Socialism and Liberalism: A Path Towards Estrangement’s End

The conflict between liberalism and socialism has been an animating force in politics for decades, if not centuries, whether the names involved were “Girondins vs Jacobins” or “Hillary voters vs Bernie voters”. The idea, reinforced by discourse and inter-factional warfare, is that the two traditions are distinct and mutually exclusive. But not only is this wrong, it is detrimental to both, in ways that are, when looking through the broad strokes of history, predictable. A pure liberal order fails in specific ways, and a purely collectivist one fails in specific ways, and both are fundamentally incomplete without the other.

I. Thesis: The liberal fail-state

Even liberal capitalism’s fiercest critics grant the monumental achievements of the liberal tradition, compared with what came before. Before, the divine right of kings; after, elected government. Before, arbitrary imprisonment; after, due process. Marx himself placed the bourgeois liberal framework in high esteem compared to the feudal, extractive economy—and his political support of Abraham Lincoln and the Union made this concrete (Marx 1864). The liberal revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries were just that—revolutionary in scale and scope, and worth defending, wherever one places themselves on the liberal-left continuum.

But liberalism doesn’t go far enough on its own. Alone, it overturns formal hierarchy but leaves social and material hierarchy in place. The famous satirical line of Anatole France—“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread”—sets the stage here (France 1894, ch. 7). Of course, everyone accepts this as satire because we know that such a law would never apply to the rich. Formal legal rights begin to lose their salience the minute material power differentials begin to accumulate—a contract is unfree when one party has no choice but to accept. Unregulated liberal capitalism produces the society of the Mafia Don—“I’ll make you an offer … you can’t refuse.”

This contradiction is such that John Stuart Mill—arguably the liberal par excellence of the mid-19th century—began late in life to describe himself as a socialist (Mill 1873)! Because the contradictions between what he saw as liberal means, and the insufficiency of those means, became increasingly apparent. A woman as eminent as Jane Addams, founder of the Hull House, was unable to reconcile the individualist moral paradigm she originally had with the deprivation she saw every day as a social worker, which led her to write Democracy and Social Ethics to argue that formal equality wasn’t enough—there needed to be collective social obligation to make those formal structures meaningful (Addams 1902).

But we needn’t look to history to make this point. We just need to turn on the TV, or look out the window, or scroll our social media feeds. On paper, the Constitution remains in force. Civil liberties are still in place. There are extensive procedural rights. Sometimes, when a particular person can gain enough notoriety and funding (in many cases crowdfunding) to fight an unjust exercise of power, that person even wins. Most don’t. And those who aren’t victimized by the state are pressured into worsening work conditions, an unstable job market with little recourse outside a threadbare social safety net, skyrocketing housing costs, and steadily increased energy devoted to just surviving.

This didn’t start on January 20th, 2025 either. This has been a feature of American life, for more and more people, for most of America’s history. While technological and material progress has improved the general level of well-being for most, social and political struggle has needed to be waged in order to distribute those gains, sometimes successfully (Reconstruction, the New Deal social contract), sometimes less successfully (Jim Crow, neoliberalism).

If a person has freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but they are compelled to work for pennies or starve, they are not free.

II. Antithesis: The socialist fail-state

It was within this context of privation amidst progress, that socialism and socialist movements emerged. While Marx was not the first—many prior attempts had been made to reconcile liberal principles with material deprivation—the failed revolutions of 1848 provided the impetus to truly forge a new understanding of the world, shaped by the violence directed against people who simply sought freedom.

Where the doctrinaire “free-market” liberal (leaving aside that there were many liberals that did not argue this) argues that market outcomes are “natural” and “fair” and therefore just, the socialist argues that those outcomes are built on a foundation of implicit coercion—that of the capital owner versus the wage laborer. Where the classical liberal argues that wage labor is simply free exchange, and a freely undertaken contractual relationship between employer and employee, the socialist points out that this is simply the argument of the mafioso—once again, “I’ll make you an offer … you can’t refuse.” The wage laborer must accept as surely as if there were a gun to their head. Where the classical liberal argues that accumulations of wealth have no bearing on democratic proceduralism, the socialist argues that this wealth is itself a question for democracy. And where the classical liberal argues that the entrepreneur, the business titan, and the magnate earned their wealth fairly, the socialist argues that their wealth is built on the contributions of the workers they employed and the institutions of broader society.

But a socialism that rejects liberalism, as the socialism of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and to a certain (albeit overstated) extent, even Marx himself, fails just as surely as the liberalism that rejects socialism does—the millions dead in China and Russia in the 20th century attest to that.

Unlike the liberal fail-state, in which economic power congeals into unaccountable privilege, which then reinforces the economic power in an extractive doom loop, the socialist fail-state comes when, without procedural, legislative, and constitutional constraints on power, the same lack of accountability emerges from state power justified by collective justice, which also uses that power to preserve itself from correction, ultimately devolving into its own doom loop. And this is not merely the retort of a comfortable liberal seeking to protect their privilege. Many leftists, especially around the time of the Russian Revolution, most notably Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman (Goldman 1923) and Julius Martov (Martov 1919), pointed this out, predicting that without so-called “bourgeois proceduralism,” socialist governance would become a new oppressive ruling class—and that is exactly what happened (Luxemburg 1918). 

If your material needs are met (in practice, actually existing communist regimes often could not do that either), but the state can murder you for disagreeing with it, you are not free.

III. Synthesis: The unified vision

It did not, and does not, need to be this way. From the beginning of the Enlightenment, to now, thinkers in both “camps” not only challenged the underlying idea of the split but created theory that unified both liberal and socialist principles, and at times, put them into practice.

Thomas Paine—a Founding era liberal read by the likes of Washington and Jefferson—argued for taxing land value long before even Henry George. In Agrarian Justice, he argued that land belongs to all of humanity in common—that its value is collectively created by society’s presence and labor, not by the individual who holds title. Ground rent, in his framework, is the people’s share by right (Paine 1797). The synthesis did not need to be constructed. It predates the split. Mill argued that both market and state are means, not ends, and that real individual flourishing—real freedom—required both in tandem (Mill 1873). Keynes argued the same—that laissez-faire did not produce true freedom, a truly salient argument in the conditions of the Great Depression, and one embedded into the great social democratic efforts of the pre- and postwar West—The New Deal, Atlee’s social welfare state, and beyond. On the other side, Bernstein, a contemporary of Marx, famously embraced liberal democracy as the true path to socialism (Bernstein was in many ways, one of the first “revisionist” Marxists). Carlo Rosselli (1930)  literally wrote a book seeking to do what this essay does here – reconcile the liberal and socialist modes of thought.

The split was, on a fundamental level, manufactured by the entrenched power structures both sides failed at addressing. Institutions such as the Foundation for Economic Education, the Volker Fund, and the Mont Pelerin Society were established as the instruments of the rich and powerful in the wake of the New Deal, with the goal of creating an epistemic framework—that unrestricted markets were the epitome of freedom—designed to roll back the social democratic victories by creating the ideological infrastructure to propagate the idea that restrictions on wealth, power, and privilege undermined liberal rights (Mirowski and Plehwe 2009). The Soviet Union, for its part, through its influence as a great power, sought to associate freedom and democracy with material deprivation, social inequality, and exploitation, and pointed out the often very real hypocrisy of the liberal camp as a means of cover. All of this established the idea that democracy was incompatible with collective power, and that markets were incompatible with material security.

Solidarity

The liberal tradition and the socialist tradition are sisters, and daughters of the Enlightenment. A project that sought to undermine entrenched power, and sought to assert that power fundamentally belongs to the people. Whether that is unaccountable political power, or unaccountable economic power—and make no mistake, the two feed each other—a truly robust liberalism requires a willingness to confront both at a systemic level. That means not seeing leftism as an “enemy,” even when it is radical (which was the great mistake of the German SPD—to align with the Freikorps which killed Luxemburg and Liebknecht in the name of “stability”), but as a partner one may have disagreements with, but agree on fundamentals—that of challenging and undermining entrenched, extracted, and exploitative power in the interests of all humanity.

Featured image is The International Socialist Workers' Congress in 1893 with Engels, Bebel, Bernstein and others, by Herman Greulich