Our series of contributions that began with the title From
Logos to Freedom has now reached a stage of complexity of themes where it
is wise to attempt a summary of the conclusions implicit in our analysis and
presentation. It may seem strange that our discussion of the concept and domain
of freedom should have involved in large part some of the greatest female
thinkers of the last hundred years, namely, Hannah Arendt (political theory),
Simone Weil (social philosophy), Rosa Luxembourg (Marxist critique) and Joan
Robinson (economic theory). Is it perhaps because “the second sex” (as Simone
de Beauvoir labelled women) has been so constrained by masculine domination
throughout the ages, especially in the political sphere, that its constant quest
for emancipation has led it to ponder more closely the nature, content and
domain of freedom?
We begin our summary here with Arendt’s proposition that
“the opposite of freedom is coercion, not necessity”. This may be a negative
definition of freedom, one that will need to be supported with positive
illustrations, but it is enlightening because it clearly draws the inextricable
and exclusive link between freedom and politics. There are certainly physical
or natural and biological restraints on the exercise of our will, but the scope
of our will is only a larger receptacle from which freedom as political action
springs. It may very well be, as philosophers from Spinoza to Schopenhauer and
lately Cacciari have contended, that even our will may be conditioned by causal
chains outside of our conscious ability to detect them (one may think of
Freudian psychoanalysis, for instance). The mistake this position incurs is
that the ultimate causal determination of the will is simply irrelevant to how
we determine the scope of our freedom, which must by definition exclude that
“necessity” that is necessarily beyond the scope of our free choice! We cannot
know what we cannot know, what is inscrutable – the “ultimate causes” of our
actions; but we do know that we make choices that affect the sphere of action
of other human beings – their “interests”, from the Latin phrase “inter
homines esse”, which illuminatingly refers to the ambit of “being among
humans”. Freedom is therefore, again with Arendt, the scope of action
unaffected by human coercion – an exquisitely political notion that bears no
relation to “scientific necessity” so long as “science” is not utilised as a
tool to justify or (as Weber put it) to rationalise the exercise of coercion on
some human beings by other human beings.
It may come as a surprise to the proponents of “liberal
democracy” that in fact liberalism is one of the most potent ideologies – one
invented and elaborated by the capitalist bourgeoisie from Hobbes to Locke and
beyond (cf. C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism)
– utilised by the bourgeoisie to confine the scope of freedom, and thereby of
democracy, to the realm of “public opinion” by means of the “scientific”
separation of politics from the realm of “necessity”, that is, economics. The
whole enterprise of “political economy” since Adam Smith to Stanley Jevons and
Leon Walras was precisely to separate “the dismal science” dealing with “the rational
allocation of scarce resources” from the ambit of political choice or “the
public sphere” where isolated self-interested individuals were “free” to indulge
their “opinions” – once again, so long as they did not interfere with the scientific
administration of the economy. Clearly then, the aim of liberal ideology was
always to remove the economic sphere – the one where the class antagonistically
opposed to the ruling bourgeoisie, the working class, was principally and most
existentially concerned in terms of “earning a livelihood” – from precisely
that “administration” or governance that is, by definition, an ineluctable
aspect of all “economic” decisions in terms of the allocation of social
resources. By naming economics “the science of choice”, Lionel Robbins
unwittingly and foolishly drew attention to the evident oxymoron of liberal
ideology: - that either economics was a “science”, in which case “choice” was
inapplicable, or else it was a “choice”, in which case it could not be deemed
to be a “science”! Alternatively, of course, the forceful separation of workers
from political activity, reflected in their expropriation from both means of
production and from the product of their living labour, was justified by one of
liberalism’s greatest apologists, Benjamin Constant, as the harmless effect of
the unwillingness of “the public” to meddle in serious matters of political
governance due to the complexity of “modern society”. Whence, according to
Constant, the overriding abandonment of the “ancient freedom” of the Greek
polis by modern publics in favour of the “guaranteed liberties” proffered by parliamentary
representative governments based on universal suffrage.
Every attempt
to derive the concept of freedom from experiences in the political realm sounds
strange and startling because all our theories in these matters are dominated
by the notion that freedom is an attribute of will and thought much rather than
of action. And this priority is not merely derived from the notion that every
act must psychologically be preceded by a cognitive act of the intellect and a
command of the will to carry out its decision, but also, and perhaps even
primarily, because it is held that "perfect liberty is incompatible with
the existence of society," that it can be tolerated in its perfection only
outside the realm of human affairs. This current argument does not hold what
perhaps is true that it is in the nature of thought to need more freedom than
does any other activity of men, but rather that thinking in itself is not
dangerous, so that only action needs to be restrained: "No one pretends
that actions should be as free as opinions." This, of course, belongs
among the fundamental tenets of liberalism, which, its name notwithstanding,
has done its share to banish the notion of liberty from the political realm.
For politics, according to the same philosophy, must be concerned almost
exclusively with the maintenance of life and the safeguarding of its interests.
Now, where life is at stake all action is by definition under the sway of
necessity, and the proper realm to take care of life's necessities is the
gigantic and still increasing sphere of social and economic life whose
administration has overshadowed the political realm ever since the beginning of
the modern age. (H. Arendt p.155, “What Is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future.)
The essence of liberalism is, on one side, to reduce the
sphere of the Political to the purely Personal, to the world of
individual opinions and beliefs (doxa), and on the other side, to turn
the Economic into a “scientific” sphere to be safeguarded from and rendered
immune to all political interference. This was always the aim of Political
Economy, Classical and Neoclassical. Indeed, the most trenchant criticism
moved against Marx’s own “critique of political economy” is precisely that,
first, it sought to subordinate the question of freedom to the narrower “social
question” (as Arendt calls it in On Revolution), to the production and
distribution of wealth in capitalist society; and second, that by so doing,
perhaps against his own inclination or intention, Marx reduced the entire scope
of human existence to the sphere of production, to the historical struggle
between “economic” classes, and therefore the entirety of human social
interaction to that of instrumental labour (cf. J. Habermas, “Labor
and Interaction”, in Theory and Practice) - with the nefarious outcome that his homo sapiens was
reduced to the animal laborans (this is the central thesis of H. Arendt
in The Human Condition).
For Marx, then, the social question – the production
and distribution of “value” in capitalist industry and society – took
precedence in the guise of “the forces of production” over anything related to
“the social relations of production” which, to him, constituted a
transient, superfluous politico-ideological “superstructure” entirely
determined by the “economic base”. Far from realising that in reality
capitalist society would never have come into existence without, and indeed is
analytically wholly reducible to, those political “social relations” that he so
brilliantly and sharply excoriated, Marx could even auspicate the eventual
“withering away of the State” and (in Engels’s words) reduce all of politics to
“the administration of things”! Of course, this Marxian “Darwinian scientism” was
never consistent with the broader concept of freedom and human needs that is
implicit throughout his monumentally genial and piercing critique; but once
again it is a powerful sober reminder of the consequences of mistaking freedom
as the opposite of necessity rather than coercion.
But the narrow focus of Marx’s critique – strictly, “of
political economy” – explains also the inadequacy of the notions of
“separation” and “alienation”, and “theft of labour time”, meaning ownership of
product – a legal standard, not directly germane to freedom – on which it was
essentially founded. As we have argued earlier, all of these notions improperly
narrow down the entire critique of the capitalist mode of production and of
capitalist society as a whole to the restricted and restricting sphere of the
Personal – the workers’ experience of their labouring activity and the
moral-legal condemnation of the “theft” of “their” product, whether taken
individually or indeed as a class. The Marxian critique fails most delusively
in the one field of opposition to capitalist industry and society that can most
justifiably and politically be raised as its most immediate threat, not to this
or that “social class”, but rather to the whole of humanity:- its threat to the
very survival of humanity on earth and of the earthly ecosphere itself! This is
a threat that can no longer be limited to the relations of human beings inter
se, as individuals or even as antagonistic social classes, in terms of
ethical or moral or legal claims of “alienation” or “exploitation”. The
environmental threat is one that is exquisitely and exclusively Political
because it concerns the interests of humanity as a whole and the very survival
of the earthly ecosphere.
Of course, and inevitably, this novel environmental critique
of capitalism – based on the concepts of overpopulation and overconsumption –
will remain political and partisan so long as our social system remains antagonistic.
But unlike the previous Marxian critique it has distinct advantages in that it
addresses the insuperable “contradictions” of capitalism in terms of its
ultimate un-viability and un-sustainability rather than on claims of
“exploitation” of one class by another. Indeed, one of the most brilliant
insights expounded by both Simone Weil (Reflexions sur la Liberte’) and
Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition) is that, given his reduction of all
human activity to the material production of the animal laborans, Marx
even failed to see that the supposed life of leisure of a future communist
society would become as arduous and wasteful as the one under capitalism in
that it would be devoted entirely to the exhausting and exhaustive immediate
production and fast consumption of products! Earlier, we highlighted how
the concept of overconsumption under capitalism must include the “distorted
needs” that enslave workers to “necessary labour” because of the
“artificiality” of those needs. Arendt, in particular, places due emphasis on
the “durability” of “work” by homo faber as against the “fast
consumption” of the animal laborans whose only reason to exist has
become “labour” itself – that is to say, “labour” intended as the division
of homogenized social labour whereby the worker is reduced to the animal
laborans as against the “specialized work” of homo faber.
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