FRAMEWORKS OF LIBERATION: What Are They?

What about "liberation"? It's one of those political terms you don't see in the mainstream probably because it's culturally dissonant, or dissonant with big bourgeois culture, which wants customers and workers who do their part to make capitalism, such as it is, work. "Liberation" is not part of making capitalism work for various reasons unless we restrict "liberation" and "liberty" to those activities that do make capitalism work which is generally what is done but far more in the name of liberty than liberation. Of course this is simply the construction of an Orwellian terminology that mystifies and misdirects. Hence the United States is "liberating" Iraq no matter how much the evidence is to the contrary. So obviously we are going to reject any such false liberation framework as an oppression framework, because that is what it is whatever the terminological camouflage.

Much could be said about what liberation is not and certainly that will be a good measure of this blog.
More will be said about what liberation and liberty are in a broader sense.

Of course liberation is dependent upon a social reality where people interact in quantitatively numerous interactions that somehow end up being to the disadvantage of one party or the other. To put it bluntly and without any detail we could say that liberation and liberty have a material basis where we mean that what people do adds up to who people are and either can or must be.

For the slavemaster liberty means the right to hold others in bondage. It is an example of a few taking advantage of the many ( maybe that is why "liberty" is the favored term on the political Right since it seems to be more about the individual). Liberation to the slave is relatively obvious in the first approximation, first overthrow the master and more broadly overthrow the social institution of chattel slavery.

So abolitionism can be thought of as a framework of liberation. Or perhaps abolitionsims can be thought of as a genus of liberation frameworks ranging from Nat Turner's Rebellion and John Brown to Quaker and other
pacifist religious groups.

This suggests we are going to need to address various taxonomic issues as we proceed. One thing is certain, that we have hundreds if not thousands and tens of thousands of individual species of liberation
struggle involved groups and certainly hundreds of millions or billions of individuals who have a concrete and I tend to think somewhat objective interest in a liberation struggle that helps break their chains and the chains of others who influence their lives.


One task is to make a list of the various frameworks of liberation. This will help organize and guide our efforts to understand and support the various liberation struggles.