Author: Ian Welsh Page 10 of 447

In the first article in this series we discussed freedom under capitalism. The conclusion was simple: capitalist freedom for the vast majority of the population means the right to choose your master, your job, if you can find one. Once you have a master, you do what they say for most of the day, for most of your life. If you can’t find a master, you’re free to be homeless, hungry and eventually (few people survive being homeless more than about five years), and soon enough you’re free to die.

Yay Capitalism.

Note that this is structural: yes some people will become capitalists or otherwise escape the master trap, but the vast majority won’t and can’t. Someone is going to lose the dire game of musical chairs (jobs.)

Now let’s look at representative democracy.

In a democracy you’re free to choose your legislators or executives. You can’t vote for just anyone, though, only approved candidates. In most systems if someone runs without belonging to a party, they won’t win, and parties usually control you can become a candidate.

As a group the people who are elected will decide pretty much everything about how your society runs. Sometimes they seem to care about the citizens (FDR say) and sometimes they don’t. (Every American government since Nixon.) I can’t remember the last time food stamps were increased, rather than cut, other than a brief raise during the pandemic.

The number of elected people with real power is small compared to the population, and as an ordinary person your vote is generally meaningless. It’s never YOU who makes the difference. Big donors and other people who can organize groups of votes do, but that’s a vanishingly small number of people. So elected officials, especially at the national and State level pander to people with money or votes (pastors, for example. Used to pander to unions, not so much any more.)

Your choice of ruler is better than having a hereditary monarchy. Yes. But your actual power is insignificant. And Democracies have all the normal powers of government: they can draft you and send you off to die. They can send you to prison. They can take property from you. They can coerce you to work. Ideally they make it so people who lose the musical boss game are taken care of anyway, but often they don’t. Certainly they can do good and sometimes do.

But any freedom you have in a society is contingent on the government. Not drafting you. Making it so you don’t have to have a master. Making it so you can get health care, or not. Your freedom is contingent on what elected officials want: officials who structurally have every reason to pander to those with money or power: and that’s before we even get to the issue of bribery, whether while in office or after: Bill Clinton became very rich after leaving office. He was bribed post-facto and everyone knows that was the case. The last President who didn’t get taken care of this way was Carter.

Trump, of course, is just blatantly accepting bribes while in office, which has the dubious virtue of complete honesty.

A system where the people who decide what freedoms you have are structurally more likely to favor a small minority with wealth and power, and where if they are corrupt, you can’t bribe them, isn’t likely to maintain your freedom very well if important people think they’d benefit from you losing your freedom, is it?

Certainly people with money and power don’t really want you to not need a job and a master, because the people who have influence over them want cheap workers who will do anything they’re told to do.

Churchill quipped that Democracy was the worst system except for all the other ones we’ve tried.

Perhaps so, though the CPC and most Chinese disagree.

But even if true, representative democracy, at least in a system with significant wealth and power differentials, is a shit system where you have freedom only if elites feel it benefits them that you be free.

Perhaps in an egalitarian system it would work better, but under capitalism, which by its nature requires concentration of power, it does not

We’ll discuss other forms of organization as this series continues. For now, just note that representative democracy, by its very design, will tend to be more responsive to people who don’t want ordinary people to have freedom than to those who do want ordinary people to be free.

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The Goddess Libertas

Are you free if you need a job? For most people lack of a job means homelessness (indeed many homeless have jobs, that’s how far things have sunk) and you’ll go hungry, and almost certainly wind up dead sooner than otherwise.

This was well understood by the people who created capitalism. The central requirement of capitalism was enclosure (getting rid of common land which people could use for crops and animals.)

The fact is that peasants worked a lot less than workers. They had more holidays. They had to do some work for their lord, to be sure, but that was far less than the 12 hour days typical of industrialization, or even the eight hour days we now work. And, mostly, they controlled their own time.

The condition of having a job is that you do what your told. It was called wage slavery by Americans being forced off farms by low profits (because of railroad monopolies) for a reason: they had controlled their own time before. To be sure they had to work, even work hard, but they weren’t taking orders from a boss.

The fact that one can, sometimes, choose one’s master (for that’s what a boss is) doesn’t change the fact that they’re a master. In good capitalist times, in my experience before 90 or so, the worst boss behaviour was mitigated by plentiful jobs and easy choice: but today people put out hundreds of applications to get a job. Once you’ve got one, you can’t risk it by telling your master to bugger off if they order you to do things you find distasteful.

Bottom line, modern life is do what you’re told in school for twelve to twenty years, then spend your adult life doing what your told by bosses, then when you’re too old to work maybe you’ll be allowed a few years of declining health without a master. Quite likely you won’t even get that.

This is the modern form of slavery, where we pretend that most people have a choice. Oh a few escape, I have (at the price of poverty), and some others do, but the structure of the economy is that most people, the vast majority, must spend most of their life as wage slaves, doing what their masters tell them to. There is no way around this, it’s what giving control of the means of production (what you need to feed yourself, have shelter and goods) in the hands of a tiny minority of people.

It’s been a while since I discussed fundamental of how societies operate and what to change to make them better. We’re going to come back to freedom, a lot, as part of a series. We’ll also do a series on the fundamentals of societies: what is used to make them stick together, what determines how we run them, and how those are used against us or could be used by us to make a better world for 99% of humanity.

For now it is important simply to understand the chains that bind us, and not to fall for the lie that we are free or that our current civilization is the best that is possible.

Everyone reads these articles for free, but the site and Ian take money to run. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.