Penguin Modern Classics (Series 1), by Camus, Susan Sontag, et al., translators: Jian Chen, Cheng Wei, et al., Edition: Penguin Random China | CITIC Publishing House, September 2021
If we put together the cases of treachery and extortion that we have just pointed out, we can expect that one day Europe will be filled with concentration camps and everyone will be locked up, except the jailers, and they will have to detain each other. In the end, when there is only one person left, he will be called the "Supreme Jailer." In such an ideal society, the conundrum of the "opposition," which plagued all twentieth-century governments, would be solved once and for all.
Of course, this is just a prophecy. Although the governments and police agencies of the world have sought with great goodwill to achieve this happy situation, we are still far from achieving it. For example, in western European countries, for example, freedom is still officially appreciated. But this freedom always reminds me of poor female relatives in some middle-class families. She became a widow and lost her natural protector. So the family kindly took her in and let her live in the room on the top floor, and the kitchen of the house opened its doors to her. Sometimes, she would be dragged out on Sundays for a public exhibition to prove that the owner of the house was kind and generous and did not do any ulterior motives. But in everything else, especially on important occasions, she was asked to remain silent. In addition, even if a policeman did something to her in a dark corner on a whim, no one would pay too much attention to her, because she had not encountered similar things before, especially at the head of the family. And, after all, it's not worth it to go to law enforcement for the trouble of doing this little thing. We must admit that in the East, people should be more open. They would put the female relatives directly in the small storage room and insert two sturdy latches to solve all the troubles about her once and for all. It seems that in about fifty years she will be released, and by then the ideal society will be completely established. Then, people hold a celebration in her name. But it seemed to me that she might have become a vintage by then, and I was very skeptical that she would still have a star and a half of residual value. If we stop and think about these two notions of freedom, the kind of storeroom and the kind of kitchen, and decide to forcibly merge the two together, and force the space of the female relative's activities further in the midst of all this noise, we can immediately see that slavery, not freedom, pervades our history, and that this is the same in the world in which we live. Every morning, this ugly world leaps out of the morning newspaper we read and pounces on us, filling us day and night with resentment and disgust.
The simplest, and therefore the most tempting, is to blame the government, or the wanton behavior of some secretive forces. Moreover, they are indeed guilty, and their guilt is so entrenched that we have forgotten how it began. But they are not the only ones responsible for this. After all, if freedom had always had to rely on government encouragement to thrive, it is likely to be still in its cradle or buried long ago, with the inscription "Another little angel went to heaven" inscribed on the tombstone. As far as I know, no one has ever claimed that a society dominated by money and exploitation has ensured the triumph of freedom and justice, and there has never been any doubt that the police state will open a law school in the cellars they use to extort confessions by torture. Thus, when they oppress and exploit, they are merely performing their duties. If someone is blind enough to entrust the protection of liberty to these people, he has no right to express surprise that liberty is immediately tarnished. If freedom is bound and insulted today, it is not because of any cunning by its enemies, but simply because it has lost its natural protector. Yes, freedom became a widow. But we must also add that this is absolutely true — that it is we who make freedom a widow.
Camus
Those who care about freedom are the oppressed, and its natural protectors have always been sought out among the oppressed. In feudal Europe, commune towns became hotbeds of freedom; the short-lived victory of freedom in the Revolution of 1789 was also the credit of the townspeople; and since the nineteenth century the workers' movement had always defended the dual glory of freedom and justice, when it was never dreamed of saying that the contradictions between the two were irreconcilable. The laborer, both physically and intellectually, is involved in shaping and promoting freedom in this world, until it becomes the cornerstone of all our thoughts, as indispensable as air but rarely paid special attention to by us, until it is suddenly taken away, and we find that our lives are short. If freedom is in the ebb and flow of a large part of the world today, it is probably because the means of slavery have never been so indifferently chosen or so effective as they are today, but at the same time they have been abandoned by the natural defenders of liberty out of fatigue, out of despair, or out of misconceptions about "strategy" and "efficiency." Yes, one of the great events of the twentieth century was the abandonment of the value of freedom by revolutionary movements. From that moment on, a certain hope disappeared from the world, and every free man fell into loneliness.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, a rumor has spread widely and has gradually become more and more powerful, that freedom is just a Bourgeois hoax. This definition gets a word wrong, and we're still paying for that misalignment today. The correct way to say it is that Bourgeois freedom is a hoax—not all freedom. In fact, we need only say that Bourgeois freedom is not freedom, or at best, just a prototype of freedom. But there are freedoms that we really need to fight for, and once we grasp them, we can never let go. Admittedly, there was no freedom for the man who was chained to the machine during the day and could not get out, and who had to squeeze in a small room with his whole family at night. But this fact condemns a class, a society, and the slavery it practises, not freedom itself. Without freedom, the poorest of us will not survive, for even if society were to change its face overnight and become comfortable for all human beings, it would remain barbaric unless freedom prevailed. Just because Bourgeois society talks about freedom but doesn't practice it, should the world of workers likewise give up practicing freedom and be proud just because they don't talk about it? In any case, chaos did arise, and freedom gradually became a bad word in the revolutionary movement, because Bourgeois society used it as a hoax. People began to reject only reasonably and healthily the hostage-taking of freedom in Bourgeois society, and then they began to disbelieve in freedom itself. At its best, freedom is postponed to a distant future, until which people are forbidden to talk about it. The reason they give is that we need to achieve justice first and then it's our turn to be free, as if a group of slaves could still count on justice. Other hard-line intellectuals will declare to the workers that it is their interest only for bread and not freedom, as if the workers did not know that their bread was more or less obtained because of freedom. We have to admit that the temptation to go to the other extreme in the face of long-standing injustice in Bourgeois society is enormous. After all, there may be no one among us who has ever succumbed to this temptation in action or thought. But history is moving forward, and given what we are seeing so far, we have to stop and think twice. The victory of the revolution set off by the workers in 1917 marked the advent of true freedom, the greatest hope ever made in the world. But this revolution, surrounded by strong enemies and facing internal and external troubles, built up a police force to protect itself. Thus the world's greatest hope gradually degenerated into the most efficient repressive rule in the world. At the same time, the false freedom of Bourgeois society has not been shaken in the slightest.
In general, we live in a world characterized by the kind of cynical dialectic that pits injustice against slavery and reinforces one with one. When we brought into the halls of culture Franco, a friend of Goebbels and Himmler, the real winner of the Second World War, there was protest that what happened every day in Franco's prison was mercilessly mocking the human rights provisions inscribed on UNESCO's Charter. In response, we replied with a smile that Poland is also a member of UNESCO, and that in terms of public freedom, the two are actually half a pound. This is, of course, a stupid argument! If you are unfortunate enough to marry your eldest daughter to the head of a former slave force, this is no reason why you should marry her sister to the most elegant agent in the social group next, and it is enough to have a scum in a family. But this stupid argument works, as we see every day. Under the disgusting "worse than rotten" attempt, only one thing remains constant – the victims are always the same group. The value of freedom is constantly being violated and used, and we notice that justice is blasphemous along with freedom all over the world.
How do you break this vicious cycle? Obviously, the value of freedom can only be revived immediately in ourselves and in others, and it can never be allowed to be sacrificed or separated from our demands for justice, even if only temporarily. The slogan for all of us at the moment can only be the following: give in on the level of freedom, and at the same time fight for every inch of land on the level of justice. Specifically, the few democratic freedoms we can still preserve are by no means insignificant illusions, and we must defend them strongly. What they represent is precisely the legacy of all the great revolutionary triumphs of the past two centuries. Therefore, they are by no means a denial of true freedom, as many clever demagogues tell us. There is no ideal that will one day be given the freedom of all mankind at the same time, like a pension that will be paid at the end of your life. The freedom that can only be won if it takes little by little hard fighting, and what we still have is only a ladder for the way forward, which is of course far from sufficient, but the path to complete liberation is indeed made up of them. If we allow these freedoms to be suppressed, we will not be able to make progress. Instead, we are retreating and regressing step by step. And one day in the future, we are destined to re-follow the footsteps of the past, when people will once again pay the price of sweat and blood.
No, today's freedom of choice does not mean stopping profiting from the Soviet regime and surrendering to the bourgeois regime. Because that would be tantamount to choosing to be enslaved twice, and worst of all, both times for someone else. Freedom of choice is not the same as turning your back on justice, although some have told us so. Rather, freedom of choice today is about those who suffer and fight all over the world, and that is what freedom is all about. While choosing freedom we also choose justice, and to be honest, from now on we cannot choose only one of them and give up the other. If someone takes your bread, then he also suppresses your freedom. However, if someone deprives you of your freedom, there is no doubt that your bread must also be threatened, for henceforth your bread depends not on yourself and your struggle, but on the mood of your master. Throughout the world, wherever freedom diminishes, poverty increases, and vice versa. If this cruel century has taught us anything, it is that all economic revolutions must be free, just as all political emancipation must encompass economic emancipation. The oppressed not only hope that they can be freed from hunger, but also from the domination of their masters. They were well aware that they would be effectively free from hunger only after they could successfully resist and repel all those masters.
In the concluding remarks, I would also like to add that the separation of liberty from justice is equivalent to the separation of labour and culture, which epitomizes all social evils. Part of the confusion faced by the European workers' movement stems from the loss of its true home, which can comfort it after all its failures, the belief in freedom. Similarly, however, the confusion faced by European intellectuals stems from a double deception created by the combined bourgeoisie and the pseudo-revolutionaries, which separates them from the only source of their authenticity, the work and suffering of all men; and separates them from their only ally, the working masses. It seems to me that there are only two kinds of people who can be called aristocrats: the laboring nobles and the intellectual nobles, and I now know how crazy and sinful it is to try to have one of them rule over the other. I know that together these two constitute the same noble whole, and that their truth, and most importantly, their validity depends on union. I know that if the two are separated, they will allow themselves to be gradually overwhelmed by tyranny and barbarism, but if they are united, they can rule the world. That is why all the efforts to break up their alliances and to separate them are at war against humanity and its highest hopes. Thus, there is nothing more of concern for all authoritarian regimes than the suppression of both labor and culture. In fact, both must be silenced, because the tyrants know very well, otherwise one of them will always shout for the other. It seems to me, then, that there are two possible ways in which an intellectual today can betray him, both of which are because he accepts the same thing—labor and the separation of culture. The first type of betrayal was common among bourgeois intellectuals who wanted to oppress and enslave workers in order to maintain their privileges. They often claim to be defending freedom, but what they defend is first and foremost the set of privileges that freedom gives them and only grants them. The second type of betrayal is common among intellectuals who consider themselves leftists who, out of distrust of freedom, are willing to put culture and the freedoms it presupposes under the false pretext of "justice that serves the future." In both cases, both those who benefit from injustice and those who rebel against freedom recognize and support the separation of intellectual and manual labor, which is destined to render both labor and culture pale. They demean both freedom and justice.
It is true that when freedom consisted primarily of privilege, it insulted laborers and isolated them from culture. But freedom is not primarily made up of privilege, but responsibility is its most important component. When each of us tries to put the responsibility of freedom before the privilege of freedom, freedom binds labor and culture together and unleashes the only force that can promote justice. The laws of our actions, the secrets of our resistance, can be stated simply as follows: everything that humiliates labor, but also culture, and vice versa. And that revolutionary struggle, the centuries-long struggle toward liberation, can first be justified as a constant resistance to double humiliation.
To be honest, we haven't quite shaken off this humiliation yet. But the wheel of the times is rolling forward, history is changing, and I'm sure one day we will no longer be alone. For me, the fact that we can get here today is a good sign in itself. Members of the various trade unions meet out of concern for our freedom and are ready to defend it. This gives us good reason to come here from all over the world to celebrate unity and hope. We still have a long way to go, but if the ugly war that disrupts everything does not break out, we will eventually have time to paint the kind of justice and freedom we need. But to do so, we must in the future calmly and resolutely reject all previously indoctrinated lies. No, freedom is not based on the suffering of the oppressed nations in concentration camps or colonies, or on the poverty of workers! No, the peace dove would never perch on the gallows! No, the power of liberty will never force the children and grandchildren of the victims to be with the executioners of Madrid or elsewhere! At least from now on we should be convinced of this, and at the same time that freedom should not be a gift from a country or a leader, but a treasure that we must work together to win every day.
The original author | Camus
Excerpt from | Zhang Jin
Editor | Zhang Jin
Introduction Proofreading | Liu Baoqing