Noob Question

[krazny]

So, I have a general understanding of Communism and Socialism, as a beginner. One of the things that bothers me, and a common response in discussion with less enlightened people, is the popular presumption that socialism equals no freedom. Is it not possible to provide social services and a fair life without invading personal freedoms? If anything, from reading the forums here, many of us seem pro-freedom. Anyone care to clarify why this misperception? I'm assuming it has to do with pseudo-Communist countries and the media?

[Aurora]

Well i guess it depends on who's freedoms were talking about, in even the most advanced capitalist countries any freedoms that workers have are dependent on whether the capitalists or the capitalist state allows them and how hard workers are willing to fight for them.

The primary freedoms that exist in capitalism are free trade, freedom to buy and sell because thats how capitalists remain capitalists. Freedom for capitalists necessitates the lack of freedom for the vast majority, so the communists in wanting to expand freedoms for workers inevitably must suppress capitalist freedoms

Marx and Engels have a bit about this here:

In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.

But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.

From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes.

You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.

[Jimmie Higgins]

The primary freedoms that exist in capitalism are free trade, freedom to buy and sell because thats how capitalists remain capitalists. Freedom for capitalists necessitates the lack of freedom for the vast majority, so the communists in wanting to expand freedoms for workers inevitably must suppress capitalist freedoms

Right. And a clear example of the hypocrisy about "capitalism=freedom" becomes pretty obvious when the right-wingers complaining about Corporations not having any freedom or that worker rights or environmental regulations are a "nanny state" are also the same people who want to build more prisons, want the police to check the immigration papers of Latinos, want to prevent gay people from getting married, and so on. The fact that the rich can just move their banks accounts out of the country, move industry to other countries and can ignore their native regulations in many of these trade-agreements, while migrant workers and Haitian refugees are detained and put through all sorts of bullshit also shows the hollowness of "free-trade" and other freedoms of capitalism.

And just on a personal level, how free do most people really feel when they are stuck in a job or have debt or mortgages or can't get out of a bad marriage because they would loose their partner's income or health insurance or it would disrupt the lives of their kids too much. It's one thing to have to work hard to farm for your own food - there's no escaping that if you are a small farmer or subsistence farmer... but in the industrial world, there's no objective need for many people to have to work so hard and just eek by day after day. When work speeds up for us or when we work really hard, it isn't because people will starve if we don't, the speedup or increased workload is only because it makes our bosses more profit. Right now output is down, but most people in the US are working harder (if they still have a job) for the same or less pay. Companies fire people and then don't replace them and expect the remaining workforce to maintain the same output.

Socialism, worker's democracy, would allow people to work together and to run production based on what's needed and desired, rather than what will make the most return on an investment regardless of how useful that enterprise really is. Just being able to democratically decide things at work would make socialism much more "free" for the vast majority of people than what life is like now. On top of that, people being able to decide how their communities are built (again rather than leaving these decisions to a handful of local developers - who again only want to make profit and don't care if they kick out a whole neighborhood of people if it will help them accomplish that goal).

I can't predict what people may decide in some future situation, but I also think that there is no reason for workers to want to regulate the behaviors of others that doesn't negatively impact others. So people might decide that it's not allowed to drink or smoke weed while working or driving, but there would be no reason to regulate people using alcohol or pot socially when it wouldn't possibly cause an accident. In class systems, the ruling class needs to have conformity so that their status quo is maintained. So there is a lot of emphasis on how to behave - if you act properly, then you will be rewarded (they claim) whereas failure to conform and have correct morals will cause you to have a miserable life and bad things will happen. In a democratically run society without a minority ruling class trying to control the rest of society, there would be no need to blame people for their own poverty and no need to explain inequality by saying that some people are "good" and get rewarded and others are bad or difficient in someway.

[Tommy4ever]

''The freedom of all is necessary for my freedom''

- Bakunin disagrees that communism is against freedom.

[mikelepore]

There is a popular misconception that socialism means abolishing freedom. The major cause of this misconception is that people haven't throught through the issue deeply enough to see the contradition in their own view. They say that the capitalist has a natural and fundamental human right to be wealthy enough to live on inheritance and never to have to work for a living. However, if such a thing really were a natural human right, and if it were also achieved generally, everyone living on inheritance and no one working, then were would be no production at all, and society would revert to the stone age. Therefore, the legally established right of the few to live on inheritance and perform no work cannot be a basic human right. Now, having established that the transformation of society on a socialist basis only abolishes a few people's legally established right, which is no one's fundamental human right, no substance remains to the claim that socialism involves the loss of freedom.

Unfortunately, the bad reputation of the idea of socialism is also produced partly by the left itself. For example, in a poll taken at this site, about 17 percent of the respondents said that they want religion to be made illegal. This group within the left drives the working class away and makes most people become more conservative.