“Freedom” naturally means different things to different people, but we’ve gone far down a slippery slope when it is reduced to the right to exploit others to the maximum extent.

Humans exploiting other humans is hardly a new phenomenon, but seldom has it ever been elevated to a “democratic” principle in the way it has in recent decades. This is because freedom is morphing from something intrinsic to people to a right embedded in money. Those who have the capital are free to wield it in any way that earns themselves more capital, regardless of harm to others.

Ideologies of individualism are not simply mechanisms to atomize society through breaking down bonds of solidarity — although that is an important reason for their propagation — they grant a license for those who have more but never enough. The cult of individuality, by reducing all social outcomes to personal behaviors independent of any social structure, provides the basis for the celebration of greed while simultaneously inculcating those who have been run over with the self-defeating idea that their individual failures account for their fate.

The class interest of industrialists and financiers is presented as all of society’s interest. “Freedom” is equated with individualism — but as a specific form of individualism that is shorn of responsibility. More wealth for those at the top (regardless of the specific ideologies used to promote that goal, including demands for ever lower taxes) is advertised as good for everybody despite the shredding of social safety nets that accompanies the concentration of wealth. Those who have the most — obtained at the expense of those with far less — have no responsibility to the society that enabled them to amass such wealth.

Imposing harsher working conditions is another aspect of this individualistic “freedom,” but freedom for who? “Freedom” for industrialists and financiers is freedom to rule over, control and exploit others; “justice” is the unfettered ability to enjoy this freedom, a justice reflected in legal structures. Working people are “free” to compete in a race to the bottom set up by capitalists — this is the freedom loftily extolled by the corporate media.

When the means of collective defense have been sufficiently eroded, material standards of living are bought at higher personal prices — longer working hours, greater workloads, ever-present insecurity from the fear of being sent to the unemployment line and fear for the future because of the lack of a secure pension. That material standard can be taken away at any moment, and for many is taken away in an era of outsourcing, corporate globalization and attacks on unions and solidarity.

Even the consumer goodies constantly dangled in front of us are a source of anxiety — commodities must be designed to lead to further consumption rather than satisfy desire so as to prop up the economy, and that wages are insufficient to buy what is produced leads to reliance on credit. The imposition of debt as a means of fattening wallets is not merely a process of saddling unsustainable levels of debt on students, retirees and everybody in between, it ensnares entire countries.

Governments borrow money from the ultra-wealthy and from corporations instead of taxing them, then have to pay higher interest rates on those borrowings because the ultra-wealthy and the corporations complain that too much is being borrowed. In exchange for continuing to buy government debt, financial institutions demand that governments cut social services, lay off workers, sell assets and impose other austerity measures.

As a result of the austerity, governments take in less revenue, so they have to borrow more from the super-wealthy and corporations, who have hoarded the country’s wealth. Governmental central banks continue to keep the interest rates at which they loan money to big banks close to zero to ensure that the banks will continue to loan money, without which capitalist economies can not function. The banks in turn loan money at much higher rates, profiting from the creation of debt.

The capital wielded in exploitative ways itself comes from exploitation — profits are accumulated on the backs of employees through paying them far less than the value of what they produce, and when there is more surplus than can be usefully invested or shoveled into luxury consumption, it goes to speculation, further destabilizing living standards when the bubble inevitably bursts.

Fables are concocted to “explain” this “freedom.” The United States declared itself to be the freest society on Earth while enshrining enslavement in its constitution. Revolutionary French leaders swore to establish “liberty, equality, fraternity” while mercilessly putting down slave rebellions in the Caribbean. Profits from the slave trade and from colonial plantations were critical to bootstrapping the takeoff of British industry and modern capitalism in the second half of the eighteenth century into the early nineteenth century.

The U.S. maintained slavery until the mid-nineteenth century, enabling the plantation aristocracy to accumulate enormous wealth on the backs of its slaves, then allowed servile relations such as sharecropping, and systematic state-backed violence, to maintain African-Americans’ subjugation for another century. The wealth of the plantation owners and the desperate poverty of newly freed slaves were both transmitted to their respective descendants, locked in through terrorism. When the civil rights movement forced a dismantling of Southern apartheid, U.S. elites countered by saying, in effect: “Look! We’re all equal now! If you are not rich it’s your own fault.” Is this not preposterous?

Supreme Court decisions such as Citizens United equating money with speech are but a logical outgrowth of pernicious ideology masquerading as “freedom.” So pervasive is this ideology that, as Fredric Jameson famously wrote, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. It’s true: Hollywood movies invariably depict the breakdown of society or the aftermath of a major disaster as a brutal war of all against all as if the very concept of the survivors cooperating to ensure their survival were beyond the ability to conceptualize.

The current globalized race to decide who dies with the most toys can only lead to the death of civilization.