Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (30 page)

But there is one thing that is certain. Any so-called ‘radical’ strategy that seeks to empower the disempowered in the realm of social reproduction by opening up that realm to monetisation and market forces is headed in exactly the wrong direction. Providing financial literacy classes for the populace at large will simply expose that population to predatory practices as they seek to manage their own investment portfolios like minnows swimming in a sea of sharks. Providing microcredit and microfinance facilities encourages people to participate in the market economy but does so in such a way as to maximise the energy they have to expend while minimising their returns. Providing legal title for land and property ownership in the hope that this will bring economic and social stability to the lives of the marginalised will almost certainly lead in the long run to their dispossession and eviction from that space and place they already hold through customary use rights.

Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage;

Minds innocent and quiet take

That for an hermitage;

If I have freedom in my love

And in my soul am free,

Angels alone, that soar above,

Enjoy such liberty.

So wrote Richard Lovelace in his much-cited poem written from prison to his lover Althea. Lovelace had been thrown into prison in 1642 for petitioning Parliament to have a law regulating the clergy repealed. He was jailed for exercising his freedom to petition Parliament. The timing is important. It was during the first phase of the English Civil War that curbed the power of the established Church and culminated in the execution of King Charles I. It was a time when, as the historian Christopher Hill puts it, the world was ‘being turned upside down’ by political, religious and social movements that sought a way to relate powerful ideas and ideologies about individual rights and liberty and the management of collective and common interests for the supposed common good (about which there was plenty of disagreement).
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Whatever the disagreements, the divine right of kings and of the established Church (though not of the dissenters) was under fierce attack. But what sort of body politic could and might replace it and with what freedoms?

The sentiments expressed in Lovelace’s poem are very much alive and well. Most of us socialised into the ways of capital believe we
are blessed with a capacity for freedom of thought no matter what walls and barriers surround us. We can easily imagine a situation or even a world that is different from that which we currently inhabit. We can even imagine active steps by which our world can be remade in a different image. And if we are free to imagine alternatives, why cannot we freely struggle to make our imaginings reality, even as we recognise that the historical and geographical circumstances may not be particularly propitious for proposing and pursuing alternatives? It is not only followers of the right-wing libertarian novelist Ayn Rand who hold to this view. Radicals of all stripes, including Marx, willingly subscribe to it. After all, says Terry Eagleton in
Why Marx Was Right
, ‘the free flourishing of individuals is the whole aim of his politics, as long as we remember that these individuals must find some way of flourishing in common’.
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What separates Rand from Marx is that the latter saw the true flourishing of individual creativity (an ideal that goes back to Aristotle’s conception of the good life) as best accomplished through collaboration and association with others in a collective drive to abolish the barriers of scarcity and material necessity beyond which, Marx held, the true realm of individual freedom could begin.

But behind all this there lurks an awkward question: is there something about the contemporary meaning and definition of freedom that stops short of embracing anti-capitalist alternatives? Will I, like Lovelace, end up in jail for freely pursuing such alternatives? Do we operate, almost without knowing it, with some partial, debased and in the end imprisoning concepts of liberty and freedom that merely support the status quo and more deeply instantiate capital’s warped vision of human rights and social justice? Is the economic engine of capital so powerfully committed to certain foundational but partial concepts of liberty and freedom as to preclude anything other than at worst an entrepreneurial and at best a liberal humanist approach to the crucial political question of freedom versus domination?

In almost every presidential inaugural address I have ever read, a dominant theme has been that the United States stands for liberty
and freedom and will not only make any sacrifice and go to any lengths to counter threats to those freedoms, but also use its power and influence to promote the spread of liberty and freedom around the world. George Bush Jr, who repeatedly used the words liberty and freedom in all his speeches, described in stirring rhetorical terms (as the USA marched into a trumped-up war against Iraq) the US tradition this way: ‘The advance of freedom is the calling of our time. It is the calling of our country. From the Fourteen Points [Woodrow Wilson] to the Four Freedoms [Theodore Roosevelt] to the Speech at Westminster [Ronald Reagan], America has put our power at the service of principle. We believe that liberty is the design of nature. We believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe that freedom – the freedom we prize – is not for us alone. It is the right and capacity of all mankind.’ In a speech to British parliamentarians at the Mansion House in London he located the roots of his thinking as follows: ‘We’re sometimes faulted for a naïve faith, that liberty can change the world: if that’s an error it came from reading too much John Locke and Adam Smith.’
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While the idea of Bush actually reading these authors is mind-boggling, the rooting of his arguments in the propositions of early political economy is, as we shall see, of critical importance.

This concern on the part of the United States to protect liberty and freedom has, unfortunately, been used systematically to justify the imperial and neocolonial domination of much of the world. There has been and is no reluctance on the part of the United States to resort to coercion and violence in the pursuit of the absolute values of liberty and freedom. There is a long history of covert operations mounted by the USA to support coups against democratically elected leaders (Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 and more recently the failed attempt against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela). Closer to home, we now live in a world of extensive government surveillance of the private communications of citizens, the cracking of all encrypted codes by government authorities (so they have access to our bank, medical and credit card records), all
in the name of keeping us free and secure from the threat of terror. The quest for liberty and freedom provides a licence, it seems, to engage in a wide range of repressive practices. The US public at large is either totally oblivious to or so deeply familiar with this contradiction that it scarcely notices how the inspiring rhetoric about liberty and freedom which it so readily embraces is so often paired with some shabby operation of domination often for narrow venal gain, to say nothing of chronic abuses of human rights, from Abu Ghraib in Iraq to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, as well as on the ground in Afghanistan. Even Amnesty International has openly condemned the United States for ‘atrocious violations of human rights’ on Guantanamo, a criticism that the US government blithely ignores. There is, alas, nothing new in reversals of this kind. ‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength,’ wrote George Orwell in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, with the then Soviet Union obviously in mind.

It is tempting in the face of all this to conclude that the political rhetoric concerning the pursuit of liberty and freedom is a sham, a mask for hypocrites like Bush to pursue more venal aims of profit, dispossession and domination. But this would deny the force of that other history which, from peasant revolts to revolutionary movements (American, French, Russian, Chinese etc.), to the struggle to abolish slavery and the fight to liberate whole populations from their chains of colonial rule, has in the name of freedom wrought a seismic reworking of the contours of how our world society works. All of this has been going on while social forces have been extending the field of freedom and liberty through struggles against apartheid, for civil rights, workers’ rights, women’s rights and the rights of many other minorities (LGBT, indigenous or disabled populations etc.). All of these struggles have worked their way through the history of capitalism in myriad ways to transform our social world. When protesters against tyrannical rule planted liberty trees, the gesture was more than empty. When the cry demanding ‘freedom now’ echoes in the streets, then the ruling social order has to tremble or concede something, even if what it offers turns out to be of little more than symbolic value.

The popular desire for liberty and freedom has been a powerful motive force throughout capital’s history. That quest will not easily die no matter how much it may get banalised and degraded in the rhetoric of the ruling classes and their political representatives. But there is a dark side to this coin. At some point in their trajectory (particularly the closer they come to achieving their aims) all these progressive movements have to decide who or what has to be dominated to secure the liberty and freedom that they seek. In revolutionary situations somebody’s ox gets gored and the question then is whose and why? Poor Lovelace ends up in jail and that seems unfair. The Terror was launched in the French Revolution in the cause of consolidating ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’. The hopes and dreams of generations of communist insurgents have crashed on the rocks of this contradiction as the promise of human emancipation crumbles into the dust of bureaucratised and sclerotic state management backed by an apparatus of police-state repression. Similarly, the denizens of post-colonial societies who truly believed that a struggle for national self-liberation and freedom would lead to an immense growth in the domain of freedom now live in a state of disillusionment if not fear for the future of their freedoms. South Africa, after years of fierce struggle against apartheid, is no better off now than it ever was in achieving basic freedoms from want and need. In some parts of the world, like Singapore, individual freedoms are strictly limited, traded away, as it were, for rapidly increasing material well-being.

There is, plainly, a whale of a contradiction here. Freedom and domination go hand in hand. There is no such thing as freedom that does not in some way have to deal in the dark arts of domination. Domination over one’s own fears in the face of overwhelming odds, over cynics and doubters, to say nothing of external enemies, may be necessary to open the way to greater freedoms. This unity of freedom and domination is, as always, a contradictory unity. Unjust means may be required to prosecute a just cause.

The two polar terms of freedom and domination lie at the extremes of a contradiction that takes many subtle and nuanced,
to say nothing of disguised, forms (domination can be masked as consent or be established by persuasion and ideological manipulation). But I prefer to stick with the flagrant and most disturbing language precisely because to ignore its potential consequences lies at the root of the disillusionment of millions who have faithfully struggled for freedom, sometimes at the cost of their lives, only to find their descendants swimming in the dark waters of yet another form of domination. Any struggle for freedom and liberty must be prepared to confront at the very outset that which it is prepared to dominate. It also has to recognise that the price of maintaining its freedoms is eternal vigilance against the return of either old or new forms of domination.

This is where the references to John Locke and Adam Smith are relevant. For what classical liberal political economy proposed was not only some sort of utopian model for a universalised capitalism but a certain vision of individual liberty and freedom that ultimately came to underpin, as the French philosopher Michel Foucault acutely notes, a self-regulatory structure of governance that placed limits on the arbitrariness of state power at the same time as it led and enabled individuals to regulate their own conduct according to the rules of a market society.
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The domination and disciplining of self were internalised within the individual. This meant that the dominant conceptions of freedom and liberty were and still are deeply embedded in the social relations and codes characteristic of market exchange based on private property and individual rights. These exclusively defined the realm of freedom and any challenge to them had to be ruthlessly put down. The social order was constituted by what Herbert Marcuse called ‘repressive tolerance’: there were strict boundaries beyond which one was never supposed to venture, no matter how pressing the cause of furthering liberty and freedom, at the same time as the rhetoric of tolerance was deployed to get us to tolerate the intolerable.
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The only surprising thing about all this is that we get surprised when we notice and think about it. After all, is it not obvious that the violence and domination of the state necessarily have to stand
behind the freedoms of the market? In the theory and practices of the liberal state that gradually emerged from the eighteenth century onwards, the guiding idea was that the state should be self-limiting in its interventions, that it should practise laissez-faire with respect to individual and particularly entrepreneurial practices in the marketplace, not out of paternalistic benevolence but out of self-interest in maximising the accumulation of monetary wealth and power within its sovereign jurisdiction. That the state frequently overreaches in its regulatory and interventionist activities is a common complaint among inhabitants and, of course, a standard complaint from capital. And from time to time political movements such as the Tea Party in the United States arise with a clear mission to roll back state intervention no matter whether that interventionism is benevolent or not. It is time, say libertarian critics, for the nanny state to be gone and the true reign of individual liberty and freedom to begin.