Emancipation is not about detaching from the world and liberating a free soul

Whereas negative freedom is concerned with assuring the formal right to avoid interference, 'synthetic freedom' recognises that a formal right without a material capacity is worthless. Under a democracy, for example, we are all formally free to run for political leadership. But without the financial and social resources to run a campaign, this is a meaningless freedom. Equally, we are all formally free to not take a job, but most of us are nevertheless practically forced into accepting whatever is on offer. In either case, various options may be theoretically available, but for all practical purposes are off the table. This reveals the significance of having the means to realise a formal right, and it is this emphasis on the means and capacities to act that is crucial for a leftist approach to freedom. As Marx and Engels wrote, 'it is possible to achieve real liberation only in the real world and by real means'. Understood in this way freedom and power become intertwined. If power is the basic capacity to produce intended effects in someone or something else, then an increase in our ability to carry out our desires is simultaneously an increase in our freedom. The more capacity we have to act, the freer we are. One of the biggest indictments of capitalism is that it enables the freedom to act for only a vanishingly small few. A primary aim of a postcapitalist world would therefore be to maximise synthetic freedom, or in other words, to enable the flourishing of all humanity and the expansion of our collective horizons. Achieving this involves at least three different elements: the provision of the basic necessities of life, the expansion of social resources, and the development of technological capacities. Taken together, these form a synthetic freedom that is constructed rather than natural, a collective historical achievement rather than the result of simply leaving people be. Emancipation is thus not about detaching from the world and liberating a free soul, but instead a matter of constructing and cultivating the right attachments.

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (Verso, 2016) pp. 79-80

Alla är maktlösa inför någon

Människor är inte så små som man tror. Och inte så stora. Felet med att ha makten som bedömningsgrund och inte handlingarna är att nästan alla friskriver sig då, var och en hittar sin maktlöshet när de behöver den. För alla är maktlösa inför någon, och något. Alla har ett skikt av maktlöshet i sig, i sin upplevelse av sig själva i tillvaron, som de då använder. Och därför ser världen ut som den gör. Alla har en glipa i sin makt, även när de vet att de har makt och ansvar, som de kan utnyttja för att förstå varför de måste handla som de gör. Moralen börjar hos individen. Man måste kräva den av alla. De som har makt föddes maktlösa och denna känsla är den som består i dem hela livet, särskilt i de stunder då de handlar fel. Då minns de att de blev mobbade på skolgården och slagen av pappa och inser att allt är någon annans fel även nu.

Lena Andersson, Egenmäktigt Förfarande (Natur & Kultur, 2013) p. 173

The current destruction of the city

Universal history was born in cities, and it reached maturity with the city's decisive victory over the country. For Marx, one of the greatest merits of the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class was the fact that it "subjected the country to the city," whose "very air is liberating." but if the history of the city is a history of freedom, it is also a history of tyranny – a history of state administrations controlling not only the countryside but the cities themselves. The city has served as the historical battleground for the struggle for freedom without yet having been able to win it. The city is the focal point of history because it embodies both a concentration of social power, which is what makes historical enterprises possible, and a consciousness of the past. The current destruction of the city is thus merely one more reflection of humanity's failure, thus far, to subordinate the economy to historical consciousness; of society's failure to unify itself by reappropriating the powers that have been alienated from it.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) pp. 125-126

A simultaneous damnation and idealisation of capitalism

The great indictments of capitalism, and of its long record of misery in factories and towns, have co-existed, within a certain historical scheme, with this repeated use of 'progressive' as a willing adjective about the same events. We hear again and again this brisk, impatient and as it is said realistic response: to the productive efficiency, the newly liberated forces, of the capitalist breakthrough; a simultaneous damnation and idealisation of capitalism, in its specific forms of urban and industrial development; an unreflecting celebration of mastery – power, yield, production, man's mastery of nature – as if the exploitation of natural resources could be separated from the accompanying exploitation of men. What they say is damn this, praise this; and the intellectual formula for this emotional confusion is, hopefully, the dialectic. All that needs to be added, as the climax to a muddle, is the late observation, the saving qualification, that at a certain stage – is it now?; it was yesterday – capitalism begins to lose this progressive character and for further productive efficiency, for the more telling mastery of nature, must be replaced, superseded by socialism. Against this powerful tendency, in which forms of socialism offer to complete the capitalist enterprise, even the old, sad, retrospective radicalism seems to bear and to embody a human concern.

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford University Press, 1975) p. 37

For the love of the trick

Something must always remain that eludes us... for power to have an object on which to be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms... As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues..."

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 240

Historien säger ingenting annat än att den eller den personen som har gjort den eller den inskriften på den eller den stenen har blivit tillsagd att göra inskriften på befallning av den eller den härskaren – historien säger ingenting annat än att den som har fått befallning att sjunga den eller den hjältedikten eller krigarvisan faktiskt har sjungit så högt att hans efterkommande och lyssnarna och lyssnarnas barn lärde sig sången utantill och förde den vidare!

Eyvind Johnson, Strändernas svall (Albert Bonniers Förlag. 2004) p. 44

Existential beauty is destroyed by the impulse to possess, to own, to contain, to hold fast, therefore to dominate. Expression is possession. the manifestation of a lust for domination. Any attempt to express in a form an idea external to it is an attempt to arrest the idea in time, to control it beyond its life. I despise all such 'expressionism', and none more than that which appropriates ineffable symbols, archetypes – in fact, types of any kind. These are the most vain and tyrannical attempts to eternalise the ephemeral.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Anarchitecture: Architecture is a political act' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) pp. 10-11