What is Freedom?
A critique of freedom from a Democratic Socialist perspective.
https://www.dsausa.org/strategy/toward_freedom/
The first thing we need to cover is: What is the current assumption of ‘freedom’ at least in the United States?
Is there a fundamental difference between how the right or left view freedom? Well, it turns out, yes! There is a fundamental difference and it affects every aspect of how we set-up and run our country. When is comes to the vague concept of ‘freedom’ Democratic Socialist believe, first of all, that the freedom of the individual can only be developed if the entire society where that individual exists embodies the values of solidarity, equality, and liberty. Now, this isn’t a crude conception of equality where individuals are equal in all respects but rather if that individual was going to develop their distinct capabilities and reach their fullest potential must be accorded their dignity denied to them by the inherent inequalities in all capitalist societies. We will see particular examples in a minute but to get a clearer picture of how we got into this precarious position today regarding Freedom we need to look back a bit, to the 1950s. While they were first written about by German Idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant, it was given its’ purpose and definition by Isaiah Berlin in his 1958 essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty”.
In that essay he wrote about the two competing differences of freedom summarized as negative freedom and positive freedom:
Positive Freedom is the possession of the capacity to act upon one’s free will, or freedom to do something. It is the ability or possibility of someone to exercise their own freedom, to act upon their own free will. This is opposed to Negative Freedom, which is freedom from external restraint on one’s actions, or freedom from someone else forcing you to do something.
Let’s say Person A is walking to get something to eat and is kidnapped and locked up until that person starves; this is a violation of negative freedom because it is an external restraint keeping that person from being free. While, you have Person B who is also walking down the same street planning on getting something to eat as well but this person doesn’t have enough money to buy food and Person B staves this would be a violation of their positive liberty. Their negative liberty is fine, no one is forcing them into starvation, but if they don’t have the funds then how truly free are they?
Ok, if you are anyone with any capacity for critical thinking I am sure you would realize that both violations are horrible. One is not worse than the other and you would be correct. However, in our current history we have had certain prevailing ruling ideologies in our country that have broken down and created a binary either/ or situation. This ideology can be seen most drastically on the rightwing of the United States in the Republican Party but it is not limited to just that party. The Democrats, especially since Ronald Reagan’s presidency have crafted policies centered around the alleviation of negative freedom at all cost while ignoring the equally drastic effects of what would happen to our country if our Postive Liberty is violated. It is also the ideology you probably most associate when you hear the word freedom in our modern discourse. When you picture freedom in your mind you probably identify mostly with Person A and probably sympathize with Person B but think it is a personal failure and not a systemic societal failure.
Democratic Socialist speak out against this dichotomy. It is here where we break from the traditional two party system. It is also here where we attempt to recapture the concept of Freedom from those who bastardize it.
So, for Democratic Socialist, positive freedom is just, if not more important, to society as negative freedom. Again, in positive freedom terms — one might say that a democratic society is a free only to the extent that a member of that society is allowed to fully participate in its democratic process and that a government should aim actively to create the conditions necessary for individuals to be self-sufficient or to achieve self-realization. No one is technically keeping that individual from voting, or seeking healthcare, or not living in a racist area but just because an individual theoretically has the freedom to do something doesn’t mean they can actually contain it.
In a wonderfully clear example of the dichtomoty between positive and negative freedom there was a highly publicized debate between Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Texas Senator Ted Cruz over healthcare a question was posed by Mr. Sanders to Mr Cruz asking him, “Ted, in your opinion is every American entitled, and I underline that word, to healthcare as a right for being an American? Yes or no? Mr. Cruz responded by quoting the Declaration of Independence as a metric for what is meant by rights: “We are endowed with our creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His response was that for him, “what is a right is access to healthcare. What is a right is being able to choose your own doctor…”
Mr. Sanders took this opportunity to remind Mr. Cruz and the audience that access “…doesn’t mean a damn thing if you can’t afford it.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y7nchytFSQ)
There you have it: a perfect example of positive freedom vs. negative freedom in the modern debate over healthcare — access vs affordability. Mr. Cruz was arguing that access should be the metric of good healthcare system while Mr. Sanders argued that again access “doesn’t mean a damn thing..” One has access to Donald Trump’s mansions theoretically. One has access to anything in the marketplace, at least on paper. That is the crucial difference with Democratic Socialist understanding of Freedom.
Again, this freedom is understood by Democratic Socialist to be hindered and threatened by the influence of racism, sexism, classism, and ageism and as Democratic Socialists we push towards the eradication of all these ideologies that keep human flourishing at bay. These ideologies and policy decisions that are built around these toxic ideologies keep us chained to our stations in life, unable to fully flourish in our modern society. A democratic community committed to the equal moral worth of each citizen will socially provide the cultural and economic necessities — food, housing, quality education, healthcare, childcare — for the development of human individuality.
Without access to healthcare how free are you if you forced into bankruptcy whenever you have a baby or have cancer? How free are you if you can’t afford a dentist? How free are you if you are terrorized and targeted by police just because you fit a certain ‘profile’? How free are you if you are a child unfortunate enough to be simply born in the wrong zip code and thus lack equitable access to schools, public transit, or a cyclical life of poverty? We as human being know intuitively that the child should not be denied access to the same resources and opportunities given by the same child born in a more affluent suburb or neighborhood in the same city, oftentimes just a few miles down the road.
So again, what is freedom? While the freedoms that exist under democratic capitalism are gains of popular struggle to be cherished, democratic socialists argue that the values of liberal democracy can only be fulfilled when the economy as well as the government is democratically controlled. Our workplaces are simply not democratically controlled. While it might seem like an illusion, individuals do have a lot of democratic control over our politics, mostly at the local level. We even have some democratic control over our media but we have virtual no democracy when it comes to where we spend most of our day as adults — the workplace.
We simply cannot accept Capitalism’s argument that workplaces and all economic relationships are “free and private” because contracts are not made among economic equals and because they give rise to social structures which undemocratically confer power upon some over others. (provide an example) Such relationships are undemocratic in that the citizens (you and I) involved have not freely deliberated upon the structure of those institutions and how social roles should be distributed within them. We do not imagine that all institutional relations would wither away under socialism, but we do believe that the basic contours of society must be democratically constructed by the free deliberation of its members. To summarize, this pursuit of Positive Freedom for Socialists can be summed up from the lyrics to “Bread and Roses’ by Suffragette Judy Collins;
“As we go marching, marching
In the beauty of the day
A million darkened kitchens
A thousand mill lofts grey
Are touched with all the radiance
That a sudden sun discloses
For the people hear us singing
Bread and roses, bread and roses.”
The bread is the labor an individual toils in the workplace and the appropriate payment for that labor done. The roses are all the flourishes of the human experience that make life worth living. It is not enough to have one, we must have both in order to be complete human beings.
