2025 Theses Doctoral

Immanent Freedom: Visions of Ending Capitalism in the Heart of Empire

Raine, Barnaby

This intellectual history reconstructs a broad socialist tradition with a distinctive method for thinking about freedom, which offers an alternative to a set of familiar binary oppositions: liberty vs. equality, class vs. identity, particularism vs. universalism. For some socialists, freedom once named an ambitious expectation of an egalitarian structure of social life permitting everyone to hone their individuality, whose future shape was imagined immanently as a possibility given by a fissure in the experience of ourselves in the present. Emancipatory subjects were depicted yearning to liberate their personalities from moulding by their subordination. The norm received its content by the determinate negation of subjects’ particular unfreedom.

The dissertation presents one genealogy of that immanent freedom through changing socialist treatments of labour and the imperial and national state in Britain from 1848 to 1989. It contrasts, on one hand, two communist accounts developed in close dialogue with British experiences (Marx’s freedom from subjection by labour in his Grundrisse and Lenin’s post-1905 republican freedom from domination by capitalists and states) that treated capitalism as an unfree social relation or system of relations and, on the other hand, a social democratic freedom that fixed labour and the nation-state as its twin foundations, seeing capitalist unfreedom more in the things it denied people than the relations it compelled of them.

This third chapter reads Keynes and TH Marshall in dialogue with Labour Party thinkers and actors, together redefining immanent freedom across the first five decades of the twentieth century amid denuding revolutionary hopes. The last chapter finds complicatedly “new” lefts in Britain after 1956 restoring and refreshing communist immanent freedoms in a critique of social democracy developing alongside deindustrialisation, connecting and reframing New Left intellectuals, trade union militants, socialist feminists and a heterogenous but coherent Black Marxist tradition in Britain. All offered (post)-Fordist futures past involving a critique of labour and its associated subjections.

Treating both political subjectivity and its horizons through the class/power/status nexus, the dissertation contrasts “status abolition” to “status affirmation,” and empowerment to redistribution, as rival socialist vocabularies meeting changing conditions. It offers an account of how the spectre of immanent freedom was lost, in a claim about the structural precarity of emancipatory politics within capitalism and empire that also highlights a troubled modernist fetish of agency in emancipatory politics and a surprising affinity between social democracy and the politics of identity on left and right as forms of recognition that enshrine subjection. In quests for control and community – or: for the immanent emancipation of time, space and individuality – the dissertation recovers anti-economistic socialisms that proceeded from contingent particular experiences to universal aspirations, highlighting a non-essentialist connection between socialist and feminist, anti-colonial and anti-racist dreams of a freedom that would remake its subjects.