It might seem that way, but genuine freedom and democracy aren’t compatible with capitalism.
看起来似乎如此，但真正的自由和民主与资本主义是不兼容的。
In the United States, many take for granted that freedom and democracy are inextricably connected with capitalism. Milton Friedman, in his book Capitalism and Freedom, went so far as to argue that capitalism was a necessary condition for both. It is certainly true that the appearance and spread of capitalism brought with it a tremendous expansion of individual freedoms and, eventually, popular struggles for more democratic forms of political organization. The claim that capitalism fundamentally obstructs both freedom and democracy will then sound strange to many.
在美国，许多人理所当然的认为自由和民主与资本主义是密不可分的。 米尔顿弗里德曼在他的“资本主义与自由”一书中，甚至认为资本主义是实现两者的必要条件。当然，资本主义的出现和传播带来了个人自由的巨大扩张，并最终促进了为更民主的政治组织形式进行的民众斗争。 资本主义从根本上是阻碍自由和民主的说法对许多人来说听起来很奇怪。
To say that capitalism restricts the flourishing of these values is not to argue that capitalism has run counter to freedom and democracy in every instance. Rather, through the functioning of its most basic processes, capitalism generates severe deficits of both freedom and democracy that it can never remedy. Capitalism has promoted the emergence of certain limited forms of freedom and democracy, but it imposes a bow ceiling on their further realization.
要说资本主义限制了这些价值观的蓬勃发展，并不是说资本主义在任何情况下都与自由和民主背道而驰。相反，通过其最基本的进程的运作，资本主义会在自由和民主方面产生严重缺陷，而这些缺陷永远无法被弥补。 资本主义促进了某些有限形式的自由和民主的出现，但它对它们的进一步实现制造了天花板。
At the core of these values is self-determination: the belief that people should be able to decide the conditions of their own lives to the fullest extent possible. When an action by a person affects only that person, then he or she ought to be able to engage in that activity without asking permission from anyone else. This is the context of freedom. But when an action affects the lives of others, then these other people should have a say in the activity.
这些价值观的核心是自决：相信人们应该能够尽可能地决定自己生活的环境。当某人的行为仅影响该人自己时，他或她应该能够在未经其他任何人同意的情况下参与该活动。这是自由的必要条件。但是当一个行动影响他人的生活时，这些其他人应该在活动中有发言权。
This is the context of democracy. In both, the paramount concern is that people retain as much control as possible over the shape their lives will take. In practice, virtually every choice a person makes will have some effect on others. It is impossible for everyone to contribute to every decision that concerns them, and any social system that insisted on such comprehensive democratic participation would impose an unbearable burden on people. What we need, therefore, is a set of rules to distinguish between questions of freedom and those of democracy. In our society, such a distinction is usually made with reference to the boundary between the private and public spheres.
这是民主的必要条件。在这两者中，最重要的是人们对塑造他们的生活所采取的决定保持尽可能多的控制。在实践中，几乎人的每一个选择都会对其他人产生一些影响。 每个人都不可能为涉及他们的每一个决定做出贡献，任何坚持这种完全民主参与的社会制度都会给人们带来无法承受的负担。 因此，我们需要的是一套区分自由问题和民主问题的规则。在我们的社会中，这种区分通常是参考私人领域和公共领域之间的界限。
There is nothing natural or spontaneous about this line between the private and the public; it is forged and maintained by social processes. The tasks entailed by these processes are complex and often contested. The state vigorously enforces some public/private boundaries and leaves others to be upheld or dissolved as social norms. Often the boundary between the public and the private remains fuzzy.
私人和公众之间的这条界线没有任何自然或自发的东西; 它是由社会进程锻造和维护的。这些进程所带来的任务很复杂，而且经常被质疑。 政权大力强制执行一些公共/私人界限，并将其他的作为社会规范予以维护或打击。通常，公共和私人之间的界限仍然很模糊。
In a fully democratic society, the boundary itself is subject to democratic deliberation.Capitalism constructs the boundary between the public and private spheres in a way that constrains the realization of true individual freedom and reduces the scope of meaningful democracy. There are five ways in which this is readily apparent.
在一个完全民主的社会中，边界本身受制于民主审议（我的看法是只要是不践踏别人的人权的事，都是私人领域的事，包括自虐自残自杀）。资本主义以限制实现真正的个人自由和缩小有意义的民主的范围的方式构建公共领域和私人领域之间的界限。 有五种方式可以很明显地显示出这点。
1. “Work or Starve” Isn’t Freedom
“工作或饿死”不是自由
Capitalism is anchored in the private accumulation of wealth and the pursuit of income through the market. The economic inequalities that result from these “private” activities are intrinsic to capitalism and create inequalities in what the philosopher Philippe van Parijs calls “real freedom.”
资本主义以私有财富积累和通过市场追求收入为基础。 这些“私有”活动产生的经济不平等是资本主义所固有的，并且在哲学家Philippe van Parijs所称呼的“真正的自由”中制造了不平等。
Whatever else we might mean by freedom, it must include the ability to say “no.” A wealthy person can freely decide not to work for wages; a poor person without an independent means of livelihood cannot do so easily. But the value of freedom goes deeper than this. It is also the ability to act positively on one’s life plans — to choose not just an answer, but the question itself. The children of wealthy parents can take unpaid internships to advance their careers; the children of poor parents cannot.
无论自由对我们意味着什么，它必须包括说“不”的能力。富人可以自由决定不工作; 没有独立谋生手段的穷人不能轻易做到这一点。但是，自由的价值比这更深。 它也是对一个人的生活计划采取积极行动的能力—不仅只是选择答案，而且选择问题本身。富裕父母的后代可以通过无薪实习来推进自己的职业生涯; 贫穷父母的后代不能。
Capitalism deprives many people of real freedom in this sense. Poverty in the midst of plenty exists because of a direct equation between material resources and the resources needed for self-determination.
在这个意义上，资本主义剥夺了许多人的真正的自由。由于物质资源与自决所需资源之间是直接等价的，很多人都很贫困。
2. Capitalists Decide
资本家们决定一切
The way the boundary between the public and private spheres is drawn in capitalism excludes crucial decisions, which affect large numbers of people, from democratic control. Perhaps the most fundamental right that accompanies private ownership of capital is the right to decide to invest and disinvest strictly on the basis of self-interest.
公共和私人领域之间的边界在资本主义中被划分的方式将影响大量人口的关键决策排除在民主控制之外。也许伴随私人资本所有权的最基本权利是决定严格依据自身利益进行投资和撤资的权利。
A corporation’s decision to move production from one place to another is a private matter, even though it makes a radical impact on the lives of everyone in both places. Even if one argues that this concentration of power in private hands is necessary for the efficient allocation of resources, the exclusion of these kinds of decisions from democratic control unequivocally decimates the capacity for self-determination by all except the owners of capital.
公司决定将生产从一个地方转移到另一个地方是一件私事，尽管它会对这两个地方的每个人的生活产生极大影响。即使有人争辩说私人手中的权力集中对于资源的有效配置是必要的，但将这些决定排除在民主控制之外，明确地毁灭了所有人的自决能力，除了资本所有者。（Job is a right,一个人做自己想要做的工作是一种人权，而私人独裁公司在老板的独裁命令之下肆意转移侵犯了工人的人权。）
3. Nine to Five Is Tyranny
朝九晚五是暴政
Capitalist firms are allowed to be organizedas workplace dictatorships. An essential component of a business owner’s power is the right to tell employees what to do. That is the basis of the employment contract: the job seeker agrees to follow the employer’s orders in exchange for a wage. Of course, an employer is also free to grant workers considerable autonomy, and in some situations this is the profit-maximizing way of organizing work. But such autonomy is given or withheld at the owner’s pleasure. No robust conception of self-determination would allow autonomy to depend on the private preferences of elites.
资本主义公司被允许组织成工作场所独裁。企业主权力的一个关键组成部分是告诉员工做什么的权利。这是雇佣合同的基础：求职者同意遵循雇主的命令以换取工资。当然，雇主也可以自由地给予工人可观的自主权，在某些情况下，这是将利润最大化的组织工作的方式。 但是，给予或拒绝这种自主权取决于老板的心情。没有强有力的自决概念会让自治依赖于精英们的私人偏好。
A defender of capitalism might reply that a worker who doesn’t like the boss’s rule can always quit. But since workers by definition lack an independent means of livelihood, if they quit they will have to look for a new job and, to the extent that the available employment is in capitalist firms, they will still be subject to a boss’s dictates.
一个资本主义的辩护士可能会回答说，不喜欢老板独裁的工人总能选择退出。但是，由于工人的定义是缺乏独立的维生手段，如果他们辞职，他们将不得不寻找新的工作，并且，如果可用的就业是在资本主义公司，他们仍然会受到老板的独裁。
4. Governments Have to Serve the Interests of Private Capitalists
政府不得不服务于私人资本家们的利益
Private control over major investment decisions creates a constant pressure on public authorities to enact rules favorable to the interests of capitalists. The threat of disinvestment and capital mobility is always in the background of public policy discussions, and thus politicians, whatever their ideological orientation, are forced to worry about sustaining a “good business climate.”Democratic values are hollow so long as one class of citizens takes priority over all others.
对重大投资决策的私人控制不断给公共当局施加压力，要求制定有利于资本家利益的规则。 撤资和资本流动的威胁总是在公共政策讨论的背景下，因此政治家们，无论他们的意识形态取向如何，都被迫担心维持“良好的商业环境”。只要有一个阶级的公民优先于其他所有阶级，民主价值观就是空洞的。（所有人一律平等，但资产阶级比其他阶级更平等。）
5. Elites Control the Political System
精英们控制政治系统
Finally, wealthy people have greater access than others to political power. This is the case in all capitalist democracies, although wealth-based inequality of political power is much greater in some countries than in others. The specific mechanisms for this greater access are quite varied: contributions to political campaigns; financing lobbying efforts; elite social networks of various sorts; and outright bribes and other forms of corruption.
最后，富人比其他人更有机会获得政治权力。 所有资本主义民主国家都是如此，尽管在某些国家，基于财富的政治权力不平等要比其他国家严重得多。这种更大机会的具体机制是多种多样的：对政治运动的献金; 资助游说活动; 各种精英社交网络; 和彻头彻尾的贿赂以及其他形式的腐败。（还有对媒体的控制，以及在社交媒体上雇佣水军五毛狗。）
In the United States it is not only wealthy individuals, but also capitalist corporations, that face no meaningful restriction on their ability to deploy private resources for politcal purposes. This differential access to political power voids the most basic principle of democracy.
在美国，不仅有富裕的个人，而且还有资本主义公司，它们的为政治目的部署私有资源的能力没有受到任何有意义的限制。这种对政治权力的不同的获取途径使得最基本的民主原则变得无效。
These consequences are endemic to capitalism as an economic system. This does not mean that they cannot sometimes be mitigated in capitalist societies. In different times and places, many policies have been erected to compensate for capitalism’s deformation of freedom and democracy.
这些后果是资本主义作为经济系统时所特有的。 这并不意味着它们不能有时在资本主义社会中得到缓解。 在不同的时间和地点，已经建立了许多政策来弥补资本主义造成的对自由和民主的扭曲。
Public constraints can be imposed on private investment in ways that erode the rigid boundary between the public and private; a strong public sector and active forms of state investment can weaken the threat of capital mobility; restrictions on the use of private wealth in elections and the public finance of political campaigns can reduce the privileged access of the wealthy to political power; labor law can strengthen the collective power of workers in both the political arena and the workplace; and a wide variety of welfare policies can increase the real freedom of those without access to private wealth.
公共限制可以通过侵蚀公共和私人之间的僵硬边界的方式强加到私人投资上; 强大的公共部门和积极的政府投资形式可以削弱资本流动的威胁; 限制在选举中使用私人财富和增加对政治运动的公共财政支持可以减少富人用来获得政治权力的特权; 劳工法律可以增强工人们在政治舞台和工作场所的集体力量;各种各样的福利政策可以增加那些无法获得私有财富的人的真正的自由。
When the political conditions are right, the anti-democratic and freedom-impeding features of capitalism can be palliated, but they cannot be eliminated. Taming capitalism in this way has been the central objective of the policies advocated by socialists within capitalist economies the world over. But if freedom and democracy are to be fully realized, capitalism must not merely be tamed. It must be overcome.
当政治条件合适时，资本主义的反民主和阻碍自由的特征可以被缓和，但不能被消除。以这种方式驯服资本主义一直是全世界资本主义经济体内的社会主义者所倡导的政策的核心目标。但是，如果要充分实现自由和民主，就不能仅仅驯服资本主义。 资本主义必须被克服。