> James, I agree with much of what you're saying, but how do you reconcile
> your position here with what you write in LM? In the latest issue, you have
> a lead article all about the constraints on freedom, most of which I
> endorse wholeheartedly, but which has little to do with the politics of
> production. And your editor, Mick Hume, says in an intro to the issue that
> the left today is the enemy of freedom (which left? the liberal-social
> worker-antismoking-Fabian-Hillary Clinton left? Noam Chomsky? Sid
> Chatterjee? Bob Malecki?).
Eric Foner's just published *The Story of American Freedom*, while pretty much devoid of any deep look at ideology, makes it quite clear just how elastic and contested an idea "freedom" has been.
The anti-statist, libertarian notion of freedom has repeatedly seduced some on the left-of-center side, in the late 18th Century with some objective foundation -- except, of course, that it served to keep slavery in place. It's later incarnations have been increasingly pernicious to larger sectors of society.
Every time American blacks make progress--coincident with a redefinition of freedom that centers around their experience--there follows a backlash period in which libertarian definitions of freedom make a strong comeback. Foner himself doesn't make this observation, but the record he chronicles is quite clear.
This isn't to say that such definitions are purely reactionary -- just that they have a substantial reactionary effect.
There's tremendous difference between Martin Luther King's use of the word "freedom" and Ronald Reagan's.
King is someone we should be happy to claim as part of the left -- and his use of "freedom" is well worth our study and consideration. Getting all in a dither because of what Bill Clinton or Tony Blair may have done as emblematic of "the left" -- that's just plain silly.
And adopting some derivative of Reagan's "freedom" as our own -- that makes US advocates of yet another flavor of lesser evilism. One that doesn't even have the plea of necessity going for it.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"