Akadēmiskā · Dienasgrāmata

...one cannot be forced to do what one cannot do, and one cannot do what one is not free to do. Hence one is free to do what one is forced to do. Resistance to this odd-sounding but demonstrable conclusion comes from failure to distinguish the idea of being free to do something from other ideas, such as the idea of doing something freely.

Look at it this way: before you are forced to do A, you are, except in unusual cases, free to do A and free not to do A. The force removes the second freedom, not the first. It puts no obstacle in the path of your doing A, so you are still free to. [...]

Marxists say that working-class people are forced to sell their labour power [...]. Bourgeois thinkers celebrate the freedom of contract manifest not only in the capitalist's purchase of labour power but in the worker's sale of it. If Marxists are right, then workers, being forced to sell their labour power, are, in an important way, unfree. But it must remain true that (unlike chattel slaves) they are free to sell their labour power. Accordingly, the unfreedom asserted by Marxists is compatible with the freedom asserted by bourgeois thinkers. Indeed: if Marxists are right, the bourgeois thinkers are right, unless they also think, as characteristically they do, that the truth they emphasize refutes the Marxist claim. The bourgeois thinkers go wrong not when they say that the worker is free to sell his labour power, but when they infer that the Marxist cannot therefore be right in his claim that the worker is forced to. And Marxists share the bourgeois thinkers' error when they think it necessary to deny what the bourgeois thinkers say. If the worker is not free to sell his labour power, of what freedom is a foreigner whose work permit is removed deprived?