Rev Left Radio - The Dialectical Inversion of Liberal Values: Freedom, Democracy, and The Contradictions of Capitalism

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

These are two snippets from a full episode which is currently up on our patreon in which Breht dialectically inverts core aspects of liberal philosophy (i.e. freedom and democracy) from a Marxist perspective, and then explains how the contradiction between the relations and forces of production under capitalism create an untenable and abjectly immoral situation wherein profit maximization for a few is always and everywhere prioritized over the wellbeing and flourshing of the vast majority.  Transition song 'Antithesnails (spintstumentals) by Spinitch ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio: https://revleftradio.com/

And just very quickly, let's go through some of those dialectical inversions of liberal philosophy. We support democracy. All right, but look how liberal democracies actually manifest in the real world. Because you support capitalism and thus private property, you create hierarchies of wealth that then translate immediately into power and corrupt whatever possible democracies could be there. So your democracies are masquerades. They are facades. They are sick jokes calling themselves democracies.

Furthermore, if you would like to actually have democracy, democracy would have to be a way of life. Therefore, it would have to infiltrate down to the community level, and that requires infiltration into the workplace. Socialists understand that real democracy would have to be present in the workplace, and what that looks like on a national scale and a global scale is democracy in the economy. These are anathema to liberals. So liberals, they say they support democracy. In fact, you ask any liberal, what's your core political commitment? Many of them will say democracy. A socialist dialectically looks at what liberals say they believe in and how their systems actually function. And we say you say you believe in democracy. Here's all the ways in which you

don't and how it doesn't manifest in your politics and how you seem to defend an entire order that is anti-democratic to the motherfucking core. So by your own standards, you have failed to live up to them. We seek to actually live up to them, right? We actually believe in real democracy. You don't. Freedom. Liberals. We believe in freedom. You know, it's so important to us, we come out of monarchy and feudalism. We believe so deeply in freedom. People should have the right to free speech, should have the right to free assembly. They should have freedom to become who they want to be. In practice, freedom is denied for the vast majority of humanity, who have to spend the vast bulk of their waking life toiling for less money than they actually produce, just to be able to survive the basics, survive the basics. that you're always hiking the price on, by the way, that your wonderful economic system is always hiking the price on. They have to afford the basics just to get by so they can do it all again.

What you actually mean, liberal, when you say freedom, is freedom for the few. Freedom for the people that have so much money through the exploitation of their fellow man that they can liberate themselves from toil and precarity completely. But that liberation is always a false one because it's never total. It's never universalizable.

It is always the freedom for a number. elite to do what they want to exploit who they want to take what they want at the cost of the freedom for the many there is no freedom in the colonized there is no freedom in the exploited in the poor in the impoverished in the oppressed your freedom is a false facade of freedom it is a sick joke of freedom it is the freedom of the slave owner and the monarch to have opulence and luxury and endless infinite privilege for themselves only We believe, as socialist and communists, in real freedom. We believe that wherever there is poverty, there is unfreedom.

And in order to solve that unfreedom, you unsolve poverty. Wherever there is exploitation, extraction, oppression, colonization, there is unfreedom. And we seek to overturn those systems of unfreedom to create the possibility of real freedom. And dialectically, we understand that nobody is free until everybody is free. You cannot build a system of freedom, wherein only a few people have it, and the vast majority are robbed of it. So again, one of your core beliefs, liberals, is a facade, is a fake, and we intend to actually make good on it. Are there any more? We can talk about human rights.

I think you mentioned another one. I don't want to take up too much time. We can go down the list. But clearly, liberal philosophy, freedom and democracy are two core values, and we, can in just a few seconds, demolish the liberal pretense to them by using the actual systems that liberalism produce against them, bring out the full meaning of the concepts they pretend to stand for, and then state claim to them. We actually are the torch carriers for freedom and democracy. You are a threat to freedom and democracy everywhere on earth in practice

except for a tiny global elite. And when you hear these words, you know, you have a contradiction of the kind Marx discussed. When you hear the words, you know you have a contradiction of the kind Marx discussed. When you hear the words, we have that technology, but it's not cost effective. That phrase means we have the social forces of production to build it, but it is not consistent with our social relations based on profit. And what does that apply to?

That applies to universal health care. That applies to affordable housing. That applies to debt-free secondary education. That applies to well-funded public schools. that applies to sustainable long-term 21st century infrastructure and public transportation, right? We have within our means the ability to produce those things for everyone, but they do not and they cannot make a profit for a few. Therefore, we have pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, you know, everybody has

to have their own car, and so we have a huge flourishing car industry, and we have a manic debt for just for having the goal of not being born rich and trying to educate yourself to advance your life, $100,000 in debt, just for thinking, you fucking peasant, that you had the right to get educated and not have rich parents, $100,000 debt. Good luck paying that off. Oh, by the way, in order to pay that off, you're going to have to work really shitty jobs under really shitty conditions, and we will never forgive it so that you will always be subservient and obedience.

So yes, we did make the mistake of overeducating our business. proletariat, but don't worry, we've accounted for that by hanging the albatross of unpayable debt with insane interest reins around their neck. So they'll be good little obedient workers nonetheless. They'll be more miserable than ever before, but they'll still show up to work because what else are they going to do? So again, this is the sort of core contradiction. We have the ability, the medical science, the technology, the ability to communicate instantly across the globe and new technologies all the time we have the forces of production necessary to create high qualities of life for everybody right but the relations of

production are still stuck in capitalism where the people in charge of making those decisions actually would rather extract a profit from you so they could live lives of luxury and opulence forever and so you don't get those things sorry it's the free market it's the invisible hand up your ass or the free market. Oh, the invisible hand of the free market happens to be flipping you off and choosing me. Sorry. It's all nature and blind forces and laws. It would be a mistake and a real pity to try to intervene in all of that.

So those things aren't profitable to a couple people. What is profitable? Blackstone private equity, buying up huge chunks of the American housing stock, driving prices through the roof, making houses on a, affordable for most, you know, working class families across America and then becoming a corporate landlord so they can extract rent from you in perpetuity. That is profitable. So that's what we're going to do. What's profitable in the health care region? It's for us to insert ourselves as corporate entities between you and your doctor and extract money from you for having the

gall to want to get help when you're sick. If you want to get help, you're sick, if you want to get help when you're sick. If you don't want you and your loved ones to die prematurely or suffer forever, you're going to have to come through us, a corporate entity that does nothing. We don't give you health care. We don't, you know, have doctors that come and check you or anything like, no, we extract money from you on your way to seeing the doctor. And if the doctor wants to give you medicine or perform a procedure on you, they're going to have to call us up. Some dumb fuck that works for a health insurance company gets to decide whether or not you really deserve that. Treatment or medicine.

Oh, you do need medicine. Oh, that's interesting. We have a whole thing called the pharmaceutical industry that loves to extract billions and billions of dollars of profit from your need for medicine. So if you want your medicine, oh, you have diabetes, boo-hoo. that's going to be several hundred dollars a month to get insulin so you don't die. Because, well, that's profitable for the pharmaceutical. It's not good for you. It's not profitable in any moral or health sense for you.

It doesn't actually benefit you at all. It sucks ass for you, majority of human beings in this country. But for them, they prefer to be able to extract billions of dollars every year as opposed to just, I don't know, giving you medicine. and health care in the richest country to ever exist in human history? I think I've made my point.