Letter+to+B+Day+on+Freedom

=Letter to Business Day on Freedom=

Mind cannot be divorced from matter in this world. Consequently Baruch Spinoza defined freedom as “the recognition of necessity” and Karl Marx in “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” wrote “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

So it is not true to say: “All conceptions of what it is to be free share the underlying idea that our freedom is diminished when we are unable to realises our purposes”.

By putting the matter this way Anthony Butler (“Two concepts of freedom”, Business Day, April 26) shows that he does not know the first thing about the way “communist intellectuals” think.

I can assure him that concrete, but not abstract, freedom is “the good that contains all other goods” (Caudwell) for communists.

Butler’s article draws a reasonable distinction between those who see elections, constitutionalism and political rights as “instruments in a larger struggle”, and those who see these “liberal institutions” as ends in themselves.

Unfortunately he then charicatures the human actors as “ANC heavyweights”, “party veterans”, and “a new generation of activists” that “chafes against restraints”. At the same time he claims “moral authority” for the paper, bricks and mortar of his cherished institutions.

Butler wants to replace human agency with institutionalised conservatism and call it freedom. His is just the kind of sophistry that tends to give democracy a bad name.


 * Dominic Tweedie**