Freedom, Equality and Justice or War and Peace

Freedom, Equality and Justice or War and Peace

By Friederike Habermann

[This address from the 4th PDS (Party of Democratic Socialists) Congress, 2001, is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.portel.pds-sachsen.de/aktuell.asp?id=6.]

I was invited to speak about freedom, equality and justice. I was not invited to speak about war and peace. Until recently peace appeared to us as a matter of course or self-evident. Two weeks ago I put my old documents from the time of the peace movement in the recycling bin and mentioned to our daughters how much I had lived in fear of war all my years as a child and youth. At that time – I am tempted to say it seemed like an eternity but it was only two weeks ago – there wasn’t any real reaction from our daughters. In the meantime we are in the Yugoslavian war but this seems less real than “Mars Attack” or “Apocalypse Now” in the movie theater. From that standpoint, war was never a theme for young persons. Now it is at the door.

I was invited to speak about justice, freedom and equality, about justice and not “infinite justice” as the planned military action was baptized in infinite cynicism.

There is no justice without peace. A war situation always goes along with limitation of civil rights. This is also clear in the present situation when sweeping telephone surveillance is urged, complete video-surveillance and information about all Arab students and their computer searches. Equality makes conditions different. Nuclear war concretizes this. Nuclear war makes everyone equally dead…

Let us focus on freedom and equality. From the perspective of capital and exchange of goods, an employment contract is a contract between free actors determined by free will. Marx called this ironically a “true Eden of inborn human rights. Freedom and equality, property and Bentham prevail here... Why freedom? Because buyers and sellers of a commodity, for example labor power, are only defined through their free will. They contract as free, legally equal persons. The contract is the final result where their wills give a common legal expression. Why equality? Because they only refer to one another as owners of goods and exchange equivalent for equivalent.”

Marx did not describe this perspective as wrong. While it is not wrong, it is also not right. There is another perspective to the same circumstance as Marx explained: “The free trader borrows vulgar conceptions, ideas and standards from this sphere of simple circulation or exchange of goods for his judgment on the society of capital and paid labor. Leaving this sphere transforms the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. His worker follows the former owner of money, the capitalist or owner of labor power. One is smiling and enthusiastic about business; the other is shy and reluctant like one who brings his own skin to market and has nothing to expect other than the `tannery’.” (MEW 23).



The Marxist and feminist Nancy Hartsock supports this idea:

“When we follow the worker home from the factory, we witness a transformation of the dramatis personae. The shy and reluctant worker now leads the way followed by a third person carrying the purchases, the baby and the diapers.”

Let us follow the housewife whether she is also a paid worker or not.. If we follow the shopping woman in the supermarket, workers held in bondage on the coffee plantations in Central America appear in the background. Let us follow here to Wal-Mart. There we see the seamstress Carmen Hernandez from Honduras in the Wal-Mart subcontractor Evergreen. Carmen works for 43 cents an hour, $3.47 per day. Roundtrip ticket, a little breakfast, a modest warm food (rice, pancake and a little piece of chicken) and the cheapest rent for a room in a dangerous neighborhood amount to the pure reproduction of labor power in the narrowest sense (sleeping, getting there, eating twice). This sum is already above the daily wage without the possibility of the worker buying something (food) for her family (her children). Clothing is also not included. Carmen cannot buy that new clothing that she knits everyday.

After we meet employees in the flower shop from Colombia poisoned by the pesticides, we race past the carpet store and the clothing discounters and buy a shirt of pure cotton. Here we encounter hundreds of bereaved families from cotton production in India whose male breadwinners committed suicide in their despair on account of indebtedness.

Starting from freedom and equality, we confront the problem of justice. In our examples, an unreal freedom and an unreal equality implied an unreal justice. Freedom and equality are the prerequisites for justice. Therefore the prize question of the Rosa Luxemburg foundation about the compatibility of freedom and equality can ultimately only be the question about justice. Freedom and equality cannot be separated from one another or defined separate from one another (Christoph Spehr). Justice also cannot be conceived as separated.

Why? Marx was certainly one of the analysts if not the best analyst of the conditions that his earth has seen. Nevertheless his analytical abilities – and the abilities of Friedrich Engels – are reduced to absurdity regarding the inclusion of women and their standpoints in their analyses. Their own masculine identity seems to have blocked their view here. Marx concentrated on the exploitation of (male) workers. Women analyzed the patriarchy as fundamental for capitalism. People from the South denounce the world economic order today as a continuation of colonialism…

The truth of the oppressed will contribute more to human emancipation than the truth of the oppressors or the truth of those who profit from the status quo…

In a world in which freedom and equality are defined as the freedom to sign contracts in equality, it is nearly impossible to gain consensus that freedom and equality are limited as long as the existing hierarchies of power are not dismantled. The relative strengths are not even seen from the perspective of the profiteers. These relative strengths mark the way of looking at things of everyone, not only the profiteers.

The production of the hegemonial culture, economy and politics must be maintained and reproduced everyday. The hegemonial meanings need not be renewed daily since they are structured and institutionalized, anchored and fixed in regulations and laws, in divisions of labor, institutions, “texts” in the widest sense and “materialized meanings” of all kinds. People are not conscious of the forms in which their life is produced or reproduced. Conduct in the specific forms does not require any reflection… In his Fetish chapter (in volume 1 of Kapital), Marx discusses the epistemological question why people do not recognize the forms in which they act as specific forms. They think, act and produce in their priorities and interests according to the social conditions. Reflection on the forms in which we think and act is necessary to overcome and change them. Making them visible so they can be recognized is not simple. These forms include property relations and capitalism, thinking in skin colors and cultures, the coercive heterosexuality and the two genders, the logic of “for the US or for the terrorists.”

The dominant way of looking at things is always right or “compelling” because social conditions define action possibilities. However the way of looking at things of the marginalized opens up different perspectives and therefore is indispensable. Still the hegemonial categories and criteria are those that usually come into our heads. This is what Antonio Gramsci called “everyday understanding”. The marginalized are also structured by the hegemony since they cannot live completely outside.

Employees also like to believe in the just exchange. West German housewives came together for the first time in the 1970s to recognize that other women happily went shopping, gently carried their children and lounged on the sofa the rest of the time. Their depressions involved their situation as housewives since that wasn’t what they wanted to do.

A counter-hegemonial understanding must always be gained in struggle with the everyday understanding. This requires both systematic analysis and common experience in political action. New ways of looking at things often arise through common political action.

When a certain position derives from a certain identity (for example as a white worker or as a black woman), two persons with the same environment could not have different views. Many truths simply led to relativism. However political action would be impossible if everyone were right.

Gramsci started from the idea that the “everyday understanding” itself must be torn in a contradictory society. Correspondingly he formulated as a political guideline: “The beginning of critical consciousness is the awareness of what really is. `Know yourself’ is the product of a long historical process that leaves behind an infinity of traces in oneself.”

The following questions are important in the search for justice: How are my existence and my consciousness determined? Do I think something because I am white or because I am a woman? How does my culture influence my understanding of justice? Nevertheless we are not one-dimensionally fixed by our identity. Firstly, dominant ways of looking at things are suggested to us. Secondly, our identity is composed of many mosaic pieces. Last but not least, we can actively question all this.

A certain analysis need not be bound with a certain standpoint. New dominances arise instead of emancipatory theoretical approaches without the integration of marginalized groups. This is also reflected in our everyday political conduct. People stay away from political groups because they don’t fit in their culture. They would participate if this culture were changed. If these people are women, colored, gays, disabled etc., exclusions are repeated with dramatic consequences for emancipatory processes.

This truth is also dangerous since the usually repressed subjectivity is unassailable. To find one’s own answers, the solution can only be a form of dialogue. We must always ask ourselves: Doesn’t the other have more right than me?

In all this, we must try to put our different existence in question. What does it mean that someone has larger feet than me? What does it mean that someone has a darker complexion than me?

We must attempt all this if we want to practice leftist politics. Gayatri Spivak calls this: forgetting privilege. Some must work at speaking. Others must learn to listen and draw conclusions. All this must be attempted though we will never definitively succeed.

Being a leftist can be damn hard.

Even the wisest or most sensitive person in this world cannot imagine a just world. All people – as equals and in freedom – must answer this question: What would a just world look like? I come back to the initiative of free cooperation from Christoph Spehr: “What is always crucial is the mechanism creating the prerequisites for free negotiation, not defining for others what is right. Leftist politics means recognizing and acknowledging other emancipatory struggles and supporting one another.”

I have been active for several years in the global resistance movement. I was in Chiapas with the Zapatistas, in Geneva at the 2nd WTO conference, in Seattle, Prague, Davos and lastly in Genoa. The new social movements that formed after ’68 were oriented in separate, identify-focused or single-point political initiatives for a long time – as unions, as Indians, as farmers, as women, as India’s or New Zealand’s aborigines, as the landless and the homeless, as students or as environmentalists. Now these movements are coming together, exchanging with one another, thematicizing capitalism and making the struggles of others into their own struggle. Together we take to the streets and speak with one another. Learning from one another, exchanging ideas and testing alternatives is a new world that can make possible new worlds.

The dreadful terrorist attacks in New York with over 5,000 dead make us like one another. The 50,000 who die everyday hardly resemble us. They don’t work in offices or wear brand name gear.

If we could listen to these 50,000, this world would be better, not a paradise but better.

The dead of New York cannot speak any more. Many now take president Bush as the spokesperson of these dead. The US government attempts to define justice with worldwide authority, “infinite justice”, “an eye for an eye”. Is this the battle cry of “civilization” against “barbarians”, “we” against “the others”?

An eye for an eye makes the world blind, Gandhi warned.

The parents of Greg Rodriguez, one of the victims of the attack on the World Trade Center, insist: “No more innocent victims in the name of our son!”…

At this moment Afghanistan women are the pariahs of this world. They fought against the Taliban for years. They seek a hearing in a time when it is a crime to invite a non-Afghan woman to tea or to leave their house without their father, mother or husband. The Afghan women’s organization RAWA – the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan – writes: “Attacking Afghanistan and killing its exploited and distressed people cannot remove the worries of the American population. We hope that the great American people can distinguish between the population of Afghanistan and a handful of fundamentalist terrorists.”

When Bush says he wants to lead the world to victory, he already denies the existence of all who don’t want to wage war and wages war on everyone against war. He makes these Afghan women invisible again.

Still they speak and we can hear them.

Sometimes being a leftist can be very simple.