Three years ago I took American Government and Politics with Jerry Goldman and had to read the textbook he and two others wrote. Essentially a long apologia for our wonderful form of government, it made one particularly unsettling assertion: Freedom and equality are, more often than not, at odds with each other.
Goldman et al place freedom and equality at opposite ends of a spectrum; the redistribution of wealth or rules against racial discrimination enhance equality but infringe on personal freedom. What makes this so troubling is that good things like free speech and bad things like racial oppression seem to be in the same camp freedom.
Goldman and friends freely admit they’re using particular definitions when talking about these issues. “Freedom” is the “freedom to” (believe, discriminate, spend your money) while “equality” is the “freedom from” (hunger, bad health, discrimination). Unfortunately, by defining the words in this way we lump together many of the positive things usually called freedoms with many of the negative ones.
Let’s try a more useful distinction, one that will divide Goldman’s freedoms and forms of equality in a more value-consistent way. Instead of freedom and equality, let’s think in terms of two kinds of freedom: the freedom to dominate, and the freedom from domination.
Now we can separate the good freedoms from the bad ones which, according to Goldman, include such “freedoms” as the freedom to rape and kill. In my definition, these along with the “freedom” to sexually harass, to break a trade union, or to buy the presidency through campaign contributions are all forms of domination. Freedom from domination, on the other hand, encompasses the freedoms of speech, belief and association, as well as freedom from slavery, assault, destitution and dictatorship.
So we can all agree that freedom from domination is good and freedom to dominate is not, right? It’s not quite so easy. If we’re going to take this distinction seriously, it calls into question the legitimacy of some of our most basic institutions. First and foremost, we have to recognize that the “free” market is another expression of the freedom to dominate.
This is because corporate capitalism is a fundamentally authoritarian form of social organization. Corporations are run by a ruling junta (shareholders) who choose a dictator (CEO) to represent their interests.
The CEO rules through the diktat of the management class while employees have no say in who their boss is and very little in what their work will be (“should I choose this unfulfilling job or that one?”). They frequently give up their most basic rights privacy, free speech, self-government just to land a job. For a society that likes to call itself democratic, it seems strange that we so passively accept a form of tyranny in half our waking lives.
Creating a society that respects freedom from domination will not be easy. But before we can begin that task, we have to understand that racism, sexism, class oppression, personal violence and limits on nonviolent individual expression all coercion and exploitation are forms of domination. Jerry Goldman and his crowd dismiss these ideas as the unpopular beliefs of a handful on the political fringe. Well, the idea of democracy was once an extremist view as well.