Capitalist freedom of choice was really freedom to lose

Evidence

Landlords could choose to lease land for a price reflecting the amount of wool it could produce. The evicted serfs could choose to offer their labour for a wage. Of course, in reality, being free to choose was no different from being free to lose. Former serfs who refused squalid work for a pitiful wage starved to death. Proud aristocrats who refused to go along with the commodification of their land went bankrupt. As feudalism receded, economic choice arrived but was as free as the one offered by a mafioso who, smilingly, tells you: ‘I shall make you an offer you cannot refuse.’ — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 100

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Compresses the whole Marxian critique of formal freedom/real coercion into an image — that the ‘free’ labour contract is a mob-style offer you can’t refuse — which likely recurs as the yardstick for judging platform-era ‘choice’.
• SEED: Possible angle: ‘freedom of platform choice is freedom to be deplatformed’ — reusing the enclosure/mob metaphor for the attention-and-gig economy.
• XREF: connects to: Capitalist economic choice was coercive, not genuinely free. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 100; The system’s celebrated freedoms function as instruments of domination — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 45; Freedom of choice can itself serve domination when options are controlled. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 121 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Capitalist economic choice was coercive, not genuinely free. #corroborates (0.95) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 100
• The system’s celebrated freedoms function as instruments of domination #corroborates (0.93) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 45
• Freedom of choice can itself serve domination when options are controlled. #expands (0.92) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 121
• Neoliberal domination works by making subjects act on themselves and call it freedom #expands (0.90) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 69
• Chicago neoliberalism recoded freedom so no economic transaction could count as coercive #complicates (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 777