153, May June 2025

The archetypal modern narrative of freedom is a progressive one: a story of greater human flourishing enabled by the steady advance of reason, which has gradually liberated human beings from nature’s capricious and uncaring grip.footnote¹ Although more often encountered within critical scholarship as a foil than a genuine article of faith, this is probably still the dominant account of modern freedom, and not just in the West. Yet today it is challenged by a widely held anxiety: that the freedoms many of us enjoy are ecologically catastrophic and that an ecologically viable future is likely to be more austere and less free. ‘The mansion of modern freedoms’, as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, ‘stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use.’footnote² It is these cheap, intensive sources of energy that have made it possible for human societies to produce more food with less labour, move more widely and rapidly, and develop intellectual and artistic capacities that demand time and resources. The reliance of modern life on such vast inputs from the non-human world, and the revelation that these have come with serious material costs, prompt unsettling questions: what will happen to the mansion of freedoms in a world no longer able to depend on fossil fuels and increasingly buffeted by the ecological consequences of their historic overuse? How might modern freedoms be maintained or reimagined if we stop treating nature as a ‘free gift’? Even those convinced that it is capitalism, rather than humanity as a whole, that bears responsibility for the overexploitation of nature’s gifts might wonder whether modern freedoms, however inadequate or partially realized, will be possible without it. How might we live differently? What else might freedom mean?

Historically, capitalism’s critics have advanced two visions of freedom. The first, associated with classical Marxism, is a view of freedom as material, its realization lying beyond the realm of necessity. The second, grounded in critical social theory, emphasizes freedom from domination by others. Each speaks to vital human aspirations—yet neither is fully adequate to our present. The material view makes freedom dependent on transcending nature—or, in some cases, submitting to it. The social view, by contrast, has very little to say about nature at all, locating freedom in formal relationships between human beings who seem to float free of earthly concerns. Yet the material and the social must be understood in relation to each other, as mutually mediated. Like form and content, they cannot be prised apart, but need to be continually reevaluated in relation to one another. This synthesis allows us to face the problem of human freedom in a resource-constrained world more directly; to ask exactly what needs to be done to make freedom possible on a damaged planet. In what follows, I will draw on Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of ambiguous freedom to chart a different path through these dilemmas. First, though, it’s worth examining these two conceptions of freedom, the material and the social, on their own terms.

The claim that ‘nothing is more material than freedom’, as Pierre Charbonnier recently put it, has a long history on the left. The argument is that socialism will finally realize in practice the universal freedom that liberalism can only formally guarantee. It will bring about the freedom from labour that capitalism promises but can never deliver. This aspiration has often been expressed in terms of Marx’s distinction between the realm of freedom and the realm of necessity:

The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production . . . Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day is its basic prerequisite.footnote³

Although this famous passage would seem to have obvious relevance to ecological debates, with its references to the ‘interchange with nature’ and ‘expenditure of energy’, its precise valence is as contested as that of any other aspect of Marx’s corpus.footnote⁴ Marx is clear, however, that working less is the aim of a socialist society. This view of freedom as release from toil, from the struggle to wrest a living from nature, echoes an ancient one. ‘If each tool could perform its task on command’, Aristotle argued, if ‘shuttles wove cloth by themselves . . . a master craftsman would not need assistants, and masters would not need slaves.’footnote⁵ Marx castigated Aristotle for justifying slavery, but other socialist thinkers took his reasoning further. Karl Kautsky saw ancient Athens as the epitome of freedom beyond necessity—the ‘only society of thinkers and artists devoted to science and art for their own sakes’—and also as evidence that only modern industry could realize freedom for all. Until the era of machinery, he agreed, activity for its own sake ‘was possible only by throwing upon others the burden of labour, by exploiting them’. Capitalism made clear that machinery alone was insufficient for liberation: the advent of self-operating tools, where privately owned, had not freed most people from the need to work, but, rather, had emptied labour of its intellectual content and made the worker an appendage to the machine. But the socialist use of machinery, Kautsky thought, could enable ‘freedom from labour’ for all, and make time for the ‘freedom of life, freedom for artistic and intellectual activity, freedom for the noblest enjoyment’.footnote⁶ It could, in other words, universalize the freedom that in Athens had been limited to the few, while avoiding the evil of slavery that had poisoned it. Much of twentieth-century socialist thought would follow suit, proclaiming that socialism would master nature in order to achieve freedom and justice among human beings.

As the twentieth century progressed and the era of mass consumption got underway, however, this view of freedom as liberation from necessary labour often blurred into a view of freedom as liberation from necessity as scarcity. Freedom, from this perspective, is not only an abundance of free time—it is not, in other words, the condition of pre-industrial leisure that Marshall Sahlins famously described as ‘stone age economics’—but also an abundance of material goods.footnote⁷ G. A. Cohen agreed with Kautsky that socialism would reduce labour hours in a way that capitalism could not—while claiming that a ‘radically reduced working day’ would require ‘astronomically high levels of productive power’. This is because, in Cohen’s view, class society itself is ‘derivative’ from the struggle to wrest a living from nature. As long as scarcity persists, some people will force others to perform unpleasant but necessary labour in their stead: ‘Men would relate in connections of mastery and servitude until they were masters of the physical world.’footnote⁸ Material abundance is the basic condition for ending the domination of one person by another. As Cohen would later argue, ‘It was because he was so uncompromisingly pessimistic about the social consequences of anything less than limitless abundance that Marx needed to be so optimistic about the possibility of that abundance.’footnote⁹ The obvious problem with this view is that any limits to abundance will necessitate limits to freedom. Already in the late 1970s, Cohen had worried that the looming ‘resource crisis’ cast doubt on the possibility that human labour could be replaced entirely and the realm of freedom expanded universally.footnote¹⁰ By the 1990s, his concern about the material limits to abundance would animate his embrace of egalitarian philosophy. Whereas it had previously been possible to believe that equality was both ‘historically inevitable and morally right’, the prospect of perpetual scarcity required more explicit arguments for equality.footnote¹¹

The anxiety that resource constraints will make freedom beyond necessity impossible has only intensified since. The geographer Matthew Huber has argued that Marx’s view of freedom as based on ‘material abundance’ and relief from the ‘toil of labour’ has thus far been largely achieved through the use of fossil fuels. Rather than retreating from the aspiration to freedom beyond necessity, Huber argues that a solar-powered eco-socialism could use the renewable energy of the sun to power collectively owned productive forces and achieve abundance for all.footnote¹² Yet this positive vision is motivated by precisely the same pessimistic, even fatalistic view that Cohen saw in Marx. Without abundant sources of non-human energy, Huber warns, making possible other kinds of material abundance, forms of unfree labour are doomed to return.footnote¹³ The writer Leigh Phillips puts it even more bluntly: ‘Energy is freedom. Growth is freedom.’footnote¹⁴