Freedom: who
could object? Yet this word is now used to justify a thousand forms of
exploitation. Throughout the rightwing press and blogosphere, among thinktanks
and governments, the word excuses every assault on the lives of the poor, every
form of inequality and intrusion to which the 1% subject us. How did
libertarianism, once a noble impulse, become synonymous with injustice?
In the name
of freedom – freedom from regulation – the banks were permitted to wreck the
economy. In the name of freedom, taxes for the super-rich are cut. In the name
of freedom, companies lobby to drop the minimum wage and raise working hours.
In the same cause, US insurers lobby Congress to thwart effective public
healthcare; the government rips up our planning laws; big business trashes the
biosphere. This is the freedom of the powerful to exploit the weak, the rich to
exploit the poor.
Rightwing
libertarianism recognises few legitimate constraints on the power to act,
regardless of the impact on the lives of others. In the UK it is forcefully promoted by groups like the TaxPayers'
Alliance, the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute
of Economic Affairs, and Policy Exchange. Their concept of freedom
looks to me like nothing but a justification for greed.
So why have
we been been so slow to challenge this concept of liberty? I believe that one
of the reasons is as follows. The great political conflict of our age – between
neocons and the millionaires and corporations they support on one side, and
social justice campaigners and environmentalists on the other – has been
mischaracterised as a clash between negative and positive freedoms. These
freedoms were most clearly defined by Isaiah Berlin in his essay of 1958, Two Concepts of Liberty. It is a
work of beauty: reading it is like listening to a gloriously crafted piece of
music. I will try not to mangle it too badly.
Put briefly
and crudely, negative freedom is the freedom to be or to act without
interference from other people. Positive freedom is freedom from inhibition:
it's the power gained by transcending social or psychological constraints. Berlin explained how positive freedom had been abused by
tyrannies, particularly by the Soviet Union.
It portrayed its brutal governance as the empowerment of the people, who could
achieve a higher freedom by subordinating themselves to a collective single
will.
Rightwing
libertarians claim that greens and social justice campaigners are closet
communists trying to resurrect Soviet conceptions of positive freedom. In
reality, the battle mostly consists of a clash between negative freedoms.
As Berlin noted: "No
man's activity is so completely private as never to obstruct the lives of
others in any way. 'Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows'." So,
he argued, some people's freedom must sometimes be curtailed "to secure
the freedom of others". In other words, your freedom to swing your fist ends
where my nose begins. The negative freedom not to have our noses punched is the
freedom that green and social justice campaigns, exemplified by the Occupy
movement, exist to defend.
Berlin also shows that freedom can intrude
on other values, such as justice, equality or human happiness. "If the
liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of
other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral."
It follows that the state should impose legal restraints on freedoms that
interfere with other people's freedoms – or on freedoms which conflict with
justice and humanity.
These
conflicts of negative freedom were summarised in one of the greatest poems of
the 19th century, which could be seen as the founding document of British
environmentalism. In The Fallen Elm, John Clare describes
the felling of the tree he loved, presumably by his landlord, that grew beside
his home. "Self-interest saw thee stand in freedom's ways / So thy old
shadow must a tyrant be. / Thou'st heard the knave, abusing those in power, /
Bawl freedom loud and then oppress the free."
The landlord
was exercising his freedom to cut the tree down. In doing so, he was intruding
on Clare's freedom to delight in the tree, whose existence enhanced his life.
The landlord justifies this destruction by characterising the tree as an
impediment to freedom – his freedom, which he conflates with the general
liberty of humankind. Without the involvement of the state (which today might
take the form of a tree preservation order) the powerful man could trample the
pleasures of the powerless man. Clare then compares the felling of the tree
with further intrusions on his liberty. "Such was thy ruin, music-making
elm; / The right of freedom was to injure thine: / As thou wert served, so
would they overwhelm / In freedom's name the little that is mine."
But
rightwing libertarians do not recognise this conflict. They speak, like Clare's
landlord, as if the same freedom affects everybody in the same way.
They assert their freedom to pollute, exploit, even – among the gun nuts –
to kill, as if these were fundamental human rights. They characterise any attempt
to restrain them as tyranny. They refuse to see that there is a clash between
the freedom of the pike and the freedom of the minnow.
Last week,
on an internet radio channel called The Fifth Column, I debated climate change with
Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, one of the rightwing
libertarian groups that rose from the ashes of the Revolutionary Communist party.
Fox is a feared interrogator on the BBC show The Moral Maze. Yet when I asked her a
simple question – "do you accept that some people's freedoms intrude upon
other people's freedoms?" – I saw an ideology shatter like a windscreen. I
used the example of a Romanian lead-smelting plant I had visited in 2000, whose
freedom to pollute is shortening the lives of its neighbours. Surely the plant
should be regulated in order to enhance the negative freedoms – freedom from
pollution, freedom from poisoning – of its neighbours? She tried several times
to answer it, but nothing coherent emerged which would not send her crashing
through the mirror of her philosophy.
Modern
libertarianism is the disguise adopted by those who wish to exploit without
restraint. It pretends that only the state intrudes on our liberties. It
ignores the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free. It
denies the need for the state to curb them in order to protect the freedoms of
weaker people. This bastardised, one-eyed philosophy is a con trick, whose
promoters attempt to wrongfoot justice by pitching it against liberty. By this
means they have turned "freedom" into an instrument of oppression.
A fully
referenced version of this article can be found at www.monbiot.com