Free At Last!

What does it mean to be free? There are many different answers to that question, maybe as many as there are people, but there's one ideological and political movement that is more associated with freedom than any other, and that's anarchism.

Anarchy comes from the Medieval Latin anarchia and from the Greek anarchos ("having no ruler"), with a- + archos ("ruler") literally meaning "without ruler". The circle-A anarchist symbol is a monogram that consists of the capital letter A surrounded by the capital letter O. The letter A is derived from the first letter of anarchy or anarchism in most European languages and is the same in both Latin and Cyrillic scripts. The O stands for order and together they stand for "society seeks order in anarchy" (French: la société cherche l'ordre dans l'anarchie), a phrase written by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in his 1840 book What Is Property?
_{source: Wikipedia}

Even though we may all have different ideas about and interpretations of freedom, one thing's for certain; currently we're not free at all. We're not raised to be free, we're not educated to be free and we haven't a history of freedom. That is unless we go back far enough, to the tribal nomadic societies of the stone age. There are two fundamental ways to look at freedom, two different basic interpretations. There's the negative freedom that's touted by the modern capitalist anarchists, which can be roughly described as "freedom from" the things that limit liberty. That is mainly the freedom from rulers, rules, laws and regulations. This is the paradoxical mindset of the anarcho-capitalist who doesn't understand that capitalism and the state are two mutually reinforcing principles. I'll come back to that later.

Then there's positive freedom, which can be roughly described as the "freedom to" do the things you want to do. This is different, because even when you're free from freedom-limiting institutions, governments and regulations, you're not free unless all the external conditions to be free are met. You're not free if you can't eat, if you don't have shelter, if you can't pay for an education or healthcare. Positive freedom is limited when the government decides to close the public library, for example. When before you had the freedom to read any book you want, that freedom is now taken away. Same goes for public education; when education is not "free," young humans are only as free as their parents' bank-accounts allow them to be.

Then there are some unchangeable facts about human beings, the most important of which is that we're social animals. We live in societies, not as hermits. We've become the dominant species on the planet due to our capacity to communicate, organize and imagine a future before putting in the work to realize that future. This most basic of facts means that freedom can only be expressed in society, in the way we structure society and organize our relations to each other and to the material resources we need to make our lifes better. When we combine these, negative freedom, positive freedom and the fact that we're social creatures, it becomes immediately apparent that capitalism is diametrically opposed to liberty.

Anarchists, true anarchists, are therefore leftists and were originally socialists and communists. Anarcho-capitalists are thoroughly confused about what freedom is and what its preconditions are. The negative freedom they long for is unattainable in a capitalist, or state capitalist society. And positive freedom is only attainable for the individuals who manage to accumulate enough material wealth to do the things they want, or even need to do, like eating and getting an education. This is the current human condition. Anarcho-capitalists have this erroneous idea that "freedom from" automatically translates into "freedom to" for most people, which simply isn't true. I think they believe this to be true because they think that under free market conditions, with the help perhaps of an "invisible hand," everyone has equal opportunity to accumulate enough wealth for themselves.

For themselves... There's another problem with modern anarcho-capitalist interpretations of freedom. Because we're social animals, freedom can only be expressed in, can only be realized through societal organization. And for negative freedom to become a reality, this organization has to be horizontal, whereas capitalism is only a continuation of the strictly vertical organizations we've known since we became civilized. The notion of freedom as something to be gained individually works in service of this vertical organization; it automatically produces a stratification in society with those who own the land, the factories, the natural resources at the top, and gives them the power to influence politics, cultivates in them contempt for the masses and a false exaggerated sense of their own worth.

Here's a quote from Errico Malatesta's work "Anarchy" that encapsulates the anarchist conception of freedom, and how it is necessarily linked to socialism:

The methods from which the different non-anarchist parties expect, or say they do, the greatest good of one and all can be reduced to two, the authoritarian and the so-called liberal. The former entrusts to a few the management of social life and leads to the exploitation and oppression of the masses by the few. The latter relies on free individual enterprise and proclaims, if not the abolition, at least the reduction of governmental functions to an absolute minimum; but because it respects private property and is entirely based on the principle of each for himself and therefore of competition between men, the liberty it espouses is for the strong and for the property owners to oppress and exploit the weak, those who have nothing; and far from producing harmony, tends to increase even more the gap between rich and poor and it too leads to exploitation and domination, in other words, to authority. This second method, that is liberalism, is in theory a kind of anarchy without socialism, and therefore is simply a lie, for freedom is not possible without equality, and real anarchy cannot exist without solidarity, without socialism.
_{source: goodreads}

Freedom is the product of the way we structure society, and is underpinned by three interdependent values: freedom, equality and solidarity. Each one of these values can only be realized if both others exist. Equality and solidarity can not exist, have never existed under capitalism, therefore freedom doesn't exist under capitalism for the overwhelming majority of the people. Under capitalism equality and solidarity exist only among the very top of its vertical organization; Jeff Bezos is so free that he can take a joy-ride into space. For the masses there's no equality now solidarity, for we're all each other's competitor, a game which produces only winners and losers, and divides us in many small groups in which we fight for the rights and freedom of our own little segment of the greater society.

"Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!" These are the closing words of Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech. He fought for true equality for African Americans and was a radical leftist. Anarchism is the ideology that caters to his wishes and the wishes of all people, but most modern anarchists are hopelessly hung up on capitalism and the fantasy of free markets. They unknowingly enslave themselves to a rigidly stratified societal organization that can never bring them the freedom they so desperately long for, and instead flee into the fantasy of meritocracy and the "Great Man Theory" hoping to one day land in a position of power and freedom. Tragically, it's this very fantasy that keeps intact the system that suppresses the true freedom that can only be realized in an equitable, horizontally organized society in which power, material wealth and freedom are distributed in a way that enables all individuals to experience negative and positive freedom.

I've linked two highly interesting and enlightening videos about the history, goals and values of anarchism, as well as its relation to and interpretation of human nature. I highly recommend you watch them both, especially if you're an anarcho-capitalist or capitalist libertarian. If enough people become aware of what's explained about freedom in these videos, maybe we'll some day reach a point where we can say: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!"

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