If I have no money, how can I do…anything? Am I still free?

Assertion

Within a capitalist society all human relations are reduced to exchanges of value; Money mediates all social interactions, and true freedom is reserved for those who control capital. 

The more wealth one has, the more autonomy they possess.

Examples of this are such; The cost of maintaining, fueling, and licensing your personal motor vehicle is the cost of your freedom to travel. The cost of rent and insurance is the cost of your sheltered protection from the elements. The cost to see a movie or hike on a trail or enter a building. In order to travel to a place, go within that place, partake in the service or good of that place once you are inside, and then have somewhere to return to once you are done, are all tied to financial costs. Everything you do siphons from your monetary wealth; To participate in society is to pay a toll.

This is not a controversial idea. The father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, acknowledges that market societies tie individual liberty to purchasing power in his book The Wealth of Nations. Notably he claims this is ‘natural’, despite the fact that it does not emerge from nature itself, but from his own, late 18th century philosophies. Capitalist ideology is man-made, and his rationalization of naturality contradicts that he himself made it. The only provable and recorded naturally emergent socioeconomic structure was primitive-communism, forming in early hunter-gatherer tribes and continuing into the 20th century; It has been with us since the beginning of our history, and has only recently been challenged by other socioeconomic structures. Capitalism, like feudalism before it, did not emerge from human nature, it suppressed it.

Metrics of Freedom

With autonomy and freedoms tied directly to financial wealth, how do we measure the autonomy of a person, and how does growing wealth inequality pool freedoms into the hands of the wealthy few?

Freedom itself isn’t quite just ‘having money’, but having the capacity to make meaningful choices that affect you or others without coercion. A framework of measure would be Isaiah Berlin’s ‘Negative and Positive Freedom’ model. Negative freedom being freedom from interference (laws, debt bondage), and Positive Freedom being the freedom to act (access to healthcare, education, food, entertainment and enrichment).

Wealth enables both. But wealth inequality restricts both types of freedom for the poor. The poor face a double bind, their negative freedom is violated by exploitative contracts and business practices, while their positive freedom is throttled by unaffordable basics. Meanwhile, the wealthy purchase exemptions, transforming their capital into legal and social immunity.

Mechanisms of Power, and How Wealth Inequality Pools Autonomy

The ultra-rich do not just have freedom, they manufacture obstructions to freedom for others. 

Their excess capital becomes tools for the following:

• Buy political influence (Lobbying, Campaign Donations, shaping laws in their favor)

• Monopolize resources (Land, Housing, Patents, forcing others into dependency)

• Escape consequences (Better Legal Defence, Offshore Tax Havens, Legal Work-Arounds, Strategies, and Loopholes that they created for themselves)

• Control Narratives (Media Ownership, Academic Funding, Disinformation Campaigns)

On top of being able to support their total autonomy with the capital they have, they can make use of their excessive supply of wealth to assure that the structure of the society they benefit from will permanently benefit them, and serve their strategies for accruing more wealth, regardless of economic circumstance or what may be better for the majority. 

This has historically manifested as the financial, technological, and cultural stagnation of that society, which inevitably develops into irreconcilable levels of poverty and lack of education, and then finally fascism. Fascism being the final stage where all autonomy and freedom has been concentrated to a select few, while the rest of the population has none, or as little as is required to survive each day.

The key mechanisms that contribute to the consequences listed above are:

• Rentier Capitalism (Thomas Piketty: When capital grows faster than wages, wealth concentrates)

• Debt Peonage (David Graeber:The poor lose autonomy by borrowing to survive, or simply to interface with the world) 

• Algorithmic Control (Shoshana Zuboff: Surveillance capitalism monetizes behavior, reducing privacy-based autonomy)

These are modern mechanisms of capitalism that we can all recognize in our everyday lives; Rent, Debt, and the Algorithms that are fed our personal data and dictate the media presented to us on our personal devices.

Counterforces: Can Autonomy Be Democratized?

Historically, societies have tried:

• Redistribution (Taxes, Welfare, UBI)

• Worker cooperatives (democratizing workplaces)

• Commons-based systems (public healthcare, free education)

• Degrowth/Post-capitalist models (redefining wealth beyond GDP)

But with these tactics there is a paradox consistent among them. Even in pure welfare states, autonomy remains tied to relative wealth. As G. A. Cohen argued, “Under capitalism, the rich can buy not just yachts but freedom from the state’s coercive arm (e.g. private security, elite schools). The poor face the state as an oppressive force (e.g.e policing, welfare bureaucracy).”

Conclusion

Autonomy under capitalism is a privilege, not a right. It is a class weapon. If you are poor, you are not free.

Wealth inequality is the siphoning of a population's very autonomy, as the medium that acts as a person’s interface to the world is being pooled into the ownership of the wealthy few, and the power to change this systemic downfall concentrates in the same place for the same reasons. 

It is the systemic transfer of agency from the many to the few. To be poor is to lack agency over your own life. 

Until capital’s grip is broken, freedom will remain a commodity sold to the highest bidder.