Freedom not for us
Freedom is one of those words which nobody can be against. The trouble is that it means different things to different people. To socialists freedom means that we should no longer be forced by economic necessity to go out onto the labour market and sell our working abilities for a wage or salary to those who own the means of life. In other words, freedom for us means emancipation from wage slavery.
To the capitalist, however, freedom means the freedom to exploit wage labour and to buy and sell without government interference. Unfortunately, but in a sense understandably (as Marx pointed out a long time ago. the ruling ideas in class society are those of the ruling class), it is this second sense of freedom that is the most prevalent today — a fact which allows capitalists to disguise their sordid money-making as an application of the noble ideal of freedom.
The present controversy over Sunday opening is a case in point. The government and other supporters of this proposal present it as an extension of the area of freedom. In this particular case, however, they have some difficulty in disguising the purely commercial aspect of this proposal to allow supermarkets and other shops to trade on the one day of the week when their moneymaking activities have been restricted up till now.
Of course socialists don’t take sides in this controversy, and even less support the Bible-quoting opponents of the measure, but we can’t help pointing out that Sunday opening would represent a further victory for the logic of capitalism, a further invasion of our lives by the rampant commercialism that is an inherent feature of the system. But we are under no illusions that this is how it has to be under capitalism and how it will be, as capitalism continues its course. America is there to show us Europe’s future when all the barriers to “free” capitalist trading inherited from a non-capitalist past (which actually never existed in America) have finally been swept away.
Another example is the much-vaunted “freedom of the press”. If you ever bother to read the editorials of the mass circulation daily press (most people don’t, and rightly) you will find that they have an extremely high opinion of themselves: according to them a “free” press is a bulwark against tyranny and dictatorship. But if you scratch the surface a bit. you quickly realise that by “freedom” they mean freedom for the capitalist enterprises (not to say the millionaire press magnates) who own the daily papers to print in them anything — be it lies, pornographic, violent or obtained by unscrupulous methods — that they consider will sell more copies of the newspaper-commodity they produce.
If from time to time they expose some corrupt practice by a politician or government official it is to the benefit of the capitalist class, not us. All government spending is in the end a charge on profits and politicians and officials are there to carry out certain administrative functions on behalf of the capitalist class — not to help themselves to a share of the profits wrung from the wage and salary working class.
Then there is advertising. The dailies today are in fact more advertising sheets than newspapers in the sense that the sensationalised “news” items they publish are essentially bait to get people to buy the paper with a view to their reading the ads. So much is this the case that Eddie Shah, owner of the latest addition to the daily gutter press, has gone on record as looking forward to the day when newspapers will be given away free, financed entirely from their revenue from advertisements. To call such commercial rags a “free” press is a travesty of the word freedom.
Having said this however, a free press does exist in countries like Britain and America but it is not represented by the mass circulation commercial dailies. Rather is it represented by journals of opinion, published by committed groups wanting to put their point of view across — such as the Socialist Standard and of course other such publications that put a different view from ours. In other words, in the end the genuinely free press in the West is not much more extensive than its counterpart — the samizdat press — in the East, even if its conditions of publication are much less difficult.
Another example of the abuse of the term freedom to make it mean the absence of legal restrictions on money-making was over commercial radio. In Britain these were most appropriately called “pirate radios” (in fact, this is what they should continue to be called), but in France they called themselves “free radios”. Some of them were indeed genuinely free in the same sense that the Socialist Standard and other non-commercial journals of opinion constitute the free press — they were run by people with a desire to communicate ideas or to simply amuse themselves and others without any ulterior money-making motive. But most were set up as profit-seeking enterprises.
In the end. the government agreed to legalise the private commercial radios, presenting this as an extension of “freedom” whereas, once again, it was really just another invasion of commercialism into our daily lives. If having the opportunity to listen to inane and insulting jingles urging us to buy this or that piece of rubbish is an extension of the domain of freedom, then the difference between the socialist and capitalist conceptions of freedom can be fully appreciated.
ALB