The realm of freedom

In the text "The principle of freedom: Banning smoking is more harmful than smoking" Ivan Milenković develops the thesis that bans, such as banning smoking in pubs, contribute to the strengthening of fascism. In addition to containing a series of bold claims and comparisons, the text is ideologically exclusive – it implicitly imposes an ideological conception of freedom as a universal principle.

Let's start from the fact that the entire civilization is based on prohibitions: from the legal regulation, for example, of property relations, to the standardization of language - all standardization is in its essence a prohibition. Without prohibitions, there is no human society. Therefore, it is not a question of whether bans are necessary - they are, the question is how justified each specific ban is: is what its goal is more important than what we have to sacrifice or limit, which are, as a rule, certain rights and freedoms.

It is important to note here that individual rights and freedoms do not exist in a vacuum, but always in context, "embedded" in power relations. So, for example, it is not the same when feminists invoke bodily autonomy demanding the right to safe termination of pregnancy, and when opponents of vaccination invoke bodily autonomy.

If we were to ignore the context, we could conclude that whoever supports the right to abortion must in principle also support people's refusal to get vaccinated. It doesn't have to.

In the first case, the context is patriarchal control of women, and in the second, the fact that collective resistance to infectious diseases depends on immunization coverage and that successful prevention of epidemics requires collective action. 

Although Ivan Milenković's text deals with the ban on smoking in France, i.e. the freedom to "light up inside", I will leave the debate on this issue aside, because I think it is wrongly posed.

Namely, it is about limitation which is justified by the preservation of health, and not about a ban that smacks of totalitarianism - a totalitarian ban would mean a ban on smoking outdoors and, in some Orwellian scenario, in private apartments. Much more interesting than the smoking ban debate is defining freedom and establishing a causal link between social regulation and the strengthening of the extreme right.

What is freedom?

The author derives the concept of freedom from the liberal philosophical tradition in which freedom is the absence of coercion and state interference in the individual's right to "have a space in which to seek their own happiness". The liberal understanding of freedom in itself is not controversial. What is disputed is that the text treats it as universal and taken for granted, leaving no room for pluralism, which it claims is an essential characteristic of a free society.

According to the text, French society is among the freest in the world. One of the indicators of freedom is pluralism in the sphere of information, that is, the existence of newspapers that cover the entire ideological spectrum. "Just as in a free society we have a choice of press and media in general in a very wide ideological angle, so there is a very wide range of everything else on offer, including pubs," it is pointed out, but it is overlooked that the "right" to smoke in kafani cannot be compared with the right to information in terms of its importance.

"Until now, in these few thousand years, no model has been found that would guarantee more freedom than the order that rests precisely on the negative determination of freedom." No happy order (communism, for example) has brought as much happiness to people (what happiness... happy orders are the promise of hell) as an order that does not promise happiness, but freedom." This claim is not supported by empirical evidence. "Happiness Index" for 2022 indicates that among the "happiest" countries there are mostly those with strong elements of the welfare state, in which there is more regulation than in some other lower ranked countries. 

"Freedom is always a risk." Freedom is exposure and uncertainty. Freedom is always a struggle for freedom. The difference between free and unfree societies is precisely the degree of security." Many would disagree. Marx, for example, believes that freedom begins where the "realm of necessity" ends. In other words, the prerequisite for freedom is the satisfaction of basic life needs - for food, a roof over your head, a healthy working environment, education. A person can only be truly free if he does not have to worry about whether he will have something to eat or pay the bills tomorrow. The fact that the French press provides an insight into a wide ideological range will only be meaningful to him if, through education available to everyone, he is enabled to think critically about media texts. In the Marxist tradition, freedom is the opposite of risk and uncertainty. 

Meeting basic needs of all it requires redistribution outside of the market mechanism, which is structured to "push" value upwards - from those who create it to the richest. Different distribution implies (different) regulation. "Through regulation and control, freedom can be achieved not only for a few, but for all - a freedom that is not a privilege, [...] but a right, and which reaches far beyond the narrow limits of the political sphere, into the very fabric of society. Thus the old liberties and civil rights will be added to the new liberties created by leisure and security […]. Such a society can afford to be both just and free." he wrote Karl Polanyi in the middle of the last century.

Instead of a society in which "everyone is free to die as they wish," a different understanding of freedom implies a less nihilistic society.

Prohibitions and the rise of fascism

The author of the text "Principle of Freedom" claims that the law banning smoking in pubs is more harmful than smoking itself because it leads to the strengthening of extreme right-wing politicians and parties. "The pro-fascist and pro-racist French group gathered around the Le Pen family begins to grow stronger, around the time when the ban on smoking in public indoor spaces, including cafes, was announced in France," the text states and adds: "That law is actually , attacked the principle of freedom". 

The causes of the growth of the extreme right in France, Europe and the world are complex and numerous. What is certain is that the rise in housing prices, austerity measures and the collapse of the remnants of the welfare state contribute to the feeling of insecurity of the majority of the population.

According to Oxfam data, the five richest people in the world have doubled their wealth since 2020, while 60 percent of the world's population – close to five billion people – has become poorer. Growing inequalities are hard to hide and anger many.

The extreme right uses this situation by directing the anger and insecurity of citizens in the wrong direction: from a bad economic and political model, to identity issues. Thus, the impoverished workers will blame their difficult situation on the migrants who allegedly steal their jobs, and not on the system that enables the enrichment of the richest based on the exploitation of both domestic workers and migrants.

Instead of being angry at conservative elites, seduced by right-wing rhetoric, they will blame sexual minorities and feminists. It is not disputed that the extreme right managed to convince many that their freedom is threatened by the ban on smoking in cafes, and not by economic and social insecurity, the only question is how we will stand up to this ideological distortion.

If we were to accept the thesis that bans such as the ban on smoking lead to the rise of fascism, it would mean that we agreed to the ideological fraud of the right, to that diversion by which it diverts attention from structural problems to minor, mainly identity issues (because smoking in a pub is also an issue of identity ). Instead of agreeing to play by the right's rules, the real causes of the problems facing the majority should be addressed. Redefining the concept of freedom in the spirit of leftist ideas could be one step in that direction. 

The author is a senior researcher at the Belgrade Center for Security Policy