When Rudolph Rocker wrote about his experiences in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, he wrote about an idyllic society based around voluntary, free association that rejected wealth and ownership. The hierarchies were rebalanced, meaning no one person stood head and shoulders above another. Traits that were believed traditionally to be more worthy than others were completely recast. Footing was not so much lost as voluntarily rescinded, so that legal professionals stood on par with waitresses. Management fell away in favour of direction, as workers obtained the means of production and chose instead to follow the guidance of a collectively decided as worthy.
I fell in love with this idea during university. In fact, I argued it as the logical conclusion of humanity's political system in one of my final exams. That as people continue to educate themselves through the endless streams of information and ideas freely available to them, they will start to thinking increasingly more creatively, overcome the problems they face and find a way where the hierarchical systems that govern us become, finally, superfluous.
When I argued this issue with my more straight thinking friends, the common rebuttal was that this is pure romanticism from an advocate. But it wasn't just through Rocker that I learnt about this historical anomaly. Most of what Rocker wrote about was supported many decades later by Anthony Beavor - hardly the world's most premier Anarchist thinker.
This was the school of thought being advocated, Anarcho-Syndicalism. It was the fuel for my faith in the future back then, that one day this would come to pass. Of course, with each passing year you find a little more cynicism trickling down over those rose tints you've used to filter your view of the future. While deep down this natural harmony remains my view of a logical conclusion, rationally it seems to me to be utterly out of reach.
The problem is that while Anarcho-Syndicalism was the brief realisation of freedom. It occurred in a fractured society where a dangerous enemy, the extreme right, scratched at the doors. It grew in reaction to that threat at a time when distinctions and battle lines were much more easily recognisable.
Now, the distinction between ideas has blurred considerably. The enemies of freedom have now begun to position themselves as its engineers - all you have to do is look at some of the party names out there. Both Britain and Austria have far-right parties that have high-jacked the name of Freedom when what they advocate is anything but. Then there's Geert Wilders Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, one of the only far-right to gain themselves a significant voice in a parliament where their anti-liberal views are not only on view for all to see, but actually enacted.
The problem is that with this advent, the idea of freedom has actually begun to erode. It's a clever enactment to redefine and mutate the word. The only way we can understand and identify the things around us and especially concepts is by their label. If their label begins to take on a new meaning, then so does the thing itself.
At the risk of saying something incredibly unpopular, a large proportion of the blame should go on people themselves for accepting such a ridiculous shift in definition. To me, the definition of concepts have to come from their relation to past occurrences. If people are so ill-informed that the label of freedom can be accepted as fitting for a party of the far-right shows not just a failure of the education system, but a laziness and arrogance in people who think that their opinion is worth so much without requiring any work at all.
I don't think that the failure of the education system is a valid argument. I hated school, was bullied almost relentlessly from primary to secondary, though I managed to punch my way out of that paper bag eventually, and was never recognised for my hard work by teachers, who seemed to heap praise on my tormenters. Starting to sound bitter?
Well, I'm not. School didn't diminish my desire to learn, and I learnt a hell of a lot outside of school than I did in. I spent hours pouring over books, absorbing documentaries and ensuring I followed the news from a collection of different publications. You learn to pick out certain pieces of information that can be defined as the closest thing to facts and identify them from the majority of spin. You learn that just because something is said, no matter how, with whatever authority and no matter how many times is not necessarily true.
I left school with average GCSE's, poor A-Levels and in a dead end. A few years later I had a diploma in Journalism and was at Westminster University studying Literature and Creative Writing. What I'm trying to get at here is that people have the means to prevent freedom becoming the fallacy it's becoming, which it's in danger of becoming completely.
Of course, these examples are the extreme versions (ba-doom-cha). They are very blatant high-jacking of labels, but they have allowed for the mutation of the intricacies of employment too. Now I turn my fire on the so-called 'Libertarians'.
To some, Libertarianism is the bastard child of Anarcho-Syndicalism, and it's a concept that I briefly flirted with for a while. Primarily, people should expect to live their lives according to the very rational principles set forth by John Stuart Mill that so long as your actions do not infringe on the utility of others, then it should be permissive. This is a major characteristic of Libertarianism.
The problem is it's all rather conflicting. Modern Libertarianism rather than freeing up all the machinery of society that keep us acting in certain ways, rather wants to remove safeguards that give us our freedom. They advocate a withdrawal from the Convention of Human Rights, which are an ironclad, multinational assurance of our freedoms and right to dignity as humans. They also advocate the reduction of corporation tax and increase of personal tax for many on lower and middle incomes with a flat tax, so those with less have more of the means of their financial freedom taken away, while those with more retain. What's more, they oppose gay marriage, an individual freedom they believe to remain in the hands of an institution.
So where does the argument of freedom come from? Well, what it offers, essentially, is more freedom for the large organisations and corporations that hold power over us. There's no doubt that they will free up companies to have more power and rescind our rights as employees. This is already happening under the coalition, who have plans to make it far easier for employees to be fired. It's almost a forgone conclusion that there will be no action on a living wage or even regressive action on the minimum wage.
What they believe is that by freeing up legislation in regards to companies, everything will work itself out. The problem is, restrictions on corporate and company actions have been an evolutionary thing. From the times when Britain was the workshop of the world, and entirely exploitative, to all the safeguards and corporate requirements that protect us now.
What people wrongly believe is that we could never go back, but that's not the case. We live in times of economic hysteria, where correct treatment means lower returns to those on top. Europe is a massive safeguard in regards to this, though admittedly they do enforce some very stupid policies too. But what people never bother looking into is the balance. What we have to remember is the aim of business enterprises is to make money, not to care for the people in the world. They are abstracts that still take precedent over the real. The only way this has even begun to be humanised is through regulation.
Political power is by no means the only power structure that wields control over us. On a very basic level, we are essentially slaves to our employers who pay our wages and give is the means to survive, not to mention every other branch of our lives that they control or influence. A completely free market economy, free of all government interference, in our current economic condition would be disastrous for the quality of our private live. The whims of management and directors would have to be followed, as an alternative place of employment is no viable option. Business works by a system of supply and demand. At present, humanity is in abundant supply while its use to business is in low demand. Vis-à-vis, humanity is disposable. Think how bad this would be without a welfare system to catch us when we fall.
And that is a major Libertarian policy, to severely reduce welfare. So without a living wage or any form of top-ups to those low wage that companies are criminally allowed to pay, how do people survive? Well, short answer would be they don't.
Finally, in what should be seen as a joke, but is instead accepted in a wholly unironic fashion by middle-England is the rejection of free movement. Liberty and libertarianism forcing the closure of boarders, preventing people from moving from one area of the globe to another. This, surprisingly, is a form of control... the faces staring back are still blank.
It is dangerous to perpetuate the hysteria over the immigration as it does fuel racism. It can also result in ridiculous rulings like this. Immigration is never discussed in-depth, rather thrown about in its most basic forms. Fear and horror stories are what sell and if the papers are to believed then one would believe no Brit has ever left the country for warmer climates. The thing is, plenty of retired British citizens have made new homes in the South of France, Spain and elsewhere. Where we to leave Europe and close our borders they'd be sent home where they'd be forced to use the welfare state here, if it still existed, in a place that they don't want to be.
The world is smaller, and the people we meet aren't necessarily from our country. Being a mixed race guy, the idea of nationalistic incest isn't something that I'm to concerned about, and I think the easier it is to be with people, wherever in the world they are from, the more you are going to enjoy your short life.
And that's the point, right? Utility. What we should be working toward is a happier life, and business is not the end all be all of life. Our rights against those of the power structures built around us must be maintained. By voting for 'Libertarians' like Ukip, you are essentially voting in a lobbyist group of the heads of big business, forwarding their cause via crude and populist right-wing, borderline nationalistic means. Whether people want to believe it or not, government is supposed to be there to check business. Of all the undesirable power structures, government is the one we have most control over it. To trade this for the free-rule of big business conjures the words 'frying pan' and 'fire'.
Prior to the domination of Nationalistic ideas in the 1800's, freedom of movement was absolute. So go back a little further to a by-gone day and you have attitudes quite different to those you believe you want to reinstate now. But to make things more confusing you have children working in factories until the early 20th century. Living conditions have improved unimaginably over the last few decades, yet people pine for by-gone days. This takes me back to my previous point. Perhaps people might want to educate themselves a little more rather than putting all their faith in the rather average Downton Abbey.
