consciously or otherwise, in the ubiquitous power struggles that characterise our world.
Every choice that is made has two aspects: the situation being faced (the way the world is) and the identity of the chooser (the way the chooser is). In other words, who we are, as well as what we are faced with, determines how we will act at a particular point in time. The decisions we make emerge from the interaction of identity and context. Control of a person’s actions can be achieved by shaping either of these elements. Understanding how is central to understanding freedom.
Shaping context
Given who we are, we make the choices we do because of the circumstances we find ourselves in. Choices are not made in the abstract; they are made in concrete situations, at particular times, in particular places. These particulars matter. The greater the limits on what we can do, the narrower the range of potential behaviour. Some constraints are imposed by the laws of physics, others by those of society.
The ultimate way to reduce someone’s options is to cut short their life. To kill someone is to extinguish their capacity to act on the world. Short of that, the direct application of coercive force, such as imprisonment or physical restraint, dramatically curtails the options available. Threats of physical or emotional punishment can exert control by raising the perceived costs of certain choices. Cultural values can restrict access to many desirable things: a parent can withhold affection, peers can withhold respect, and society at large can deny acceptance and status. Controlling the context of a choice reduces the number and appeal of the options available to a chooser: behaviour is then channelled in the desired direction by shutting off options. While cultural incentives can be powerful, organised coercive force is necessary to close down avenues of action on a large scale.
Modern states expend vast resources on shaping the possibilities and incentives of their populations. Intelligence agencies, police forces and soldiers – along with surveillance cameras, guns and barbed wire – guard the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ behaviour, changing the risks associated with different courses of action. Laws define what is allowed, and coercive force awaits those who step beyond the paths of compliance. It is in the context of wide-ranging laws, backed by state power, that we make all of our choices.
Without the threat of coercive power, massive inequalities of wealth could not be sustained. The starving will take food if they can, the homeless will occupy empty buildings if they are able, and the sick will obtain treatment if not prevented from doing so. The more concentrated wealth becomes in a society, the more resources must be dedicated to its protection. One way to measure this is to look at the proportion of the national workforce dedicated to maintaining ‘security’. This includes police officers, military personnel, prison guards, court officials, but also private security firms and weapons manufacturers. Across nations, a clear pattern can be observed: more unequal nations have a higher proportion of their workforces dedicated to ‘guard labour’.2 Since inequality exploded in the United States, there has been a marked increase in guard labour – in fact, it is a world leader in this respect, boasting 5.2 million workers in the sector in 2011.3 As a proportion of the total workforce this amounts to four times that of Sweden, a nation with a comparable standard of living. The pattern holds within nations just as it does between them. The most unequal American states have double the amount of guard labour (as a proportion of the workforce) as the most equal ones.4
The function of guard labour is to restrict the ways that people can gain access to valuable, often essential, resources – resources under the legal ownership of someone else. Ownership, by definition, reduces the options of other people. The owner of a resource has the power to decide what to do with it. Put another way, to own a resource is to deny the rest of the world the right to use it without permission. It is a relationship between one person (one company, one country) and the rest of humanity – one that is ultimately founded on force.
Centuries of violence have drawn and redrawn national borders, and ownership rights have been transferred to those who wielded the most effective fighting force. Indeed, the modern state was born of war. Given a fairly broad definition, one count estimates that over a thousand wars took place between 1400 and 1984.5 European monarchies averaged 40 per cent of total expenditure on warfare in the fifteenth century, 27 per cent in the sixteenth, 46 per cent in the seventeenth, and 54 per cent in the eighteenth.6 In times of war, military costs can exceed 90 per cent of total expenditure. In fact, over the past two centuries, there has not been a single year in which the world has been without military conflict.
From 1500 to the twentieth century, almost every country on Earth came under the direct or indirect control of European colonial powers. Native populations were wiped out or dispossessed of their land. Natural resources were stolen and used to enrich the colonising nations. The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw almost all of Africa conquered and divided up between a handful of European nations. In the blink of an eye, 110 million Africans were turned into subjects.7 Nations were conjured out of thin air as territory was demarcated with clean straight lines across the continent. Joseph Conrad called it ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience’.8 Leopold II, King of the Belgians, was a key player in this ‘scramble for loot’. For decades he had been obsessed with obtaining a colony for his young country. Belgium ‘doesn’t exploit the world’, he told one of his advisers. ‘It’s a taste we have got to make her learn.’9 Though he never set foot on Congolese soil, Leopold took control of a territory seventy-six times larger than Belgium itself with the aim of growing rich on the systematic theft of rubber and ivory. Under his brutal and exploitative rule, at least half the population of his newly created nation perished. According to authoritative estimates, that amounted to roughly 10 million people. It was genocide.10
Prior to the First World War, the European powers owned more than three-quarters of the industrial capital in Africa and Asia.11 During this period, writes Thomas Piketty, ‘the rest of the world worked to increase consumption by the colonial powers and at the same time became more and more indebted to those same powers. . . . The advantage of owning things is that one can continue to consume and accumulate without having to work . . . The same was true on an international scale in the age of colonialism.’
Ownership has always been a defining concept of legal frameworks. Laws determine who controls what, what limits exist on that control, and how rights can be transferred. Much ownership can be traced back to acts of violence and subterfuge. Leopold’s legal ownership of the Congo began with African chiefs signing treaties in a language they didn’t understand and with no idea of what they were giving away. Over the course of history, claims of ownership have been made on all kinds of things, from land, buildings and machinery to water, ideas and even DNA. Claims of ownership have also been made on human beings. The idea that women are a resource to be owned and controlled by men has been deeply embedded in the laws and practices of civilisation for thousands of years. The same is true of slavery. Many millions have lived their lives as the state-enforced legal property of someone else.
In almost every large civilisation, slaves have occupied the lowest tier of a large and complex social hierarchy. Their intelligence, talents and energy were used to bring about outcomes desired by their owners. Just two centuries ago, over three-quarters of humanity were held captive by systems of slavery or serfdom.12 Traders from Britain shipped close to 1.5 million slaves across the Atlantic, earning for themselves roughly £8 billion in today’s money. The conditions of a slave’s existence, as historian Adam Hochschild testifies, were abysmal: ‘They plant, cultivate, and harvest most of Earth’s major crops. They earn no money from their labor. Their work often lasts twelve or fourteen hours a day. Many are subject to cruel whippings or other punishments if they do not work hard enough. They die young.’13
Today, the ownership of the talents, energies and time of human beings persists, but takes a very different form. In the past, the control exerted by masters over their slaves was lifelong, coercive and bound by few constraints. Now, control of human labour manifests as highly constrained, temporary forms of consensual ownership: ‘employment’. Instead of being sold against our will into indefinite servitude, we rent ourselves out for a fee, for defined purposes and set periods of time (of