Semiotics of Freedom
Defining Freedom, Choice, Opportunity, and Personal Responsibility
Terms like freedom, choice, opportunity, and personal responsibility carry heavy ideological weight while appearing value-neutral. In a previous article (see above), I promised to write more on these terms.
What makes these words powerful is not their meaning, but their ambiguity. In capitalist societies, they function as what Albanian-Italian philosopher Antonio Francesco Gramsci called “common sense” ideology: uncritical and contradictory ideas that feel natural, obvious, and beyond question, even as they reproduce existing hegemonic power relations (the theory of cultural hegemony was also developed by Gramsci). Communication systems such as classroom education, media, advertising, and political rhetoric, do not merely describe reality; they organize consent around it.
These terms are not outright lies. They are partial truths, stripped of material context, then redeployed to discipline (oppress) populations rather than emancipate them. To transform the social order in the interests of the entire working class, this repressive “common sense” ideology must be reevaluated and challenged through the philosophy of praxis, becoming the basis for revolutionary class consciousness.
Freedom
The United States of America. The Land of Free. Home of the Brave.
Free to do what? Certainly not free to use what’s left of the healthcare system.
Freedom for whom, exactly? The wealthiest ten percent? Five percent? One percent? How Brave.
Capitalist ideology treats freedom as negative liberty (freedom from interference), while quietly ignoring positive liberty, the freedom to actually act in the world. Isaiah Berlin distinguished these in The Two Concepts of Liberty decades ago, but capitalist societies selectively remember only the version that places no obligation on the state or its ruling class.
To quote the recently departed Dr. Micheal Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds (Chapter: Let Us Now Praise Revolution, Section: The Freedom of Revolution):
“Some people conclude that anyone who utters a good word about leftist one-party revolutions must harbor antidemocratic or “Stalinist” sentiments. But to applaud social revolutions is not to oppose political freedom. To the extent that revolutionary governments construct substantive alternatives for their people, they increase human options and freedom.
There is no such thing as freedom in the abstract. There is freedom to speak openly and iconoclastically, freedom to organize a political opposition, freedom of opportunity to get an education and pursue a livelihood, freedom to worship as one chooses or not worship at all, freedom to live in healthful conditions, freedom to enjoy various social benefits, and so on. Most of what is called freedom gets its definition within a social context.
Revolutionary governments extend a number of popular freedoms without destroying those freedoms that never existed in the previous regimes. They foster conditions necessary for national self-determination, economic betterment, the preservation of health and human life, and the end of many of the worst forms of ethnic, patriarchal, and class oppression.”
This directly contradicts liberal propaganda that treats freedom as a purely individual possession rather than a social relation. Marx was clear: freedom under capitalism is freedom to sell one’s labor or starve. The worker is “free” in a double sense: free from feudal obligation, and free from ownership of the means of survival.
How about the freedom afforded to those who are targeted by, or incarcerated into the American Prison-Industrial Complex?
A privatized system in which the profit motive demands that the most amount of people are locked up, for the most amount of days possible, while providing them the bare minimum (and usually even less than that) level of humanity.
Here, freedom becomes a rhetorical weapon. The U.S. imprisons more people per capita than any society in human history, yet brands itself as uniquely free. This is not a contradiction, but a function. As both Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore argue, the prison system is not about justice but social management: warehousing surplus labor created by deindustrialization, austerity, and racial capitalism. Modern day slavery.
Do the ultra wealthy ever see the inside of a jail cell?
Not often, and when they do, it’s not for a long time, unless they’re being made an example of, and even then, they’re given royal treatment compared to the average imprisoned citizen. Look at Ghislane Maxwell, for example.
Freedom, in practice, is classed. It always has been.
Choice
My body, my choice? Hardly.
Choice of 1,000 different types of cereal from the same handful of umbrella corporations that are all the same blend of high fructose corn syrup, refuse wheat and corn blends, and cancer causing chemicals that can’t even be sold in Europe or Asia?
Choice of housing? Sure, if you can afford it.
Here is my point: Unless you have a minimum of ten’s of millions of dollars, you have but the illusion of choice.
In his 1964 One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse coined this Repressive Desublimation: the appearance of freedom through endless options, “flattening out of the antagonism between culture and social reality … in the higher culture by virtue of which it constituted another dimension of reality”, one that never challenges underlying power. Capitalism excels at offering consumer choice while foreclosing structural choice.
You may choose what brand to buy, but not whether housing is commodified. You may choose between political candidates, but not whether capital governs politics. This is the difference between a market democracy (the Neoliberal system the U.S. has now, representing the will of the monied) and a substantive democracy (one that emphasizes political equity, representing effectively the will of The People). Substantive theorists contend that a country with significant inequality, where only the affluent can sway policy decisions, fails to be genuinely democratic, despite conducting regular and “transparent” elections.
Choice under capitalism is constrained by material conditions. If one option leads to homelessness, debt, incarceration, or death, then choice is not “FREEDOM™”. It’s branded coercion.
Opportunity
The United States of America. The Land of Opportunity.
Opportunity to exploit your fellow man, woman, and child. Opportunity to expropriate resources inside and outside of the heart of empire.
“Opportunity” functions as a moral alibi. If success is available to all, then failure must be personal. This logic erases history: slavery, settler colonialism, redlining, imperial extraction, and union busting. Austerity disappears behind rags-to-riches mythology.
Dialectical materialism rejects this framing. Opportunity is not evenly distributed; it is produced through relations of power. The opportunity of the capitalist depends on the immiseration of the worker, both domestically and globally. In the same vein that Egyptian-French political and economic theorist Samir Amin argued in his Dependency Theory, the wealth of the core is inseparable from the underdevelopment (read as: overexploitation) of the periphery.
Opportunity for some, requires dispossession for others.
Personal Responsibility
If you haven’t caught the theme yet, structural problems are seen as personal failings in the U.S.
This is perhaps the most insidious term of all. Personal responsibility is invoked precisely where individuals have the least control: healthcare outcomes, housing security, educational access, employment stability, and even chemical dependence.
If you are sick, you made bad choices.
If you are poor, you didn’t work hard enough.
If you are incarcerated, you failed morally.
This narrative collapses systemic violence into individual guilt. It is the ideological glue that holds austerity together. Similarly, as liberal philosopher, Mark Fisher posits, capitalism not only exploits labor, it colonizes mental health, or “privatizes stress”, turning social misery into personal shame. He claimed that treating mental health solely through medicine, while ignoring social causes, serves to depoliticize the issue. Fisher connects the rise in mental illness to Capitalist Realism: the widespread, internalized belief that there is no alternative to capitalism. This creates a nihilistic, hopeless, futureless landscape, inducing anxiety and depression, with no hope for escape. This is by design. It may have also led to his early death.
Personal responsibility becomes a disciplinary tool utilized upon the working class, ensuring that anger is directed inward rather than upward.
Ideology Internalized
Ideology is most effective when it stops feeling external. The power of capitalism is not only in what it enforces through law or violence, but in what it convinces people to enforce upon themselves.
Louis Althusser described this process as interpellation: the moment when individuals recognize themselves inside ideology and begin to act accordingly. You are not merely told what freedom, choice, opportunity, or responsibility mean; you are trained to see yourself through these terms.
From early childhood onwards, schooling conditions people to equate obedience with merit and competition with virtue. Standardized testing, grading curves, and behavioral discipline mirror workplace hierarchies, preparing individuals to accept overt surveillance, precarity, and evaluation as normal. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Brazilian philosopher, Paulo Freire called this the Banking Method of Education: a system designed to produce compliant subjects across a population, not to cultivate a critical consciousness.
As I described in my last publication, media reinforces this internalization. Advertising does not sell products; it sells identities. Freedom becomes a car commercial, top down, hair blowing in the wind. Choice becomes a brand aesthetic. Opportunity becomes hustle culture, grindset-mindset. Failure, when it appears in any form, is framed as a personal deficiency rather than a predictable outcome of structural design. Jamaican-British cultural theorist Stuart Hall argued, dominant ideology works through encoding and decoding: messages are framed to be read as common sense, not political claims.
Quick break away to define some communication basics:
What is communication?
Process by which individuals use symbol, signs, and behaviors to exchange information
Symbols
Arbitrary constructions of language and behavior which refer to people, objects, things, and ideas.
Codes
Symbols joined together to create a meaningful message
Encoding
The process of mentally constructing a message
Decoding
Interpreting and assigning meaning to a message that is received
Let’s get back to it.
Workplace culture completes the circuit. Productivity metrics, performance reviews, and “professionalism” transform economic coercion into self-discipline. The worker learns to blame themselves for burnout, stagnation, or unemployment. As French philosopher Michel Paul Foucault observed, modern power operates less through force and more through self-regulation, in which individuals become both prisoner and guard.
This is where personal responsibility does the most damage. When people internalize systemic failure as personal inadequacy, collective resistance collapses. Solidarity is replaced with shame, damaging community. Anger is redirected inward, towards peers. The result is a population that feels perpetually inadequate in a society designed to produce inadequacy.
Breaking this internalization requires more than exposing lies; it requires restoring historical memory and collective analysis. When people recognize that their struggles are shared, structured, and intentional, ideology will begin to crack. What was once internal guilt can become external critique. What was once isolation can become organization. Hope returns. Maintain revolutionary optimism.
The greatest threat to capitalist society is not rebellion. It is consciousness.
Closing Thoughts
As I described, the terms freedom, choice, opportunity, and personal responsibility, are not neutral. They are weapons of communication, obfuscating material interests, deployed through mass media, education, and political discourse to stabilize and pacify a deeply unequal system.
A society genuinely committed to freedom would organize material conditions in such a way that people can actually live, choose, heal, rest, learn, and thrive. Until then, these words will continue to mean their opposite, promising liberation while enforcing compliance.
