1.5: Liberation Theory Part 1

Ideas for Action

As we engage in community organizing, we need to be clear about the goals of our work. Having an understanding of the major forms of domination at work in society will help you understand the deep systems in place that anchor the problems we are fighting against. People don’t just have trouble affording housing because they don't manage their money well. There is not enough housing available at prices people can afford. There are deep problems in how our society is organized that have to do with imbalances of power, which make housing unaffordable for many people. Understanding these deeply entrenched systems will help us to see where to put our energy to change society to work for all of us.

Note

The following are short excerpts from the book Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change by Cynthia Kaufman

Section 1: Introduction to Ideas For Action

When I went to my first meeting about the growing wars in Central America, I was nineteen years old and had never been involved in a political group before. At that time, my reaction was a simple humanitarian horror that people were being murdered and that my government was on the side of the murderers. Before I knew it, I was being recruited to form a chapter of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador in the area north of Los Angeles where I lived. I had no idea what I was doing, or how to go about forming an organization. Fortunately, I was put in touch with a few other young and inexperienced people from the local community college who had already begun to organize. They had just arranged an educational forum on El Salvador. One of the speakers lived in my community and had been very involved in the movement to stop the Vietnam War. As I listened to his stories of doing social change work back in those days, I realized how much our group could benefit from the involvement of people with more organizing experience.

Through this work, I got to know many people who had been involved in the radical social movements of the 1960s and others who had come directly from the revolutionary movements of Central America. I felt fascinated by the ideas and histories that appeared to be second nature to more seasoned activists. They had a whole vocabulary of historical events, famous people, and political positions that I had never heard of. They talked about the Russian Revolution, Emma Goldman, mysterious countries I didn’t know existed; they argued over violence and pacifism; people would be dismissed as out of touch, with labels such as “sectarian” or “Maoist.” At first I found it all very intimidating. How could I be a part of this movement if I had no idea what they were all talking about?

As I became more involved, my understanding of the world was completely shattered. Where I had once believed that the US government was democratic and that it promoted democracy around the world, I began to see it as controlled by evil forces and wreaking havoc on the world. In order to make sense out of my new awareness, I began to read. I read books about anarchism, Marxism, the Spanish Civil War, and feminism. My reading was scattered, and the more I read the more, I realized, I still had to learn. The most important thing I gained from all of this reading was a new framework for understanding the world. I no longer saw the United States as a benign force for good, nor did I see it as simply a force of pointless evil. I began to gain a new, fairly coherent picture of the world that included concepts such as imperialism, colonialism, corporate influence over the media, and ideology. These concepts were crucial for forming a new sense of meaning.

At the time when I became involved, there were many people around me who had been involved in the movements of the 1960s. And though many had come to see limits in what they had accomplished, they nevertheless had seen some major social transformations—the end of the eight years- long Vietnam War, for one—happen before their eyes and as a result of their actions. As that time recedes into history, and textbooks and TV movies portray ’60s activism as nothing more than naïveté and a bad fashion statement, the possibility that social movements can make a positive difference is increasingly hard to believe.

Mainstream media rarely represent social movements without distorting them—and the theories associated with them—beyond recognition. Still, when activism becomes too widespread to ignore—as it did in 1999 when tens of thousands of protesters shut down the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle—popular dissent and the possibility of making a difference becomes obvious even to the mainstream. Yet the intellectual tools needed to turn this discontent into a plan for action remain virtually inaccessible. Those interested in reading about politics find few contemporary theorists whose writing is easily understood. In meetings as well as in written materials, newcomers encounter people who use information and political jargon as a weapon to gain social status and intimidate others. And they see how intellectuals sometimes put themselves above people with less education. One easy response to all this is to become anti-intellectual, yet the fact is that we are always using ideas and theories. If we don’t reflect on them, we are likely to be using ideas that will not serve us well.

As people begin their engagement with movements for social justice, they often struggle to understand what they are doing and why they are doing it. Without some basic literacy in social theory, it is easy to be confused about what sorts of issues one should be working on, how this work will ever end up making a difference, and how the things one doesn’t like in the world are related to each other. Confronted with the corporate corruption of our government and declining avenues for democratic change, many people choose to drop out of politics altogether. Popular media portray cynicism as cool. The majority of Americans feel hopeless, ineffective, or both.

Understanding the issues from a historical point of view and using theory to analyze them can be very empowering. If we know the places where people’s thinking has gotten stuck in the past, we are less likely to repeat their mistakes. If we understand the references people are using, we are more likely to challenge and question, and less likely to be intimidated into agreement. If we understand the underlying issues in a given political situation, we are in a better position to analyze it for ourselves and to understand what should be done.

When I first began to study radical ideas and history, I had to remind myself that I was never going to know about everything. I needed to get used to the situation of knowing that there was a lot I didn’t know, and many theoretical issues about which I wasn’t sure of my opinion. That is a lesson I carried into the writing of this book. The book presents issues that I’m still wondering about and great debates that I can see both sides of.

There aren’t any simple answers to political questions, but there are tools and points of reference that can enrich our understanding of what is going on. I hope this book offers a coherent analysis of the issues and theoretical innovations of current US social justice movements and encourages you to investigate further. People can disagree about important issues and still be on the same side politically. They can accept some ideas from a thinker while rejecting others. When activists use a black-and-white framework, with theorists already pegged as either good or bad, they don’t push themselves to do the hard but rewarding work of putting the world together in a way that makes deep sense for themselves.

There are habits of mind that I think are important for a healthy engagement with the political world. One of the most important is openness. When we think we have all the answers, it is easy to become dogmatic and authoritarian. The other is humility. By this I mean holding on to a sense that no matter how much we know, other people have experiences and perspectives that we have much to learn from. This openness to complexity can also serve us well in political situations, where we learn to value the multiplicity of perspectives that different people bring to a situation.

If I believe that there are simple political truths, then I am likely to make judgments about other people before I have really listened to their perspectives. A vision of the world that includes the possibility for change requires a major reorientation in how we see the world. The biggest reorientation we need is one that enables us to see the ways that ordinary people, when they work together, can make huge changes in their society.

We are encouraged to see history as being made by amazing individuals, by the inevitable flow of things, or by government action. The fact that ordinary people acting together to achieve goals is a crucial part of the history of human society is rarely part of the picture we are given. Yet if we look at the positive changes that have been made in the recent past, almost all were the result of collective struggle.

Women didn’t just get the vote in modern electoral democracies when the time for it was inevitable. Rather, thousands of ordinary women, and men who supported their cause, in countries all around the world, organized and agitated to get the vote. The elementary school version of the civil rights movement is that Martin Luther King Jr. made it all happen through the sheer force of his personal morality. What’s too often left out is that King himself operated in the context of a broad popular movement made up of many ordinary people pushing for what they believed was right. The movement made King as much as King made the movement.

We can see these distortions in the way that Rosa Parks’s story is told. Many people learn in school that Rosa Parks was an African American woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who was so tired coming home from work one day that she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white rider. She was jailed for her action, which led to a boycott of the bus system that lasted more than a year until segregated seating was abolished.

What we aren’t told is that Parks was an activist who had gone through organizer training at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, that she was a member of the NAACP, and that King and his organization were looking for a case to draw attention to the issue of segregation. While it wasn’t especially uncommon for African Americans to resist giving up their seats— conflicts over segregation happened all the time—what was special about Parks’s case was that she was part of a movement to challenge segregation.

Rosa Parks was not an amazing individual when she took action. She was a person of conscience acting as part of a movement. When she refused to give up her seat, she didn’t know how the situation would play itself out, but she knew she could count on the movement to back her up. When we’re in the heat of a movement, we often don’t know the importance of what we’re doing. Partly that’s because it really is unpredictable how our actions will add up to lasting social change. But we also lack the most basic information about how the actions of those working for change in the past have added up to many of the things we take for granted in our lives.

The eight-hour workday was one of the major goals of the labor movement from the nineteenth century when the struggle began until it was enacted in the twentieth. In contrast with the US Labor Day in September, people throughout the rest of the world celebrate International Workers’ Day on May 1, to commemorate the May 1886 demonstration for the eight hour day in Chicago’s Haymarket Square and the four anarchists, whom the Illinois authorities hanged for their alleged association with a bomb that exploded at that demonstration. The Haymarket incident was just one of the many events that took place as thousands of ordinary labor movement activists fought to achieve the eight-hour workday. Surprisingly few people in the United States have any idea that it was the labor movement that enabled us to have some reasonable time off from work.

Probably most of the people involved in the movements that have shaped our lives for the better doubted their abilities to make a difference and were ridiculed or persecuted for thinking that they could make a difference. Yet ordinary people acting together for common goals have accomplished incredible amounts. There is nothing magical about making social change happen. What is required is a sense of hope that it is possible to make a difference, and some understanding of the world that helps orient our choices about what kinds of actions to take.

It is easier to see how our actions can make a difference when we can see how the actions of others have made a difference in the past, and when we can understand activists as ordinary people like ourselves.

Activity \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Reading Response Questions:

Please reflect on this reading by writing a short response to these questions. Your answer can include personal experience, and the writing does not need to be formal or polished. You are welcome to write as little as a sentence and as much as a paragraph. Think of it like journaling. 

1. How does it feel to you to think about being involved with social change?
2. What do you find intimidating about it?
3. What do you think about how Rosa Parks is taught about in school?
4. What do you relate to or find interesting in the Introduction to Ideas for Action?

Section 2: Capitalism, Freedom, and the Good Life

In 2002, I was involved in a struggle in Oakland, California, where I lived, to protect the rights of tenants. For the previous decade, the economy in the Bay Area had been booming. Despite the collapse of the computer and internet-related industries, a lot of money had poured in, and many people who had lived here for generations were displaced by well-heeled newcomers.

In Oakland, we had a moderate form of rent control. The landlord could raise our rent only about 3 percent a year, but whenever an apartment went vacant, he or she could raise it to whatever the market would bear. My landlord evicted one of my neighbors, then turned around and rented out the apartment for $600 more a month. African Americans were leaving the city at an alarming rate, many returning to the South.

The organization I worked with, Just Cause Oakland, passed an ordinance that made it illegal to evict people unless they had done something illegal or destructive. As I talked with people on the street about the issue, the tenants eagerly grabbed the petition out of my hands. They were angry and afraid of losing their place to live. But many people I gave the petition to felt differently. They rented out property, and they’d say, “It’s my property, shouldn’t I be able to do what I want?”

I found it difficult to counter those arguments in a way that made sense to property owners. Belief in the rights of property owners runs deep in this society. Many of the landlords claim that if tenants want more security they should buy their own homes. They also argue that rent control is the problem. If we were to just let the market work, there wouldn’t be such a difference between the rents people pay now and the amount a new tenant would pay. And they believe that if the market were able to do its work, then, somehow, there would be homes available at the prices people could pay.

This is Adam Smith’s theory of “the invisible hand of the market”: when markets are allowed to operate, resources appear where they are most needed as if put there by an invisible hand. In the housing market, this theory assumes that some landlords will always choose to rent their properties more cheaply than others.

Yet Smith himself knew that markets could accomplish only some social goals. Markets will not provide goods to people who have no money. They won’t make it profitable to provide decent homes for the poor, at least not when the wealth gap is as extreme as it currently is in the United States, when the wealthy are willing to pay incredible sums for center-city condominiums.

And markets will never promote forms of life that have nothing to do with buying and selling.

The reaction to Oakland’s anti-eviction petition was the clearest example of a class difference that I had seen in years. You could predict with incredible accuracy what viewpoint someone held by knowing which class position he or she occupied. The experience also reminded me of how intensely the dominant view of freedom is mixed up with capitalism.

For the landlords, the law we were trying to pass would indeed limit their freedom. To them, freedom means the ability to do what they want with what’s theirs. Landlords believe that the tenants are free to buy homes if they want. And if they can’t afford homes, they are free to get a job or go to school to get a better job so that they will be able to do so in the future.

One of the amazing things about the views of freedom that develop in a society dominated by capitalism is that those views focus on the freedoms of those with power. The freedom to live in your rented apartment without fear of eviction somehow doesn’t count. That’s because people thinking according to a capitalist logic associate freedom mostly with largely the freedom of property owners to dispose of their property as they please. This is supposedly fair because everyone has the right to own property. So we are all equal. This way of thinking hides the mechanisms that make it easy for some people to own property and harder for others. And it hides the ways that other sorts of freedoms are limited by this primacy of property.

Those of us brought up in a society dominated by capitalist logic are taught from an early age that capitalism equals freedom, that a free-market economy is the only way for society to produce wealth. We are surrounded by a dazzling array of efficient machines and cool products. We are told that capitalism allows anyone—with effort—to have everything he or she dreams of. And we are told that the alternatives involve poverty, stagnation, boredom, and a police state.

Capitalism has led to an unprecedented development of useful machines, technological abilities, and an endless supply of desirable consumer products. No one in the nineteenth century could have dreamed of the things we now take for granted, from smartphones to Botox, prosthetic limbs to chicken nuggets. The idea we are generally taught is that capitalism is the magic machine that has given us all of these things, and freedom, too. Capitalism means a free market—and, somehow, a free society.

Early ideas about capitalism and freedom

People didn’t always associate capitalism with freedom. When it was first coming into being in England in the seventeenth century, many people saw capitalism as taking away their freedoms. For them, members of the rising capitalist class were thieves. While many people worked as serfs under brutal conditions of feudalism during this time, peasants who lived outside of the feudal estates could be relatively self-sufficient. Those living on land known as the commons, which officially belonged to the king, were permitted to build cottages, gather firewood, hunt, and even farm. With the rise of capitalist agriculture, these common lands were increasingly fenced or otherwise enclosed by the aristocracy and entrepreneurs. Deprived of their farming and grazing land, the only option left to the poor was to sell their time for wages. Working for wages was an entirely new arrangement, and the formerly independent and largely self-sufficient laborers resented it tremendously.

According to David Mulder, “Vulnerable to fluctuations in price and wage, dependent on seasonal work, housed in rude one-room cottages, shunted to the fringes of the manor, landless wage laborers had no stable niche in the rural economy.”1  Gerrard Winstanley was one of the most renowned anticapitalists of this early period. He was a writer and organizer and a founder of the movement known as the Diggers. Winstanley had a vision of a society in which everyone had access to the resources each needed to have a decent life. He saw capitalism as taking away this access and forcing people to be even more dominated by the wealthy than they had been before. In 1648, Winstanley and a group of thirty to forty people decided to take back the land they believed to be rightly theirs. They occupied a piece of unused land called St. George’s Hill in the town of Cobham, building huts and planting crops. They intended to set up a communal society in which everyone would work the land and share what they produced. They hoped that the idea of “digging” would spread to all of England and that people would begin to see the error of private ownership.

Winstanley was a religious thinker and saw private property as sinful. “In the beginning, the great Creator Reason made the Earth to be a common treasury.” He believed that the wealthy landowners were only able to have their wealth by forcing others to work for them, and he thought that digging would undermine the whole system of capitalist wage labor. Winstanley addressed the landowning class when he wrote,

The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword.

Just as the Diggers’ crops were beginning to bear fruit, English soldiers, supported by local landowners, went to St. George’s Hill and destroyed the encampment, injuring several, destroying the huts, and trampling on the crops. At the time of the Digger resistance to capitalism, there was a threeway battle going on in England between the old feudal aristocracy, the rising capitalist class, and the poor. In the English Civil War, the aristocracy had largely sided with the monarchy, while the rising capitalist class sided with the parliament. They wanted to overthrow the monarchy in favor of a parliamentary system that would act in their interests. In order to have the power to overthrow the monarchy, though, they needed the help of the poor.

Many poor people joined Oliver Cromwell’s pro-Parliament army because they were told that they were fighting for liberty and access to land for all. At every step of the way, though, the wealthier members of the movement ended up betraying the interests of the poor people’s organizations.5 

One of the most brilliant theorists of nascent capitalism was John Locke. Locke was born in 1632. He was trained as a medical doctor, but made his living for much of his adult life as assistant to the Earl of Shaftesbury—one of the important leaders of the English Parliament. He spent many years in France in exile because his ideas were seen as undermining the power of the monarchy. Locke is most famous for developing theories of natural rights and individual freedom.

And yet, he was an investor in the transatlantic slave trade and helped write the constitution for Carolina, a document that included slavery.6 As advisor to Shaftesbury, he advocated for the “enclosures,” which threw poor people in England off their land, and he advocated for the expropriation of the lands of indigenous peoples.

From around 1600 through 1850, many European thinkers were interested in ideas of freedom, democracy, individual rights, progress, and politics based on reason rather than traditional authority. This period, called the Enlightenment, has been seen as the birthplace of much that is good in the European tradition. Until very recently, social justice advocates have mostly seen their work as extending the values of the Enlightenment.

Yet anticolonial thinkers have long pointed out that there is a deep contradiction between Enlightenment values and the practices of the very thinkers who espoused them. Many of the same people who supported capitalism and Enlightenment ideas also supported colonialism and slavery. During the Enlightenment, Europe was engaged in some of the most brutal practices in its history: slavery and colonialism. The rise of capitalism in Europe also exacerbated brutal forms of inequality and poverty. As a result of the enclosures, large numbers of previously independent peasants were thrown off their land. Even with the increasing destitution, there remained a shortage of people willing to work under the conditions offered in the new factories. This is one of the reasons England developed the poor laws that effectively outlawed not working for a wage. Poor people were routinely picked up by the police for sleeping outdoors, for not having any obvious means of support, and for vagrancy. They were turned over to poor houses where they were forced to work.

In Locke’s work, we can see all of the complexities and contradictions of a proslavery Enlightenment. In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke makes a powerful argument against the legitimacy of monarchy and feudalism. In the process of making that argument, he lays the foundation for a justification of capitalism, colonialism, and slavery. What is amazing about

Locke’s work is that he justifies these things all in the name of freedom. Locke constructs his argument by asking us to imagine we are in a “state of nature” in which people are “all equal and independent [and] no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”7

This state of nature is what philosophers call a “thought experiment.” Locke makes no claims that it ever existed, rather, that we can know our true state by imagining this possibility. Locke argues that this state of independence is our natural state. He wants us to think of ourselves as individuals first and as members of families and of society second. This undermines any sense of social solidarity and mutual obligation and challenges the idea that the world belongs to all of us to figure out how to use and share. In his justification for private property, Locke argues that although God gave us all the Earth to share, those who make the most of God’s gifts deserve them the most.

In England in this period, there were many landlords interested in “improving” their property—in making it more profitable. New agricultural techniques made this development possible, and new class relationships allowed these wealthy landowners to rise to political power. Locke was a part of that “improving” class.

In her book The Origin of Capitalism, Ellen Meiksins Wood points out that the word “improve” in English comes from a French root that meant doing something for profit.8 According to Locke, the indigenous people of the Americas did not have a right to their land because they were not generating excess for the market. The same could be said for the poor in England. The land belongs to those who can make the most profit from it or to the capitalist landlords.

Locke’s theory of natural rights is another aspect of his argument that helps support the domination inherent in capitalism. He claims that those with reason will all be in a state of nature with each other—meaning that they will all respect each other’s natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Some people, however, cannot be expected to use their reason to come to this conclusion. These people are like lions of the forest and cannot be trusted. Because of this, these people are in a state of war with the rest of humanity, and “reasonable” people can do whatever they want to protect themselves.9

It was this argument that Locke used to justify slavery. The idea that some people are rational and to be treated with respect, while others who think differently cannot be trusted, is a  fundamental part of the ideology of the Enlightenment.

Locke wants us to see society as an aggregation of independent, reasonable people, all with their own land, entering into contracts voluntarily, as all parties desire them. We are to see these independent people as meeting in an imagined state of nature. By asking us to think in this way, Locke is asking us to wish away history, and he is helping us develop the habit, very important as capitalism develops, of not seeing the complex realities of social relations.

Locke’s philosophy, by positing the state of nature, encourages us to look at people as if they had no history. According to his view, people chose to enter into and exit from contracts. In reality, people are often forced by circumstances and by the law into situations that they do not choose. This habit of making history invisible and supposing that we are all born free and equal is another important part of capitalist ideology. When people complain about inequality, we are told that everyone has the same chance to become wealthy and that wealth is based on our ability and desire to work hard. This leads to the idea that those with wealth should be able to do what they want with the wealth, without any obligations to others. Of course, those without wealth are also free to do what they want with their wealth, never mind that they don’t have any.

The vision of society as an aggregation of individuals with no history is, of course, a myth. Even in a society with a large capitalist sector, there are networks of relationships that bind us together. What is unusual about life in such a society is that these interconnections are erased by the dominant ways of thinking. We end up not seeing the social mechanisms that give some people more opportunity to succeed than others. And we end up not noticing the ways that we are all coerced to compete in a particular set of economic relations that we do not choose. Nor are we encouraged to see the ways in which people cooperate and help one another in all spheres of life.

An Enlightenment belief in progress might encourage us to think that Locke and his capitalist class made the world better by overthrowing feudalism. This view, however, would leave out the fact that at that time in England there was a far more radical alternative: that of the Diggers and many other radical anticapitalists.

According to the British historian Christopher Hill, There were, we may oversimplify, two revolutions in mid-seventeenth- century England. The one which succeeded established the sacred rights of property (abolition of feudal tenures, no arbitrary taxation), gave political power to the propertied (sovereignty of Parliament and common law, abolition of prerogative courts), and removed all impediments to the triumph of the ideology of the men of property—the protestant ethic. There was, however, another revolution, which never happened, though from time to time it threatened. This might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic. People who were a part of this second revolution knew full well the problems with capitalism; they saw members of the emerging capitalist class take their land.

Activity \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Reading Response Questions:

Please reflect on this reading by writing a short response to these questions. Your answer can include personal experience, and the writing does not need to be formal or polished. You are welcome to write as little as a sentence and as much as a paragraph. Think of it like journaling. 

1. What was meaningful to you in this reading?
2. How do you think capitalism has impacted your life?
3. Do you think capitalism increases or decreases your freedom?

Attributions

• Adapted from "Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change, 2nd Ed” by Cynthia Kaufman is copyrighted. It has been reproduced with permission from the author and publisher.