The more power someone has over another person, the more they can constrain that person’s freedom – and it’s hard to think of a power imbalance more extreme than being dependent on someone for food, shelter, and other survival needs. Yet this is the norm in our society.
Human freedom is constrained by the fact that most of us are dependent on the economic ruling class for our survival. In today’s world this means that most people are dependent on a wage paid by an employer, which we do in exchange for working for that employer. In earlier eras many people were dependent on land that was owned/controlled by lords or other elites, and access to that land was only granted in exchange for paying those elites either in crops, currency, or labor. In both cases an economic ruling class controls access to resources the rest of us are deprived of yet need for survival, and this enables our exploitation.
But why is it like this? How was this dependency created? How is it that we, the vast majority of humanity, lost our freedom? That's what this video seeks to explore.
The main takeaway is that a person’s freedom is not secure if someone else controls their access to the means of subsistence and means of production – which in today’s world is much more than just the land. Therefore, to create a society where people are truly free, it must be the case that access to the means of subsistence and means of production are shared by all, and something that no one is alienated from. By contrast, if these are under the exclusive control of only a portion of the population – whether that be an elite economic class or even a socialist/communist political party – then that is a recipe for tyranny, exploitation, and unfreedom.
