David Harvey: Socialists Must Be the Champions of Freedom
Right-wing propaganda claims that socialism is the enemy of individual freedom. The exact opposite is true: socialists work to create the material conditions under which people can truly be free, without the rigid constraints capitalism imposes on their lives.
This is the paradox of our current situation: that in the name of freedom, we’ve actually adopted a liberal utopian ideology which is a barrier to the achievement of real freedom. (Andrés Gómez Tarazona / Flickr)
The topic of freedom was raised when I was giving some talks in Peru. The students there were very interested in the question: “Does socialism require a surrender of individual freedom?”
The right wing has managed to appropriate the concept of freedom as its own and to use it as a weapon in class struggle against socialists. The subservience of the individual to state control imposed by socialism or communism is something to be avoided, they said, at all costs.
My reply was that we should not give up on the idea of individual freedom as being part of what an emancipatory socialist project is about. The achievement of individual liberties and freedoms is, I argued, a central aim of such emancipatory projects. But that achievement requires collectively building a society where each one of us has adequate life chances and life possibilities to realize each one of our own potentialities.
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