In Wendy Brown's brilliant book, "States of injury," she reserves her harshest criticisms against the left for abandoning the call for "freedom" in their struggles. Cowed by the anti-statism of the right proclaiming an ethnocentric and jingoistic "free" society, the left turned on the concept, emptying it of power and action.

Over the past week, several stories have appeared that promote and feature “freedom” as the hinge upon which a new era swings. Clawing its way back from military parlance of the post-9/11 world, “freedom” seems to have taken on a new importance both for resistance movements and for marketers promoting the next chapter of property relations.

I don't want to write this entry only to end up saying that the word "freedom" is being co-opted again, because I think there's something more interesting happening here - I think the social justice perspective has interwoven with the corporate regime - much in the way that Harriet Friedmann describes in her work (see attachment). Are we being coopted so much as we have bargained and won a tiny little liberal piece of what we were looking for? 

Take for example, “The Internet Freedom Declaration of 2007: A Public Agenda for the Future of Communications [1].” This treatise against Net Neutrality [2] focuses not only on the economic self-interest of users, but uses the issue of bandwith as a platform to make a case for equality and distribution of key public resources:

"Broadband Internet access should be universally available and affordable. Rural or urban, rich or poor, every American must be able to access the information superhighway at fair prices and speeds that rival the rest of the world. Like the public highways, the information superhighway must be considered a key piece of public infrastructure -- an indispensable part of our society that provides economic and social opportunities to all."

Universable affordable access is only one pillar of the campaign - the other pillars involve demands that the Internet remain part of the "free market" - not subject to censorship or unfair competition. Here they seem to be alluding to an idealized free market, and not the state-backed corporate capitalism that now exists. References to the "free market" weaken their overall argument - that public resources should be distributed equally - but the challenge here is clearly to monopoly capitalism - seen as the greatest threat to bandwith access, and not capitalism more generally.

Now compare internet Freedom to "Freedom Fruit" - a Dutch company that ships fruit from South Africa, supporting local woman's organizations and reinvesting "turnover" (profits) into small-scale development projects in rural communities. Like internet equality, once again we have an economic system that re-embedds ethical social relations.

Or do we? Freedom Fruit is exemplary as a piece, but as a sum of its parts, it's a bit less impressive. Just like the "free market" giveaway of "internet freedom," Freedom Fruit represents the power of capital to adapt and create new tiers to cater to every niche market. Yes, it's a way to advance "corporate social responsibility" but pragmatically, it's about responding the consumer demands for better, more ethically grown food. Consumer-driven capitalism is still antagonistic to food sovereignty movements.

Let's take one more example of "freedom" circulating around what look like social justice movements. John Wilinsky, author of "The unacknowledged convergence between open source, open acccess and open science. [3]" I quote this article often because Willinsky both foregrounds the property relations implicit in these "open" systems and also defines the "open" movement in its fullest realization as a "free system." Free as in freedom, not as in free beer. What's more, he connects on-line "open" movements with the neccessity for a corrollary common space in the physical world, such as the need for libraries, public space, and universal access to education, so that these on-line freedoms contribute to an accessible public and discursive sphere.

It is this final version of freedom that foregrounds a comprehensive notion of freedom that could guide us today. Freedom means creating the space where various issues of domination and hierarchy may be linked together; where a radical critique of power may be articulated; and where there can be no total cooptation because there is no place, that we know of, that stands outside of the messy, muddy puddle of liberalism.