Some of the biggest blows to labor come as attacks in the name of freedom; the decision in Janus v AFSCME (“Janus”) that prevents public unions from collecting dues (including our union), the attacks on closed-shop by the name of “right-to-work,” or the insistence on the uninfringeable management rights on the rule of the shopfloor. Precarious and unsafe gig work, likewise, is presented as realizing freedom, autonomy, and independence.
Mark Reiff, in his In the Name of Liberty, observes that in the face of attacks on workers in the name of freedom, labor has not been able to respond on the same dimension, has retreated from the ideal of freedom, and has focused on concepts like equality, equity, and workplace security. (Reiff 2020, 6) Without denying the importance of the latter, we can argue that the inability of labor to tackle the issue of freedom is to our grave disadvantage. A serious approach to freedom from the perspective of the working-class is an indispensable task to set labor on a more radical path, counter attacks we face, and confront our immediate problems from a different perspective. A working-class conception of freedom is key for the ideological, strategic, and ethical clarity labor requires today.
Anti-labor forces find it easy to appeal to freedom to undermine labor’s power because our common conception of freedom is founded on the anti-worker structures of capitalism. To understand this, we need only minimal claims about capitalism: that it is a system characterized by wage-labor, infinite accumulation of profit, and the universalization of production for exchange-value. Capitalism seeks infinite accumulation of profit through exploitation, and producers have no avenues of subsistence of their own but by selling their own capacity to work at the market, i.e., become wage-laborers. What concerns us is how such a productive relation constitutes a certain conception of freedom and how subjects in capitalism are led to understand freedom and their relation to others.
Here, I focus on two aspects of the concept of freedom under capitalism. First, the bourgeois conception of freedom is characterized by anti-sociality, which arises on the individualized and competitive subject formation intrinsic to capitalist wage-labor. Second, the annulment of workers’ demands for freedom in the workplace in capitalism, which originates from how the capitalist right to private property “depoliticizes” private capitalist rule over workers.
The Anti-Sociality of Bourgeois Freedom
The first important aspect is the anti-sociality of bourgeois freedom. Wage-workers under capitalism are structurally constituted as individualistic and competitive because they are reduced to securing their material existence by selling their capacity to work in the market. Here, they confront others as rivals and learn that their interests and self-realization are matters of individualistic realization. The other appears not as someone one realizes freedom with but against, such that Marx notes that under capitalism “every man…see[s] in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty” (Marx 1978, 42).
The atomization and anti-sociality of individuals under capitalism can be thought of as the basis of what is otherwise called the negative conception of freedom. In distinguishing between negative and positive freedom, Isiah Berlin defined the contours of many discussions regarding freedom. Negative freedom, in broad terms, means that individuals realize freedom the more they expand their bubble of action unimpeded by others; lack of interference from others means more freedom. This conception prevails under capitalism because capitalist wage-labor forms the material ground of subjects inclined to understand their freedom as such. Under capitalism, real material practices make community and freedom antithetical.
The importance of understanding the anti-social aspect of bourgeois freedom becomes evident when we realize that attacks on labor in the name of freedom are ultimately based on a model of the individualized subject separated from others, asserting interests and rights against those others. Freedom here becomes the right to separate, undermining the power of labor. Such is the case in Janus, where freedom of speech, asserting the right of isolated abstract subjectivity, becomes the means to materially separate the worker from organized power (Bottari 2018). The same goes for the so-called “right-to-work” laws, which Martin Luther King called a “false slogan” whose “purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone” (EPI 2011). Similar discourses are employed in anti-union campaigns that paint unions as infringing on the individual rights of workers and as third parties, or in the enforcement of scabs’ rights against the collective actions and rights of strikers. In all these, the holder of the kind of freedom that capital enforces is the atomized individual; the principal subject of bourgeois right and the Archimedean point for dissolving the organized power of labor organized according to the distinct logic of collective rights and freedoms.
It is not difficult to see that in all these cases, the opposite of what capital proposes to workers comes to pass. The dissolution of workers’ organizations strengthens employers’ power, securing their domination over workers and entrenching undisputed management of the shopfloor. Instead of autonomy, unorganized workplaces or gig-style work result in the suppression of workers’ voice and will at work, with little ability to oppose management control. Capital promises freedom of speech protections against unions (as in Janus), but management commonly surveils workers’ communication, restricts what workers can talk about, and fires workers for political speech. (Gourevitch 2015, 176). Enforcing an isolationist freedom against the unions becomes a means for capital, conversely, to strengthen its own power over workers.
Domination in the Workplace Under Capitalism
The next important aspect we need to understand about the notion of freedom under capitalism is the lack of discourse of freedom in the capitalist workplace. As Allen Wood teaches us, this is not a coincidence, but an essential result of the form that the appropriation of surplus value takes under capitalism.
In distinguishing between how surplus is appropriated under feudalism and capitalism, Wood notes how the former was characterized by more direct state intervention in surplus expropriation. Increasing surplus, for example, could be achieved through military force and increased taxation on products. With capitalism, surplus extraction becomes a private matter, and the state takes on an apparent neutral quality. This means that the “political quality of force over producers has fundamentally transformed, and the exploitative coercion and domination over producers as producers at production becomes a “private” matter. Capitalism, thus, while “freeing” producers by making them wage-workers (which largely concerns the moment of the contract and the realm of exchange), also legitimizes private class rule in production (Wood 2016, 33-35).
Hence, for Wood, there is a special separation of the political and the economic under capitalism. The workplace operates with a different logic where the workers’ will is annulled, and their rights of democracy and self-determination must be left outside. Bourgeois democracy never really reaches into production because its first principle is not actually democracy but property, and the right of property for the bourgeoisie means the right of private (and not democratic) control over the work process, investment, the products of work, etc.
We can term this the social-spatial differentiation of the right to freedom and self-determination under capitalism. Contrary to the universality of freedom proposed by modern society, the privatization of class power of control over the labor process, workplace, and the products of labor (which is the basis of the bourgeois rights to private property over means of production), actually secures, in Wood’s terms, an unprecedented, depoliticized control over production process and time (Woods 2016, 44).
The Working-Class Struggle for Freedom
Labor’s task in approaching freedom, then, is twofold in tackling the bourgeois conception’s social-relational and social-positional grounds of bourgeois freedom. A brief review of labor’s challenge here gives us an idea of a working-class conception of freedom.
Consider the former first, where our task is the socialization of our conception of freedom. Freedom is only meaningful if it can be actualized, and the socialization of freedom has to come through an understanding of the essential social nature of our self-realization. Labor already advances this through its championing of solidarity. Advancing solidarity is frequently taken to mean advocating for and committing to the common good beyond egoistic self-interest. This is evident in membership development, where the primary rationale we try to oppose is again an isolationist egoism characteristic of scabbing. The workers who scab take advantage of others’ contributions while giving nothing in return, thus again revealing the apparent dichotomy between the common good and self-interest, which parallels that between freedom and solidarity, community and individual, obligation to others and self-gain.
Negative bourgeois freedom denies and ignores that the ends that such a subject sets for oneself and the conditions of their realization are social. But no ends we set and seek to realize are entirely private matters, but are intersubjectively constituted in their meaning. At the same time, no ends are privately realized, but always require some sort of cooperation with others. Scabs, again, are a good example of the self-denying nature of negative freedom; they alienate themselves from others for “self-interest,” but the conditions that allow them to do so are established by collective, organized institutions, which they undermine through their separation from the community. This is also the contradiction of free-riding.
What overcomes this contradictory conception of freedom, its subject and action is a concept of free self-realization in which the individual and others do not stand in opposition. Hegel’s conception of concrete or social freedom expresses such logic in taking friendship or love as the basis of such freedom. In these relations, he says, we are not “inherently one-sided; we restrict ourselves gladly in relating ourselves to another, but in this restriction know ourselves as ourselves.” Hence, in “restriction,” or participation in the other, one “should not feel determined” but as oneself, so that this higher freedom “lies neither in indeterminacy nor in determinacy; it is both of these at once” (Hegel 2008, 33). The key insight here is understanding freedom in our social intertwinement with others, and in the recognition of others in the constitution of ourselves. This means an intertwinement of ends in that individuals, in unforced cooperation, take upon the ends of others as their own and also recognize others’ ends and actions as constitutive for their own self-realization (Honneth 2023, 98-101). For early socialists and Marx, this conception was highly influential because it presented a way in which the two fundamental ideals of the French Revolution, fraternity and freedom, both of which are made impossible under capitalism, are brought together in a higher plane (Honneth 2017, 12-13). In this way, we understand association, solidarity, and community not as antithetical to freedom but freedom’s enriching ground.
Of course, not all associations are liberating, and just as does our freedom, our oppression comes through others. However, just as this does not change the fact that any free self-realization is a social matter, this theory shows us that a higher and richer form of freedom is found in association with others instead of against them. This social conception of freedom is the one needed for labor. Unions must serve as a means through which workers learn community and that others empower them while isolation impoverishes them; that organization “frees” and isolation both impoverishes freedom and fortifies capital’s domination. Labor cannot succeed by furthering the efforts at anti-social self-realization and “freedom.” In this, it only strengthens capital, creates competition among workers, and leads the working-class into dead ends. The social relations that labor attempts to create must possess a new consciousness of freedom in its attempts to instill the essential intertwinement of individual ends with others.
This is another key reason why democracy in unions is so important. William Foster emphasizes that democratization in unions is key to the power of unions and that democratization and mass participation is not merely an add-on (Foster 1970, 233-235). Business and/or service unions fail to challenge the capitalist atomization of workers because it leaves them in the passive position of recipients of individualized benefits. Against capital’s impoverished freedom, democratic unions remind workers that their real freedom lies in strengthening their bonds of solidarity with their coworkers. Seeking freedom with and through others instead of isolation from them must be the lesson unions instill in workers.
Besides the socialization of freedom, labor also faces the task of reintroducing the consciousness of self-determination and freedom to the workplace for advancing a true working-class democracy. It is well-accepted that the task of unions is to advocate for the material interests of their members, understood as fighting for higher wages and further benefits. But what kind of “interest” is working-class power in workplace economics, shop-floor control, and company investment structures, if not “material”?
Joe Burns notes that the no-strike laws, limitations over what unions can bargain on, and bureaucratization of bargaining processes have narrowed the vision of working-class struggle and turned bargaining into a form of “collective begging” (Burns 2014, 16). The “common sense,” “pure and simple” unionism frequently acts as an unquestioned shackle over working-class demands, especially when it comes to demands for working-class democracy and self-determination. The control over the shop-floor and company finances is rarely subject to serious bargaining, and these areas are where management is least open to forfeiting power.
This, as we discussed, is because the capitalist right to private property means workers must forfeit control over their products and work process. Labor’s struggle for freedom, though, must challenge this system of class control and seek to make freedom and democracy truly universal. In bourgeois logic, concern for freedom ends with the contract; both sides have met on equal and free terms, and whatever ensues thus excludes domination. Labor’s insistence against this must be that democracy does not end at the foot of the workplace (Ocak 2025), and that true freedom for the working-class cannot be conceived under capitalist management of work.
This is why unions must also enlarge their vision of how they will really secure the “material” or any other interests of their workers. Simply repeating the same processes of bargaining that leave management power over work untouched does not get workers closer to real liberation. These short-term fights must be part of a process of revolutionizing workers’ consciousness and instilling in them the confidence and vision for growing power to eventually not “ask.” Instead of “collective begging,” then, the real questions unions must set for themselves must come from boldly understanding the roots of the situation that workers face under capitalism and clearly seeing that the problems they tackle won’t be resolved as long as workers are not in the decision-making positions to decide on things they ask management to grant them.
The real and ultimate “material” interest to seek is to tackle the problem of how to bring the working class to be those who decide. Shying away from this fundamental issue in pursuit of short-term and narrow fights (that are not used as means to reach this ultimate goal) makes unions akin to crutches that make working-class misery and impoverishment a little more bearable without seeking to treat the actual root of the illness. Labor’s task of advancing working-class freedom and democracy, then, also comes from understanding and challenging the fundamental disenfranchisement of workers under capitalism over their lives at work.
If freedom is to have a real meaning for the working-class, its form needs reconsideration, because structures of capitalism are already formed to realize freedom in an anti-worker manner. The working-class struggle for freedom, thus, renews our understanding of freedom, while striking at the heart of workers’ unfreedom and domination under capitalism. As we face attacks in the name of freedom against unions, it is important to be clear about the richer freedom labor offers and challenge capital’s discourses of freedom for what they are, i.e. means to subjugate workers further under capital’s power while seeming to offer freedom to workers. This higher path to freedom is through socializing and communalizing our relationships for establishing true working-class rule over our workplaces and labor as a whole.
References
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EPI.“Martin Luther King on the ‘Right to Work.’” April 11, 2011. https://www.epi.org/publication/martin_luther_king_on_right_to_work/
Foster, W. Z. 1970. American Trade Unionism: Principles, Organization, Strategy, Tactics. New World Paperbacks.
Gourevitch, A. 2015 From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press.
Honneth. A. 2017. The Idea of Socialism. Polity.
Honneth, A. 2023 The Poverty of Our Freedom. Polity.
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Marx, K., Engels F. 1978B. Tucker, C. Robert (ed) The Marx-Engels Reader, New York and London, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Ocak, O. “Die Demokratie wird den Betrieben verteidigt.” Jacobin. March 31, 2025. https://jacobin.de/artikel/betriebsraete-betriebliche-mitbestimmung-wirtschaftsdemokratie
Reiff, M. 2020 In the Name of Liberty: An Argument for Universal Unionization, Cambridge University Press.
Wood. El. 2016. Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism. Verso.
