inevitably, by the ruling class; and the liberty thus prescribed is already restricted to the limits of freedom from. Thus, to suppose that slices of freedom can be gained within capitalism and put together to make a free society is naive in the extreme.

Choice and Responsibility

The context in which "freedom” takes on positive meaning is freedom to. Individually, innumerable extensions might be given: what they add up to socially is freedom to choose. This is the all-embracing denial made by the authoritarianism of a class-divided society. Under it, for the ruled, choice is directly refused or made impossible. One’s station and way of life, loyalties, duties, means of expression are selected and hung on one. A free society is definable as such only in this way; in it, individual choice is sovereign.

All sovereignties have boundaries, however. The alternative point of view, the Stirnerite one which disfavours society itself for inhibiting the ego’s absolute demands, is still practised by a number of anarchists whose cult it is never to answer letters, keep appointments etc., as proof that they are free and spontaneous individuals not responsible to anyone. When the doctrine is stated like that, both its absurdity and its perniciousness are plainly visible: this is not freedom at all, because it depends on mutilating someone else’s freedom. Freedom is relative always to the fact that man exists only as a social creature.

In simple everyday experience, every relationship or contract voluntarily made is a limitation on freedom. A person joining a political group or a recreational organization has “tied” him- or herself by the acceptance of obligations, including the recognition of rules and majority decisions. Much has been written recently about growing numbers of couples who set up their homes and raise families without the formalities of marriage. Those who explain their viewpoint always emphasize that, so far from being rejected, the responsibilities and restraints generally are undertaken more deliberately. The fact that this is some people’s preference is not beside the point: it is the point.

The Way to Go

Freedom, then, means a state in which contracts are entered and obligations accepted, but by one’s conscious choice not a predetermined one. The comparison to be made is between a free society and the authoritarian system where the obligations remain while somebody else imposes the choice. What must be recognized, however, is that the obligations are there in both cases. Indeed, freedom implies responsibility where servitude does not; having the choices imposed and the decisions made for one is tolerable to many people because it is easy. Part of the tyranny of capitalism is to make a virtue of that kind of mental laziness and extol bromides like “liberty not licence” to try and keep responsible thought in check. 

Given comprehension of what freedom is, how is the free society obtained? The lack of freedom is not just a question of holding wrong outlooks. It derives from material conditions as much as from legal and moral restraint. The irony of the old saying that everyone is free to dine at the Savoy has innumerable applications. A poor or ill-educated person is not free to choose his work, or where he will live, or even whom he will mix with. Badly-housed people are restricted sexually, intellectually, and in a dozen other ways. Financial worries, insecurities, hostile circumstances of all kinds are obstructions to freedom.

But it does not follow that reforms of circumstances are the answer. That takes us back to the realm of freedom from, where capitalism's nature is to turn apparent gains into equivalent losses; at this, you can’t win. The creation of a free society can be accomplished only by changing the structure of society. The disabilities and oppressions which are everywhere are aspects and consequences of the basic enslavement by capitalism, the class-ownership of the means of living. To replace them with freedom of choice and make responsibility instead of imposition the keystone of social life, common ownership is the pre-requisite.

Socialist Emancipation

This is the failing-point of the various “liberation” movements which are pressing for attention today. The impulse which leads black people, women, homosexuals and other groups to organize in the face of their special problems is understandable, of course. Nevertheless, the belief that those problems can be solved by legislation, or exchanging rule by Them for rule by Us, can lead nowhere except out of one cage and into another. The fact is that we are all caged by capitalism. The indignation and energy now going into those protests should be used fruitfully in the Socialist movement which works for “the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex”.

Freedom is the natural — and immediate — concomitant of the establishment of Socialism. Nor is any abstract judicial freedom meant. The economic condition of Socialism, production for use, means free access by everyone to the material wealth of society. That is emancipation, and from it arises the freedom to choose the sort of life one wants. That is liberation.

Robert Barltrop

On Liberty. (1922)

From the July 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

Your walk of life does not matter, neither your occupation, social standing, nor domestic circumstances. If your brains are sufficiently developed, your understanding sufficiently large to realise what a hard vigilant taskmaster Liberty is, how it must be won by bitter exertion, deep introspection, subtle selection of essentials, and the most ruthless determination to articulate and to live the essence one discovers to be oneself —then, and not till then, are you individually free.

No wonder so few people are personalities and truly human. It is so much easier to jog along simply on the lines of least resistance, to submit to the general trend without struggle, to allow habits, comfort, laziness or cowardice to hold one down, to be nothing but a reaction to other people’s lack of ideas, to say and do what is generally expected, what thousands have said and done before on similar occasions.

After all, only slaves tolerate fetters. Freedom is within the reach of those who will take the trouble to grasp it. But it cannot be bestowed from without, like a diploma or a patent; it must be won from within — and one must feel the power to win it.

Socialism points the way. Economic freedom alone makes individual freedom possible for mankind.

W. J. E.