Mike Ballard Wage-slavery is freedom. Yesterday at 6:08am · Like Charles Brown Yes, wage-slavery is so-called doubly "free". It is not slave labor , so it is free relative to that. But the wage laborer is "free" of owning any means of production, as pre-wage laborers did. They have been deprived of any means of production which forces them to sell their labor to live. 22 hours ago · Like Charles Brown "One of the prerequisites of wage labor, and one of the historic conditions for capital, is free labor and the exchange of free labor against money, in order to reproduce money and to convert it into values, in order to be consumed by money, not as use...See More Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations by Karl Marx www.marxists.org As these were not intended for publication, but rather Marx’s self-clarification...See More 22 hours ago · Like · Remove Preview Charles Brown What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e., its historical genesis, resolve itself into? In so far as it is not immediate transformation of slaves and serfs into wage labourers, and therefore a mere change of form, it only means the expropri...See More Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter Thirty Two www.marxists.org Capital Volume One � What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e ., its historical genesis, resolve itself into? 22 hours ago · Like · Remove Preview Charles Brown nominally free labour 22 hours ago · Like Fu Lin-lin Charles Brown, the freedom Marx spoke of in his Capital is not to be questioned. I am rather referring to the freedom which the people regard as theirs when they do their part in capitalism - their role as wage workers. 5 hours ago · Unlike · 1 Charles Brown Uhhh I'm thinking about what ur saying...Yes, I think what you are referring to is related to the "freedom" sarcastically referred to by Marx as being "freed", as in deprived of ownership of the means of labor. For, without means of labor , the wage laborer is forced to self her labor to the capitalist for a wage; because the capitalist owns all the means of production or means of labor, instruments of production, raw materials, land, etc. 4 minutes ago · Like Charles Brown This is part of what Marx calls alienation, I think. Wage laborers are alienated or separated from the means of using their labor to make things. Your thought can even , perhaps, get us to the libertarian illusion of "freedom" in isolated individuals, or radical individualism that is the idea underlying so many people's beliefs in capitalism. It is libertarianism , in the radical individualism that is the ethic of artists in capitalism, "do your own thing". There are a million examples of this in the ideals of wage laborers under capitalism. about a minute ago · Like Write a comment...
Liberty. A study in bourgeois illusion ________________________________ Source: “Studies in a Dying Culture,” first published 1938. Republished 1977 in “The Concept of Freedom,” Lawrence & Wishart, London. Transcribed: by Dominic Tweedie; Proofed and corrected: by Guy Colvin, November 2005. ________________________________ Many will have heard a broadcast by H. G. Wells in which (commenting on the Soviet Union) he described it as a “great experiment which has but half fulfilled its promise,” it is still a “land without mental freedom.” There are also many essays of Bertrand Russell in which this philosopher explains the importance of liberty, how the enjoyment of liberty is the highest and most important goal of man. Fisher claims that the history of Europe during the last two or three centuries is simply the struggle for liberty. Continually and variously by artists, scientists, and philosophers alike, liberty is thus praised and man’s right to enjoy it imperiously asserted. I agree with this. Liberty does seem to me the most important of all generalised goods – such as justice, beauty, truth – that come so easily to our lips. And yet when freedom is discussed a strange thing is to be noticed. These men – artists, careful of words, scientists, investigators of the entities denoted by words, philosophers scrupulous about the relations between words and entities – never define precisely what they mean by freedom. They seem to assume that it is quite a clear concept, whose definition every one would agree about. Yet who does not know that liberty is a concept about whose nature men have quarrelled perhaps more than any other? The historic disputes concerning predestination, Karma, Free-Will, Moira, salvation by faith or works, determinism, Fate, Kismet, the categorical imperative, sufficient grace, occasionalism, Divine Providence, punishment and responsibility, have all been about the nature of man’s freedom of will and action. The Greeks, the Romans, the Buddhists, the Mahomedans, the Catholics, the Jansenists, and the Calvinists, have each had different ideas of liberty. Why, then, do all these bourgeois intellectuals assume that liberty is a clear concept, understood in the same way by all their hearers, and therefore needing no definition? Russell, for example, has spent his life finding a really satisfactory definition of number and even now it is disputed whether he has been successful. I can find in his writings no clear definition of what he means by liberty. Yet most people would have supposed that men are far more in agreement as to what is meant by a number, than what is meant by liberty. The indefinite use of the word can only mean either that they believe the meaning of the word invariant in history or that they use it in the contemporary bourgeois sense. If they believe the meaning invariant, it is strange that men have disputed so often about freedom. These intellectuals must surely be incapable of such a blunder. They must mean liberty as men in their situation experience it. That is, they must mean by liberty to have no more restrictions imposed upon them than they endure at that time. They do not – these Oxford dons or successful writers – want, for example, the restrictions of Fascism, that is quite clear. That would not be liberty. But at present, thank God, they are reasonably free. Now this conception of liberty is superficial, for not all their countrymen are in the same situation. A, an intellectual, with a good education, in possession of a modest income, with not too uncongenial friends, unable to afford a yacht, which he would like, but at least able to go to the winter sports, considers this (more or less) freedom. He would like that yacht, but still – he can write against Communism or Fascism or the existing system. Let us for the moment grant that A is free. I propose to analyse this statement more deeply in a moment, and show that it is partial. But let us for the moment grant that A enjoys liberty. Is B free? B is a sweated non-union shop-assistant of Houndsditch, working seven days of the week. He knows nothing of art, science, or philosophy. He has no culture except a few absurd prejudices, his elementary school education saw to that. He believes in the superiority of the English race, the King’s wisdom and loving-kindness to his subjects, the real existence of God, the Devil, Hell, and Sin, and the wickedness of sexual intercourse unless palliated by marriage. His knowledge of world events is derived from the News of the World, on other days he has no time to read the papers. He believes that when he dies he will (with luck) enter into eternal bliss. At present, however, his greatest dread is that by displeasing his employer in some trifle, he may become unemployed. B’s trouble is plainly lack of leisure in which to cultivate freedom. C does not suffer from this. He is an unemployed middle-aged man. He is free for 24 hours a day. He is free to go anywhere – in the streets and parks, and in the museums. He is allowed to think of anything – the Einstein theory, the Frege definition of classes, or the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Regrettably enough he does none of these things. He quarrels with his wife, who calls him a good-for-nothing waster, and with his children, who because of the means test have to pay his rent, and with his former friends, because they can enjoy pleasures he cannot afford. Fortunately he is free to remove himself from existence, and this one afternoon, when his wife is out and there is plenty of money in the gas-meter, he will do. A is free. Are B and C? I assume that A will reply that B and C are not free. If A asserts that B and C do enjoy real liberty, most of us, without further definition, will know what to think of A’s idea of liberty. But a Wells, a Forster, or a Russell would doubtless agree, as vehemently as us, that this is not liberty, but a degrading slavery to environment. He will say that to free B and C we must raise them to A’s level, the level, let us say, of the Oxford don. Like the Oxford don, B and C must have leisure and a modest income with which to enjoy the good things and the good ideas of the world. But how is this to be brought about? Bourgeois social relations are what we have now. No one denies that the dynamic motive of such relations is private profit. Here bourgeois economists and Marxists are agreed. Moreover, if causality has any meaning, and unless we are to throw all scientific method overboard, current economic relations and the unfreedom of B and C must be causally inter-related. We have, then, bourgeois social relations on the one hand, and these varying degrees of unfreedom – A, B, and C – on the other hand, interconnected as cause and effect. So far, either might be the cause, for we have not decided whether mental states arise from social relations, or vice versa. But as soon as we ask how action is to solve the problem, we see which is primary. It is useless to give B, by means of lectures and picture galleries, opportunity for understanding philosophy or viewing masterpieces of art. He has no time to acquire, before starting work, the taste for them or after starting work the time to gratify it. Nor is C free to enjoy the riches of bourgeois culture as long as his whole existence is clouded by his economic position. It is circumstances that are imprisoning consciousness, not vice versa. It is not because B and C are unenlightened that they are members of the working class, but because they are members of the working class, they are unenlightened. And Russell, who writes In Praise of Idleness, praises rightly, for he is clever because he is idle and bourgeois, not idle and bourgeois because he is clever. We now see the cause and effect of the situation. We see that it is not this freedom and unfreedom which produces bourgeois social relations, but that bourgeois social relations alike give rise to these two extremes, the freedom of the idle bourgeois, and the unfreedom of the proletarian worker. It is plain that this effect, if undesirable, can only be changed by changing the cause. Thus the intellectual is faced with another problem, like that when he had to define more precisely who enjoyed the liberty he regarded as contemporary. Does he wish that there should exist for ever these two states of captivity and freedom, of misery and happiness? Can he enjoy a freedom which is sustained by the same cause as the workers’ unfreedom? For if not, he must advance further and say, “bourgeois social relations must be changed.” Change they will, precisely because of this unfreedom they increasingly generate; but to-day the intellectual must decide whether his will be part of the social forces making for change, or vainly pitted against them. But how are bourgeois social relations to be changed? Not by a mere effort of the will, for we saw that the mind was made by social relations, not vice versa. It is matter, the quantitative foundation of qualitative ideology, that must be changed. It is not enough to argue and convince. Work must be done. The environment must be altered. Science shows us how. We achieve our wants always, not by the will alone, not by merely wishing them into being, but with action aided by cognition, by utilising the physical laws of reality. We move mountains, not by the mere movement of desire, but because we understand the rigidly determined laws of kinetics, hydraulics, and electrical engineering and can guide our actions by them. We attain freedom – that is, the fulfilment of our will – by obedience to the laws of reality. Observance of these laws is simple; it is the discovery of them that is the difficulty, and this is the task of science. Thus, the task of defining liberty becomes still harder. It is not so easy after all to establish even a contemporary definition of liberty. Not only has the intellectual already had to decide to change bourgeois social relations, but he must now find out the laws of motion of society, and fit social relations into a causal scheme. It is not enough to want to be free; it is also necessary to know. Only one scientific analysis of the law of motion of social relations exists, that of Marxism. For the understanding of how, physically, at the material level of social being, quantitative movements of capital, of matter, of stuff, provide the causal predictive basis of society, and pass via social relations into the qualitative changes of mind, will, and ideology, it is necessary to refer the bourgeois intellectual to Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin and Bukharin. Let us suppose that he has now done this and returns again to the difficult pursuit of liberty. His causal conception of society will now enable him to realise that the task of making social relations produce liberty is as rigidly conditioned by reality as the task of making matter fulfil his desire in the form of machines. All matter – machinery, capital, men – and the relations which they exhibit in society – can only move in accordance with causal laws. This involves first that the old relations must be broken down, just as a house must be pulled down if we would entirely rebuild it, and the transition, putting up and pulling down, must follow certain laws. We cannot pull the foundation first, or build the roof before the walls. This transitional stage involves the alteration of all the adherences between humans and the capital, machinery and materials, which mediate social relations. These must no longer adhere to individual persons – the bourgeois class – but to all members of society. This change is not a mere change of ownership, for it also involves that no individuals can derive profit from ownership without working. The goods are not destined to go the rounds of the market – the profit movement – but directly into use – the use movement. Moreover, this involves that all the visible institutions depending on private profit relations – laws, church, bureaucracy, judiciary, army, police, education – must be pulled down and rebuilt. The bourgeoisie cannot do this, for it is by means of these very institutions – private property (the modest income), law, university, civil service, privileged position, etc., – that they attain their freedom. To expect them to destroy these relations on which, as we saw, their freedom and the workers’ unfreedom, depend, is to ask them to go in quest of captivity, which, since liberty is what all men seek, they will not do. But the opposite is the case with the unfree, with the proletariat. The day they go in search of liberty, they revolt. The bourgeois, fighting for his liberty, must necessarily find himself in antagonism to the non-bourgeois, also fighting for liberty. The eventual issue of this struggle is due to the fact that capitalist economy, as it develops, makes ever narrower the class which really owns liberty until the day comes when the intellectual, the doctor, the petty bourgeois, the clerk, and the peasant, realise that they too are not after all free. And they see that the fight of the proletariat is their fight. http://www.marxists.org/archive/caudwell/1938/studies/ch08.htm _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
