We have heard many times from the MAGA crowd that a Trump presidency will be a return to 'freedom of the individual'. Ironically what underlies and enables this ersatz notion of freedom is not the existential or practical freedom to think and act but rather the pathological desire to legitimate hatred and normalize the domination of the poor, disenfranchised, or indeed anyone who disagrees with them--and, of course, anyone who is perceived as 'left', 'woke' or social-minded. What is important here is that this pathological desire did not begin with Trump, even if he appears now as the proximate cause. Instead, it derives from a long history of equating freedom with an economic system that ends up enslaving the majority: namely capitalism and more particularly, neoliberal capitalism.
It is crucial for progressives to challenge the notion that democracy and capitalism are synonymous and recognize that the free market translates only to a kind of vapid personal freedom. Capitalism has over the past 60 years colonized human freedom, reducing it to the freedom to buy, sell, or adopt an individual ‘lifestyle’ that is exclusive only to a wealthy few. Freedom colonized by capitalism exists within a corporatized politics that collapses the political into economic and the personal. It disconnects citizens from the governments elected to govern them and gives governing decision-making to what Noam Chomsky has aptly described as private corporate tyrannies.
As governments are rendered all but powerless the notion of public or common good dissolves and self-oriented narcissism oriented by greed or desperation dominates the social and virtual relations. Freedom colonized by capital and especially neoliberal forms of capital becomes a kind of bondage that isolates individuals from larger social and economic issues.
This is premeditated, this was designed: the concentration of power in the hands of corporations and the power elite systematically depoliticizes individuals, eviscerating any connection they have with common humanity—relegating the majority to a state of bare survival where the only thing that occupies their mind is the desperate struggle to get through the next day, week or month without going hungry or being evicted. Under such circumstances, the freedom to act and live a decent life is reduced to simply learning how to subsist. Choice is paralyzed by hardship, lack of health care, poverty, unemployment, lack of housing, low wages, and other constraints that deny true freedom.
Under this neoliberal conception of freedom, selfishness becomes the only defining attribute of freedom. Compassion toward those in need and social responsibility on the part of the government is equated with weakness or ‘socialism’. If we are to decolonize freedom we must begin to see it as something empowering, something that can be re-connected to social and economic justice and care for the health and well-being of the planet. This means that neoliberal and fascist notions of freedom can only be challenged by making clear that democracy and economic equality are mutually reinforcing while democracy and capitalism are mutually antagonistic.
Here’s the bottom line: The call to a radical vision of freedom is inseparable from the call for expanding labour rights, clean air and water, nutritious food, free education, and healthcare, affordable housing, and the notion of a politics of freedom realized through the democratic notion of government by and for the people.
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