Dear Unknown Friends: 

ith this issue we begin to serialize There Are Two Freedoms, the lecture Eli Siegel gave on June 5, 1970. It is about one of the most beautiful and important words in the world: freedom. And yet, as Mr. Siegel shows, people have used the word freedom as a cover for some of the ugliest and most vicious activities.

     Take the Confederate cause in American history. Southerners went to war so that Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, etc. could be "free" to run themselves-not be told what to do by Lincoln and Congress. Lee may have looked picturesque on his white horse, but the cause he represented was the "freedom" to own human beings and deal with them any way one chose. It was the freedom to own a slave and beat him to death if one wanted.

There Is "Free Enterprise"

hen there is the much glorified phrase "free enterprise." An employer who hired children to work in his factory was engaging in free enterprise: it was his business-shouldn't he be free to run it in the way he saw as most profitable? Also, free enterprise takes in the ability to have your worksite arranged any way you choose: once you're forced to put in fire exits and sprinkler systems and safety equipment, you're no longer free. You're shackled, told what to do on your own premises! Ever so many employers feel that way now, and see their evasion of OSHA requirements as an effort to be free.

     Mr. Siegel writes about the term "free enterprise" in a note to one of his poems in Hail, American Development-the poem "Ode on the Death of a Racketeer." He says:

The check on free enterprise or laissez faire-as it used to be called-is ethics. Government, supposedly representing ethics, has often restricted free enterprise-for instance, in the field of child labor....Yet free enterprise has often been talked of as if the word "free" were clear and virtuous....The freedom of once has been seen later as injustice, as ugliness. Where do the ugliness and injustice of free enterprise begin?

Freedom & Lies

n personal life too, as people simply think to themselves, the beautiful idea of freedom is quietly and hugely exploited. Every lie comes from a notion of freedom: I should be free to do anything with the facts that I please-in my own mind and as I communicate with others. The freedom people take every day to alter the facts, or not look clearly at them, is related to the freedom of the slaveholder. It's related to the freedom of the boss who employs 8-year-olds. In each instance, "freedom" is the ability to do whatever one wants with what's other than oneself.

Freedom Has to Be Aesthetics

The principle at the basis of Aesthetic Realism is urgent for the understanding of freedom: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." Freedom has several opposites, among which are exactitude and justice. In all authentic art, freedom and exactitude, freedom and justice, are the same. A ballet dancer can soar through space with such freedom because her technique is exact: she worked years to get the precision that made her free. A good actor is one who seems completely free in a role-and his freedom as Hamlet, his being so fully at ease with Hamlet's words, comes from his being just to Hamlet, just to the words Shakespeare wrote. In acting, freedom and justice are the same. And in music, when sound is free, when it soars or scampers or teases or crashes beautifully, there is structure in that freedom. The accuracy of organization is in that wildness of sound.

     Aesthetic Realism is based on the idea that what happens in art is, literally, what life needs. This goes for personal life and it goes for the economics of a nation. Freedom that isn't also justice and exactitude is a mess, and cruel. It's contempt, "the addition to self through the lessening of something else." At the end of the note in Hail, American Development from which I quoted, Mr. Siegel writes:

Freedom is not just freedom, but accuracy too. Perhaps then we should change a well-known term to Free-and-Accurate Enterprise; or, perhaps, Free-and-Just Enterprise; or, even, Free-and-Beautiful Enterprise.

The Failure of Ill Will

There Are Two Freedoms is the fourth of Mr. Siegel's Goodbye Profit System lectures. In them he showed that economics impelled by ill will-seeing one's fellow humans in terms of how much profit one can make from them-was no longer able to flourish. It would never again succeed the way it had once seemed to. Economics now had to be based on true freedom, the freedom of good will: the seeing how self-expression, individual creativity, real self-glory are the same as justice to other people and things.

     Beginning about a hundred years ago, there were increasingly those "checks" on the profit system-to make it more humane, add a little ethics to it, temper its injustice. Most of these checks arose from the courageous battling done by unions. There came to be laws against child labor, laws mandating workplace safety, minimum wage, worker's compensation. Men and women in, or trying to form, unions fought and sometimes bled and died so wages could be higher and people need not be hungry. Then unions fought so workers and their families could live with more and more dignity and pleasure, get more and more of the good things of this world.

     Every one of these checks on profit economics was a check on bosses' and stockholders' freedom to pocket the wealth that workers produced. After all, as Mr. Siegel put it, it's mathematical: each penny that people's labor brings in, beyond the money needed to have production continue, will go either to those whose work creates the wealth or to owners who don't work for it. Every curb on the profit system's injustice-from mandated ventilation to an employer-paid pension plan negotiated by a union-interfered with the profit system itself. It was money used in behalf of what workers deserve, and thus cut in on how much profit could go to persons who did not do the work.

What Unions Need to Be Clear About

ere is what unions today need to see. The greater justice for which they fought, and which they increasingly achieved, has helped to disable profit economics. That's why there has been such a fierce effort these decades to do away with unions in America, and why so many companies are having their work done overseas by "cheap" labor. I said this some years ago, based on what I learned from Eli Siegel-the present difficulty of unions is really a sign of their strength: by the 1970s, unions were able to accomplish so much, get such a better life for American workers, that employers have found themselves unable to come away with the profits they desired. Unions, making work more ethical, have weakened a way of economics based on bad ethics. Seeing this fact should bring pride and encouragement to the American labor movement.

     In the August 6 New York Times, Ben Stein writes: "Corporate executives say that...our industries cannot compete with foreign makers because our labor costs are so high that if we used American union labor, we would see profits evaporate." Here we have what Mr. Siegel described 36 years ago as the two main factors causing economics based on profit to fail: 1) unions have gotten workers more of what's rightfully theirs; 2) " America is not the only country now with industrial know-how....There is more competition with the American product."

"Free-and-Just Enterprise"

nions have been threatened into agreeing to givebacks. And whole unionized industries (like steel) have shrivelled in America . The answer is not to try to save profit economics by having less justice-less in terms of wages, health coverage, job security-come to workers. Unions need to see what they are really after: " Free-and-Just Enterprise." That is, enterprise based on ethics and aesthetics.

     Unions need to see that givebacks won't solve the problem-that we've reached the point when American workers cannot get paid with any decency and have big profits come to people who don't do the work. Further, unions need to be clear about a very happy fact: American companies can exist quite well without profits coming to non-working individuals. In fact, such unearned profits are the big interference with the US economy.

      Americans, including labor leaders, need to look straight at the following question: Since the jobs of America cannot provide profits for non-working owners and also provide what the American people deserve, the wages, healthcare, security, pensions, and yes the leisure time-which of the two should be eliminated? Should the well-being of Americans be sacrificed so a few rich people can get richer? Or should the wealth that the American people create be theirs to give them good lives-and those completely unnecessary unearned profits be eliminated? The workers of America, with management included among the workers, can run and own the work of America, the workplaces of America, very efficiently. Having one's life used to enrich somebody else was always wrong and ugly anyway. And non-profit jobs are ever so American. Firefighters do not work to supply some individual with profit. Nor do most teachers. Nor, even, do park rangers, who help us value and enjoy the American land.

     Aesthetic Realism differs from every other approach to economics in saying that economics has to be the same as aesthetics and ethics. In sentences of 1946 from Self and World, Eli Siegel describes what America is looking for. It's what our economy can no longer function well without-the oneness of individual freedom and justice to all people:

All persons should be seen as living in a world truly theirs. In the same way as 10,000 persons can be listening to an exciting composition of music, each feeling that he is listening to it, while others are listening-so each person can see the wonder and delicacy and largeness of the universe as his, while knowing that other selves are apprehending pleasantly this universe.

— ELLEN REISS, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism