This is the third in the series:
2) Freedom Under Representative Democracy
Scholars often divide freedom into two types: negative and positive. Negative freedom is “freedom from”. From arbitrary search and self incrimination, for example. Freedom from is primarily about what other people, including the government, cannot do to you.
Positive freedom is the ability to do things: free speech and freedom to follow any religion are two of the positive freedoms enshrined in American Constitutional law (though freedom of expression is much violated in the practice, as opposed to principle.)
The preamble of the Declaration of Independence says that everyone has the inalienable right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Obviously, again, these principle are more theoretical than practical, given how busily the American government kills people. (Nothing is said in the preamble about these rights being only for Americans, indeed they are supposed to be for everyone.) And then there’s how many people America locks up, which isn’t exactly liberty.
No rights, positive or negative, to do or to be free of, are actually ordained by the Creator, nor are any of them inalienable. All of them exist exactly and only to the extent that one has the power to enforce them. The English Magna Carta, which gave nobles the right of jury trial was forced by the Barons on the King, not granted by the King out of some beneficience. Later expansions of the right to jury trial were won by Republican and Parliamentary powers, and indeed, right now the British government is removing the right to jury trial for most offenses, in part so that opposition to genocide can be quelled without juries refusing to convict, as they have done.
Israel’s lobby in Britain is more powerful than those who believe in jury trial. And power is all that matters when it comes to freedom and rights.
This is why the actual left is always concerned about restricting concentrations of power and wealth and why most modern liberals are fools, believing that rights can exist with concentrated. Older liberals were not so foolish, FDR knew, and so did Justice Brandeis:
“You can have a great concentration of wealth or you can have democracy. You can’t have both.”
You can have the form of democracy, as the US does. But not the reality.
But there is another type of freedom to. We touched on it when we discussed freedom under capitalism, but let’s revisit it.
Elon Musk has far more freedom to than anyone reading this post. So does Mark Zuckerberg. They have vast wealth, and money is, at its heart, the ability to tell other people what to do and to command the results of their labor. If either man wants to do something, they can get a thousand people to do it for them. If they want almost anything they can buy it. They never have to work for anyone else, and other than (sometimes, but not most of the time) obeying the law, there are few practical limits on what they can do.
Compared to them, or to top political leaders like Trump or Putin or Xi or even Starmer, you and I have no freedom to do things. We obey our lords and masters.
This is especially true under capitalism, because capitalism is a system in which the means of production are controlled by a very few people. Under feudalism or for hunter-gatherers, this was not the case. You had land. You had animals. You could take care of yourself. This isn’t to say such people free in all ways, just that they had a freedom we have mostly lost. Work for the lord for 60 days, give him his cut, and the rest of their time was theirs to do with as they saw fit.
To create capitalism required removing their land and animals and rights from them. In exchange, over time, they received other rights.
But as long as we must work for others, and do what they say, we are not and cannot be free in the sense of having “freedom to do”. Most our life is spent doing what others insist on.
To be free means an end to capitalism and a system where we can, hopefully as individuals, but more likely as small groups, provide most of our own needs and where we do not have to spend most of our time accepting orders from bosses.
This is one of the essential points of this series of essays and we’re working towards looking at what such a society would be like both in principle and in practice. But the bottom line is that if you must spend almost all your days working for someone else, you are not free. And if you cannot create, if you cannot do, you are not free, no matter how much “freedom from” you have—and in the West, we have less and less of that freedom from each year, with the rise of surveillance, the constant assaults on free speech, association, and due process. Almost every Western nation, it seems, is restricting due process and allowing people to be destroyed by administrative order, as for example when the Canadian truckers and opponents of genocide were de-banked and/or sanctioned, making it impossible for them to pay rent or even buy food.
We have very little real freedom. We find that out when we do something the government disapproves of, like saying “please don’t help Israel mass murder children, torture and rape.” We find that out when we realize that we spend 8 or more hours a day obeying a pin-headed boss, and that if we don’t, we’ll wind up homeless and starve.
Neither represenative democracy nor capitalism has worked, and while China is more generous now that most of the West and better run, they have not solved these problems either. Perhaps they will. Perhaps they’ll make that transition to true communism, the withering of the state, and the control of the means of production by the proletariat.
Maybe. But I doubt it. Not without a clear picture of what such freedom would look like. And that’s the real question, and the real problem.
So that’s what we’ll tackle.
What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.
Bob
Yes.
The various ruling classes did a capital job convincing the plebs in the west that they are in any meaningful sense “free”.
The Americans have obviously made a comedy routine out of the whole thing with shouting – muh freedom, freest country evar and so on.
But most people in my far more low key society think they’re free too because a day job is freedom and the school system is freedom, apparently.
bruce wilder
Civilizations are predators, plagued by parasites of their own making. The political contest over the distribution on income and risk isn’t solved by erecting a political and social hierarchy — it just becomes more complicated, more complex. (Yes, “complicated” and “complex” can be different properties of systems, designed and emergent.)
The libertarian fantasy that we humans can thrive by abolishing hierarchy is in fundamental tension with the authoritarian fantasy that hierarchy without architecture can stand, let alone solve problems effectively. Power is necessary to cooperation but power corrupts.
I have always leaned hard toward idealism, wanted to rally with the better angels — I suppose that is temperament or neurosis manifesting. In my old age, I am suspicious even of my own attempts at denying how fundamentally problematic political cooperation is. I see the ambivalence people experience with regard to actual hierarchies and their dysfunctions as inextricable from their unwillingness to think about potentially insolvable problems.
Feral Finster
There are no answers, only temporary expedients. What may be the cure in one instance can be the disease in a generation or so.
This is why, after some 5,000 years of himan history, one can find successful examples of just about every political and economic system imaginable, and all of them eventually fall apart as sociopaths take over.
For power is to sociopaths what catnip is to cats. Humans could take it or leave it.
At the same time, power is what gets shit done. Not only that, but even if you refuse power, others will not share your scruples, and you may not like what they do with power.
Of course, sociopathy has its limitations. The sociopath needs normies, as a zero-trust no-holds barred winner society is not conducive to building lasting institutions. There is a reason that dynasties do not as a rule last for long.
spud
collapse might bring something different. and collapse we will. your watching the inevitable collapse of a system that was intensified in the 1990’s to extract all the worlds wealth, into the pockets of a few, and the inevitable push back from the civilized world.
every move the western free trade empire made from 1993 on wards was the wrong one. it looked right for the few, after all, money rained down from heaven.
but that money came at a price, it gutted the western free trading empires military, political and economic strength.
now cartoon character oligarchs like karp, musk and adelson run the show. creatures so far removed from reality, that outside observers know the jig is up.
they are burning through just about everything, to try to outlast the civilized world. good luck with that.
mean while inside the western empire, the pleebs are going to revolt, the cartoon character oligarchs now realize this, and they will intensify repression, only to have that blown right back into their faces.
even more resources will be blown on the repression. and the military might become suspect to the cartoon characters after the police get neutered, after all. most of them are simply mercenaries, who are in it for the money and power. when faced with real tangible threats like in uvalde, they will fold.
then comes the mercenary armies, the last gasp. what ever comes next is anyone’s guess.
the enlightenment in europe, and then america was to solve this scenario. the parasites immediately started to under mine it, and here we are. Jefferson even stated how dare they challenge us already.
so if you look at any hunter gather tribe, there are those who get tossed out of the tribe and become loners because they want more more more, and give less less less.
purges help, but only for so long. china will slip someday, russia will have a relapse someday, and so will Iran.
the ferocious appetites of a few, will eventually win.
gene roddenberry had it right, replicators and matter transfer will free the human race up from the parasites. but that is simply sci. fi. right now.
if you
Bill H
I suspect that if you saw a five-legged elephant, you would claim that all elephants have five legs and should therefor be destroyed. Capitalism is merely an economic system, and is in and of itself neither good or evil, any more than are four legged elephants. Merit of the system lies in the manner of its implementation.
Today’s implementation of capitalism is badly implemented. That its first duty is to the stockholder, and its ability to control governance are but two of the current evil manifestations which corrupt the system. But they are not inherent in the system and, in fact, the latter one is more a flaw in governance than it is the economic system.
StewartM
Well put, Ian.
Years ago, in a blog sphere far away, I wrote about the notion about how the American ideal of “liberty” was inspired by our interaction with the native peoples here. While they hadn’t been hunter-gatherers for about 1000 years, they still experienced a degree of freedom unheard-of among Europeans, especially commoners.
However, the US Founders still could not understand these peoples nor fully accept their “liberty”, as notions of what was correct “social order” had been deeply ingrained into them. All the other experiences of “liberty” familiar to them (Greco-Roman, German) were quite limited by contrast. They still thought that someone had to be “in charge”.
The failure to conceive of societies where no one person was “in charge” of things led to all sorts of problems with treaties; the Europeans and later Americans could always find someone who seemed to be important to sign a treaty, only to find out that that person didn’t have much in the way of any coercive power (“Did so-and-so agree to live on a reservation? the others would say. “So let him go live on that reservation. He doesn’t speak for us.”) At most, these people only had the power of status and persuasion.
(Before anyone interjects something, yes, it’s quite possible that there were state-level societies in North America during the height of the Mississippian period, with leaders who did have coercive powers. But these collapsed either shortly before or shortly after the European arrival, and it’s possible that European diseases played a role in that collapse–a veritable tidal wave of disease rolled across the Americas with European incursion, and it’s quite possible many natives died from that even before they laid eyes upon European. Some native peoples have legends that would be consistent with this; the Cherokee said that they once had an emperor and a tyrannical priestly class, but these were overthrown in a revolt).
But I think the biggest problem we would have in creating truly free societies is the mindsets we inherit from our current society, that considers some oppressive relations as “right”, even if we manage to construct the economic fundamentals. I remember my usenet days, when someone (who perhaps was used to being in a position of power and control over others) railing at another poster and obviously frustrated that he couldn’t shut the other person up. It could get pretty comical.
KT Chong
The high-profile foreign policy showdown at the May 20, 2026 Munk Debates in Toronto featured:
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Waltvs.Mike Pompeo and Victoria Nuland
The co-authors of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” (Mearsheimer and Walt) defeated the neocon duo (Pompeo and Nuland) by a margin of 56% to 44%.
Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH6pXjjJI_8
KT Chong
The high-profile foreign policy showdown at the May 20, 2026 Munk Debates in Toronto featured:
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt
vs.
Mike Pompeo and Victoria Nuland
The co-authors of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” (Mearsheimer and Walt) defeated the neocon duo (Pompeo and Nuland) by a margin of 56% to 44%.
Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH6pXjjJI_8
Note: Please delete my previous comment post — i.e., bad formatting — and this note.
mago
As I’ve been quoting since my mid twenties and have said here before: economic freedom is social freedom.
There’s more to say of course, but I’ll leave that to the more articulate.
Feral Finster
@StewartM:
“Before anyone interjects something, yes, it’s quite possible that there were state-level societies in North America during the height of the Mississippian period, with leaders who did have coercive powers. But these collapsed either shortly before or shortly after the European arrival, and it’s possible that European diseases played a role in that collapse–a veritable tidal wave of disease rolled across the Americas with European incursion, and it’s quite possible many natives died from that even before they laid eyes upon European. ”
I have never understood why that tidal wave of european diseases did not start with the Vikings who landed in Labrador and Newfoundland.
For that matter, it calls into question the idea that Ming treasure voyages reached the Americas.
Ian Welsh
Yes, homonyms are my writing kryptonite. I think in sound when writing. Thanks for the catch.
StewartM
I have never understood why that tidal wave of european diseases did not start with the Vikings who landed in Labrador and Newfoundland.
Probably for the following reasons:
1) the contact just a drop in the bucket compared to the later European incursions
2) As this was the 10th century, and contact within Europe was less than later, perhaps the Norse themselves had not been exposed to as many European diseases;
3) As the transition from hunter-gathering to denser, horticultural populations had only started to occur in the Americas at this time, the native population would have been less dense and thus transmission less likely. This would have been true with the Inuit in Greenland and probably true with the tiny (30 to 160 people) settlement in Newfoundland.
The Southeastern and Eastern peoples, by contrast, as I said might have been in much denser state-level populations (at one time, Cahokia near present-day St. Louis is estimated to have been bigger than London). It’s unquestionable that European incursion, by a European population more exposed to pathogens perhaps than the Norse had been, touched off a massive death toll among natives. De Soto’s expedition along the Mississippi counted some 88 Native towns, during their trip; when LaSalle followed him some 122 years later, there were just *two*.
Feral Finster
The Norse were major travelers, regularly going as far away as Constantinople and all over european Russia.
StewartM
Feral Finster
The Norse were major travelers, regularly going as far away as Constantinople and all over european Russia.
Yeah, but not the same “Norse”. Sure, the “Norse” as a group traveled all over Europe, but the ones in Greenland weren’t the same ones as in Russia.
TSC
Test And later, applying this to the freedom of artistic expression but the same can be applied to any freedom under Are you free in relation to your publisher in relation to your public, which demands that you provide it with in frames and paintings, and as a
Feral Finster
They certainly came into contact with one another, when they returned to Norway or Denmark or whatever. Gotland off the coast of Sweden was a major trading hub, and I mean “hub”, as in “place where people left and came back to”.
So I have never fully gotten it. Just as the demise of the Norse Greenland colony (supposedly because of climate change and a population not accustomed to eating fish) never did make sense to me. I mean, the Puritans weren’t used to eating maize at first, either, but eventually, they figured it out.