Liberty 101
When I was an undergraduate doing philosophy modules it was very clear what political liberty was and wasn’t. You had ‘negative liberty’ which meant that the state doesn’t have the right to imprison you without trial, shoot you, torture you, censor you, or do other dictatorial things. Then there was ‘positive liberty’ – the right to benefits if you lost your job, to see a doctor if you got sick. The state could leave you alone but still help you through tough times.
Freemarket ideologues claimed the banner of liberty during Thatcher’s doctrinaire capitalist experiment. The destruction of trade union power ‘liberated’ people from the right to strike against management decisions and the destruction of manufacturing industry ‘liberated’ workers from secure employment. At the same time the state was tapping trade unionists’ phones. The Tories were happy to get big government out of our pocketbooks and put big government into our bedrooms. The conventional myth is that Thatcher sacrificed positive freedom at the expense of negative freedom when in fact both were attacked during her reign.
Under New Labour things are more complicated. There has been redistribution of wealth, investment in public services and a slightly fairer tax system but also the most frightening expansion of state power in decades. Almost every day there is some shocking new infringement of basic freedoms.
Many on the left are still confused about positive and negative liberty. Even professional philosopher Julian Baggini claimed that ‘the liberty agenda of the British left has, in a fundamental way, come to resemble that of the American right.’ He cited Bush’s opposition to ID cards as evidence that Bush was a dogmatic opponent of ‘big government’ with whom the left should not agree on anything. Conor Gearty is just as foolish. He thinks that ID cards are just part of Gordon Brown’s great benevolent National Plan. He asks: ‘Why are passports and modern car licenses OK if an identity card is not?’
You could point out that a) if ID cards are the same as passports, why can’t we just keep passports and save money; and b), as Henry Porter says it’s not the card itself but the massive overarching database it would be attached to that is the problem.
But the left has historic difficulties with this sort of thing. This is not surprising when so many people who call themselves professional revolutionaries are employed by the state: in local government, in the graphic design departments of universities, in further education colleges trying to persuade scale-one cleaners that Gaza is the most important issue in their working lives. Their ideological purity does not extend to a refusal to take money from the state they presumably want to overthrow.
It’s great to have services and industries under democratic control but that doesn’t mean the workers are the same thing as the state – failure to realise this always leads to the gulag. There are others who are happy for the developing world to live under dictatorship while rightly excoriating any totalitarian strands in Western democracies. And still others who claim in prolier-than-thou rhetoric that all this civil liberties stuff is for upper-class ponces and no one gives a shit on the barricades. It’s not just the left. People can’t always handle freedom. Freedom can be scary.
I think Gearty’s problem is that he is afraid of liberalism shading into libertarianism. In his view there is good liberty and bad liberty:
One is the libertarianism we have just been discussing, the ‘Englishman’s home is his castle’ school of thought. The other is the position of the civil libertarian who sees the freedom of protest as essential to the proper running of our democratic state because he or she ultimately believes in the power of the state to do good.
It’s understandable that Gearty doesn’t want to be associated with the sillier kind of libertarianism. There have been so many self-pitying lunatics martyring themselves over the most petty and sinister ‘freedoms’, from the ‘right’ to drive at ridiculous speeds to the ‘right’ to shoot a teenager in the back. Yet libertarianism isn’t always wrong – the UK smoking ban proved that.
As Porter says, ‘[T]here can be no social justice without liberty, and no liberty without social justice.’ Again, it’s not either or: it’s both or neither.
Lobby Ludd said,
February 12, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Call me thick (well, somebody will) but I’m not sure what you are saying.
“Under New Labour things are more complicated. There has been redistribution of wealth, investment in public services and a slightly fairer tax system…..”
Is that true? I thought that the gap between rich and poor had widened under Labour. Investment in public services is rather more complex – it is not investment but outcomes which count here. As to the tax system ‘fairer’, only if you look at the tax burden of those on very low incomes and ignore the reduced burden on the rich.
“But the left has historic difficulties with this sort of thing. (What kind of thing – my comment.)This is not surprising when so many people who call themselves professional revolutionaries are employed by the state: in local government, in the graphic design departments of universities, in further education colleges trying to persuade scale-one cleaners that Gaza is the most important issue in their working lives. Their ideological purity does not extend to a refusal to take money from the state they presumably want to overthrow.”
I just do not get what you are saying . That “professional revolutionaries” take money from the state is neither here nor there, after all a revolutionary postman is a revolutionary regardless of his employer. If you simply mean that many ‘professional revolutionaries’ are in secure employment and have little engagement with the concerns of the class they seek to lead – no problem, you’re right.
Waterloo Sunset said,
February 13, 2009 at 3:14 am
Generally a good post for me and I’m with you on a lot of it. In particular, I think your categorisation of the Conservatives under Thatcher is spot on. The committment to ‘liberty’ on their part was entirely rhetorical, not real.
To move on to points of disagreement/concern.
I’d agree with Lobby on Labour. On top of what he/she outlines, social mobility has not just stagnated but gone into decline.
I’d also agree with the critique of the relevance of people being employed by the state. Does an anticapitalist worker become less so if they’re paid by a boss under a capitalist economic system? Can people on the dole not be revolutionaries? Logically, it would seem to me that the only logical answer to what you’re saying here would be for everybody to drop entirely out of society (New Age Travellers perhaps), which really doesn’t strike me as politically feasible.
It’s also the case that both of the sources you cite are decidely on the liberal/social democratic section of the left. The fact that liberals are essentially authoritarian is no surprise, surely? I certainly think that there are segments of the left tradition that need rexamining (Luxemburg, Worker’s Opposition, the Situationist International etc.) but to argue that “the left has historic difficulties” in this area isn’t technically true. Certainly, sections of the left do, including possibly the part you come from, but it strikes me as rather shrewish to try and blame the rest of us for mistakes we warned against from the beginning.
Civil Liberties and Civil Rights said,
February 13, 2009 at 4:51 am
I enjoyed this article and you have some agreement from across the pond. We use different words, but share the same views. There is responsibility on both side.
maxdunbar said,
February 13, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Lobby
Credit when it’s due. There has been some redistribution in the form of working tax credits etc, there have been new schools and hospitals opening (even though loads of them are PFIs) and there is now a 45% tax rate for the rich. I would agree that even so the gap between rich and poor is widening and that social mobility is going backkwards. Loads more needs to be done.
My point about professional revolutionaries being employed by the state is an idle curiosity – how is it that people who won’t buy Israeli oranges are happy to take a wage from the state that propagates war and oppression.
Lobby Ludd said,
February 13, 2009 at 8:33 pm
“how is it that people who won’t buy Israeli oranges are happy to take a wage from the state that propagates war and oppression.”
I think it is to do with the need to earn a living.
Boring bit:
Some years ago I worked in a factory which did nothing but machine component parts which were then shipped off to the next stage of production. One of my fellow factory hands was a Quaker, she refused to touch any work to do with armaments, and demanded to know what the bits of metal she was machining were, before working them (or not). Much of the work, it turned out, was things like firing pins for guns, and even shrapnel (shrapnel is not just lumps of metal but designed for its purpose).
My Quaker friend was treated as something of an eccentric, but given non-armaments work. Despite her objections she still contributed to the continued profitability of the enterprise, of course.
She needed a wage, what should she have done? As it is, she was keen to inform her fellow workers about quite what they were doing. and it stuck with me, and others I worked with.
Yes, the shrapnel still got made, as it was bound to be. In her own way she played a minor, but progressive, role. Could you call her a hypocrite because her need for a wage resulted in her working for an enterprise producing parts for weaponry? Paradoxically I think she did the right thing working there, since she alerted many of us to quite what we were doing.
Rosie said,
February 13, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Lobby – I’m not sure of what the moral of that story is, but it does remind me of a quotation:-
“If you don’t do it, someone else will.”
“Then that someone else can do it as I won’t.”
Lobby Ludd said,
February 13, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Rosie, I rambled, and yes your quotation has some force.
What I am trying to say is that in society as we find it we find it we are forced to reproduce it. We can, and should, refuse to be directly involved in the worst excesses. My Quaker friend precisely took the view “Then that someone else can do it as I won’t.” The factory continued to produce weaponry.
Individual refusal, however well intended, by itself, can only flag up ‘injustice’ (for want of a better word).
So the moral is, only collective action can achieve change. (Not a surprising view on a leftist blog, I suspect.)
Rosie said,
February 14, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Lobby – my quote was a paraphrase from Felix Holt the Radical by George Eliot. Felix is refusing to carry on his father’s quack medicine business because he knows it’s a dangerous fraud. So his is the individual morality forming part of the social good, which is a big theme of George Eliot’s. So Eliot would have approved of your Quaker friend for doing what good she could in difficult circumstances, her individual morality forming part of the social good. Eliot, though, was a Victorian liberal and rather nervous of collective action.