Freedom of the Individual

[p026] FREEDOM OF THE INDIVIDUAL scandal occurred in 1924 in German-Soviet diplomatic relations, as a result of a German communist’s seeking refuge from arrest in a Soviet institution in Berlin and being pursued into it by the German police (the Bozen- nardt incident), Trotsky assured Rantzau that this affair need have no effect on the secret military collaboration.9 Rantzau fully appreciated that the converse was also true, so long as Trotsky remained powerful—the secret military collaboration would have no effect on the policy +’ Freund, op. cit. p. 195. of encouraging and helping the revolutionary movement in Germany! The ousting of Trotsky from the War Commissariat, early in 1925, marked the definite opening of a new phase in Soviet foreign policy, acutely summed up by Isaac Deutscher: ‘In the Leninist period diplomacy had been as it were, an auxiliary detachment of the Comin- tern. That relationship was to be reversed.’50 °0 I. Deutscher, Stalin (1951), p. 392. Freedom of the Individual Peter Fryer “We are not communists who want to destroy personal freedom and transform the world into one great barracks Or one great sweat-shop. As a matter of fact there are communists who do not care for and want to suppress personal freedom, which in their opinion bars the way to harmony; but we do not want to buy equality at the ex- pense of personal freedom’ (Frederick Engels, Kommunis- tische Zeitschrift, September 1847). CAPITALISM AND HUMAN NATURE To liberals no freedom is higher and more precious than the freedom of the individual. Marxists whole- heartedly agree that it is the individual human being who achieves freedom, and not humanity in general. They agree that society as a whole cannot free itself unless every individual is freed. But they take issue with the use of the watchword of individual liberty in opposition to socialism and socialist planning. For they do not think there is any contradiction between the interests of the individual and the interests of a society whose fundamental aim is the satisfaction of peeple’s material and cultural needs and the enrich- ment of their lives. They take the view that only under communism will the individual human being be able to develop his potentialities and abilities to the utmost. Under capitalism the great majority of people have neither leisure, money nor education to develop as all- round human beings. Nor are they encouraged so to foster their individuality. The capitalist system of pro- duction, the bourgeois educational system, the barrage of advertising and ready-made ‘culture’ to which the individual is subjected from the cradle to the grave, are not designed to fan into flame the sparks of talent and creative ability that are possessed by all but a tiny pro- portion of human beings. They are designed to make competent wage-slaves. Capitalist relations of produc- tion—the private ownership for private profit of the means of production—cannot bring to the individual wage-worker the freedom that comes through leading a full life, a life packed with many-sided activities and giving the fullest scope to every physical and mental aptitude. They block the way to a full life for the exploited. Capitalism devastates human nature, dulls and ex- tinguishes the senses, corrupts and brutalizes men as it sucks out profit from their work, rends men into fragments, into half-men, makes labour a burden in- stead of a joyful and indispensable part of life. It robs men of their heritage of happiness, beauty and know- ledge. It takes the warmth and colour out of human relationships and measures every emotion, every delight and every virtue by the yardstick of gold and silver and bits of printed paper and entries in account books.! The individual is not, and cannot be, free under Capitalism because he cannot leap out of the world of the market, the world where everything moral and spiritual is bought and sold for cash. It is a world of universal venality, of cynical self-interest. Human labour power; works of art; knowledge; the very cons- cience and honour of men; truth itself:? all become commodities, measured in terms of their market value, accessible to those with money. To the profiteer the object he is buying or selling, its meaning and importance to human beings, are in them- selves of little or no importance compared with the object’s abstract expression in monetary terms. This barren outlook determines and taints every relationship, not only between man and object, but between man and man. Money becomes a fetish: the cash nexus be- comes the only significant bond between people. The questions that matter about a fellow human being are not ‘Is he happy?’ or ‘Is he hungry?’ or ‘Is he a good man?’ but ‘Is he rich?’ and ‘Can we do business to- gether?’ and ‘What advantage can I get out of him?’ 1 In his Adult Interests (New York, 1935) Dr Edward L. Thorndike gave the cash payments which men and women would take to do certain normally repugnant things. He claimed to find that the average woman would practise can- nibalism for 750,000 dollars, but the average man would do so for 50,000. The women tested would renounce hope of life after death for 10 dollars, but the men wanted 1,000. The men would become intoxicated for 25 dollars, but the- women demanded 98. Other ‘money equivalents’ were given for blindness, temporary insanity, eating beetles and earth- worms, choking a stray cat to death, cutting a pig’s throat and spitting on a crucifix and on pictures of Charles Darwin, George Washington and one’s mother. Dr Thorndike has been described as ‘the Nestor of American psychologists’. ‘The best test of truth,’ according to Mr Justice Holmes’s epigram, ‘is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market’ (Dissenting opinion in Abrams v. U.S., 250 U.S. 616 (1919) ). te 119

[p027] LABOUR REVIEW Those who have this outlook cannot be said to enjoy life: what they enjoy are deals and transactions and money-making. ‘Life’ in bourgeois society means “‘mak- ing a living’. Nor can the wage-worker remain wholly unaffected by this outlook. The very fact that he is forced to sell his labour power, that he must work for someone else in order to live, drains his labour of its sweetness, makes it a dreary burden instead of an essential and beneficial part of living. The life of the individual worker is chopped and divided: there is the part of his life that is not his own, but the boss’s, spent in the factory, where the boss is the aristocrat; and there are the looked- forward-to oases of leisure, the time that belongs to the worker himself. “The invariable comment when the Jeaving-off hooter sounds is: “That’s the one I’ve been waiting for all day!’ And in the morning when the starting-signal is given they mutter, “Roll on the second one!” They look forward every day to the end of so many hours of life.’"> Only when his working day is done does the worker’s own life really begin. He is robbed of a third or more of his life—half or more of his active, waking life. He is not free to lives as he wishes, to taste the pleasures of creation, the thrill of work that is done, not because one has to do it in order to eat, but because one feels passionate and absorbing enthusiasm for the social task. Work done for someone else, in which the worker belongs not to himself but to another, is, as Marx pointed out, external to the worker instead of being part of his nature; it is not in itself the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs.* This has been grasped by certain bourgeois writers. Thus John Dewey says: “The subordination of the enterprises to pecuniary profit reacts to make the workers “hands” only. Their hearts and brains are not engaged. They execute plans which they do not form, and of whose meaning and intent they are ignorant—beyond the fact that these plans make a profit for others and secure a wage for themselves . . . Minds are warped, frustrated, unnourished by their activities.° Another American writer, in an essay on ‘Freedom in the Factory’, re- marks: The operative is fitted like a cog to another cog in wheels turning endlessly round; over his movements in the rotation he has no more control than have the hands of a clock over their movements upon its face. Save when he is hired and fired, or bawled out for such a slip as any wearing machine part might make, he is not a person with a proper name, but a hand in the shop, a numbered machine part, making movements he does not initiate, producing results he does not intend and owns no part in.6 And the professor of philosophy of education in the University of London calls for ‘respect for and cultiva- tion of the free personal life’ and ‘the infusion of some- thing of this spirit into the highly organized life of modern society, so that “freedom” is not separated from 3 R. M. Fox, The Triumphant Machine (A Study of Machine Civilization) (1928), p. 35. 4 See T. B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel, eds., Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (1956), pp. 169-70. 5 John Dewey, Individualism Old and New (1931), pp. 122-3. € Horace M. Kallen, The Liberal Spirit. Essays on Problems of Freedom in the Modern World (Ithaca and New York. 1948), p. 193. 120 August-September 1958 “work”, not something to be attained after the reins of organization have been laid down, but something which is intrinsic to daily work itself, sweetening every part and making it human’.’ Where every object, including other human beings, has become a source of profit, all men’s senses—not only the physical senses, but also the feeling for beauty, for the arts, for knowledge, for the enrichment of the human spirit—all these senses are subordinated to and largely replaced by the single, abstract desire for pro- perty. for ‘possessions’. ‘I have’ becomes the supreme emotion. The barrenness of ‘I have’ find its finished, most abstract, expression in money—the supreme sub- stitute for real human relationships. Men are thus rendered less than truly human. Instead of living to the full, instead of squeezing from life and making part of themselves every drop of the beauty. created by human hands and brains or latent in human relationships, they are fobbed off with a substitute for these concrete riches: the abstract hoarding, ‘possession’ and contemplation of things. They are impoverished by capitalism —all the more terribly because they are only dimly, if at all, conscious of the cynical trick capi- talism is playing on them. The more the worker pro- duces, the more he empties himseif into the product, the more powerful becomes the world of things which he creates but does not ‘possess’, which is his own labour objectified and standing independent of and opposed te him, and the poorer becomes the worker’s inner sen- suous life.8 Even this does not exhaust the crippling of human nature by capitalism. Men are not merely spiritually robbed and emasculated, shut out from a whole world of sensuous, intellectual and moral delight. They are also split, turned into fragments of men, by the enforced sacrifice of all their other physical and mental faculties to the development of one single faculty. The individual, subordinated to the principle of the division of labour, becomes a mere cog in the production process, the appendage and servant of a machine, a detail worker performing one small operation over and over again. The individual is moulded by the machine he serves into something less than human. ‘Taylor, of Bethlehem Steel Works fame, has declared that in order to get pig iron loaded most efficiently it is necessary to get men as near like oxen as possible. But men do not grow so; they have to be made. An important part of scientific management is this scientific degradation of men.’? The individual is stunted, warped, chained for life to one particular calling, to one particular function, often to one particular tool. In capitalist society what matters is not man as such but particularized man, restricted and conditioned by his special skills: the division of labour is the division of the individual labourer himself. And this means that men are subjected to their instru- ments of production, that instead of the producers using and controlling the means of production, the latter use and control the producers. Nor have men control over the disposal of the products which result from their labours; these products become independent forces which overpower their makers in booms and slumps according to the ‘blind’ laws of the market. 7 Louis Arnaud Reid, “The Individual and Social Purpose— IV, The Fortnightly, no. 1017 ns., p. 623, Sept. 1951. 8 Bottomore and Rubel, op. cit. p. 170. 9 Fox, op. cit. p. 5.

[p028] FREEDOM OF THE INDIVIDUAL The means of production are utilized in such a way as to enslave men and atrophy their faculties. And the exchange of products for profit leads to the concentra- tion of enormous wealth in the hands of a few and the impoverishment of the majority, to economic anarchy and periodical economic ‘blizzards’. Thus men are not free to determine their own destiny. It is determined for them by forces over which they have no control. In the process men’s individuality is forfeited, is crushed. They lose their individuality be- cause they are dependent on capital. ‘In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individ- uality.!° ‘An economic individualism of motives and aims,’ echoes Dewey, ‘underlies our present corporate mechanisms, and undoes the individual.’!! Defenders of and apologists for the capitalist system of society have as little right to speak of the freedom of the individual as they have to speak of any other free- dom. Under capitalism human individuality ‘becomes at once a commercial article and the fabric in which money operates’. Capitalism “estranges man from nature, from himself, his own active functioning ... It is the aliena- tion of man from man.”!? Capitalism stifles men’s crea- tive spirit. condemning the majority to a life of monotony, drudgery and ugliness—to life in a cage. It puts out the eves of the painter and cuts out the tongue from the poet who is within each one of us. It butchers human nature on the altar of the machine and calls that progress. FREEDOM AND CULTURE Certain forms of mass culture, which masquerade as popular art but in fact are imposed on ordinary people by big business, play a big part in the devastation of human nature by capitalist society. Many films, ‘popular’ songs. thrillers, comics, news stories, advertise- ments and television shows, in which artistic standards and techniques are largely abandoned, both reflect the splitting, stunting and dehumanization of people and powerfully assist that process. Spoon-fed to the com- mon people, such culture is pitifully shoddy and tawdry. It abounds in clichés, in stock situations, stock emo- tional responses, stock remedies for human problems. It provides a cheap, potent and hallucinatory fantasy- world. Its vulgarity heightened by daily repetition, it rings the changes on the slogan with which the adver- tiser, plugger. publisher, editor or film magnate wishes 10 condition the minds of his audience. After reading a dozen or more versions of the illustrated fable of how a worker was too tired to work properly until he drank a certain milk-food. or smelled of stale sweat until he washed with a certain soap, or had halitosis until he used a certain toothpaste, a reader has been trained~ - or so it is hoped—to react in a specific way to a specific stimulant. The ‘popular’ song reiterates a limited num- ber of emotional phrases in trite verse, set to hackneyed and soothing harmonic progressions. The thriller and the horror comic blend violence with pornography, ‘re- tool for illiteracy’ and prepare the reader’s mind for war. The Press moulds the minds of its readers with '0 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, vol. 1 (19803. p. 46. it Dewey, op. cit. p. S7. 12 Marx. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, quoted Modern Quarterly, vol. v. no. 1. p. 14, Winter 1949-5u, a daily flood of mass suggestion. Television pro- grammes, particularly in the USA, tend to distort reality, play down to the lowest common denominator of artistic taste among audiences, and glorify acts and threats of violence, especially in children’s programmes.!3 All this art is fundamentally propaganda for capital- ism, for it aims not merely to sell people chlorophyll tablets and detergents, but also to lull them into a com- placent, passive, helpless, habit-bound acceptance of things as they are. It provides vicarious experience, ex- citement and enjoyment, to make content those whose lives are dreary and impoverished. As one student of advertising folklore has observed, ‘to keep everybody in the helpless state engendered by prolonged mental rut- ting is the effect of many ads and much entertainment alike’ .!4 ’ It is, of course, true that many workers have a healthy contempt for this form of art, and that their number and their contempt grow in times of social struggle. But there is no such thing as a mental vacuum. To the extent that liberating ideas, ideas which challenge capitalism’s ‘mind-forg’d manacles’, ideas of working-class militancy and socialism, are not gripping the minds of the masses of the people, then inevitably the lives, opinions, emo- tions and outlook of the masses are to that extent con- ditioned by television jingles, Press lies and prejudices and the like. And to that extent they are unfree. THE DECAY OF LIBERALISM The liberal idea of individual liberty is a good ex- ample of an idea which is progressive when first put forward, but which begins to play a reactionary role when the circumstances which gave rise to it have changed. Preoccupation with the individual and his rights be- gan in the seventeenth century, with the rise of the bourgeoisie, whose existence and development as a class depended on the freedom of the individual capitalist to buy, and of the individual proletarian to sell, labour power. The rebellion of the rising bourgeoisie against the economic shackles of feudalism found its political, social and ideological expression in opposition to arbitrary political power, to arbitrary restraints on per- sonal liberty, to the violation of human dignity and to clerical obscurantism. The fight was seen as a struggle between reason and unreason. The class which fashioned liberalism as its intellectual weapon conceived of indi- vidual freedom, not as freedom from all restraint, but 13 See, e.g., Dallas W. Smythe. “Reality as Presented by Tele- vision’, Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. xviii, no. 2, pp. 143- 56, Summer 1954. 14 Herbert Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, Folklore of Industrial Man (New York, 1951), p. v. Discussing a motor oi] advertisement with the caption ‘Freedom ... American Style’. showing a middle class family on a picnic, McLuhan writes (p. 117): ‘If this is “freedom ... American style", then is it not freedom and not American to have less money and fewer possessions? .. . What proportion of Americans enjoy this style of freedom? .. . Looking at the standardized equipment of this family and their stand- ardized pattern of living ... how far [can they] be said to be free as human beings? ... Does “freedom”? mean the right te be and do exactly as everybody else? How much does this kind of freedom depend on obeying the “‘orders” of commercial suggestion? If it takes a lot of money to conform in this way, does conformity become an ideal to 5 strive for? . 2 121

[p029] LABOUR REVIEW as freedom under the law,'° as freedom limited by certain eternal truths and values which were thought to be embodied in a natural law or natural rights derived from human nature. Both the atoms of which matter was composed and the social atoms of which society was composed were governed by rational laws which human reason could grasp and apply. But, as Marx observed, the natural ‘Rights of Man’, the rights belonging to individuals by virtue of their humanity, did not eliminate man the egoist, an individual withdrawn into his private interests, separated from the community. On the contrary, bourgeois society itself appeared in them as an external frame for individuals, as a limita- tion of their original independence; the only ties by which individuals were held together were natural necessity, material needs, private interests and the con- servation of their property.!® As developed by the bourgeois intellectuals of the early nineteenth century, the liberal idea of individual freedom remained progressive in an age when the workers were totally deprived of their leisure, when women and children worked in the pits, when there was no legal limit to the working day. These intellec- tuals supported the struggle for leisure for the industrial workers, as a struggle for time in which people might be free to do, think and say what they liked—provided they were not thereby endangering capitalist society.!7 The liberal ideal could not, and did not, transcend (but rather reflected) the splitting of a man’s life into two parts: his working time, in which he was unfree, a wage- slave, and his leisure, in which he was for a few hours a day an individual shorn of responsibilities, answerable only to himself—an individual temporarily outside of society, and whose ‘freedom’ was enjoyed outside of society. Mill, for example, wanted every worker ultim- ately to have the same leisure as his employer and therefore the same partial freedom from the necessities of social organization as he. What happened to liberal ideology when capitalism approached its monopoly phase has been well summar- ized by Hallowell and Laski: So long as the bourgeoisie remained economically, socially, and politically unsatiated they championed the substantial rights of man. As . . . monopoly capitalism replaced free enterprise .. . and as the bourgeoisie acquired a dominant social and political position, they tended to espouse formal: equality and formal rights of citizens rather than substantial equality and substantial rights of man.18 15 ‘Freedom,’ wrote Voltaire, ‘exists in being independent of everything but law’ (Pensées sur l’administration publique). 16 See D. Rjazanov, ed., Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, part i, vol. i, I (Frankfurt, 1927), p. 595. 17 ‘No one pretends,’ wrote John Stuart Mill, ‘that actions should be as free as opinions. On the contrary, even Opinions lose their immunity when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the Press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard’ (On Liberty (Everyman edition, Utilitarianism; Liberty; Re- presentative Government, 1954), p. 114). 18 John H. Hallowell, The Decline of Liberalism as an Ideology With Particular Reference to German Politico-Legal Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1943), p. 14. 122 August-September 1958 The earlier liberals released the individual from a type of social organization which restricted his capacity for growth. But the assumption which underlay that release made it in fact valid only for men who were in a position to surmount the conditions of a fiercely competitive industrial society, — that is, broadly, the owners of property. The liberty pre- dominantly secured was their liberty; the others came in as residuary legatees of their triumph. And when the men of property had won, they conceived that the campaign was over... What they did not see was that the new social order their liberalism had built brought with it new problems as intense as any they had solved ... Liberalism... had estab- lished a freedom in which, formally and legally, the workers were entitled to share. Actually, they could not, for the most part, share in it because its attainment was predominantly conditioned to the possession of property; and they had no property save in their labour power. When the victors were asked to extend the privileges their new freedom had brought them they were dismayed.19 In the period of monopoly capitalism it is precisely the separation of the interests of the individual from those of society, the counterposing of individual free- dom to external social necessity and social responsibil- ity, that becomes an ideological weapon for the defence of capitalism and for arousing opposition and hostility to socialism. The social discipline of social plannng is held to destroy human personality, to take away the individual’s liberty to ‘live his own life’ and to think and choose for himself. This discipline is represented as being imposed on people against their will. The liberal who today attacks socialism on these grounds is in fact surrendering all the values that liberalism once championed. He is turning his back on the warping of human individuality and human per- sonality by monopoly capitalism. Whether he is aware of it or not, Ais claim to ‘freedom of the individual’ is at bottom the claim of the privileged, leisured and rich section of the population to the maintenance of their privileges, leisure and riches, based on ‘the liberty of private property as such, to be uncontrolled in its opera- tions by aught else than the will of the individual possessing it’.?0 Since these privileges, leisure and riches are obtained and maintained for the bourgeoisie and for the intellectuals who serve them only by the ex- ploitation of millions of their fellow human beings, what the modern liberal is really demanding is freedom for an élite. No wonder that Dewey says of liberalism today that it is ‘vaguely called forward-looking, but quite un- certain as to where to look and what to look forward to’.2! The liberal idea of ‘individual freedom’ is hollow, bankrupt and impotent, for three reasons: because it cannot be realized for more than a tiny minority, and then only imperfectly and at the cost of the distortion of social values; because it predicates an individual abstracted from society; and because it conceives of freedom not as power for men to do things in social co- operation, but as the absence of restraint, as freedom from what are in reality the unavoidable necessities and obligations of living, the social ties that make men human. In other words, ‘the individualism which centres in personal property .. . is a purely abstract and formal individualism which sacrifices the real freedom of the 19H. J. Laski, The Decline of Liberalism (1940), pp. 13-14. 20 E. Belfort Bax and J. Hiam Levy, Socialism and Individual- ism (n.d. [1904] ), p. 10. 21 Dewey, op. cit. p. 58.

[p030] FREEDOM OF THE INDIVIDUAL individual to his merely nominal freedom’. One illustration of the hollowness, bankruptcy and impotence of the liberal ideology is the way prominent German liberals accepted—and some even acclaimed— the coming to power of the Nazis in 1933. The liberals ‘had neither the standards nor the will to declare this despotism wrong. They “saw nothing to fight about. They had no ideas, no values, for which to fight: they had no doctrine, no way of life to defend ... The Nazis were the legitimate heirs of a system that committed suicide.** Another is the limited horizons of liberal thinkers when they try to grapple with the worker's loss of individuality in the capitalist factory. When Kallen, in The Liberal Spirit, comes to give his nostrum for ‘free- dom in the factory’, all he can suggest is that the workers should somehow have their vision expanded ‘from their own narrow task to the entire operation in which the factory as a whole is the craftsman and the worker but one of its hands’ so that the individual worker can ‘identify himself with the entire industry as a team-mate’: and that workers be given “the oppor- tunity to experiment. to take initiative. to exercise and to gratify the creative impulse under conditions of com- petitive co-operation’.** Similarly William Angus Sinclair, though he calls himself a socialist, cannot imagine any better society than a capitalism which somehow manages to give ‘people in ordinary jobs that sense of their importance which is felt by creative minds and men in responsible positions’.*° It is the scramble for profits that tramples on human personality. Socialist planning, by enabling men to co- operate to run the world in a rational, conscious way, will integrate the needs of the individual human b2ing with the needs of the whole of humanity. Only real socialism can emancipate the individual and pave the way to the utmost development, under communism, of all his physical and mental powers, senses and aptitudes. THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIALISM The task of socialism is to lay the indispensable basis for the teeming abundance of necessities and what are today called luxuries that must be achieved before men may receive according to their needs. The social disci- pline of socialist planning alone can free men from the jungle of capitalism. Even with bureaucratic distortions, socialist planning is able to achieve a great deal. With these distortions eliminated socialism will harness the creative energies of millions. Real socialism does not impose economic plans on people “from above. The individual helps to draw up, administer and fulfil the plan: by so doing he not only helps to make everybody else’s life better. but also improves his own life. The in- dividual cannot free himself from the capitalist swamp by his own unaided efforts. but only in active co-opera- « as -- Bax and Levy. op. cit. p. 24. -* Hallowell. op. cit. pp. 108-9. -+ Kallen, op. cit. pp. 211-12. 75 William Angus Sinclair, Socialism and the Individual Notcs on Joining the Labour Party (1988). p. 74. A classless society ‘in which every man... receives... whatever he may need to lead the good life... seems impossible to realize.” he adds. since “things just do not work out that way (ibid. p. 121). Those who think differently from Mr Sinclair on this question he terms ‘silly socialists’. ‘un- practical extremists’, ‘crackpots’. ‘calamitous idealists’ and ‘the Labour Party’s lunatic fringe’ (ibid. pp. 149-50). tion with millions of others. Together they are fired with the vision of a new life and a new society. Together they work to achieve them. To accomplish the socialist re- construction of the world is not to mould the individual to the requirements of an abstract ‘society’. It is to re- shape the social system to the requirements of the in- dividuals who make it up. This implies planning. It implies discipline, endeavour, sacrifice, voluntarily undertaken. But this alone is the way to make men free from class exploitation and class oppression. “The out- come of socialism is...a Auwmnan individualism as opposed to class individualism.’76 it is not, perhaps, surprising that those who fail to understand that freedom from exploitation, unemploy- ment, poverty and want has any bearing on the freedom of the individual are those who have never worked in a factory, never drawn the dole in a Labour Exchange, never been without the price of a lavish meal in their lives. To them freedom is something spiritual, and a ‘free economy’ is one where some are free to exploit and others to suffer. This was stated quite explicitly not long ago by Mr Howard Pyle, one of the U'S. President’s assistants at the White House and a former Governor of Arizona, who ‘left the comforting thought at Detroit —where unemployment in the motor industry is in- creasing—that “the right to suffer is one of the joys of a free economy”.’?? The view that men who are hungry, or poor, or in- secure, or exploited, or unemployed, or homeless, or oppressed, are not free, that freedom from these social evils is the foundation of human liberty, is to be found well before the advent of Marxism. It was held by Shelley: What art thou, Freedom? Oh! could slaves Answer from their living graves This demand, tyrants would flee Like a dream’s dim imagery: BS * For the labourer thou art bread And a comely table spread From his daily labour come In a neat and happy home. Thou are clothes. and fire, and food For the trampled multitude: No-—in countries that are free Such starvation cannot be As in England now we see.28 If by ‘England’ we mean also the British colonies in Africa and Asia, the argument summed up in these lines is Wholly true today, when for hundreds of millions of Asians and Africans the problem of individual liberty is before everything else the problem of finding enough food to keep the individual alive another day. Moreover it is recognized by many of those concerned about the -* Bax and Levy. op. cit. p. 28. -" Quoted in a dispatch from the Washington correspondent of The Times, May 25, 1956. “Mr Pyle,’ the dispatch went on, “seems to have added a fifth dispensation to Roosevelt’s four freedoms . . . Now and again the philosophers of the Eisenhower Administration have an uncanny knack of say- ing the wrong thing.’ -* The Masque of Anarchy. 123

[p031] LABOUR REVIEW growth of revolutionary movements in what are called the ‘under-developed’ regions as by far the most difficult argument for imperialism to answer. An editorial in the Manchester Guardian, for example, came to the conclu- sion that the advocates of ‘Western freedom’ must address themselves, not to the masses of the people of Asia, but to the intellectual élite there, for only this en- lightened minority could understand the meaning of the ‘freedom in ideas and freedom of debate’ that the West had to offer. Offer a starving man liberty or a packet of sandwiches, it is said, and he will naturally choose sandwiches. But the clasres to whom our appeal is addressed are not actually starving, though they may be commendably disturbed about how many of their countrymen are in this plight. Tne middle classes and intelligentsia of Free Asia can still be attracted by the ideals of liberty .. .29 But socialism does not make real liberty, liberty with- out quotation marks, stop at freedom from hunger. What it does do is expose the hypocrisy of capitalist ‘freedom’, which denies the fundamental freedoms to the colonial peoples, and hypocritically prates about ‘freedom in ideas and freedom of debate’ though it can no more permit free discussion and exchange of ideas in the colonies, when those ideas challenge imperialism, than it can adequately feed the millions it oppresses. Real socialism offers not merely material prosperity, but is also a powerful stimulus to intellectual ferment. Even with major bureaucratic distortions and defects, a workers’ State has taught tens of millions in the central Asian republics to read and write, so opening for them the gates to the world of ideas and culture. And, as even Sinclair admits, ‘one reason for the appeal of commun- ism to the Asiatic and the African . .. is that it promises an industrialized culture with a higher standard of living to groups that have remained intact and continue to feel as groups; whereas at present the Western powers can only provide an industrialized culture which admit- tedly offers a higher standard of living, but in which a man feels an isolated and lost individual. Whatever else they give him it does not include what is essential for his happiness.’2° Cherishing and fostering individual ability, socialism will elevate the individual to a position of far greater real importance and give him far greater social respon- sibility than capitalism can ever do. To run society in a conscious, planned way cannot but call forth the ut- most personal initiative, imagination, enterprise, zeal and creative ability from each individual. Liberty to choose where and how one can best take part in the general social activity, to discuss that activity both in its general aspects and its local details, to have one’s own suggestions and criticisms discussed, means that the individual is no longer an insignificant cog in a vast, impersonal, exploiting machine, but a vital and cons- cious part of a great collective endeavour whose central aim is the improvement, elevation and ennoblement of human life. Now while this is already a tremendous advance on the stifling of personal initiative and creativeness by capitalism, it does not yet solve the problem of the splitting and stunting of the individual. This problem is solved only in the course of a long transition to com- munist society. 29 Manchester Guardian, January 10, 1956. 30 Sinclair, op. cit. pp. 146-7. 124 August-September 1958 The individual becomes free in the full sense of the word only when he is able to take out of society’s store exactly what he needs to develop all his capacities to the full; when dull and arduous work is abolished and a new attitude to work as a joyful and indispensable part of life has grown up; when the distinctions between intellectual and manual labour no longer exist and all workers are raised to the level of engineers, technicians, scientists and artists; when the hours of socially neces- sary labour have been shortened to something like four hours a day or less, enabling the individual to ‘work’, play, study and take a full part in running society. Of all these requisites, none is more important than the shortening of the hours of labour, the ‘fundamental premise’, as Marx observed, for the flourishing of ‘the true realm of freedom’.*! The individual becomes reaily free, in fact, only when men have achieved complete conscious social control over their entire economic de- velopment—complete control over the utilization of their means of production and the disposal of their social product. This establishes truly human conditions of existence, in which ‘the free development of each is the 32 condition for the free development of all’.} THE HEALING OF MEN Communism will bring abundance, such as the world has never before known, a bountiful abundance in which all men will share. It will give everybody an all-round education, open wide the gates of culture and know- ledge, make life full, absorbing, exciting and free. No longer the passive recipients of a ready-made culture, no longer conditioned to believe in their own inferiority and incapacity, the new generation of men and women born into a world cleansed of exploitation will be all- round people, masters of many different skills, crafts and arts. Their birthright will be the comprehensive development of their physical and mental abilities. This is no Utopia, though it corresponds to the hopes for the future of humanity entertained by men of vision through the ages. Now the time has come when the real- ization of these hopes is within the grasp of humanity. The harnessing of atomic power, automation, the scien- tific discoveries that come thicker and faster with each passing year, provide the material basis for such a colossal enrichment of life as will make the whole earth a paradise for those who dwell on it. The struggle of the working class and the colonial peoples to conquer the world for the common people will ensure that these advances in technique are in fact harnessed for the good of all. Before long the centuries of class antagon- ism, of greed, cruelty and torment, will have passed away like an evil dream, and man, no longer stunted and crippled in body and mind, no longer shut out from the good things of life, will pass from prehistory into history, will become the master of his destiny. The founders of scientific socialism rightly refrained from giving anything but the barest outline of the main features of the future society, and of the concomitant development and flowering of the human personality. They could not solve in advance the problems of humanity under communism, nor even foresee what many of those problems would be. Neither can we. They did forecast, however, that labour would be- 3' Capital, vol. iii (Calcutta, 1946), p. 652. 32 Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. i, p. 51.

[p032] COMMUNICATIONS come ‘not only a means of life, but life’s prime want’, that ‘productive labour, instead of being a means of subjugating men, will become a means of their emanci- pation, by offering each individual the opportunity to develop all his faculties, physical and mental, in all directions and exercise them to the full . . . therefore, productive labour will become a pleasure instead of being a burden’.*4 Thus ends the splitting of men’s lives. Where men are working, not for a boss, but for themselves and for their own society, the whole of their time is theirs. Marx and Engels foresaw, too, the ending of the sub- ordination of men to the division of labour, and the emergence of ‘the fully developed individual, fit for 4 variety of labours, ready to face any change of produc- tion, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers’.*> Thus ends the fragmentation of men themselves. bos Ibid. vol. ii (1950), p. 23. ; Engels, Anti-Diihring (1955), p. 408. Capital, vol. i (1954), p. 488. 2 9 + a Men are no longer engineers, or miners, or bricklayers, or clerks, but men—all-round men, spending part of the month or year at one particular occupation, re- freshing their minds and bodies with several others the rest of the time. Where every occupation is as absorb- ing, exciting and spiritually rewarding as what we today call hobbies, men in love with work because they are in love with life will paint pictures, write poems, compose music, work with metal, conduct in- vestigations in scientific laboratories, design houses and help build them—all in the same lifetime, perhaps within the same year. The distinctions between artist, designer, craftsman and labourer will vanish. All will in their work to some degree add to the store of beauty available for the enjoyment of mankind. Man will explore the depths of the ocean bed and the far reaches of space, will eliminate disease and increase twice, four- fold, tenfold, the span of human life, will reconstruct his own physiological and psychological make-up 30 that ‘the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.’* 36 Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (1957), p. 256. Communications