Liberalism arose alongside the rise of the bourgeoisie, expressing the material needs of a new capitalist class seeking to overthrow feudal privilege and establish freedom for trade, property, and capital. Thinkers like Locke, Hume, and Adam Smith gave philosophical form to these needs, transforming “freedom” into the right of private ownership and market exchange. Yet this freedom was inherently contradictory: it liberated the capitalist while binding the worker to wage labour.
As capitalism developed, liberalism evolved into the ideological mask of bourgeois domination. Its focus on individualism and formal equality conceals the deep social and economic inequalities of class society. Electoral democracy and “free speech” exist alongside the private ownership of production and wealth, maintaining what Lenin called “democracy for the rich.”
Liberalism’s notion of “negative freedom” mystifies genuine liberty, which requires material means and social equality. Marx’s distinction between personal and private property clarifies that socialism does not abolish personal possessions but seeks to end exploitation through collective ownership of the means of production.
Thus, liberalism functions as the ideological armor of capitalist rule. Only socialism (through democratic control, workers’ power, and collective ownership) can transform formal freedom into real human emancipation.
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Further reading:
- Leon Trotsky, “The Transitional Programme” (1938)
- Committee for a Workers’ International, “Trotsky’s Transitional Method”
