Liberalism as an Ideology

For the sake of brevity I will give a brief, yet sufficient, background on Liberalism and the appearances, or forms, it has taken on throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. This is by no means an in-depth historical analysis of this particular ideology, but it will serve for our particular purpose in this article.

Liberalism can first be traced back to the writing and synthesized ideas of John Locke, who himself was influenced by the philosophy of René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes, in his 1689 work outlining his major ideas, Two Treatises of Government. It is considered a most important and foundational document that influenced Liberalism and political philosophy as a whole.

In his second treatise, Locke argues that individuals are born with certain rights that cannot be taken away for they are natural, or inalienable, and, in what has certainly turned out to be the more contentious and controversial point, Locke also advocates for the social contract theory (his idea of the social contract is much different than the one advanced by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan (1651)), in which he outlines the idea that individuals will form a state based on the Law of Nature in which the state will act as a neutral party that takes on the role of the protector of individual liberties in exchange for certain freedoms and particulars such as laws and taxation.

The reader can see that the interpretation put forth by Locke of the social contract is one of the definite foundational pillars of the rule of law, a most important concept in Western liberal society. It would be a folly to not mention that Locke was a firm believer in the right to private property, this, of course, is a fundamental tenet of Liberalism. Revolution, to Locke, is one of the definite rights of the people; furthermore, it becomes an obligation to revolt when a government infringes on the right of the people to life, liberty, and estate. Unfortunately, Liberalism has all but abandoned its revolutionary roots and perverted into the most aggressive and vile reactionism.

Among the foundations of Liberalism is the separation of powers within a government. This theory of separation was put forth by the French philosopher Montesquieu in 1748, in his work The Spirit of Law. Montesquieu put forth the basis that governments were based on three branches, legislative, executive, and judiciary, and that each branch must have powers separate from the others. It is interesting to note that Montesquieu makes it very clear that he believes the executive branch must be headed by one person because it is the branch that requires “immediate action.”

To say that the ideas put forth by the early liberal thinkers were influential to the Founding Fathers of the United States would be a tremendous understatement; no, those ideas were paramount to the founding of the U.S., and, consequently, to all the nations that constitute the modern day West regardless of when they were adapted.

Economically, early Liberalism, or what we formally know as Classical Liberalism, was based foundationally on the theories most popularized by economists Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill.

Adam Smith, known as the father of capitalism, notoriously advocated for a greater division, or specialization, of labor, the idea of the invisible hand, and minimal government interference in the economy — these ideas formed the basis of laissez-faire capitalism.

Ricardo was particularly influential for his theory of comparative advantage in which he theorized that countries benefit from trade regardless of if one country is a more efficient producer, therefore, each country should do what it does relatively, or comparatively, better than others and trade for what it doesn’t, the iron law of wages in which he stated that wages tend to settle at a level that is just enough for workers to survive, and the law of rent which shows that landlords disproportionately benefit from periods of economic prosperity because rent prices will rise without landlords taking on any more work.

Mill refined the ideas advanced by Smith and Ricardo to form the early foundation of what would become modern liberalism. His ideas including a larger and more pronounced role of the state, progressive taxation, wealth redistribution, and economic inclusion influenced modern social democrats — those who aim to make capitalism more humane rather than replace it with socialism.

The Industrial Revolution in England was a golden age for the capitalist and the dawn of misery for the worker who saw their laboring power crushed under the oppressiveness of continuously expanding capital leading to child labor, workdays lasting up to eighteen hours, an unprecedented rise in productivity, only comparable to the modern rise of technology, while wages fell as the labor force grew. This same trend followed in all the industrialized liberal countries which gave rise to revolutionary ideologies born out of the yoke of capitalism; most notably scientific socialism, but that is a topic for another day, for I don’t have the time to go into great detail here.

The founders of scientific socialism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, wrote in great detail about capitalism and the inherent flaws built into the system. One of the main problems that they noticed in capitalism was that it was prone to crises and would periodically experience times of collapse and disaster. As history has taught us time and time again, capitalism is volatile and economic crises are likely to occur once every ten years or so. These periods are characterized by overproduction of goods, unemployment, rising poverty, and financial instability. The worst of this happened in 1929.

The Great Depression had all the common characteristics of the period of depression, or crisis, common to capitalism, but it was intensified a hundredfold by the stock market crashing, banks collapsing along with peoples’ savings, an incredibly unequal distribution of wealth, high tariffs leading to decreased trade, and horrific austerity measures by governments. The weakness of capitalism had been exposed for all to see plainly, so Western liberal governments scrambled to save it. They found their savior in John Maynard Keynes.

Keynes rejected the classical liberal economics, instead advocating that governments should, and needed, to spend especially in crises to stimulate the economy. He supported government interference because he believed it to be the best way to manage capitalism and its inherent failures and weaknesses. To him capitalism needed to be regulated with safety nets put in place to limit the damage caused by periods of downfall. His economics became known as Keynesian economics which dominated the mid-twentieth century and influenced liberal governments across the Western world. This Keynesian brand of economics with a mixed economy and an increased importance placed on social issues is known as Modern Liberalism. Modern Liberalism was the dominant ideology in the West until the late 1970s.

The founding of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 marks the beginning of a disastrous epoch for the proletarian. Made up of minds from the classical liberal trend, the society set out to reinvigorate laissez-faire economics and classical liberal politics in the most insatiable and vile form, neoliberalism. The neoliberals initially masked their real goal, liberalization of the market to its most extreme extent, by stating that their focus was on replacing laissez-faire with the competitive order, that is to say, to increase capital through competition, but their lies were thinly veiled and have been exposed in their entirety. Unfortunately, this happened all too late and the neoliberals were able to dominate political and economic thought from the 1970s to this current day.

The neoliberal trend is a return to liberal politics as it was initially, a return to Classic Liberalism which has proven to be a most unfair and unjust system of governance in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries completely dependent on oppressive hierarchy, a return to classical economics with a more aggressive monetary and imperial twist, in a word, a return to a system, with barely new “features,” that is built on the basis of inequality and inequity. Resulting from this, we see the clear evidence of inequality in society. Wages no longer rise, the union has been turned into a corrupt arm of the employer, conditions worsen, productivity rises, rate of profit rises tremendously, the value of laboring power is decreasing each and every day, and the social position of the worker is firmly below that of the capitalist, and only getting worse.

What the reader can see is that Liberalism was built on foundations of civil liberty and inalienable rights, laughable considering that slavery was most egregious and rampant during its synthesis, after its synthesis, and still today in both the literal sense of slave and master throughout parts of the world, and in the sense of the wage-laborer being the modern slave to the capitalist. Such is the hypocrisy of the liberal who clings onto capitalism as it has failed the majority of society in which it is employed.

The Twenty-First Century Liberal

The modern liberal is a most interesting character. Owing to the simple fact political consciousness is at such a low level, the liberal in the twenty-first century can not help but fall into hypocrisy. You may say that this statement is brazen and it is quite a contentious claim to make. On that point I concede, but allow me a moment to explain exactly why I have come to this conclusion, and perhaps you too will see exactly what I mean when I say the liberal cannot help but be hypocritical.

First of all, we’ve already seen that liberalism, at it’s conception, was hypocritical for espousing civil and individual liberties in societies that were in the mode of production known as slavery, that is to say that an ideology can express one thing in words, freedom in the case of liberalism, while doing something completely different in actions, accepting slavery, and even fighting to defend it and keep it, in the case of liberalism. That much is incontestable.

With that being said, the modern liberal is not better than their eighteen and nineteenth century counterpart. Today’s liberals, that is both liberals and conservatives, for we must remember that conservatism is just a trend in liberalism as anarchism is just a trend in socialism, make their hypocrisy plain to all. Allow me to elucidate this claim, the liberal of today has taken up the reactionary banner that has inscribed on it, “Israel has a right to defend itself,” when, in reality, Israel has no right to land in the Middle East for their imperialistic, genocidal, and ethnic-cleansing aims at creating an ethno-state dominated by the Jewish people at the top of the hierarchy with the Arab people below them. The founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote about race and hierarchy in his Zionist diaries, it is no secret that he subscribed to the theory of a racial hierarchy that placed Jews above Arabs, the hypocrisy of this is another topic for another time. Israel today stands as a settler-colonial state, a wall between the pure Europeans and the barbarous Arabs of the Middle East, at least that’s what it comes to be. The hypocrisy of the liberal stands as this: they support a “state” that is openly committing genocide against innocent Palestinians, bombing them, shooting them without cause, and denying them food and aid in a deliberate effort to wipe as many of them out as possible and takeover their land while supporting the Ukrainian state, a state that was invaded for imperialistic goals in a targeted effort to take over land and resources. The hypocrisy is clear, but allow me to spell it out for you; how can one support a genocidal “state” that is committing atrocities left and right while also supporting a state that is itself being “invaded” and “subjected to horror”? If you will, let me answer: Israel and Ukraine are more alike than different, Israel is committing terrible human rights violations on a daily basis while Ukraine is committing war crimes that outright violate the Geneva Convention, but they’ll never be held responsible because they are allied to the West. What you have are two states actively breaking laws set by the Geneva Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights set by the United Nations, laws set to protect the rights of the individual in time of peace and time of war. And therein lies the hypocrisy of the liberal who follows an ideology set to protect the rights of the individual while simultaneously breaking those rights themselves in the past and actively supporting states that break those rights to this day.

To my second point, I must ask you to direct your attention to the inner workings of capitalism, to the very foundations upon which liberal political economy is founded. My objective here is not to reinvent the wheel and find new ways to critique capitalism, I am certain that the time will come for that eventually, no, my goal here is to explain the incredible hypocrisy that stems out of liberal political economy. Having already elucidated that liberalism and all its tenets stem from hypocrisy, our job is to prove that these hypocrisies still hold true today. To do so, we must take an example that I am certain most, if not all, will be able to relate to, we take the example of the t-shirt. Take a look at the tag of the t-shirt and you will almost certainly find a “made in China” or “made in Bangladesh” tag, other large producers include India, Vietnam, and Pakistan. China remains the largest producer of t-shirts on the planet. The reason for this is that China has an extremely large labor force that is both capable of producing t-shirts and in need of employment. What this means for the Western liberal capitalist is that they can offshore their manufacturing to these countries, set up sweatshops, produce the same, and in most cases a higher, number of shirts, purchase the laboring power for a fraction of what it’d cost to produce in the West, sell the shirts back to the West at an outstanding value much more significant than the cost of production, consequently making a huge profit and an incredibly high rate of profit of which the worker who produced the shirt will see nothing but fractions of cents per dollar of profit. This is an amazing deal . . . for the capitalist. The laborer is screwed over and the purchaser of the product, in this example the t-shirt, is screwed over. I should make it very clear that cheap labor does not benefit the Western liberal consumer unlike how they believe it does, for this can, and will, be their job one day getting sent someplace else because a capitalist can profit more off of cheaper labor. What we have in these overseas sweatshops and factories are the modern day plantations housing the modern day slave to their modern day master, the capitalist. The hypocrisy of individual liberties for the few while shouting “individual freedom for all” can not be more naked to the eye.

A Final Word

With more time available to me, I would be able to make clear my thoughts on the future of liberalism and if the liberal can be “cured” or not. However, I simply do not have the time to undertake such a task at the present moment so I must save that for another day, but I will certainly address this in great detail sometime soon as it has been a topic of great importance in the past and is seemingly gaining more and more validity as a question each passing day. What I will leave you with is this: liberalism in all its forms, factions, trends, and so forth, has always been steeped in hypocrisy, and consequently, always will be a hypocritical ideology befitting the snake in the grass. Our task is one of the utmost importance, we must free those who are able to from the treachery of liberalism, we must make the lies, hypocrisy, and baselessness of this abhorrent ideology as clear to as many as we possibly can. Each individual that ventures down the path of liberalism is doomed to live a life of hypocrisy, doomed to suffer from the misery that capitalism spits at them, and doomed to have their revolutionary wings cut off leaving wounds that heal into scars of reactionism!

Comrade Drew