Dreaming of Liberty by Brian McCarvill

Dreaming of Liberty

by Brian McCarvill

It's about liberty, comrades, not freedom. To dream the impossible dream of anarchism is to dream of liberty. Splitting hairs? No, liberty is the purest state of free, cannot be subdivided, freedom can.

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" (Rousseau, 2003, p. 1). "Man is born at liberty, and everywhere he is in chains." This is what Rousseau meant, or should have meant; in any case, this is how the concept will be developed in this article. Perhaps the distinction between freedom and liberty was not settled in Rousseau's time, before the advent of anarchism. It is settled now. We anarchists have settled it. Liberty is our dream. Our dream is liberty.

We anarchists, we want liberty, we disdain today's freedoms because they are qualified by political and social authorities. Here in the US, freedom is expressed in term of rights. We have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from unreasonable seizure of persons and things (property), freedom of religion, the list goes on and on and why shouldn't it? It's all crapola anyway.

Government, what we attribute the state as being, is the dictator of how-much and when-where we enjoy our freedoms. Such dictation is always in flux. There seems to be an inversely proportional law as to our quantum-freedom. Whenever questions of national security (an oxymoron if you think about it, or at least to anarchists), or macro-economics are at stake, our freedoms tend to be limited. So long as the Dow Jones is up and there is no marching in the streets, no demonstrations, our freedoms tend to be limitless. In other words, our freedoms are bold, pretentious, idolic so long as we don't attempt to utilize them. The only freedom we can really count on to always be available is the right to remain silent.

To anarchists, Us rights-freedoms are superfluous. To a way of life, to an ideology of liberty, if I may call it an ideology, in the strictest of terms it is accurate. It's not that we disdain them as a concept, these rights-freedoms (sounds a lot like Reich-freedoms doesn't it?), it's just that we do not need them for a robust life. This is not to say that we won't use them as tools if and when they are necessary to further the dream, our liberty. It can be very advantageous to throw the state's granted freedoms and rights in its face as methodology to limit the state's intrusions into our lives. We cannot rely on such illusory tools as these freedoms, these rights, as most non-anarchists do, but we can use them. I recall a blurb from a prison security threat group officer to me, on my way to the hole as retribution for a lawsuit over anarchist publications not being allowed into prison, he was upset that I, an anarchist, an understood disbeliever in the state that he was an agent of, had the audacity to utilize the state's constitution to defeat prison policy. Defeat it we did. I had no problem adhering to the dream while utilizing the state's lip service to liberty, its illusion by which it maintains its very existence, its constitution, the ark of democracy's covenant, its holy grail. Like the grail of legend, real or not, the state's self-appointed role as keep of liberty's flame is lost. Liberty belongs to the individual, the state can only infringe on this perfection, splitting liberty into freedoms.

To embrace the dream, to embrace liberty, one must refuse to borrow, to borrow Zerzan's terminology, the state's reality. The state is well aware of the dream. Here in the US, the state seeks to compromise the dream with its (the state's) false freedoms couched as liberty.

The state, in sheep's clothing, intends to impose reality and ignore the dream (Bell, 1998, p. 252). It is our duty to shape their reality into the dream. If we do not take this path and tread upon it consciously, then the dream is just so much bullshit, and should be recognized as such. The dream is not bullshit, it is very real. I trust that you, the reader, are drawn to the dream. I entreat you to place the dream foremost in your heart.

To place liberty before all else, to insist upon liberty as life is to place it before the state. Your loyalty is to liberty. The state will constantly tell you that it is the provider of your liberty, that without the state's embrace liberty would be non-existent, anarchists must, by definition, take exception to this would-be axiom.

What the state actually is, is the limiter of your liberty, the provider of your freedoms. All anarchists think they understand this dichotomy, I put it to you that they do not.

Even if this dichotomy is understood it must be re-examined, from time to time as the state employs many means of corrupting perception, and continually does so. I entreat all to consciously examine the social relations around them, to assess their desires in terms of liberty or freedoms, and to adjust themselves to the resulting derive (a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences. Also used to designate a specific period of continuous deriving) (Knabb 1995, p. 45). Liberties are not given, they are taken (Zinn, 1999, p.57).

Just as freedom is not liberty, government as we know it is not the oppressor per se of liberty. We have seen that government is the granter of freedoms but both government and its freedoms are carrot-and-stick methodologies of society as a whole. Yes, society is Leviathan, not what we know as established government. Anarchists need to understand this, and should understand this, it is what sets anarchism apart from all other methodology. This concept is easily conceived in one's consciousness, with simple analysis, by looking at government everywhere, past and present. Western democracies are defined by constitutional apparatus that regulate all aspects of civil life and capitalist economy. Communist people's republics have all been of the Bolshevik variety and defined by totalitarian bureaucratic apparatus that regulate all aspects of civil life and capitalist economy, albeit a state run capitalist economy. Dictatorial authoritarian governments run by military juntas or single person despots, regulate all aspects of civil life, without question, within a capitalist economy. The common thread here, with all three of these governing structures is the capitalist economy.

The capitalist economy is ultimately based upon a monetary renumeration, dollars, rubles, pesos, whatever. One cannot eat dollars. One cannot take physical shelter beneath or within rubles. One cannot wear pesos. However, one can love these doppelgangers of freedom, see Marx's 'Fetishization of the Commodity'. It is this fetish for the commodity spectacle that underwrites the government's incarnations discussed above. Yes, there are other reasons touted for the existence of these governments, national defense, health and welfare, development/progress, and the like, but, the real reason, the common thread throughout all government is capitalist economy. Individuals have come to associate buying power/accumulation of commodities, with freedom and freedom with liberty. Individuals dream of being rich with visions of accumulated commodities al snug in their beds. Freedom, ultimately, aberrantly, is couched in terms of wealth.

Again, looking to the foregoing descriptions of governments, we see the repetitive feature is capitalist economy. In analyzing this concept we simply break it down further. We can do this with simple division and logical truth. The root of 'capitalist economy' is economy , the term 'capitalist' is an adjective and does not stand alone when viewed in this light. Where am I going with this? I ask you who, in society around us, stands to have the most interest in the economy we have described? The manipulators of this economy are the corporations, and are consequently society as we know it. The corporations are the puppet-masters, as our actual government. The corporations are our task-masters, the granters of our freedoms, the suppressors of liberty. The corporations are at the heart of liberties oppression. This concept agrees nicely with the age-old meaning of the word anarchy, which comes from the Greek an (without) archy (government).

Under the yoke of the corporation, born of the mass socialization following the industrial revolution, we enjoy, so to speak, in a bastard way, capitalism. Capitalism, with or without concepts of surplus value and dead labour, denies the dream. Nothing in existing culture so denies liberty as the total absence of money (Galbrath 2000). An absence of money goes directly to base human needs, food, shelter, clothing. The scrabble for existence itself cannot be couched in terms of liberty. It is only once these base needs are met that liberty comes into play as a function of socialization and interaction. To date, capitalism has proved to be the only socio-economic system that can serve as software for human social interaction.

How do we contrast our dream against the firmly entrenched capitalism? Here is the big question, the unknown, the task. One must convince oneself that not only does this task exist, one must commit to the task, the complete undermining of capitalism as a socio-economic system. If one cannot commit uncompromisingly, how can one further the dream? I suppose that the dream can be served by the non-committed if there is direct support of those in the midst of the task, those at war.

Society, with or without capital, is a world of conditions. Mill, in 1859, discussed liberty in terms of thought and discussion as applied to the individual, and in terms of limits of society's authority over the individual. Mill's essay is still widely read today, as a philosophical treatise, if for no other reason. To sum up Mill's basic premise, he put forward the idea that man should be at liberty to do anything and everything he wants to do, or not, that does not affect the liberty of others. Simple enough on its face. Yet consequences stemming from an individuals' actions can be argued semantically to be far reaching or not at all affecting other lives in myriad ways.

So, what is liberty, a fiction? No, liberty, as ideal, is expressed in terms of truth. There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home. Yes, liberty is corrupted always by the discipline of society, with truth exiting as a combining of opposites (Mill, 2000, p. 35).

Our dream provides the antagonisms with which we can measure truth, such antagonisms not embodying the normal deleterious connotations one might afford such terminology. Our anarchism, our desires, provide the construct for truth, as we wish it to be. Personally, I do not include capitalism in this construct though I am aware that others of us do include capitalism in this construct. Measuring truth against axioms has historically proved to be elusive. Pravda, the Russian word for Truth, was the Bolshevik party newspaper, need I say more? We, as theorists, putting anarchism into practice, must recognize and honor relativity and statistical maxims. We must be real. We are aware that a perfect anarchist society may not be arrived at yet, if this is so, we are prepared to struggle for that perfect anarchist society forever (Dawn collective, 2003, p. 59).

Dream on, my friends and comrades, dream on. We have miles to go before we wake.

Bibliography

Bell, J.Bowyer (1998) The dynamics of the Armed Struggle, London Frank Cass Publishers

Dawn Collective (eds) (2003), Under the Yoke of the State, Selected Anarchist Responses to Prisons and Crime, Vol. 1m, 1886-1929, London and Berkely, Kate Sharpley Library.

Galbraith, Jon Kenneth (2000), The Progressive, October

Knabb, K (ed) (1995), Situationist International Anthology, Berkely Bureau of Public Secrets

Mill, John Stuart (1859-2000), On Liberty, New York, Dover Publications

Rousseau, J (1762-2003), On the Social Contract, New York, Dover Publications