Creating Freedom. Raoul Martinez

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      Modern states expend vast resources on shaping the possibilities and incentives of their populations. Intelligence agencies, police forces and soldiers – along with surveillance cameras, guns and barbed wire – guard the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ behaviour, changing the risks associated with different courses of action. Laws define what is allowed, and coercive force awaits those who step beyond the paths of compliance. It is in the context of wide-ranging laws, backed by state power, that we make all of our choices.

      Without the threat of coercive power, massive inequalities of wealth could not be sustained. The starving will take food if they can, the homeless will occupy empty buildings if they are able, and the sick will obtain treatment if not prevented from doing so. The more concentrated wealth becomes in a society, the more resources must be dedicated to its protection. One way to measure this is to look at the proportion of the national workforce dedicated to maintaining ‘security’. This includes police officers, military personnel, prison guards, court officials, but also private security firms and weapons manufacturers. Across nations, a clear pattern can be observed: more unequal nations have a higher proportion of their workforces dedicated to ‘guard labour’.² Since inequality exploded in the United States, there has been a marked increase in guard labour – in fact, it is a world leader in this respect, boasting 5.2 million workers in the sector in 2011.³ As a proportion of the total workforce this amounts to four times that of Sweden, a nation with a comparable standard of living. The pattern holds within nations just as it does between them. The most unequal American states have double the amount of guard labour (as a proportion of the workforce) as the most equal ones.⁴

      The function of guard labour is to restrict the ways that people can gain access to valuable, often essential, resources – resources under the legal ownership of someone else. Ownership, by definition, reduces the options of other people. The owner of a resource has the power to decide what to do with it. Put another way, to own a resource is to deny the rest of the world the right to use it without permission. It is a relationship between one person (one company, one country) and the rest of humanity – one that is ultimately founded on force.

      Centuries of violence have drawn and redrawn national borders, and ownership rights have been transferred to those who wielded the most effective fighting force. Indeed, the modern state was born of war. Given a fairly broad definition, one count estimates that over a thousand wars took place between 1400 and 1984.⁵ European monarchies averaged 40 per cent of total expenditure on warfare in the fifteenth century, 27 per cent in the sixteenth, 46 per cent in the seventeenth, and 54 per cent in the eighteenth.⁶ In times of war, military costs can exceed 90 per cent of total expenditure. In fact, over the past two centuries, there has not been a single year in which the world has been without military conflict.

      From 1500 to the twentieth century, almost every country on Earth came under the direct or indirect control of European colonial powers. Native populations were wiped out or dispossessed of their land. Natural resources were stolen and used to enrich the colonising nations. The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw almost all of Africa conquered and divided up between a handful of European nations. In the blink of an eye, 110 million Africans were turned into subjects.⁷ Nations were conjured out of thin air as territory was demarcated with clean straight lines across the continent. Joseph Conrad called it ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience’.⁸ Leopold II, King of the Belgians, was a key player in this ‘scramble for loot’. For decades he had been obsessed with obtaining a colony for his young country. Belgium ‘doesn’t exploit the world’, he told one of his advisers. ‘It’s a taste we have got to make her learn.’⁹ Though he never set foot on Congolese soil, Leopold took control of a territory seventy-six times larger than Belgium itself with the aim of growing rich on the systematic theft of rubber and ivory. Under his brutal and exploitative rule, at least half the population of his newly created nation perished. According to authoritative estimates, that amounted to roughly 10 million people. It was genocide.¹⁰

      Prior to the First World War, the European powers owned more than three-quarters of the industrial capital in Africa and Asia.¹¹ During this period, writes Thomas Piketty, ‘the rest of the world worked to increase consumption by the colonial powers and at the same time became more and more indebted to those same powers. . . . The advantage of owning things is that one can continue to consume and accumulate without having to work . . . The same was true on an international scale in the age of colonialism.’

      Ownership has always been a defining concept of legal frameworks. Laws determine who controls what, what limits exist on that control, and how rights can be transferred. Much ownership can be traced back to acts of violence and subterfuge. Leopold’s legal ownership of the Congo began with African chiefs signing treaties in a language they didn’t understand and with no idea of what they were giving away. Over the course of history, claims of ownership have been made on all kinds of things, from land, buildings and machinery to water, ideas and even DNA. Claims of ownership have also been made on human beings. The idea that women are a resource to be owned and controlled by men has been deeply embedded in the laws and practices of civilisation for thousands of years. The same is true of slavery. Many millions have lived their lives as the state-enforced legal property of someone else.

      In almost every large civilisation, slaves have occupied the lowest tier of a large and complex social hierarchy. Their intelligence, talents and energy were used to bring about outcomes desired by their owners. Just two centuries ago, over three-quarters of humanity were held captive by systems of slavery or serfdom.¹² Traders from Britain shipped close to 1.5 million slaves across the Atlantic, earning for themselves roughly £8 billion in today’s money. The conditions of a slave’s existence, as historian Adam Hochschild testifies, were abysmal: ‘They plant, cultivate, and harvest most of Earth’s major crops. They earn no money from their labor. Their work often lasts twelve or fourteen hours a day. Many are subject to cruel whippings or other punishments if they do not work hard enough. They die young.’¹³

      Today, the ownership of the talents, energies and time of human beings persists, but takes a very different form. In the past, the control exerted by masters over their slaves was lifelong, coercive and bound by few constraints. Now, control of human labour manifests as highly constrained, temporary forms of consensual ownership: ‘employment’. Instead of being sold against our will into indefinite servitude, we rent ourselves out for a fee, for defined purposes and set periods of time (of course, some people are still forced into slavery).

      Why do people sell their labour? In the present system, access to basic goods and services – food, shelter, energy, education and healthcare – is increasingly obtainable only in exchange for money. Access to money is closely controlled (a primary function of guard labour). For those that do not inherit wealth, the ways of obtaining this currency are extremely limited. To survive, most people must pass through the tight bottleneck of employment. That money is paid does not change the fact that at the heart of this arrangement is a relationship of control. The employer determines a vision of the future and the employee works to bring it about. Many people are compelled to do this because other paths to meeting their fundamental needs have been closed off or are just too risky to take. In fact, the options available to many people are so limited that those who manage to obtain employment – even dangerous, unsatisfying or low-paid employment – are considered the lucky ones.

      Loans are the only other viable source of money for most people. Taking on a debt appears to be a voluntary action, but as pathways to life’s indispensable resources are increasingly closed off, it may become unavoidable. The need to borrow money in order to pay for life’s fundamental necessities locks people into a relationship of compliance and control. The legal obligation to repay what is borrowed (plus substantial amounts of interest) traps people in a form of indentured labour with respect to the lenders making the loans. The coercive apparatus of the state ensures that failure to make repayments carries heavy penalties, ranging from the repossession of a СКАЧАТЬ