“The first person, who, having inclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.”
-Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality
Seeing so many debates taking place within the left and in the political realm broadly has reminded me how often one discovers how little they actually share with their political bedfellows. God knows this is especially true within the left, a political galaxy more or less descended from the theoretical writings of various overly verbose Europeans from the 19th century, many of whom hated each other and regarded one another’s political goals as totally antithetical to their own. Following this are generations of activists, leaders and revolutionaries who often never properly understood the theoretical basis of their ideology, suppressed parts of it they disliked, or in better instances adapted it to a different time and context.
For that reason, and as a preface to other work I’d like to do on this platform, I feel the need to clarify the position from which I’m writing, and a bit on how I got there, and I will go out of my way to use clear and simple language to do so. I certainly won’t communicate any new ideas in this essay; rather I will try to distill and shed light on ideas that are the subject of centuries-old discussions about the goals and methods of human societies. I can only do so in the clumsy manner I’m familiar with, but nevertheless I hope it will be useful to those who are new to these ideas.
Simply enough, the guiding force behind my politics is a desire for the most possible freedom for the most possible people.
What is freedom? That is an entire field of study of its own, but for practical purposes I will define it simply as the ability to do anything, to behave as one pleases with the absence of any force that can compel you to stop. Even if the behavior is something bizarre that no one would ever actually do, a perfect freedom would make the allowance for it, but certainly it would include basic aspects of day to day life, the right to live, to breathe clean air, to love freely, to share in and provide for one’s community, and to maintain basic bodily autonomy.
So even as soon as we accept that freedom is the goal of politics, we have to simultaneously accept that this definition of freedom is unattainable. No person who has ever lived has had the perfect ability to do whatever they may desire. Force- defined here as that which can compel one to engage in or abstain from behaviors independent of their desire to do so- is an ever present reality of human life.
The most fundamental, coercive and universal force, of course, is natural law. Nature is a constant of all human societies. It is natural law that if you go long enough without eating, you will become hungry. If you go hungry long enough, you will starve. You do not have the freedom to abstain from food- at least not for very long. The same is true of water and air. Simple constraints. You can hold your breath for some time, but no matter how hard you try, you must eventually breath or die. You must go out into the world and find these things. Thus, you must work. And furthermore, after a lifetime of working, you will die anyway, because nature has not given us the freedom to opt out of the aging process. Not exactly a fair contract, but one we’ve yet to figure a way out of.
The other omnipresent force in human life, of course, are other humans and the systems they build to exert greater force on others, which I typically refer to as systems of domination. These can be churches, street gangs, organized states, firms, or in some cases even isolated individuals. These are the institutions which pass laws, levy fines, and maintain a monopoly on needed resources- whether they be education, land, financial capital or something else- for instance, social media platforms have even found a way to increasingly become gatekeepers to and profiteers of basic human social interaction. The name of the institution is not really relevant- the point is that these constitute organized groups wielding immense power to compel others to obey their will, with or without their consent.
This wealth is what defines the terms of economic life- your boss can fire you and not the other way around, if we’re being honest, because your boss has more money than you. Wealth provides freedom, and that makes it a form of power. Your boss doesn’t need to listen to you, doesn’t even need to be nice to you, because she generally has more economic freedom to weather the financial costs of you leaving your job than you do. In a society without a state apparatus to outlaw such things, in principle there’s nothing stopping your boss from hiring armed guards to beat you if you don’t work hard enough and shoot you if you are insubordinate.
This is not to say your boss is the sort of person who would ever do such a thing, simply that if they were, they would be more likely to have the resources to do so, and you would have very little with which to defend yourself. The same is true if your boss decides to fire you one day while you still have rent due and children to feed. This is a freedom they have that you do not. Thus, it is necessary to be honest with ourselves about the difference. In modern terms, they are the employer and you the employee. In the lexicon of the 19th century, they are the capitalist, you the proletarian. If we go back to the 18th century, the terms become less euphemistic- to use Adam Smith’s refreshingly clear terminology in The Wealth of Nations which I will adopt from this point forward, they are the Master; you are the Workman. And as in Adam Smith’s time, the ideal relationship between you and your Master, from an economic perspective, would simply be slavery- a master/workman relationship free of labor laws, benefits, or the inconvenient need to pay you and allow you to leave.
But the state has outlawed outright slavery, so we instead opt for the wage labor system (or more and more commonly that of an independent contractor), a system in which the workmen rent themselves to their masters for a period of time, during which they are in every meaningful respect a servant, expected to do what their master (or more often a manager hired by the master) asks of them without complaint or question. This is of course theoretically a far cry from slavery, and gives the master much less control of their workmen. Because of this, other tools of coercion are used.
Debt is a fantastically useful instrument which serves myriad purposes for the master class. It carries an economic weight but also a compelling moral one, which can be used to justify circumstances that people would normally find abhorrent because, after all, a debt must be paid. A classic example of this is the lives of sharecroppers in the Post-Reconstruction South. Former slaves, having no education and no prospects, were generally directed by the Freedmen’s Bureau back to the plantations they worked on as slaves to work instead as tenant farmers, and it was through debt that the masters achieved what was their explicit goal, to maintain slavery by whatever means they legally could. W.E.B. Du Bois writes in his essay on the Freedmen’s Bureau in The Souls of Black Folk:
For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges.
It is an odd habit of people to get caught up in labels rather than practical realities. In this regard I am a materialist- if an individual is legally “free” but still has to work constantly to pay their rent and their crop loan, then they are not free in any meaningful sense. Today most working class people have traded the plantation owner for a landlord and the crop loan for student loans, medical bills or credit card debt. They may not be sharecroppers, as sharecroppers may not have been slaves, but they are not free. And if you’re not a free person, then what are you?
Saddled with debt, you will go to a job you do not like and do things you would probably find mundane at best and often would consider immoral in your private life. Indeed, so much of the behavior motivated by economics bristles at human nature. I don’t know about you, but I find customer service, either giving or receiving it, to be an incredibly bizarre form of human interaction. Both of us are aware that one of us is being paid to be there and is only behaving with an artifice of sickly sweet kindness so they can get paid. When you ask a cashier “how are you”, it’s blatantly obvious to both of you that there is only one acceptable answer. A manager doesn’t want to hear their employees complaining to customers that they don’t make enough money, that they’re low on sleep, have a chronic illness, or any of the other things a normal person would relate to. That would break the artifice of a “perfect customer experience”, and that would be bad for business. Such behaviors, irrational in a transaction-based economy (increasingly a transaction-based culture), are to be suppressed. Making such a society more free would require eliminating the economic structures that compel us to behave in such ways.
A society with, for instance, universal free housing, single-payer healthcare and free college education would be one in which it would be far easier to leave a job you didn’t like. It would represent a rebalancing of social power dynamics. It is for this reason, of course, that the wealthy meet such proposals with uniform contempt. Economic freedom is freedom. And freedom is very inconvenient to the ruling class. Best admit you’re a subject. It’s the first step, which poses the question: what do we do about it?
So then, we come to what I understand as the basis of all leftist thought: as long as the capitalist class has all the power, in the form of wealth, fixed capital and a monopoly on violence, that 99% of society that survives off income from labor (rather than income from capital) will never be able to chart the course of their own lives, always having to scrape by on the margins of a society designed by and for the rich and in which they are forced and indoctrinated into subservience. I will dispense with the argument of whether or not this system is legitimate- that can be the subject of another time, but I would suggest you ask your own eyes. Let us assume economic freedom is a desirable goal, and the ruling class stands in the way of it. So we must ask, How do we overthrow them?
There have been, broadly (and I am oversimplifying here), two basic socialist answers to these questions: those of authority and anti-authority. The former, embraced by Marx and Lenin, suggests supplanting the capitalists with a centralized state that overcomes the elites with state power and gradually develops into a democratic, worker owned society without the need for a state (indeed eventually without the need for work). In practice, such projects tend to produce totalitarian single-state parties in which decisions are actually made by a small circle of elites and all dissent is denounced as bourgeois interference and brutally repressed. To most Americans, this is what socialism is, the only form a worker-owned society can take, and it’s not surprising that they don’t like what they see. I agree with them.
But there is another, in my opinion much richer and humane tradition fostered by individuals like Mikhail Bakunin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin, carried on by the likes of Emma Goldman, Buenaventura Durruti and Nestor Makhno, and in the modern era by Murray Bookchin, David Graeber and Noam Chomsky. Its name, Anarchism (interchangeable with Libertarian Socialism, coined by Joseph Dejacque due to French suppression of media using the former term), is a fraught one, subject to much misunderstanding.
Anarchy is an ancient term derived from the Greek anarkhia (“without a ruler”). In this term alone we see clearly the distinction between the colloquial understanding of the term- “lack of order”- with its real meaning, which is the absence of leaders (perhaps belying the modern assumption that the latter implies the former). Quite simply, it is the condition in which people are to live and order their lives and communities without masters whenever humanly possible. It asserts that the coercive nature of states is fundamentally immoral and that only a society in which the people are given equal say in how their community functions can possibly legitimate itself on ethical grounds.
This idea is, at its bedrock, the theoretical basis for democracy, the belief that the people are their own best rulers. And this idea seems to crop up again and again throughout history, wherever conditions allow for it. Benjamin Rush wrote tellingly of it, describing the tendencies of poor American farmers to presume themselves capable of managing without masters as a mental illness:
The excess of the passion for liberty, inflamed by the successful issue of the war, produced, in many people, opinions and conduct which could not be removed by reason, nor restrained by government. For a while, they threatened to render abortive the goodness of heaven to the United States, in delivering them from the evils of slavery and war. The extensive influence which these opinions had upon the understandings, passions, and morals of many of the citizens of the United States, constituted a species of insanity, which I shall take the liberty of distinguishing by the name of Anarchia.
On this point it must be made clear: The Founding Fathers hated Democracy. They regarded common folk as a brutish mass of fools who would, left to their own devices, turn to sin, violence and debauchery, and appoint as their leaders demagogues who would gleefully quash minority dissent. John Adams famously wrote:
There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.
Alexander Hamilton, perhaps the poster child of elitist thought in American history:
It has been observed that a pure democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.
This is, in fact, the attitude underlying both the dominant liberal and conservative ideologies, and which on a subconscious level Trump supporters on the right and progressives on the left have recoiled from: the belief of both parties that regular people are barbaric fools, and need elites to rule them. It is this chastising attitude, this contempt for common people, that authoritarians use to justify their roles in society (and all the privileges they entail). If people were capable of managing themselves, why bother with a president, or a congress, or courts carrying out laws written by them? We could simply ignore them and manage ourselves as if they didn’t exist. Indeed, it is precisely the fact that Anarchist experiments have generally proven themselves quite capable of doing so that made their repression politically necessary to both right and left wing authoritarian regimes. Anarchists argue that to the degree people have fallen short of self-management, it is because they have been debased and artificially impoverished by elites. It is regular people who have advocated for their own right to have a cheap, quality education, and elites who, year after year, have degraded it. Regular people agree that there is a need for universal healthcare, and yet we have somehow been denied it. Regular people have largely supported welfare policy, and yet Republicans and Democrats alike have cut it repeatedly. Regular people, Anarchists believe, yearn to be free to make their own choices- elites, through school, work, church, television and social media, insist to them every day that they can only be successful by listening to experts, by being rigorously obedient and grateful to their teachers, their coaches, their pastors, and most importantly, their bosses. They subvert people’s self esteem with advertising insisting to them that they have flaws only a product or expert can solve, generating an unattainable vision of human life meant to make people disgusted with themselves and afraid of their neighbors. There is one constant, unabated ideological trajectory, instilled from early childhood: to make the individual loath themselves, so that they will turn their life over to some revered figure who can take control and put them on a clear path. You are a fool, you are disgusting and pathetic: do what I say and you can be fixed.
Anarchists are unique in the political spectrum for their ability to notice and reject this program, a heresy for which they have been punished for centuries. The Anarchist regards the individual as his or her own and only master who, if given the tools by a sane society that feeds people’s innate desire to learn and discuss ideas, will design a humane society that gives priority to more human values than economic growth and military supremacy. Instead of relying on an invisible hand, they turn to mutual aid. They are possessed of an unusual self confidence and ability for self direction, tempered by a faith in the ability of others to manage themselves.
Thus, the Anarchist sees systems of domination as illegitimate by default, and if they are to remain, they must meet a burden of proof as to their own value. The fact that the institution has power and violence at its disposal is not itself a justification for that power and violence. The hope of Anarchists is that such systems are only allowed to exist such as they create the conditions (particularly relative material security, progressive taxation, strong labor unions, social equality and good, universal education) in which a direct participatory democracy can be built and the old hierarchy simply ignored out of existence. The Anarchist engages in direct action towards building the society they wish to live in, rather than appealing to leaders in a system of domination they regard as illegitimate. Indeed, it is this action that has, in large part, built the more civilized aspects of our present world.
Of course, this is a relatively moderate Anarchism. There have always been militants, as in any political movement, and the better of them make worthwhile arguments which deserve consideration. You mileage may vary, but this is the point- that to the degree governments exist, they should exist to allow for an organized deliberative decision making process in which everyone is granted a right to have direct participation, and no one is threatened with violence or deprivation into compliance.
But this should be recognized as a real burden for the average citizen to bear. When conservatives argue that capital holders deserve a greater share of profits than workers, they fall back on the argument of risk and responsibility. An employee doesn’t have as much skin in the game, they are given the leisure to not think critically and simply do what they’re told. When things go awry, they don’t take the blame, and (so they argue, fairly absurdly) they don’t suffer the consequences.
The conservative argument is overstated, but there is a kernel of truth to it. The truth is, being told what to do can be a relief. Many people do in fact enjoy being able to pass the responsibility for their actions onto their manager, and the affairs of their community onto their government. Of course on the other side, the same conservative will say the poor are responsible for their poverty, that they should have taken more initiative, that they should have been more thoughtful and determined to succeed. This is the constant contradiction of capitalist society: on the one hand telling you to relax, do what your boss tells you and consume, but also blaming you for being financially irresponsible and inadequately industrious. There is no real answer, for it’s a trick question.
The only path, in my mind, is to accept the burden of self rule and self assertion. Be your own master, and rule yourself well. Reject anyone else who tries to encroach on your most sacred right, your right to answer only to yourself. Adopt a thoughtfully constructed moral code, and follow it. When someone offers you money or something else to violate it, simply say no, forcefully if necessary. Have faith in yourself and your inherent value as a free human being. And from that framework, seek to build a world modeled after this spirit of liberty. This, to me, is the only path forward for good people.