Choice is Not Freedom

There is power in choice; or at least that’s what we’re led to believe. This is a popular idea in these democratic days. We elect our leaders, consenting to our governance, and “to democratize” something means to make it legally accessible and available on the market. This idea has attended major revolutions and minor shopping sprees. If Marx is right that the prevalence of commodities characterizes capitalist societies, then so too does the capacity to choose one commodity from amongst all those available.

Here I want to explore the limits of choice, and will argue that choice is a derivative of freedom. Genuine freedom is not like selecting a dish from a menu; instead, it’s more like the ability to create a new dish and perhaps to prepare a whole other menu. To mistake one for the other is to succumb to a debilitating illusion.

Why choice now? Partly, it’s because choice is so strongly associated with liberalism, and Richard Seymour has powerfully argued that the era of liberalism is behind us and we face “disaster nationalism.” In his book by that title, Seymour argues that the world is currently undergoing a shift from classic liberal ideals expressed, for example, in the form of respect for civil and human rights and the protection from coercive infringement upon those rights by states.^[1] Such rights are perhaps best known from United Nations proclamations, like its Millennium Development Goals, and the rights each person would have if those proclamations were realized. In liberalism, institutions of civil society materially enact and effect an abstract humanity and individual humans who could have those ideal rights. Seymour argues that current far-right nationalist movement poisoning the world distend and distort familiar liberal institutions like the juridical codes that structure civil society. But does this actually undermine the power to choose, to accept or reject state intervention in a person’s affairs, at the core of liberalism?

Another reason, alluded to before, is the importance of choice to capitalism—a mode of production heretofore strongly associated with liberalism. If these two are twinned and Seymour is correct that liberalism is heading towards fascism, then I want to think about suitable changes to the conception of capitalism and where choice fits in.

One more reason to think about choice is that there’s a new book on the subject. Sophia Rosenfeld’s The Age of Choice is a history of the idea of freely choosing and its extraordinary power.^[2] From the earliest days of the Christian church, choice meant transgression. God in heaven made the world and set the rules for creation. To attain salvation one needed to stick to that straight-and-narrow path, or repent of one’s trespasses against Him. What Rosenfield describes is how choice was rehabilitated for the individual Protestant as the chance to find and choose the correct doctrine and then morphed into the capacity for the bourgeoisie subject to make “choice” selections.

The bourgeois revolutions of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries have compounded that final move. More and more people today see themselves as having the capacity to choose in a growing number of areas of their lives. In her book Rosenfeld discusses the activity of shopping as a prime example of this experience and how it forms subjects, with the site of the marketplace being the middle class locus classicus. Certain assumptions like the importance of thrift and shrewd business dealings, equal exchange in interpersonal interactions, and techniques of “choice architecture” created a standpoint from which subjectivities result. What was for centuries a marginal arena in feudal societies across Eurasia became in Western Europe the meeting place of decoded and deterritorialized flows of capital and labor. Those already present were primed to profit, and they pushed their advantage. In the name of the freedom to choose with whom and over what they made contracts for the exchange of goods and money, they laid tyrants low and raised the median standard of living.

How has this played out recently? One need look no further than feminist struggles for bodily autonomy and “the right to choose” whether to have an abortion. This slogan speaks to the unfulfilled aims of the bourgeois revolution: to make all equal before the law and to craft laws geared towards granting individuals the power to maximize their welfare. Rosenfeld pays particular attention to the role of women in the history of choice, though she looks upon her forebears with a critical eye.

To take but one historical example: starting in the 19th century women used certain dance cards, little slips of paper where they recorded their dance partners at grand balls, to gatekeep their romantic availability and also keep score with other women ‘on the market’. Such techniques for navigating social relations may have granted women a certain marginal autonomy when it came to finding a spouse. But the courtly balls and the culture which made that possible were only open to the already-privileged. Rosenfield uses illustrative moments like this to criticize “choice feminism” for naively equating an increase in the number of choices available to women with their general empowerment.

In other cases the focus on choice elides aspects of gender and sex like sexual orientation which are understood today as beyond choice. That naive feminism overlooks the techniques of exclusion necessary for empowerment through choice and how those techniques actually force women to acquiesce to certain constraints in order to affect them. It also misses the ways that embracing sexual orientation as something one is born with often makes people happier with themselves, as when queer people manage to attain self-acceptance in the face of prejudice.

Widening the aperture, liberal idealizing of choice has always been tenuous. It requires a national or global identity extrapolated from the abstract subject in the urban marketplace to greater and greater geographic scales. Increasingly elaborate apparatuses perform that scaling in order to secure that subject and market, like the checks and balances of the US Constitution or, later, the Globalist network of institutions.^[3] As Rosenfeld says, the idea of choice implies a bounding and excluding function in order to create a supposedly well-defined array of options. Choice abhors ambiguity and clarifies through these “choice architectures." You can choose anything on offer, but what is on offer is determined in advance.

Capital, however, cannot abide limits. It must grow and capitalists are compelled to help it to do so. That means that contemporaneous self-conceptions, legal configurations, and institutional arrangements must give way before this mode of production and its required and irreducible ambiguities. Thinkers ranging from critics of political economy such as Karl Marx to market fundamentalists like Hayek and Friedman have understood this. They knew that both choosers and choices change as what is deemed “socially necessary” changes, and each modulates as the tension between a framing choice architecture that bounds the options available and capitalism’s continuous cycles of creating new wants and needs and then new products to satisfy those wants and needs works itself out. New anti-social ideologies like anarcho-capitalism, the “sovereign citizen” and other far-right movements, and cryptocurrencies’ trust-less protocols are outgrowths of (neo)liberalism and should be understood as taking it to new extremes. Fascism comes from mainstream liberalism as its ‘molar’ aggregate population is sliced and diced according to various attributes and those groups are made into new markets. Therefore, it arises from the history of the capitalism which precedes it. It is not a corruption or parasite.

By what mechanism does capital affect those modulations? Marx’s analysis in Capital, Vol. 1 highlights that the dual circuits of Commodity-Money-Commodity (C-M-C) and Money-Commodity-Money[^Prime] (M-C-M’) are grounded in choice.^[4] Commodities are, for Marx, specific to the historical period of capitalism, and are legally saleable goods or services. Money is a special commodity that is picked out by convention to act as a general equivalent or medium of exchange. People treat the commodity known as money as if it had no qualities of its own besides durability. It therefore lets its owner buy anything available on the market at the time that suits their fancy provided they have a sufficient quantity.

The first circuit characterizes any person’s ability to sell a commodity they own for money in order to buy commodities which meet their needs for personal and social reproduction. The second and properly capitalist circuit is distinctive because it’s the means by which capital can grow. In it capitalists spend money on one or more commodities which are put to work to produce other commodities that are then sold; the commodities sold will, hopefully, result in a net profit for the capitalist. With the second circuit, capitalists are attempting to solve this problem: “How do I use the resources available to me to expand the amount of money I possess, given that I need to spend some of what I have in the first circuit to reproduce myself?” If capitalists just spend their money without growing it then they soon end up penniless and only able to participate in the first circuit as proletarians selling their labor-power as a commodity on the market. They therefore need to either invest their resources in speculative ways, or else convince others to invest in them and their initiatives until they can make enough to become speculators themselves. The ultimate hope is that their efforts will issue a profit, and that profit lets them at least retain their current status.

In point of fact, however, both circuits are speculative. A person may not have the skills that anyone wants to pay for and so their labor-power is worthless, and they can purchase a foodstuff expecting to cook it but instead it spoils. What differentiates the two isn’t that one is speculative while the other isn’t. The difference lies in the power to choose where to speculatively invest time and money and the ability to manipulate state institutions into constructing markets which benefit capital. Making a purchase creates a market for the skills and goods necessary to produce more of that product. It therefore plays a role in determining how the productive forces will develop. People with lots of money can buy things they don’t need to merely survive and therefore can create markets, not just participate in existing ones.

So power in capitalism derives from the ability for capitalists to buy commodities for their use in the productive process and the special commodity of labor-power which, when organized appropriately and when the product is something that society wants to buy at that time, yields a profit that returns to the capitalist. The laborer who rents themselves out as the commodity called “labor-power” and other suppliers have to accommodate themselves to selling commodities which are of interest to capitalists and to putting in the hours at their job. This goes on until finally that market for a particular commodity is saturated and a crisis of overproduction ensues. In such a crisis the capitalist realizes they need to make a change to what or how they’re producing in order to make a profit, or they’re unsure of the worth of their goods and so are unsure of how to price their wares. Either way, this is a crisis of confidence resulting from feedback from the market which changes this actor’s behavior. The more powerful the capitalist, the greater the ripple effects of those changes.

What distinguishes the rightward extension of liberalism into “disaster nationalism” is an increase in the extensive and intensive scope of choice available to capitalists. New techniques for architecting choice have appeared which augment what we can segment into arrays of options. Take genetic modification through means like CRISPR: it extends the choices we can make about our health and wellbeing to new dimensions of the body, and we can choose to give ourselves what we speculate to be desirable traits. We can subdivide and subdivide even to the molecular level, thereby making “dividuals” of ourselves, to use Deleuze’s phrase from “Postscript on the Societies of Control”.^[5] The disaster nationalist movements operate at relatively ‘molecular’ levels, creating new segments and groupings, proliferating modes of identity and conflicts between identities. Molar civil institutions like the military or state media outlets can barely keep up with the development of subcultures which crosscut localities and temporalities. These new identities create new lifeways. People now travel thousands of kilometers to see Taylor Swift perform and relish the chance to commune with fellow Swifties. Along with that comes new separations and an increased number of ways that someone can be distinguished from, and opposed to, others.

These are new nations, flying new flags. As they multiply people can choose to which they’ll pledge allegiance. At first glance the idea of fandoms as national identities may seem insipid; however, these inter- and intranational the groups pose a significant enough threat for the Trump administration to declare gangs to be foreign entities and cite the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as legal justification for the actions it is taking to defend the American state. And that’s not even getting at the idea of grouping people by phenotypic traits. What new races and racial nationalisms will result from CRISPR?

What Seymour does so well is to analyze the dynamics by which these identities and conflicts increase and produce the breakdown of the liberal social order and push the state towards fascism. Each of us, including those accommodating laborers, has a homunculus, a little cop-fascist, in our heads which treats ourselves as “human capital” to be managed as it so chooses.

So how is freedom to be won? The answer, of course, is overcoming liberal and fascist ideology and the capitalist mode of production. To understand what “overcoming” means, let’s return to the posing of problems. Earlier I noted that the capitalist problem is one of social reproduction through “growth.” To restate the problem: “How do I take advantage of all this power—over how to invest my money, including buying labor-power—to make more money?” The question is speculative and the resulting choice a gamble. The outcome will depend on how the productive process is socially organized and those productive forces developed, and whether the capitalist has read the tea leaves of the market well.

The socialist mode of production would face a qualitatively different problem: “What now?” The framing remains speculative and, from a certain perspective, a choice. However there is no longer a division which bounds the array of options for a chooser. Instead it is a question of productive capacity and the immediate circumstances where that capacity can be exercised. In this case a free association of producers will face a genuine existential crisis and must face nature as a part of nature; that collective will determine its future based on the natural forces it can muster. Or as Marx and Engels put it in The German Ideology: “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”^[6]

This is the vision advanced by Robert Meister in Justice is an Option.^[7] Meister notes that financial speculations in capitalism today compound the issues of an original accumulation or “formal subsumption” theorized by Marx. It is helpful to recall, he says, that capitalism has always required liquid cash and that having that liquidity is always more valuable than committed spending on specific assets. For Meister the state is the ultimate “choice architect,” to use Rosenfeld’s phrase, and has relied upon historical injustices like colonialism for its primitive accumulation of capital assets which can then be invested in or turned into a more liquid form.

Liquidity is the power of choice stated in the language of financial theory: money is more liquid than other commodities and therefore does have a use value, but one that operates at a meta, virtual level beyond the level of commodity exchange. To understand this, consider that someone who has yet to make a choice, who has money and therefore the general equivalent, is more powerful than one who has made their choice; a gift of cash is more valuable than a gift card precisely because the former can buy anything while the latter is, in a sense, money already spent. It is therefore strategically important to ‘seize the option’ and to find a way to redistribute it to a socialist mode of production which isn’t backwards compatible with capitalism. Meister suggests using blockchain technology in his book. That need not be the method actually used; nevertheless it is valuable for revealing the necessary qualities of any bearer of value in that socialist mode of production.

One feature that value-bearer requires is that it’s able to avoid recapture by the state, which has always guaranteed liquidity to capitalism and sustained its markets. The state is therefore the means through and out, because we can use that liquidity which it holds in trust and dump that value into our future value-bearer instead of its authored currency.

The other feature of that bearer is that it needs to grow as a result of our own changing social relations. As we unconsciously set ourselves those existential tasks and work towards their achievement we become different and interact with each other differently. Those proliferating differences would be recorded as the creation of new value in the form of qualitatively differentiated value-bearers because, in a socialist mode of production, living life would be valuable in itself and the essence of life is its changing nature. This would amount to realizing justice for the prior injustices because that liquidity is always more valuable than the sum worth of the objects held by the capitalists.

Once we have that differentiating bearer, which I call “provisions,” and it holds enough value derived from capitalism, we can just act and recreate ourselves in the act. Even reflecting and consenting to or rejecting a course of action already underway would induce a change, differentially amplifying and dampening parts of ourselves and effecting the giving and taking of provisions. This changing subjectivity and proliferation of modes of relation would make us into something akin to Kathi Weeks’ feminist subjects.^[8] This would be genuine freedom; freedom to become, and in becoming just be.