Libertarianism uses 'freedom' as instrument of oppression

Published by the British newspaper, The Guardian:
https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentis...dom-oppression

This bastardised libertarianism makes 'freedom' an instrument of oppression
It's the disguise used by those who wish to exploit without restraint, denying the need for the state to protect the 99%

George Monbiot
guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 December 2011

Illustration by Daniel Pudles
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

© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

While I completely agree with George Monbiot's debunking of conservative/right-win libertarianism, I cannot help but note that he is a cheerleader for Nuclear Power. At least he was up until the start of the ongoing Fukushima Daichi 1-6 horror that started last March. Lately we haven't heard much from him about that. That's the only reason I didn't give "gratitude" to your reposting of his critique.

Lamentable but true. No one is squeaky clean, even me. I have one, maybe two character deficiencies.

We need to exterminate the imperfect human race and replace ourselves with robots that are perfect. Some folks support this as a strategy for saving the earth from human pollution and environmental destruction.

Edward

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Posted in reply to the post by "Mad" Miles:

While I completely agree with George Monbiot's debunking of conservative/right-win libertarianism, I cannot help but note that he is a cheerleader for Nuclear Power. At least he was up until the start of the ongoing Fukushima Daichi 1-6 horror that started last March. Lately we haven't heard much from him about that. That's the only reason I didn't give "gratitude" to your reposting of his critique.

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Posted in reply to the post by "Mad" Miles:

While I completely agree with George Monbiot's debunking of conservative/right-win libertarianism, I cannot help but note that he is a cheerleader for Nuclear Power. At least he was up until the start of the ongoing Fukushima Daichi 1-6 horror that started last March. Lately we haven't heard much from him about that. That's the only reason I didn't give "gratitude" to your reposting of his critique.

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I would suggest that unless he is running for public office (in which case we must concern ourselves with all of his views (are you listening, Ron Paul supporters?)) it is proper to give gratitude when he is right, and reserve your reservations for when someone posts his views on nuclear power.

Patrick Brinton

So Patrick,

Are you saying I should not have mentioned the glaring lacunae in Monbiot's credentials as a Left Progressive, his cheerleading for nuclear power over the last decade plus, in the context where his reasonable and incisive criticisms of conservative libertarianism that is fronted by Paul, have been raised?

Please explain what purpose is served by enforcing the distinction between the two issues. I think there is a relevant connection. Otherwise I wouldn't have brought it up.

The reputation, and consequent trustworthiness and effectiveness in the public sphere, of an advocate is affected by their positions on all matters upon which they have volubly pronounced. It's one thing to tolerate idiosyncratic contradictions in someones personal character. We all have those, evidement.

I consider the matter of nuclear power to be one of the most important political issues in the last fifty years. And the consequences of bad policies regarding it are unfolding as we type, since last March in Fukushima. (Not to mention all the other plants and waste dumps across much of the industrialized world.)

And issues of appropriate governance and economic opportunities, central to the debate about a properly regulated, or not, economy, are also directly connected to the nuclear power debate. Industrial science, market capitalism, environmental destruction due to industrial technologies and economies of scale, all are directly related to nuclear power and to whether or not Libertarianism has something to contribute to a well organized and just society.

I hold that it's a distraction, irrelevant and unfeasible. The pipe dream of conservative cranks. People also thought the same about National Socialism in the early days of that movement.

As to what George Monbiot posits for policy, I recall he's a Leftist Progressive, as I mentioned. Probably some kind of Social Democrat or the obverse, as am I in a loose, heterogeneous, heretical way. Perhaps that's part of why I'm strict with him. He's one of us. So when he's spectacularly wrong, it rankles more than from someone whose ideology I consider fundamentally flawed.

We make distinctions for the purpose of analysis and description, but as they say, it's all one, one blue ball, one ecosystem, one family of humans, One Love.

George Monbiot says many good things. (So did Christopher Hitchens and Vaclav Havel.) But his position, up until recently, on nukes, has been destructive, regressive and in the aid of profit over human and animal health and safety. (Same goes for Stewart Brand.) Of course Monbiot doesn't see it that way. He thinks, as many do, that there is such a thing as a safe nuke.

But he and everyone who believes so, is wrong. And to the extent they have already gotten their way, and may be able to foist an expansion of nuke plants on our societies, they are dangerous to the welfare of everyone, including themselves.

Listen to Helen Caldicott, Michio Kaku, read Barry Commoner's ouvre. Google: Mutagenic effects of low level radiation.

Go beach combing on the eastern Pacific rim in the next few years with a Geiger counter. If the Libertarians have their way, and their critics who also support nukes as some alternative to fossil fuel/global warming tech, well, try living in a nuclear radiated hell with extreme weather, toxins throughout the food chain from all of our industrial spews, while invasive species from the south replace native flora and fauna weakened by climate shift so they can no longer survive in their original environment.

Want a preview? Become a garbage picker on an urban waste dump for food and small change. It's possible to survive that way, people do it all over the world. And an early death from cancer might be a relief under those circumstances.

It's all of a piece. Think it's not at your own, and everybody else's, peril. And whether we live under a "Statist" command economy military dictatorship, or a paradise of small producer driven free markets in near Anarchism with a government that only organizes a bare bones legislature, executive and judiciary, which only supports a national military defense and community policing, while every other aspect of society is privatized and personal responsibility and market competition determines what is good and successful... or something that is actually within the realm of possibility given the legacy of real history and actual human needs and proclivities... None of it will matter when vast numbers of children are born deformed, many still born.

And whether Paul or Monbiot were right, won't really be on people's minds as they wail, weep and curse previous generations.

Free speech Baby. Cite Monbiot, you're gonna hear from me about his regressive and dangerous role in vital issues of the day.

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Posted in reply to the post by "Mad" Miles:

Please explain what purpose is served by enforcing the distinction between the two issues. I think there is a relevant connection. Otherwise I wouldn't have brought it up...

(... and much much more)

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I think will tiptoe around this one and go peacefully about my business. I did not intend to stir up such a hornet's nest. I have seen too many threads devolve from here into endless back and forth bickering which serves no purpose.

I agree with much of what you say, but I find your ways of stating your views a touch absolutist for my taste; I think it is an error to take a part of the truth and elevate it into the whole truth, which is what I see you doing.

But that is just my opinion and it seems clear that I am unlikely to persuade you.

Patrick Brinton

"...but I find your ways of stating your views a touch absolutist for my taste; I think it is an error to take a part of the truth and elevate it into the whole truth, which is what I see you doing."

Then you're either projecting or not paying attention Patrick. If you read me carefully, absolutism and elevating parts of the truth to the whole, are both things I scrupulously try to avoid. In fact I make a conscious effort to go in the opposite direction. With an emphasis on relativism and specificity, avoiding totalizing and reductive ideas and tendencies.

Within the limits of language of course, all language depends on generalization to convey meaning.

Saying someone is wrong about something is neither an absolute claim, or or a confusion of the part for the whole. It's the essence of refutation. I refute Monbiot as a valued commentator, because of his position on nuclear power. I consider that a reasonable opinion, and I explained why.

You chided me for introducing Monbiot's excreble position on nuclear power in a thread about his critique of Libertarianism. I found that a bit overbearing, bordering on patronizing and controlling (Don't put that here! It's in the Wrong Place!!). I found that irritating, and explained in strong language, admittedly somewhat hyperbolic, why I think making the link was important.

Often we agree. Sometimes I find your approach to politics, well... so cautious as to be paralyze the potential for any action that might make a real difference. As in all things, it's a matter of taste and sensibility.

You don't support odious positions or causes. Unless it comes to your tendency to defend the local police no matter what they've done.

It's a big world. Takes all kinds.

Peace Out