The Freedom of Masters

Reflections on freedom, class struggle, and interior struggle

I’ve been trying to do some more reading recently, which includes catching up on the writings of some old internet acquaintances. This brilliant article by Paul Luria contains a decent amount of overlap in material with my previous article on this blog on Capitalism versus Contemplative Life, and much in common with many of my other writings in this space. But there is one observation which Paul brings to the discussion that deserves particular attention. Evidently channeling the thought of Alexandre Kojève, Paul criticizes a certain strain of thinking on the contemporary political Right, which purports to revive the idealized social hierarchies of Antiquity as a response to the widespread stagnation of society under the malaise of postmodernity. This reactionary vision effectively seeks to reassert the position of Masters over that of Slaves:

Increasingly from the Right the argument is put forward to reignite the Master/Slave dialectic in black and white terms against the grey complexity of modern relations of production; the honest demand for clarity of present conditions delivers them to the desire to impose a ‘New Antiquity’ corresponding to their conception of the birth of civilisation, as an entirely arbitrary and meaningless imposition of a sovereign minority onto the whole human mass…

However, Paul insightfully notes, this position is an entirely reactionary position — but this is not simply because it seeks to revive something that would be no more than an anachronism under present historical conditions, certainly damaging to society but ultimately doomed to a quick demise (the fate of Nazism). Rather, the reactionary and obsolete character of this “New Antiquity” is manifest in the character of that freedom which Masters enjoy, over and against the enslavement of the masses who serve them. It is a conditioned freedom, one that is circumscribed in fear of the oppressed masses from whom that very freedom is extracted by force. Thus, Paul writes, again with unmistakable echoes of Alexandre Kojève:

the leisure and liberty of the Master remains a conditioned liberty, against which most must work ceaselessly for that realisation. Liberty as a dependency on slave labour does not then describe real liberty, but a volatile and anxious form of partial and conditioned liberty dependent on the persistence of slave unconsciousness, a historically unsustainable social arrangement inevitably mired in anxiety and fear of the majority; a suppressive apparatus is required, a militarised strata, which further compounds the anxiety of the Masters. Leisure time conditioned on labour, whether the wage labour of modern individuals or the slave labour of antiquity, is not then properly leisure time. If, as Aristotle claimed, free time is for the ends of Wisdom, then from the Master's point of view, the truly visionary Master, it becomes imperative to abolish slavery or else be abolished by it, as the existence of slaves is inevitably an impediment to his own coming to Wisdom…

But there is another problem with the Rightist position, which makes it appear less anachronistic than simply clueless and unaware. Arguably, in the West, and in America more specifically, the freedom that we so proudly and boastfully enjoy is already no more than the freedom of Masters. We are the Masters of the world, and the developing and underdeveloped nations are our Slaves. Our prized American liberty is manufactured by means of enslavement, and thus it is no more than the conditioned freedom of Masters, wrapped in anxiety and paranoia about the boiling resentment of the oppressed. The heavy militarization and the universal presence of the American global police state is a direct effect of our paranoia. Our freedom is bought at a heavy price, and it is inseparable from a very great and underlying fear. And as long as this is the case, it is a freedom with an expiration date, a false freedom, and a kind of slavery in itself.

In my previous entry, I wrote, “The time we gain to be free, we spend still being slaves,” and I claimed that “this is a fitting description of the general condition of our late-capitalist society.” A question arises: how is it that we have the freedom of Masters, yet waste it entirely by being still Slaves? How can we be Masters and Slaves at the same time? Indeed, we are Masters, because the entire world is enslaved to us through apparently permanent proletarianization; yet we occupy our abundant free time as though we were not free, as though we still depended upon labor for our live — as if we were slaves ourselves. Yet to whom are we enslaved, if we ourselves are the Masters of the world?

According to Kojève, the revolutionary potential of the Slave figure is tied to his familiarity with working for another. While, on the one hand, the Slave has every cause to desire the freedom and recognition enjoyed by the Master, on the other hand, his closeness to work enables him to actually construct a world in which it is possible to enjoy this freedom without needing to enslave others in turn. The Master, by contrast, on account of his unfamiliarity with work, is ultimately incapable of such a transformation. He does not work for another; he has no disciplinary Master wielding the fear of death (e.g. by starvation) to animate him to work; he is not familiar with oppression by another, nor with the work that is enforced by such oppression. He is the oppressor, and he believes himself to be free — even as he fears the oppressed.

So how can the Master be also a slave? Kojève observes that the figure of the bourgeois is characterized not merely by his oppression of the proletarian, but by a kind of self-oppression. That is, the bourgeois, though he is not enslaved to another, does indeed enslave himself, for both he and the working man are enslaved by capital — but it is the bourgeois himself who embodies or represents capital. Thus, he is not a pure Master; rather, he is both Master and Slave — yet not as though he were the higher synthesis of Master and Slave that is the actual end result of the historical process; rather, he is Master and Slave in disjunction, as though he were split in two, alienated from himself. Indeed, according to Kojève, the Marxist concept of alienation applies strictly to all members of capitalist society, not merely to the proletariat: “For Hegel, as for Marx, the central phenomenon of the bourgeois world is not the enslavement of the working man, of the poor bourgeois, by the rich bourgeois, but the enslavement of both by Capital.” (Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 65.)

Thus, in the “bourgeois world,” there is a real sense in which there are no class distinctions between Masters and Slaves, but only this strange hybrid that attempts but fails to be a true synthesis of Master and Slave. (Relatedly, I have noted in the past how well this characterization is mirrored in Byung-Chul Han’s characterization of life in the neoliberal era as “self-exploitation” — a concept I have also explored in depth here and here.) The realization of a true synthesis, according to Kojève, cannot take place without a struggle between Master and Slave; and since they are both embodied, disjointly, in the single figure of the bourgeois, this struggle is internal to the bourgeois. It is against himself that the Bourgeois must struggle. Thus Kojève: “The Bourgeois is neither Slave nor Master; he is — being the Slave of Capital — his own Slave. It is from himself, therefore, that he must free himself.” (Introduction, 69.)

In our late-capitalist world, there is something like a class struggle that now takes place, not within the borders of any particular nation (though on both the Right and the Left we like to imagine it takes place in a polarized America), but between nations themselves. I have argued many times that the classical Marxist distinction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat has been transposed to the global plane, where the West, and America in particular, is itself the bourgeoisie, while the developing world, led today by China, is itself the global proletariat. So class struggle does exist, though it now takes the shape of a civilizational struggle (Samuel Huntingon’s “clash of civilizations”). Kojève himself recognized this.

But within the world of the bourgeoisie, there is another struggle, not strictly a class struggle, but an internal and spiritual struggle. Or, to put it another way, just as on the global plane it has been transposed into a struggle between civilizations, in the bourgeois world the class struggle has been internalized into a spiritual struggle. Alienated man must struggle against himself, with all the rigor of the ancient ascetics, in order to overcome his own alienation — his own self-enslavement. Only thus can he hope to be truly free.