Chris Wyatt
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Self-determination, self-realisation and negative freedom
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The main objective of this chapter is to mark out the specific ways in which freedom as Marxian-autonomy brings together ideals from the positive conceptions of freedom (self-determination and self-realisation), which, far from violating the usual set of freedoms from, is, for a number of reasons, the optimum means through which to protect them. In their productive lives, members of work teams in the guild cooperatives are ensured the opportunity to self-elevate into their higher-selves through a democratic determination of cooperative method and policy, including self-legislation, which overlaps with the radical republican notion of liberty (self-determination), and the universalisation of a creative mode of labour, which is a version of idealist liberty (self-realisation). The chapter argues that these two inseparable labour processes are configured in such a way that they provide fair value to the usual set of equal political liberties. It is then this particular rearrangement of the intrinsic properties of political participation that provide the levels of instrumental acts upon which a just constitution rests. Moving on, this argument is enhanced through a discussion of the contemporary literature on how freedom is best enforced. The focus is now on the role of civic virtue as a guarantor of negative liberty. Here the chapter infers that for the implied link between civic virtue and negative freedom to be robust enough to fulfil its instrumental role, a system of workers’ cooperatives formed through internal participatory structures is the essential ingredient. In these self-governing conditions, the freedom of citizens will need no formal enforcement from a centralised political authority.

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Associational anarchism

Towards a left-libertarian conception of freedom

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