Many companies now offer contracts with ‘unlimited’ paid holidays to prospective employees. The caveat of the apparent freedom of these contracts is that the employee must obtain permission to take their holidays, and that they will be subject to periodic performance evaluations. The outcome? On average, employees on these contracts take far fewer holidays, roughly half as many as those with definite paid leave.

On a similar note, during my travels in the United States I expected to find a place free from overriding cultural mores and norms, where individual expression and judgement reigned. What I found was quite the opposite: The Americans I met seemed far more rigidly puritanical than their European counterparts. They were overwhelmingly opposed to swearing, had stricter expectations regarding stylistic expression in music and clothing, and were constantly alert to ‘wrong thinking’; an extreme paranoia about alternative ideological beliefs which precluded meaningful art and politics.

In a more general sense, the great cultural liberation movements of the 20th century, the deconstruction of prohibitions on racial, sexual, and gender minorities, have taken on an oppressive, alienating form. A movement for individual freedom has become dependent on restricting individual speech and thought, and its most zealous adherents must constantly be on the lookout for ‘problematic’ tendencies.

The general structure of these examples is clear: An objective freedom, a total openness brought on by the destruction of outmoded limits, seems to pass arbitrarily into a mode of re-repression. What is unclear is why this happens, and what we can learn from it?

Immediately, we can regard this in a vulgar dialectical way. An astronaut, feeling constricted by the walls of his space station, will tear them away to find himself floating helplessly in the void. Similarly, we cannot tear down an institution without a void appearing – we are helpless without a frame of reference to cling onto.

A positive freedom cannot exist without an inverse negative, the internal contradiction giving the concept its reality. Racial equality cannot be achieved without a prohibition on racists, class liberation cannot be achieved without repressing class dynamics.

Similarly, when a social institution is removed, the responsibilities of that institution – the question it existed to answer – fall to the individual. The individual has no choice but to self-evaluate the answers to those questions each time they arise, and in many cases they end up self-repressing far more harshly than an institution would have done. “Should I take this holiday, or will it reflect badly on me?” “Should I make this joke, or does it contain a subtle form of oppression?”

The individual therefore becomes totally impotent to protest or rebel. In the past, a limit was set by a repressive institution against which rebellion was both practically desirable and morally acceptable. Now, the limit is set by one’s own superego: Rebellion can only be against one’s own moral compass. This is why American conservatives – often the most economically deprived strata – are eternally battling phantasmatic liberal oppressors: They desperately crave an authority to rebel against, to blame for their woes and redeem themselves in opposition to.

We also begin to see institutions reconstitute themselves, however. The self-repressing individual, seeing someone behave in a way they would not permit of themselves, flies into a moralistic rage: How can this person defy the implicit rules of the individual? How can they disobey the objective laws of my solipsistic society? On ‘both sides’ of the political spectrum, we can clearly see this rage crystallise into new social institutions: On the conservative-liberal side reconstructing old religious prohibitions, and on the progressive-liberal side to cement the aesthetics of inclusivity and polite exploitation.

This also hints at the modern tendency to obsessive categorisation. Every aspect of the individual must be named and categorised, and this creates a firm, objective identity and set of rules.

Crucially, this mechanism is not unique to capitalism. After the end of the Russian civil war, the new space of total openness gave way to total political repression in less than a decade; real or not, the political and popular consensus was that intrinsic and extrinsic threats were necessary to define the Soviet political identity. From the late 1920s onwards, every large-scale decision was made with reference to the west as a threat and a competitor.