For over a century, the left was concerned primarily with deliverance from self-inflicted unfreedom – which is why it was so fundamentally aligned with the anti-slavery movement, the suffragettes, groups sheltering persecuted Jews in the 1930s and 40s, black liberation organisations in the 1950s and 60s, the first gay and lesbian protesters in the streets of San Francisco, Sydney and London in the 1970s. So, how did we get to the situation, today, where ‘libertarian Marxist’ sounds like a joke? The answer is that, sometime in the twentieth century, the left traded freedom for other things.
