Socialism is the Path to Liberty

Self-Determination is a Capacity, Not an Emotion

The purpose of this essay is to create a broader political dialogue in order to get the US, and with it the world, out of the policy messes that the US is creating. When I speak with my Republican friends, there is widespread agreement regarding what the problems that the US faces are. Differences enter when it comes to solutions. And while there is no claim to Truth here, the left has spent more time considering solutions than the right has.

American political discourse has proceeded in recent decades from the pretense that a political ‘center’ both 1) exists, and 2) represents the policy outcomes that most Americans want. But both political philosophy and basic common sense argue against this interpretation. On the common-sense front, voters have been fleeing both of the uniparty parties to become political Independents for twenty-five years now. There appears to be no way to rid the US of the uniparty.

On the political philosophy front, the US is, and has long claimed itself to be, the ‘most capitalist nation on the planet.’ Recall that outside of the US and for most of modern history, the ‘left’ has been defined by opposition to capitalism and the ‘right’ has been defined by support for highly concentrated incomes and wealth. Around 1992, US politician Bill Clinton coined the phrase ‘social liberal, fiscal conservative,’ to define the new right-wing in the US that he represented.

The social backdrop in Clinton’s formulation is that fiscal conservatism has characteristics, such as the unquestioned funding of every war that the Western MIC can conjure up while cutting social spending and programs that benefit the rest of us. In other words, fiscal conservatism represents the political precepts of capitalism. Note that this is where Bill Clinton placed himself, through his policies, on the ideological spectrum. On the monarchist right, but with oligarchs instead.

Note also that Clinton and Clintonism have been called ‘the radical left’ by self-described representatives of the American political right since the 1990s. The basis of this description is that Mr. Clinton occasionally said kind things about the poor and oppressed Americans that he was screwing with his economic policies. Question: how could a man (Clinton), who is widely ‘credited’ with completing the Reagan Revolution, represent ‘the radical left?’ Answer: the claim is a non sequitur. It is a purposely ludicrous description used for political effect.

The point here isn’t the name that something is given, but rather the political premises that go into doing so. Consider, ‘fiscal conservatism’ nominally describes the economic philosophy behind Donald Trump’s / Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts in the same way that it did Bill Clinton’s ‘ending welfare as we know it.’ Clinton was motivated by the same logic that Ronald Reagan was. The argument was, and remains, that capitalism is best served by an impoverished and desperate workforce that has no alternative but to labor for a prevailing wage.

The American obsession with cultural divisions is evidence of right-wing control of American politics. In a society with equitable distribution of income and wealth, culture war differences would be re-framed as cultural, rather than directly political, through redistributing social power from the few to the many. Racial and gender reconciliation wouldn’t have to be forced onto those who resent it because the economic disparity needed to turn it into a repressive politics would no longer exist.

This would benefit both right and left in the sense that lines of cultural division could be maintained by those who want them, but economic support that might make doing so socially consequential would be missing. In the parlance, people would be free to be assholes to one another. But their ability to turn being an asshole into a socially destructive act would be limited by relatively flat social power. The assholes wouldn’t have the wherewithal to follow through because they would lack the relative social power to be effective.

The purpose in addressing cultural factors here is that they are important to both sides of the American political right. If the wants and desires of the cultural right could be satisfied in socially neutral fashion, whereby ethnicity and culture persist without devolving into active and / or passive social violence, progress can be made toward creating a shared prosperity. Now forgotten, cultural conservatives were once the early-adopters in the US of philosophical Postmodernism, now derisively referred to as ‘cultural Marxism’ by these same people.

The practical problems with not doing so are 1) proximate tensions will undermine political alliances that are otherwise necessary for social progress to be made, 2) these same tensions will doom positive social movement to being undermined by what in context are tangential issues that can be solved through economic policies, and 3) ‘no justice, no peace’ applies to conservatives and culture warriors as well as to the other political right in the US, and the left.

For readers who respond to the graph above with fear that a political left that is that far to the left of the ‘center’ in the US must be really radical, once political ideology is left out of policy discussions, a large majority of Americans want the policies of an actual American left--- living wages, decent healthcare, quality education, stable and prosperous communities, shared participation in society, and an end to war as the basis of the American economy. How radical is this? The PTA (Parent-Teacher Association) in New York was advocating these policies when I was in the sixth grade in 1968.

Note what isn’t on this list. Culture war distractions. This isn’t because they aren’t important to those to whom they are important. But there are other, less offensive to other Americans, political routes to achieving similar goals. With DEI being unwound as quickly as it was erected, it is reasonable to conclude that a political error was made in both the its conception and implementation. Bringing all Americans who want to work into economic life under life-sustaining terms was the ‘American’ ambition before neoliberalism shifted the focus to making rich people richer.

From the end of WWII onward, a legitimating discourse was fabricated to make the actions of the Federal government seem reasonable with respect to the economy. The rationale for keeping American workers poor, uneducated, and desperate was / is that doing so keeps inflation from arising, went the argument. That wars are the major cause of inflation historically was tossed onto the trash heap in favor of the argument that workers being paid too much is. So, from 1948 or thereabouts, every time that wages started to rise, the Federal Reserve stepped in to create a recession.

Doing so has one meaning if workers are being paid too much relative to economic output (the Phillips Curve argument), and quite another if war spending produces too much competition for limited resources. In the first case, economists blame American workers for inflation. In the case of war spending, economists never got around to creating a theory for the economically appropriate level of war spending. Further, economists aren’t even interested in the question.

Why? Because wars are considered to be transitory affairs, and Western economists are only interested in timeless and universal causes. The reason is partly methodological--- economists can only incorporate certain types of thought-objects (operational) into their models. And they only have jobs as long as they exclude plausible explanations from outside of their purview. Stated differently, economists prefer implausible economic explanations to plausible accounts from other disciplines because that is all that they allow themselves.

A central fact of the ‘most capitalist nation in the world’ is that it is also the most militaristic nation in the world. While individual wars, coups and regime change operations may be transitory, American militarism has been quite constant for two centuries. Read the list (link above), please. If the US has a purpose in the world, it is to slaughter innocents and destroy nations. So, why would Western economists find the Phillips Curve to be a plausible explanation of inflation, but not permanent US wars?

Now, place yourself on the side opposing the US in this. The IMF (International Monetary Fund) makes a loan to a ‘leader’ of your nation. But when it comes time to repay it, it turns out that it is the citizens of your nation that are on the hook for repaying it, not the leader who borrowed the money. As a consequence, the IMF orders that wages be reduced, taxes raised, and property seized to repay the loan. Three minutes later, Wall Street predators arrive to buy up what is left of your nation for pennies on the dollar.

Question: why would any nation accept this type of predatory behavior? Because if the citizens don’t pay, US economic sanctions and / or bombs are likely to follow. In fact, during the first Green Revolution, US funds lent to foreign nations were regularly redeposited into US banks in the names of foreign leaders alone. The US was using debt to manage its empire, paying off foreign leaders to sell out ‘their’ people so that the US could loot and plunder with impunity, aided by local politicians who profited by keeping ‘their’ populations in line.

From approximately the Reagan era on, this same program has been applied to American workers. The Reagan – Clinton -- Trump line had it that this is the road to renewed prosperity for the US. The plan has been / is to make the US an internal colony and treat everyone but the very rich like illegitimate invaders who have no right to exist. (Recall the term ‘super-predators?’) If this seems overstated, much of the once-prospering Rust Belt still looks like Beirut circa 1982. This is American capitalism.

Those who have been paying attention over recent decades couldn’t have missed the explanation that has accompanied every economic downturn since 1980 or thereabouts. Once the proximate causes are identified, the explanation is always, always, always that it wasn’t ‘real’ capitalism that had failed. The explanation is that it was state ‘interference’ in the economy that caused capitalism to fail. That this explanation is never claimed during economic upturns points to a conceptual flaw in the economic logic being applied.

What is meant by ‘real capitalism’ in this (Libertarian) formulation is capitalism without state sponsorship. In history, all capitalist economies have arisen within / through state sponsorship. The capitalist development model since the mid-twentieth century has been export-led economic production. Export-led economic production has never been self-generating at the national level--- it has always been conceived and implemented through state planning.

So, the conception of capitalism without a supporting state is as ahistorical as it gets. Emerging from Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin, the left theory of the state has it that the state arises as a support function for capital. Consider the American Revolution. One explanation of it is the desire for liberty on the part of the American people. But the US was established as a Constitutional Republic. And the so-called founders were oligarchs. Creating liberty for the little people had nothing to do with it.

Either an accident of history can be claimed to explain why the US was founded by oligarchs in 1776, and why in 2025 it is still being run by oligarchs, or the persistence of history can be granted. However, once the persistence of history is granted, suddenly the histories of Russia and China are removed from the realm of ideology and placed back into history. The state-centric versions of Marxism that each implemented represent historical development cobbled to historical foundations that had already been laid.

The American concept of liberty--- itself a stand-in for the more overtly political capacity for self-determination, was intended for the oligarchs, not the riff-raff. Question: what constituted an American? Slaves might have been designated 3/5ths of a person in the Constitution to accrue political power to slave masters, but they weren’t citizens even though they were human beings living within the geographic borders of the US. The history of the US after slavery was ended was of capital using state and economic power to force Americans into wage labor.

Within the conceptual frame of a liberal state, liberty is imagined to be equally available to all who care to avail themselves of it. This most certainly wasn’t what the founders, with the exception of a few Philosophes (French philosophers of liberty), had in mind. Liberal ‘rights’ have always been a bourgeois conceit. The social facts have it that the rich can do as they please, the rest of us, not so much. That this isn’t widely understood is testament to the power of foundational mythology.

A question then for Libertarians is precisely how capitalism was chosen 1) initially and 2) ever since, when the people expected to labor for it had no say in choosing it. A second order question would be why state power is being used at the behest of capital to assure that other forms of political economy are kept off of the ballot? Conversely, as political scientists Thomas Ferguson and Gilens and Page have asserted, money determines political outcomes in the US, and it is capital that controls the money.

The argument that the state is repressive by its nature, while capital is liberatory by its, is straight-up bizarre. For an insightful discussion of the challenges of political representation, I refer readers to Robert Paul Wolff’s In Defense of Anarchism. A limitation of the book is that it is premised in an individualist ontology that isn’t plausible. But the same is true for capitalism. I explain how and why this is true in my book Zen Economics.

To clarify a narrow point, the assertion that the existence of Federal licensing requirements for US banks means that it is the Federal government that creates bank money is a category error. Banks in the US are given the power to create credit (money created out of thin air) because doing so facilitates the capitalist capital allocation function. This means that profit-seeking banks are in charge of the economy-wide allocation of capital. While capital markets have deepened this process, the charge that licensing makes it state-run does not logically follow.

That my Libertarian friends appear not to know that since 1980 or 1992--- pick your date, removing the state from markets has been the stated goal of the uniparty, and that the current political-economic moment is the result, is a bit of a mystery. Donald Trump has imposed the Libertarian ideal of an eviscerated state led by self-dealing oligarchs in his second term. This state-of-affairs has been known as ‘capitalism’ for several centuries now.

It is also what Marx and Marxists predicted--- liberty for the few, propaganda, censorship, and violent political repression for the many. That Mr. Trump’s ‘fiscal conservatism’ led to the largest increase in the Federal budget deficit (itself a canard) in US history would be a surprise if it were a surprise. It reflects the prerogative of oligarchs to fabricate whatever nonsense they need to to maintain absolute control over Western political economy.

Finally, the argument in favor of Libertarian solutions to the US war machine seems misplaced in this historical moment. As Donald Trump’s foreign policy merges with Joe Biden’s foreign policy, the laugh line that ‘no matter who I vote for, I get John McCain,’ has descriptive value. But Biden and Trump came from what each claimed were not just different, but antithetical, premises to end up in the same place. For his effort to gut the (easy targets in the) state, it’s a mystery why Libertarians don’t love Mr. Trump?

If one imagines that a ‘purer’ effort to gut the state might work, you and who’s army? Donald Trump is screwing this up so badly that there won’t exist a US in anything like its present form within a few years (I’m usually early but correct with these types of predictions). The problem for the world is that the US is a rabid Rottweiler at present, destroying everything that it touches. For instance, a US sponsored genocide is still underway in West Asia.

Now is the time for (real) left alternatives to get a hearing in the US, and across the West. For those afraid of a return of Stalinism, please recall the bit about historical persistence above. What preceded the Bolshevik Revolution? The Tsar sent millions of Russians to die pointlessly in WWI while the Russian people starved. Post-revolutionary accounts of famines and mass political violence miss that both preceded the Bolshevik Revolution, as well as followed it.

Additionally, consider the perspectives of Americans other than yourself. The US has one of the largest carceral prison populations in the world in both nominal and relative terms. Many practices in US prisons are considered torture outside of the US. The overwhelmingly Black populations of the south-central and south-eastern US live ten or more fewer years than the citizens of other states and do so in much poorer health. Please accept the fact that a lot of Americans, a majority even, are living lives of quiet desperation.

Therefore, before speaking of Russian ‘gulags’ or Chinese ‘work camps,’ consider that conditions are as harsh or harsher in US prisons, and the motive for putting people in prison--- for competing with the CIA’s drug distribution business, explains most of the US prison population. Americans who have travelled to Europe know what actual food tastes like compared to the industrial waste that is called food here. And what is exceptional about the US at present is how rapidly our imperial decline is proceeding.

To restate the practical impact of these ‘radical left’ ideas on Americans, they are living wages, decent healthcare, quality education, stable and prosperous communities, equitable social participation, and an end to US militarism. Readers hopefully see why the phrase ‘radical left’ is being used by politicians. It is to frighten people with ahistorical and anti-historical lies. In terms of common sense, the theory that left governance would recreate Stalinism requires near-complete ignorance of how it was created in the first place.

Here is George Kennan, now considered the dean of American diplomats, writing in 1959 about Western motives for interfering in the Bolshevik Revolution. The point of relevance is that the Soviets took the interference very seriously, and considered it an effort to reverse the Revolution and to seize control of the Soviet Union. So, if you want to know why Joseph Stalin and the Soviets were (legitimately) paranoid and you are American, British, or French, get to know your nation’s, as well as Russia’s, history.

Lastly, a friend recently visited Cuba and traveled the island. He isn’t conspicuously political, and soon started talking about how poor Cuba is. After a few minutes of back-and-forth regarding the effect that US economic sanctions had on the Cuban economy, he offered that the Cubans seemed to be the happiest people that he had ever met--- all over the island. He isn’t Marxist, and he certainly wasn’t telling me what he thought that I wanted to hear. The point: the crap on the shelf at Walmart isn’t the path to happiness for most humans. We need a different way.