Freedom on a Damaged Planet

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The following is based on a contribution to Salvage’s panel, ‘Freedom in the Twenty-first Century’, at the 2022 Historical Materialism conference in London.

‘The history of the world is nothing but the development of the idea of freedom’
—Hegel

Freedom in the twenty-first century is freedom in an ecologically damaged world. One of the first crises of freedom in the twenty-first century came in the form of an ecological crisis, a global pandemic likely sparked by the zoonotic leap of a Covid-19 virus from the wildlife reservoir. But what are we calling freedom?

Freedom is a powerful myth of capitalist modernity, especially petromodernity. And, being allied to capitalist growth, this is mainly a negative freedom: freedom from interference in voluntary contracts. Any policy that could restrict growth, by restraining the right of individuals to strike whatever contracts they see fit – buying an airline ticket, or buying an airline – would appear to be counter-freedom. 

There is another conception of freedom linked to the socialist, feminist and anti-racist freedom struggles, which has more in common with the republican tradition described by Quentin Skinner: political freedom from domination. This isn’t to be confused with abolition or emancipation, though political freedom has been driven up the agenda by Black Lives Matter, anti-carceral and anti-police struggles. Freedom, as Foucault pointed out, is what comes after emancipation. As I’ve said before, just because you decapitate the king doesn’t mean you’ve abolished the monarchy.

Now this shows that freedom is inherently a partisan matter. Marxism is a form of thought, a critical procedure, that tries to free humanity from ‘the realm of necessity’. And, because in that way it’s a form of practical knowledge, it can’t accept a simple distinction between fact and value, is and ought. So when Marxists talk about freedom, as Lenin repeatedly insisted, we immediately face the question: freedom for whom, and for what purposes? There’s a despotic potential in such questions, if it results in nothing but contempt for liberal freedoms (as in Lenin’s reported response, in 1920, to Menshevik critics: ‘Of course, gentlemen, you have all the freedom to publish this critique – but, then, gentlemen, be so kind as to allow us to line you up the wall and shoot you!’) But that doesn’t mean we can avoid the problem. And it has become more urgent now that it’s clearer that the realm of necessity is going to outlast capitalism.

The animating myth of capitalist freedom derives its power from various concrete, unequal freedoms. Take the freedom of movement. I have the freedom to fly from London to New York, as long as I have enough money. That freedom doesn’t exist for those who have the wrong passport, or are politically stigmatised, or could never dream of having enough money, because it is realised in institutional (market and state) forms that congeal unequal access to the resources of petromodernity. That makes it contestable. Either it should be universal, or maybe I should not have that freedom, or maybe it should be rationed.

During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the freedom to travel between states (and often out of your home) was seriously abridged in order to limit the spread of a virus that has officially killed 6.6 million people worldwide. You can legitimately argue over whether that was necessary given the scale of the crisis, the alternatives, the trade-offs and so on. But if you dispute that it could ever be necessary, that seems to place a very high price on my freedom to travel. It trumps, in principle, all the freedoms of those who might die as a result of my transmitting the disease. What politics of class and race does that assume? You could argue that restricting the right to travel is racist, or at least racially laden, and liable to punish migrants and refugees more than the business and tourism travellers who constitute the majority of such flows. But, obviously, so would allowing the disease to spread, since we all acknowledge that racism and poverty are pre-existing health conditions. I can see no intelligent way for anyone on the Left to argue against such coercion in principle.

Now take another example. Should my freedom to travel by plane be removed, or at least rationed, to limit carbon emissions? As a matter of current technological necessity, flying causes world-destroying emissions. One can minimise these – air travel ‘only’ causes 2.5 per cent of all emissions – but that 2.5 per cent still counts given how close we are to exhausting the carbon ‘budget’. So if you say that such restrictions are not reasonable in principle, you’re once more putting a very high price on the freedom for the estimated 4 per cent of the world’s population who take international flights. This figure conceals inequalities. For example, while the average person in the US is said to emit a total of seven metric tons of CO2 annually, the owners of private jets have emitted on average 3,300 metric tons from those jets alone. Further, the profitable core of the airline industry is business travellers – members of a growing transnational capitalist class involved in finance, tech and global governance. Still, most flights are for leisure, or to see family.

How many might lose all freedom for this to continue? A pandemic is a relatively discrete event, in which deaths are measurable. Is it possible to safely measure how many will die of drought, flooding, storms, overheating, wildfires and the decimation of the food chain in the coming years? Probably not with any precision, but we can’t make big political decisions without at least some sort of idea. According to a recent study, extreme weather currently accounts for 9.4 per cent of global deaths each year, which is about 5 million people. Not all of this is driven by climate change. But it’s a reasonable inference that as extreme weather becomes more recurrent, it will account for a lot more death worldwide. 

So let’s have some bids: how many more excess deaths triggered by this single variety of ecological disaster is worth the uninhibited right to fly? Five million? Ten million? Remember, it’s good and edifying to be well-travelled, there are places to see, families to visit, cultures to experience. I hear twenty million: can I get fifty million? How much of other people’s freedom and flourishing, and our own in future, shall we, the 4 per cent, burn?

The pandemic is a good place to start for exploring this question of what freedom might look like on a damaged planet. 

While the image we get from neoliberal ideology is that we are always managing the risks that others represent to us, the plague is one situation in which we acknowledge ourselves as the bearers of risk. Wherever we go, we bring the grim reaper with us. Take a sneaky holiday to Cornwall in April 2020, and you may well have been bringing them the plague. ‘Act Like You’ve Got It, Anyone Can Spread It’, the British government announced in its ad campaigns. We are all unclean, no one is innocent. 

Now I’m not here to defend lockdown per se – I think a pro- or anti-lockdown position is fundamentally beside the point. But the fact that our risk is not simply of becoming ill, but of killing others, was tellingly elided in so much anti-lockdown eristic – though it is essential to any egalitarian ethics.

One anti-lockdown argument that didn’t completely evade this essential problem was Panagiotis Sotiris’ analysis for Historical Materialism. I don’t wholly agree with it, as will become clear, but it raises profound questions that should interest us if we’re serious about building freedom on a damaged planet. Crucially, Sotiris is looking for alternatives to capitalist biopolitics, to the surveillance, control and regimentation of populations by medical bureaucrats and national governments. As he points out, in a way lockdown – though justified in terms of social solidarity – purges disease control of its social and political content. Lockdown strategies contain no acknowledgment of pre-existing health conditions like racism and poverty. Although leading anti-lockdown reactionaries criticised it for disrupting their normal – that is, exclusive, partisan – freedoms, actual lockdown strategies far more severely compound the existing unfreedoms experienced by the working class and racially oppressed, and indeed by anyone who might experience the wrong end of a police baton.

So, Sotiris – in a way that I think is actually premature, or prefigurative – tries to discern a possible democratic or communist biopolitics. He references the history of ACT UP, which offered medical help for AIDS sufferers during that pandemic amid callous, homophobic official indifference. He references the Black Panthers’ ‘survival pending revolution’ strategy. One might add the brief flourishing of mutual aid in the early days of the pandemic. What he’s referencing here is what we sometimes call ‘self-help’. What Foucault in his study of ancient philosophers calls ‘the care of the self’. Which is not about scented candles and feng shui, but about the conditions necessary for citizenship, for living freely. We cannot be free if we don’t take care of ourselves – that is, if we don’t understand who we are, what we desire, what we are capable of – because we will misuse ourselves and others. We will be what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt calls ‘wantons’, easy meat for purveyors of exploitation, addictive products, sleazy disinfotainment, and so on. And that makes us irresponsible. To partake of social being, as Marx called it, we need to be capable of reorienting our willpower, of achieving more conscious control over our desires. A communist biopolitics asks you to do that: self-isolate if you need to, we will help; stay off work if you need to, we will provide; if you need company, we will try to give it within our means: but, comrade, you must take care of yourself. Just as you might need a partner or a parent to take care of themselves, we need each other to take care of ourselves.

But I agree with Gareth Dale’s retort. Lockdown unarguably brings evils, but so do the alternative strategies (test-trace-isolate), and so does the spread of Covid-19. And even if you think this pandemic didn’t necessitate centralised, top-down biopolitical controls – and I really disagree with you or at least insist that you outline your predicates, your costing, your analysis of who benefits and who dies – but setting that aside, even if we agree to say that this pandemic didn’t necessitate such coercion, you should at least admit that other pandemics, and other ecological emergencies, could do so. That, while there is a legitimate struggle over how funds and resources are distributed, how coping mechanisms are embedded in communities, and who pays the costs of preparedness and disease control, localised responses lacking the direct coercive element and scaling of big public monopolies may not be enough. After all, we are by and large committed to handling ecological crisis and class justice by means of global planning. However democratic and egalitarian that may be, it seems foolish to me to think we are ever going to eliminate coercion and injustices entirely, however much the iron fist is sheathed in the velvet glove.

Marxism is nothing if not a tragic vision of human history. For the vast majority of human existence, it argues, nothing has been possible apart from poverty and unfreedom for the majority. Socialist freedom, as freedom from the realm of necessity, freedom for the majority and not just a ruling class from the exigencies of survival, only seriously comes on the agenda once the freak occurrence of capitalism produces an historically aberrant and unsustainable expansion of the means of production. So if we take tragic possibility seriously, we must admit that the trade-offs will often not be between just and unjust outcomes, but between injustices. That becomes more urgent to face up to as ecological deterioration speeds up and the old patterns of life-building become untenable for most of humanity.

And actually, I have another predicate which is worth clarifying. I don’t subscribe to any naive static view of human nature. I think humans have unique capacities, which can result in a wide variety of social types. But I do think that there is a constitutive contradiction, a non-relation as the Lacanians might say, in how societies are made. That there will probably always be costs to civilization, that there will always be antagonism, conflict and dysfunction beyond that which the society can reasonably put up with. There will always be some tragic choices in which sometimes even the freedoms of minorities have to be weighed against the well-being of the whole. And if those tragic choices, as in lockdown situations, make some people angry, bitter and misanthropic, it’s possible that they will behave destructively and in a paranoid or malicious or selfish fashion – as some did during the peak of the pandemic. So, the question for me becomes, how do we manage that while living freely?

Perhaps we could take another look at biopolitics. Benjamin Bratton, in his most recent book, engages in a reparative reading of biopolitics. He urges us to reclaim the ‘epidemiological model’ of society. While it does radically devalue the ‘individual’ – at least in relation to capitalist mythology of personal responsibility – it doesn’t necessarily have to invisibilise poor people, queer people, disabled people, the racially oppressed. It makes us into a network of transmitters and receivers, and we can build infrastructures of care around the information that is generated. We don’t have to accept the obscurantism of the market in which social outcomes are unaccountable because their causes are inscrutable, an obscurantism that necessarily generates conspiracist hystericisation (Bill Gates’ microchip, the 5G masts, the satanic conspiracy, etc). We can use these surveillance mechanisms to make social injustices visible and accountable, and build aggregated popular will into the responses. We’re talking about social intelligence here.

There are a few lines from Prynne’s poem, ‘Airport Poem: Ethics for Survival’, that I like. It’s the only one of his poems I’ve really managed to absorb:

The heart is a changed

petromorph, making

pressure a social

Intelligence.

The heart is a rock formation, stuck in its ways, resistant to change, yet also changed. And, since a petromorph is already a product of change, to speak of a ‘changed petromorph’ is either a tautology or a doubling down: changed, and then changed again. By – what? – a ‘social intelligence’. A flow, a soft, slow friction: water, gently running, containing just a little grit.

It’s coercion, not as brutalisation, not as punishment, not as condemnation or shaming, but as social intelligence. This doesn’t solve the problem of, say, protecting minority rights when the community is at stake. In fact, it doesn’t solve any problem. What I’m giving you here is a series of questions and intuitions. Because we’re only just beginning this work.

Richard Seymour is a writer and a founding editor of Salvage. He is the author of The Disenchanted Earth (Indigo Press, 2022), The Twittering Machine (Indigo Press, 2019) and Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (Verso, 2016), among other books. He is one of the co-authors of The Tragedy of the Worker (Verso/Salvage Editions, 2021). His writing can be found in the Guardian, the New York Times, the New Statesman and his own Patreon.