February 16, 2014

the crafts of freedom (1966)

The last essay that Abbie Hoffman wrote for The Catholic Worker argued for worker-owned cooperatives as a liberatory strategy for impoverished Mississippians.

Hoffman's title – "the crafts of freedom" – suggests a novel way to translate artes liberales, conventionally taken as "the liberal arts." While Cicero made a distinction between mental skills suitable to a free person and physical skills suitable to a slave, "crafts of freedom" more capaciously embraces any practice that emancipates us from what Blake called "the mind-forg'd manacles." That includes worker autonomy, whether in a factory or a corporation.