I really am interested in getting people's ideas as I seem to be completely confused on what freedom is.

This means that many forms of capitalism and communism fall short of the mark.

Communism, if state-imposed with restrictions on peoples' civil rights, does not preserve freedom in the sense that I have defined it.

Capitalism, if characterized by large maldistributions of wealth and power, also does not preserve freedom in the sense that I have defined it.

Every time a worker is required to come in even if deathly ill or risk being fired, that person is being harmed and freedom is not preserved.

Every time a police officer strikes an unarmed civilian who poses no threat to public order, that civilian is being harmed and freedom is not preserved.

There are no limits on freedom. At all. There is no component of freedom that requires it to observe the interests of others.

Freedom is only a component of a just state -- not the foundation of one. To try to set up a government based on freedom alone is like trying to use a stool with one leg: The balancing required to stay seated makes it unteneble. Freedom has to be coexistent with other interests like Equality and Universality when guarantees are made.

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Markbo are we free to pollute the world and now it seems space as well? I think we have been somehow brainwashed with this word FREEDOM. It is the end all of necessity.

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Freedom is relative thats why I get frustrated when many on rabble equate some minor infringement on our freedoms to a dictatorship such as Cuba. They are lacking any perspective at all and it belittles and demeans the freedom we have.

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We drive around in our polluting vehicles. Must have two in every family. Fill up the garbage sites and ship garbage to other countries. Produce garbage. Have no respect for the food we eat. (Animals) BUT WE HAVE FREEDOM.
Isn't it lovely to feel so free? [/QUOTE

You are confusing a lot of different issues that are independant of one another. Maybe you should ask yourself if you support protesters who block my freedom to cross a picket line? or destroy my property infringing on my freedoms.

[QUOTE]
Freedom at its fundamental root is the ability to do as one pleases as long as one's actions do not harm other human beings (which, to forestall objections, includes environmental damage, since environmental damage harms humans as well as the animal species that inhabit affected ecosystems).
This means that many forms of capitalism and communism fall short of the mark.

Communism, if state-imposed with restrictions on peoples' civil rights, does not preserve freedom in the sense that I have defined it.

Capitalism, if characterized by large maldistributions of wealth and power, also does not preserve freedom in the sense that I have defined it.

Every time a worker is required to come in even if deathly ill or risk being fired, that person is being harmed and freedom is not preserved.

Every time a police officer strikes an unarmed civilian who poses no threat to public order, that civilian is being harmed and freedom is not preserved.

I could think of many other examples, but I believe these will suffice. Freedom for some and not for others is not true freedom.

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Works both ways, baby!

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Communism, if state-imposed with restrictions on peoples' civil rights, does not preserve freedom in the sense that I have defined it.

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In an introduction to the Communist Manifesto (which I am rereading after 30 years) the editor states that Marx and Engels were opposed to so-called "state imposed communism". Simply put, communists and communism were a loosely defined fealty to the interests of the working class at all levels of society from Daddy Warbucks on down to Dan Hill. Any behavior that made things better for working people was "good".

Why? Becuase it meant more freedom for the majority.

Freedom is Communism.

If you feel free you are. I say that the freedom to pollute.........etc. Is not freedom. We lack respect in virtually all we do.

I mean relative to your way of life in the society that you live in. It is not relative to those who live in Cuba. Make sense :Verba Tim:? I think we get stuck sometimes on unecessary actions and say our freedom is being abused. 202 TV channels that is freedom. Freedom to watch what we choose. In fact I think our freedom trots around consuming. We consume and as a result we have a lot of garbage.

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Private property is property upon which most people may not stand, walk, or sleep. Therefore, the more private property, the less freedom.

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The Communist Manifesto did not call for the end of private property. Indeed Cuba's constitution provides that every person has a right to own land, a homestead.

What communists said would create more freedom is public ownership of the means of production. This is different. I think it harkens back to the idea of the Commons. It is OK for people to have their little squat of territory on which they can build their home and grow their vegetables. This is liberating. It is obscene to have vast estates or tracks of land that are simply trophies of a weathy corporation which are then used to improve status when their banker's visit while prople in Toronto or Los Angeles go homeless, starve and die without any of the social amenities of a civil society...

Let's warm up:

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Oh freedom, oh freedom, oh freedom over me
And before I'll be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave
And go home to my Lord and be free

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Our texts for the day:

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Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains.
-- J-J Rousseau, Le Contrat Social

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But now abideth liberty, equality, fraternity, these three; but the greatest of these is liberty.
-- with apologies to 1 Corinthians 13

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Liberty. The impulse to be free is the most basic of animal impulses, and lies behind our few inborn fears -- of falling, eg.

I have every sympathy for each of the politicians who has argued above against each of the political systems that seems to her/him to have tricked us out of our liberty. So, like, preach to the converted, y'all, all sides of the ideological divides; why not? who's listening anyway when we talk like that?

Or recognize that impulse; seek only the compromises and arrangements that maximize the yearnings of all of us who sing that song with feeling.

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Oh freedom, oh freedom, oh freedom over me
And before I'll be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave
And go home to my Lord and be free

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My attitude towards freedom is fairly existential, in that you've always got it and can't get rid of it. The real freedom is the choices I can make from the realities that I have around me. I am not free to grow wings and fly in the air or become intangible and walk through solid walls. Everywhere there are impediments to my options. Some man-made, and thus easier to fight against, and others intrinsic to the laws of the universe, and so harder to topple (but not impossible).

Whatever the circumstances, however, I am always free. Free to decide if I will accept the impediments that I have been given or struggle against them. Many people struggled against humanity's earthbound nature for centuries, and little by little we find ways to overcome it. Similarly, in the nineteenth century, economists maintained that the vast majority of people would always be destitute. Again, certain people did not accept this and found that it wasn't true.

This is your real freedom. Will you accept or will you strive?

There could never be any absolute freedom in terms of enablements to action. The acient pharohs and emporers wanted to be free to live as gods, and had to enslave the rest of humanity to do it. By changing that social order, we have denied them that freedom. If the idea of a world of equality appeals to you, then this is a good thing, but you are creating impediments nonetheless. Creating some to remove others. It's always a judgement call.

I don't think of myself as fighting for freedom. Rather, I use my freedom to fight for a vision of a better world, by my own subjective standards. Will it be a world that is more free? People in general will be more free to attain a modest level of happiness and prosperity, but then they will be less free to rise above their fellows and bend them to their will.

In Canadian society, we most often offer up our freedom and our power without thinking about it. I struggle every day to maintain my autonomy, to exert my power, and to be free. All the choices I make in a day are a part of this struggle.

Every time I turn on the TV and spend my time and my intelligence watching garbagey drivel, heavily laden with advertising, laced with the ideology of consumption, of profit motive, of moremoremore, I'm giving some of MY individual power to the TV machine, the industry that creates the stuff that shows up on the screen and all of the industries that the TV fuels and spurs on (most of which, IMO, are responsible for the degradation of the environment and universal human rights, directly or indirectly).

If I were to buy coffee at Starbucks or Second Cup, and when I go to Tim Hortons, I'm giving some of MY power (in the form of my consumer vote--my money) to those corporations.

There are more and more examples, of course.

For me, freedom is having the ability to choose where and when and how I use my power. Freedom is *having* power to use at my discretion (we start out with it, but it's easy to lose it). There's an upward vacuum, sucking all the people's power to the top, to the government and the CEO's and keeping it there, out of the reach of us regular folk. As it seems, once it's gone, it's really really hard to get it back. It's gonna take a proletariat revelation, though, to spur on the revolution. We're all so stupefied by TV (my personal nemesis, clearly) that we don't realize how much power we really have and how we could work together to wrest it back from the powers that suck....

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Our lifestyle is pretty miserable. Markbo don't you dare call me a dreamer. I consider our society garbage. We have brainwashed ourselves into thinking that we are Free.

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Our government safeguards our freedoms more than any other government on the planet, except the U.S. which you critisize. If your lifestyle is miserable in this country it would simply be far worse anywhere else.

I understand that this does not mean we can't improve our freedoms and responsibilities that come with them. Its just that you should be consistent with how you categorize Canada. If life here is miserable, then Cuba is horrific, and we'll have to get a thesaurus out or maybe invent new words worse than catastrophic, or hellish etc...

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Private property is property upon which most people may not stand, walk, or sleep. Therefore, the more private property, the less freedom.

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How do you reconcile this with the fact that the richest countries in the world protect property rights the most?

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This is liberating. It is obscene to have vast estates or tracks of land that are simply trophies of a weathy corporation which are then used to improve status when their banker's visit while prople in Toronto or Los Angeles go homeless, starve and die without any of the social amenities of a civil society...

How can any of us be free with this kind of thing going on?

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Homeless in toronto don't starve unless they want to.

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There could never be any absolute freedom in terms of enablements to action. The acient pharohs and emporers wanted to be free to live as gods, and had to enslave the rest of humanity to do it. By changing that social order, we have denied them that freedom. If the idea of a world of equality appeals to you, then this is a good thing, but you are creating impediments nonetheless. Creating some to remove others. It's always a judgement call.

I don't think of myself as fighting for freedom. Rather, I use my freedom to fight for a vision of a better world, by my own subjective standards. Will it be a world that is more free? People in general will be more free to attain a modest level of happiness and prosperity, but then they will be less free to rise above their fellows and bend them to their will.

The world is always full of impediments, and until you are impeded from living your freedom remains. The question is what are you going to do with it?

[QUOTE]
could freedom be the ability to live according to the laws you feel are best, whether its communist, Islamic, libertarian, or fascist, ...?

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until that system imposes on others freedoms. Such as sharia law, etc...

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So I'm with Jacob Two-Two, but I'm also with the Communists

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Our government safeguards our freedoms more than any other government on the planet, except the U.S. which you critisize. If your lifestyle is miserable in this country it would simply be far worse anywhere else.

What our government and the US government safeguards is not as much our freedom as it is our property, our luxuries, our profit-motivated economy and our ability to exploit the environment and the less prosperous people in the world so that we can have all our sneakers and X-boxes and pop-tarts for cheap.
Property rights do not equal freedom, and as others here have already suggested, may actually be perfectly contrary to real freedom.

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Homeless in toronto don't starve unless they want to.

This statement is just plain offensive to me. I cannot understand the arrogance of people who think that the people living on Toronto's streets have chosen to be there. Don't starve unless the want to?!?! What are you talking about?? Who would ever choose to live like that? If it is any kind of choice at all, it's not a free one, and likely they're on the street because it's the lesser of two or more evils. Some people really don't have the options that the rest of us do. Nobody CHOOSES to starve or freeze to death or to live in filth and squalor. I can't believe that that's possible.

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Which communists. what about voting.

I'm with the communists who think that the most power should be held by the most people, that the people should control the means of production of the things that we need and want, that we should be able to choose how our resources are used, and that profit and growth is NOT the only measure of worth. Those ones.

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If your lifestyle is miserable in this country it would simply be far worse anywhere else.

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How do you reconcile this with the fact that the richest countries in the world protect property rights the most?

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[ October 09, 2002: Message edited by: Sarcasmobri ]

Jacob Two Two sees freedom as an individual and inalienable thing. Lima Bean agrees with him. Satana argues it has to do with equality. For Dr. Conway it is the right to do as you choose which, in turn, does not infringe on the rights of others. Let's call it a balance of self-interest. He can correct me if he likes.

I read your post but I am still unclear. If that cynic comment was aimed at me, do know I still love you and accept the label. I am a cynic.

Freedom is a much over used word. We confuse freedom of choice with the option of WalMart or Zellers and a thousand brands of toothpaste. We decide we our freer than others because we have SUV's while they ride bicycles. A case in point was George W. Bush post-9/11. He could have addressed Americans stating now is not the time to give into fear. Now is the time to embrace our freedoms by living our lives and building our communities. We will not be chained by the tyranny of terror. Instead he said go out and shop.

I think this thread demonstrates the great ambiguity of what is freedom. We don't know. We have our basic freedoms of religion and association and speech. But then they are curtailed in every which way. Markbo would deny your choice to grow a plant, harvest it and smoke it but he says he stands for freedom. We have the right to wear that placard and march the street but how does that single and lonely voice compete with a multi-million dollar budget and ads on every station and billboard and newspaper all proclaiming not only is the world not ending it is brought to you by Maxwell House?

And what of our religions? Should they speak out loudly on social and political matters, the corporate lobby shouts back even more loudly that churches ought to remain silent and only concern themsleves with matters of the spirit lest their tax exemptions be withdrawn.

And then when we walk the street or speak our thoughts, our most private and intimate thoughts, we find our movements are now surveilled by video camera our converstaions monitored and taped. Our thoughts and sentences subject to examination and future investigation should unknown, unseen powers determine them so worthy. And should we speak out, the last defence of police states everywhere is invoked: if you are doing nothing wrong you need not fear.

Our personal information, our most important and greatest freedom, the freedom of privacy, is warehoused, trafficked and sold for the commercial use of government and marketers alike. And barely a peep is raised.

But what I'd like to talk about is political freedom. The freedom to observe the law or break it. The freedom to change the law and impose it.

[ October 09, 2002: Message edited by: satana ]

[ October 09, 2002: Message edited by: WingNut ]

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You cannot have any freedom of speech when the principal and most effective media of communication are an exclusive monopoly held by the most privileged and richest sectors, sworn enemies of any kind of change, be it economic, political or social. The ability to enjoy wealth, education, understanding and culture remains in the hands of that tiny part of the population which recieves the largest proportion of the goods produced by the country. It is not a casual fact that Latin America is the part of the world with the greatest difference between rich and poor. What kind of democracy and which human rights could exist in such conditions? It would be like trying to cultivate flowers in the middle of the Sahara.

No puede haber libertad alguna de expresión donde los principales y más eficaces medios de comunicación constituyen un monopolio exclusivo en manos de los sectores más privilegiados y ricos, enemigos juramentados de cualquier tipo de cambio económico, político y social. El disfrute de las riquezas, la educación, los conocimientos y la cultura queda en manos de los que, constituyendo apenas una ínfima parte de la población, reciben la mayor proporción de los bienes que produce el país. No es casual el hecho de que América Latina sea la región del mundo donde existe la mayor diferencia entre los más ricos y los más pobres. ¿Cuál democracia y cuáles derechos humanos pueden existir en esas condiciones? Sería como cultivar flores en pleno desierto del Sahara.

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The arch-enemy of liberty, Fidel Castro, speaks about freedom of the press, May 1, 2002.

As he goes on to point out, Cuba has opted for other freedoms: the freedom from hunger, the freedom from disease, the freedom to receive a good education. Despite many years of economic blockade, the collapse of its primary benefactor, and a significant disadvantage in the receipt of foreign aid, Cuba has not done too badly, as shown by figures from the UNDP:

Life expectancy at birth:
Cuba 76, United States 77, Canada 79
Doctors per 100,000 people:
Cuba 530, United States 279, Canada 229
Infant Mortality Rate (per 1000 live births)
Cuba 7, United States 6, Canada 6
Infants with low birth weight(%)
Cuba 6, United States 8, Canada 6
Adult/Youth Literacy:
Cuba 96.7/99.8
Female secondary enrolment rate:
Cuba 79, United States 76, Canada 93
Female secondary enrolment as percentage of male:
Cuba 111, United States 73, Canada 98

The comparison with any other Latin American country would be even more dramatic.

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posted October 09, 2002 05:23 PM
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You cannot have any freedom of speech when the principal and most effective media of communication are an exclusive monopoly held by the most privileged and richest sectors, sworn enemies of any kind of change, be it economic, political or social.

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Surely this describes Cuba itself

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Probably. But that does not deny the argument, which I think has value. It is far too easy to opt for liberties (or neoliberties ) and leave the poor to starve in the street, as is their right . ("The law, in its majestic equality, forbids all men to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread - the rich as well as the poor.")

Luis Alberto Rivera Leyva (a self-described independent journalist in Cuba) reveals the oppression he faces:

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I was detained twice....

On both occasions I was taken by agents of the State Security Department (DSE) to houses of "interrogation," where officials used what must be their new "method of working." Instead of beatings and threats, I was offered excellent food and drink, that I refused to taste, and they tried to persuade me to stop being a journalist or just to write about the achievements of the revolution

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(available here.)

Seriously, I am very divided about Cuba. On the one hand, its successes, both in education and health, are monumental and ejemplary. On the other hand, things are deteriorating (which is very sad) and the progression towards democracy is pretty well non-existent.

At the same time, it is very hard to be optimistic about the state of democracy elsewhere in Latin America. Surely what is needed is the freedom to adopt parts of each model; unfortunately, external pressures make that very difficult.

[ October 09, 2002: Message edited by: Rici Lake ]

We need to take hold of the fact that the personal and the political are two sides of the same coin and that what we choose, what we do, has a real effect on a lot of things and a lot of people, that intrinsically, each of us has SO MUCH power. It's just a matter of getting it back and putting it to use. Things could be so much better for so many more people if we could just redistribute the power more fairly.
That would be Freedom, no?

[ October 09, 2002: Message edited by: Lima Bean ]

[ October 10, 2002: Message edited by: Lima Bean ]

I envision things like freedom and power as being entities much like water--they are in finite quantity, though vast and unmeasurable, and cannot be diminished or destroyed. They move through our world in a cycle like water does, collecting here, dissapearing from there, rising and falling. And just as the cycle of evaporation, condensation, rain, etc. can change and be distorted if the water itself is manipulated or abused, so can power and freedom shift and change to become a menace, or something desperately lacking, or something that gets hoarded and kept out of the cycle (like the way the Alberta oil industry is stealing so much fresh water and sealing it up forever in the cavities created when they suck the oil out of the earth).

I agree entirely with Lima Bean's way of putting things when she says:

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It's how capitalism has destroyed democracy: the profit motive and competitive nature of a free economy, coupled with the ideology of acquisition and growth, makes us focus on the personal "freedoms" of consumer choice and instant gratification of any nature we can imagine. The political falls by the wayside for everyone who doesn't feel that s/he personally and directly profits from his/her investment in it, be that invesment time, intelligence, passion, or money (or anything else). TV and shopping malls tell us that our money is far more powerful than our thoughts and ideas, our shared knowledge, our material capabilities, and ultimately, in a democracy, our votes. We also learn that without money, we are nothing: if you cannot buy you're worthless as a human being--no matter what you can think or feel or do.

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Capitalism destroys democracy; it offers us individualism and consumer culture as tacky substitutes for our lost liberty -- that's more the way I would like to think.

Why am I so intent on saving words like liberty and freedom? I'm not making much of a point here, not disagreeing with others' emphasis so much. Except I know enough history to know that many good people in the past, fixed for long enough on oppressive systems that they opposed, have ended up believing, in their narrow, critical fixation, that liberty really was dispensable, or could wait till other things got fixed.

I don't want anyone to conclude, out of disgust with "individualism" (which I agree is a problem, an ideology to be fought, almost a cult in North America), that it is to be equated with real liberty, and therefore to dismiss cranky eccentric hermits like me as spoiled and irrelevant.

Depressed people have often fallen for bread and circuses in the past when they have vaguely perceived that all other liberty is gone, along with the other things that give them, each of them, dignity. I think we are in that situation.

But I think it's important to keep stressing the reality of the thing we want, to speak of it positively even as we critique the plastic parody we've got. And I guess I just stumbled across what it is I think liberty is: it is one of those things that contributes to human dignity. (Animal dignity, too, to me.) If our behaviour isn't giving us that, then it isn't a true expression of freedom -- more likely it's neurotic.

And thank you for this:

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And I guess I just stumbled across what it is I think liberty is: it is one of those things that contributes to human dignity. (Animal dignity, too, to me.) If our behaviour isn't giving us that, then it isn't a true expression of freedom -- more likely it's neurotic.

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Power and freedom....perhaps a state of mind, but if so, the state of mind has to influence action, has to be real and material in some sense as well.

So I think those of us who have money do have a fair amount of freedom in this society, but we get it at the expense of those who don't. In a truly free society, the inequalities wouldn't be so pronounced. In this society especially, but in all societies to some degree, power is attached to material wealth.

Nationalism and racism and religious conflict and geography, capitalism, television, and loads of other things make it so that we can protect our own and forget about the rest--globally, provincially, and even at home, here in our cities.

There is enough food and land on the earth for us all to live well. The disparity that exists isn't because we lack sufficient resources, but because of the free market economy that dictates that only money equals freedom, only money equals power. Imagine if instead of profit and gain and growth, our collective goals were health and happiness and security for each and every one of us.....

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...health and happiness and security for each and every one of us...

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To say we live in freedom (as jacob 2-2 clearly stated earlier) is inaccurate pretty much from the get-go because there are many things impinging on our freedom. The freedom of others would probably be the first order of social impingement. It seems like the discussion here is not "what is freedom" but "how should we reconcile each person's freedom?" The argument seems to be about what priority to place on each category of freedom.

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Freedom seems to have become a catch-all phrase at this point. I still understand freedom as being a physical and existential state of being...

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I don't know. If we're to maximize everyone's freedom, we have to make it impossible for any one person or group to seize and hold hugely disproportionate amounts of power (and I include money in this, as a form of power). A free market is only free as long as there is competition - once there's a monopoly, or competition is somehow less than totally active (as when corporations cooperate to keep wages down or prices up or whatever), the consumer no longer has a choice.

Basically, it used to be that the corporation was really limited. There were caps on how much money they could hold, rules about mergers and property rights etc. At some point the corporation came to have the same rights and powers as an individual and that's when everything changed--or started to change.

So, somewhere way back there, there were legislated methods to control corporate power and growth. I wonder if reinstating some of those would help...(if, of course, it were possible.)

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Early American charters were created literally by the people, for the people as a legal convenience. Corporations were "artificial, invisible, intangible," mere financial tools. They were chartered by individual states, not the federal government, which meant they could be kept under close local scrutiny. They were automatically dissolved if they engaged in activities that violated their charter. Limits were placed on how big and powerful companies could become. Even railroad magnate J. P. Morgan, the consummate capitalist, understood that corporations must never become so big that they "inhibit freedom to the point where efficiency [is] endangered."

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Full text here: http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/28/usa.html

[ October 16, 2002: Message edited by: Lima Bean ]