What is liberalism?

Many different people with many different politics identify with the tradition of liberalism. In Australia, the party of right-wing conservatism is named the Liberal Party. On the other hand, the radical student movement in the USA of the 1960s, and many of the participants in the civil rights movement, were inspired by liberal ideas. How can one set of ideas contain this wide breadth of political positions?

Liberalism should not be seen as a set of values or ideas, as its proponents suggest. Instead, it should be understood as a particular class perspective. At its core, liberalism is the perspective of capital in the abstract, derived from the framework of the commodity form. The multitude of liberal traditions, and the inconsistencies within of each of them, are no paradox, but are instead a reflection of the antagonism between capitals, and of the contradictions inherent within the social reality of the commodity form.

As with all political traditions, liberalism did not emerge or develop in a vacuum but in concrete historical conditions. Economic and social processes, most of all revolutions, have influenced liberalism throughout its existence. The tradition has also had to come to terms with, and define itself against, rival political projects.

Despite its many forms and renovations, liberalism has never fundamentally escaped the problems of its birth. The liberal tradition remains trapped within its capitalist class basis, and for that reason can never solve its own internal contradictions, provide an accurate assessment of society, or act as a consistent guide to action for those who want a better world.

The material basis of liberalism

Liberals understand their own political framework as a series of ideas or values, often founded on the vague principle of “liberty”. Usually, this includes the rights of individuals, standing for rationality, meritocracy and equality. By the mid-twentieth century, social progress and democracy were also, generally, included in the liberal grab-bag.

This is a vast simplification, though. Many different “liberals” disagree on which values are part of the tradition and which are not. Practically every thinker claiming the liberal mantle has attacked their political rivals for failing to include core tenets of the liberal canon.

The problem here is not that the liberal tradition cannot agree on which ideas are and are not liberal. It is the foundational premise of the debate that is the source of the problem. That is, liberals understand their own politics in idealist terms.

For a more serious understanding of liberalism, we should reject its own tools of inquiry, and instead turn to a materialist analysis. For Marxists, all ideas are rooted in the material reality of society, and especially the reality of class relations. Put simply, ideas have a class basis.

The class basis of Marxism is the working class. This is not to say that working-class individuals “invented” Marxism, or that workers will automatically take up Marxist ideas. But Marxism as a theory flows from an understanding of the position of the working class in capitalism, taken together with the lessons of the history of working-class struggle.

The perspective(s) of capital

Liberalism has a class basis too, though it is much more contradictory. In the most basic sense, liberalism is the perspective of capital. This only begs the question, though, because in reality capital can have many different perspectives based on its concrete situation. A more rigorous definition would be that liberalism is the perspective of abstract capital.

Unlike the working class, the capitalists are not a collective class. Their class interests can only be achieved individually, against both the workers they exploit but also against one another. That is to say, capitalist competition is the reason there cannot be one, true perspective of capital.

Liberalism, then, takes the perspective not of any specific capital, but of capital in general. To put it another way, liberalism as a political theory is not an attempt to theorise from the perspective of an actually existing capital, but is forced instead to try to understand the abstract perspective of abstract capital.

As a side note, the social layer that is best equipped to develop this theory is not a section of the capitalist class themselves. Their interests are too caught up in the day-to-day business of capital accumulation – trapped in the narrow, short-sighted perspective of their own profits. Instead, capitalism throughout its history has relied on a layer of bourgeois intellectuals to develop the theory and politics of the class as a whole. Liberalism is no less capitalist for having not come from the top-hat wearing industrialists themselves.

The commodity form

Liberalism’s fundamental starting point, then, is a quite high-level abstraction – capital. It is possible to understand much about capital in the abstract from a historical generalisation; history proves time and again that capital seeks to expand, to revolutionise the means of production, to increase exploitation, etc. But a more solid theoretical foundation is required to properly explain liberalism.

Marx posits that the foundation of capital is the commodity: a thing with both a concrete use and an abstract (quantifiable) value, which is traded on the market.[1] Capitalism as a mode of production can be defined as the system of generalised commodity production. That is, when the logic of value, rather than anything else, is the prime determinant of society. This system requires, and culminates in, the commodification of human labour.

As a system made up entirely of social relations, this process is, of course, undertaken by human beings. Insofar as these individuals play a part in this process, though, they act not as human beings but as representatives of aspects of that social process. As Marx says in reference to the aristocratic landlord class:

Every first born in the line of land owners is the inheritance, the property, of the inalienable landed property, which is the predestined substance of his will and activity. The subject is the thing and the predicate is the man. The will becomes the property of the property (my emphasis – LH).[2]

To follow the same logic, the capitalist is the embodiment of their capitalistic property. Theoretically, the standpoint of the capitalist is the standpoint of capital, which is itself the process of generalised commodity production under conditions of commodified labour. All this is to say that the social position of the capitalist is rooted in the commodity form.

The fundamentals of the commodity form accord with the core fundamentals of liberalism. Commodities confront the world as discrete units, which pass from the hands of one discrete owner into the hands of another discrete owner. The owner of a commodity, and especially the capitalist, thus similarly confronts the world as a discrete individual. In consequence, a framework that derives ultimately from the form of the commodity, via the perspective of the capitalist, will conceive of the world as made up of atomised individuals. The political individualism of liberalism reflects the social reality of individualism inherent in the commodity form.

The existence of the commodity form is also contingent upon certain rights or freedoms of the owners of property. Centrally, the owner of a commodity must have the right to sell their commodity and buy others. Otherwise, the thing being exchanged is no commodity at all, but only a thing with a use, produced or acquired by extra-economic means (ie outside of a trade relationship).

Once again, this social dynamic leaves deep political imprints in liberalism. “Natural rights” or a rights-based framework are central to the liberal tradition. The foundational unit which “naturally” has those rights in the economic world, the commodity, corresponds to the foundational unit in the (bourgeois) social world, the individual. In a sense, individuals only have rights under capitalism as an extension of their capacity to own the real bearer of rights – commodities. As Pashukanis says:

Having fallen into servile dependence upon economic relations surreptitiously created in the form of the laws of value, the economic subject – as if in compensation – receives a rare gift in his capacity as a legal subject: a legally presumed will, making him absolutely free and equal among other owners of commodities.[3]

Relatedly, formal equality, a central aspect of liberalism, is implied in generalised commodity production. On the market, there exists a certain reality of equality – everyone’s money is worth the same. Any exceptions to this are, definitionally, extra-economic.

Commodified labour also creates a certain social reality of formal equality between human beings, by converting qualitatively different labour into quantifiable units of the same, interchangeable, labour power. Capitalism, that is, creates equality between people by considering them completely interchangeable. The way that this approach cannot help but ignore the reality of actually existing differences and inequalities (especially, but not limited to, economic inequalities) is reflected in liberal/bourgeois law.

Thus it is no accident that the bourgeoisie has “pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’”.[4] They are merely realising the implications inherent in the commodity form. Liberal equality has its roots in generalised commodity production.

It is worth noting that in material reality, the processes of capitalism never reach these “ideal” forms. “Perfect” capitalism has never existed and cannot exist, because of the contradictions of the process of capital accumulation.

This is a problem for capitalism (and thus for liberalism) but not for our purposes here. As we have established, liberalism is based not on actually existing capitalist reality but on an abstract, theoretical capital. This is why the commodity form, an abstraction predicated upon social relations, is so important. There is nothing else that can be the foundation of such an abstract philosophy.

Extra-economic compulsion and the commodity form

This can help us to understand one of the great conundrums of liberalism – the contradiction between freedom and force. This conundrum is indissoluble, as it is rooted not in a contradiction of ideas but in a contradiction of the commodity form itself. The social relation itself contains a paradox.

This paradox is relatively simple, if we consider how trade occurs socially. The owner of a commodity must be free to sell it (or not), but that freedom can only be guaranteed by force. It is explained most clearly by Colin Barker: “The exclusion of others from access to one’s own property without one’s consent is a necessary precondition of commodity-legal production, and material means are necessary to achieve this”.[5]

It should be understood that this exclusion refers not just to the exclusion of non-property owners, but also to the exclusion of other property owners. In other words, capitalists have to protect their property from rival classes, but also from rival members of their own class. If one owner of property can seize the property of others, it undermines trade in general.

The only way to guarantee the sanctity of trade in general, then, is to have some kind of force that acts not on behalf of a specific property owner, but of property owners in general. This force is the capitalist state.

The requirement for force to guarantee freedom (of property, particularly) explains how liberals can base their theories on the same premise and yet come to seemingly opposite conclusions. John Locke and Thomas Hobbes offer a good example. Both are foundational thinkers in the Enlightenment tradition that liberalism stems from.

John Locke, from the perspective of the individual right to property, arrives at a fundamentally libertarian philosophy. He argues that humans are naturally in

a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.[6]

Thomas Hobbes, on the other hand, justifies the greatest authoritarianism. So in Leviathan, he declares the need for an all-powerful absolute sovereign to prevent a condition where “there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain”[7] – an opposite conclusion to Locke, yet predicated upon the same fundamentals: the right of the individual to freely dispose of their property.

Both thinkers are aware of the inverse of their own emphases. Hobbes suggests that “The right of nature…is the liberty each man hath to use his own power as he will himself for the preservation of his own nature”.[8] And Locke demands “that all men may be restrained from invading others’ rights, and from doing hurt to one another”.[9]

Locke accepts, in other words, that were it not for the threat of a general force, the force of individuals (or, as Hobbes is also concerned about, the force of the masses) could disrupt the rights of property owners. No liberal since has been able to resolve the dilemma.

This is because the dilemma is a social one, and not something that can be overcome in mere thought. The commodity form, and therefore liberalism, is made up of a contradictory fusion of individual libertarianism and ruthless authoritarianism. There is no paradox here, other than the paradox of capital.

The historical development of liberalism

Liberalism, then, is rooted in the theoretical framework of abstract capital. This is a necessary starting point, but it is only a starting point. There are aspects to liberalism which cannot be fully illuminated by a process of logical reasoning alone.

This is because the political philosophy and practice of liberalism was not developed in the heads of thinkers who existed in a void, cut off from the world. Like all political traditions, it was developed in specific social and historical contexts. These contexts left their mark on the liberal tradition.

The roots of liberalism can be identified in the proto-bourgeois and bourgeois ideologies that historically preceded it. We have already mentioned the Enlightenment, which is the most important of these, but the line can be drawn back to the very beginning of the rise of capitalism in Europe.

The emergence of new capitalist productive relations was necessary for the development of capitalism. But capitalism’s breakthrough from the margins of feudal society to become the dominant economic system required more than mere economic development. It required revolutionary social and political transformation – and this required ideas.

These ideas were developed as preludes to, as part of, and in the wake of social conflicts between the bourgeoisie and the feudal order. In this manner, new ideological reckonings became both possible and necessary for the rising bourgeois forces. Each conflict pushed the emerging bourgeois elements to make sense of themselves and their political and economic interests as a social layer.

In the womb of the old society

Economic development across Western Europe and Italy was such that by the fourteenth century there was already the basis for important pockets of capitalist relations of production, though commodity production was not yet generalised in any of these societies. Within the desert of feudal society, there were oases of proto-capitalism.

These oases generated the earliest proto-bourgeois ideas – articulated by John Ball and Wycliffe in England, and the thinkers of the Italian Renaissance. In Italy, the political forms of the city-states meant that, as Albert Weisbord puts it, “money-men…came into prominence. Entrenched behind the city-states under their control, they were able to develop a culture entirely their own”.[10]

Renaissance thought was concerned mostly with the development of the arts and sciences. The fact that this early Renaissance emerged in Italy, within city-states that were dominated by semi-capitalist classes, meant that, at first, Renaissance thought did not concern itself much with politics and philosophy. But by the height of the Renaissance, with the forces of feudalism and the Church more openly resistant, a budding proto-liberal political philosophy was evident.

Machiavelli, who represented the culmination of Renaissance political philosophy, articulated support for a government which included the popular classes, and even for limited popular struggle against the aristocratic class: “in every republic there are two parties, that of the nobles and that of the people; and all the laws that are favourable to liberty result from the opposition of these parties to each other”.[11]

Much to the disappointment of Machiavelli and his grand political and geopolitical vision (which can perhaps be summarised as authoritarianism in pursuit of liberty, foreshadowing Hobbes), the developing proto-capitalist economies of Italy were unable to be cohered into a state that was strong enough to support them against both the old order and their rivals elsewhere in Europe.

In Western Europe, the proto-capitalist pockets had provided the basis for a different trajectory. Chris Harman argues that though the proto-bourgeoisie did not themselves challenge the feudal order in this part of the world, they did offer an “independent centre of power” which classes that were struggling against the feudal ruling class could look to, and which the feudal state could occasionally see an interest in developing.[12] The existence of these independent centres of power allowed the peasants’ revolts of Western Europe in this period to push back against feudal forms of labour and thus increase the economic base of proto-capitalism.

Harman explains the dynamic that followed:

Caught between the past and the future, the monarchical states facilitated the growth of capitalist forms of exploitation, but also became a drag upon them at key moments in history. Then bitter class struggles alone could determine whether society moved forwards or backwards. And these struggles involved bitter clashes between rival exploiting classes as well as between the exploiters and the exploited classes.[13]

Throughout this period, the economic and political centres of the emerging class forces were to be found in parts of Germany, the Netherlands, Normandy (in the north of France) and England.

Religion and revolution

It is no coincidence that these places are also, for the most part, where the Protestant Reformation found purchase. Religion, like any other idea, is not something that exists outside a social context. Religious ideas should instead be understood as generated by specific forces in society, and utilised for specific ends. During the European Middle Ages, this was relatively straightforward – the Catholic Church provided the ideological underpinning for the aristocratic ruling classes (and, of course, for themselves where they played the role of the exploiting landlord).

Even in this period, though, there were various “heretical” sects associated with peasant and/or urban discontent. Marxists should understand these religious movements as attempts by oppressed and exploited social layers to develop or popularise ideas that justified their struggles. The fact that these ideas were understood in religious terms does not undermine this evaluation, as religion was the terrain of ideology at this point in time.

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was qualitatively different from the preceding “religious” conflicts, both in depth and breadth. The ideas of the Reformation represented the outlook of a growing layer of merchants and city-dwellers, who were restricted politically and economically by their landlords and the Church. The critiques that these layers developed could also mobilise the urban poor and the peasantry, who were being increasingly squeezed by the same forces.

Though Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism does not escape the bounds of idealism, he does provide a useful framework of what Protestantism actually stood for in its social context:

Calvinism opposed organic social organization in the fiscal-monopolistic form… Its leaders were universally among the most passionate opponents of this type of politically privileged commercial, putting-out, and colonial capitalism. Over against it they placed the individualistic motives of rational legal acquisition by virtue of one’s own ability and initiative. And…this attitude played a large and decisive part in the development of the industries which grew up in spite of and against the authority of the State.[14]

That this is a capitalist framework is fairly clear. But the hostility to “unfair” monopolies of the state is distinctly liberal. The Calvinists articulated an individualist creed, one that sought freedom (from extra-economic coercion) and equality (on the market).

Of course, not all Protestants were Calvinists, and not all Calvinists lined up neatly for the bourgeoisie. Different social forces came to oppose the general European order for different reasons, and the particular array of Protestant ideas that they adhered to reflected their social priorities. Despite these differences, though, the general framework of the Reformation provided the ideological foundation for the most important social conflicts of the era – the early bourgeois revolutions in the Netherlands and England.

In the Netherlands, as Pepijn Brandon argues:

The Reformation formed the ideological background to the rising opposition movements of the 1560s. The relative openness of Dutch society, its urbanisation and its strategic position at a nodal point in the European exchange of both material goods and ideas, made it exceptionally susceptible to the spread of Reformation ideologies.[15]

These opposition movements reached revolutionary heights in the late 1560s, and by 1588 the Dutch Republic had been formed. Though the merchant and bourgeois elements were dominant in the cities before this, they had been subordinated to and constrained by local and foreign feudal ruling classes. After the revolution, the bourgeoisie were the ruling class.

England was an even clearer example. The cause of the Parliamentarians in the Civil War of the 1640s was tied up with the defence of Protestantism against a feared resurgence of Catholicism and feudal absolutism.[16] The execution of King Charles I and the subsequent establishment of the republican Commonwealth was perhaps the single most influential event of the modern era. The Enlightenment, the immediate forerunner of the liberal tradition, was more than anything else a project of interpreting the events of the English Revolution.

Compromise and tolerance

Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the English Parliamentarians and then Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, was not known as a tolerant man. In all ways representative of the vanguard of the proto-bourgeois “middling sort of men”, Cromwell was personally and politically a zealous Puritan, and after the war he executed thousands of Irish in the name of ending “popery” (though, of course, there were other, more worldly, reasons for his regime to consolidate power over Ireland).

In the revolutionary period then, at least in England, the question of religious freedom or tolerance was not high on the agenda of the leading bourgeois forces. But for the Enlightenment tradition, and subsequently for liberalism, religious tolerance (and later, secularism) was of central importance.

There is certainly a basis for these ideas in the logic of abstract capital. The formal equality inherent in the commodity form suggests an indifference to faith, and the revolutionising of the means of production in general requires that, at a minimum, religious dogmas should not hinder the pursuit of rational material sciences.

But since religious freedom was not necessarily a part of the bourgeois revolutionary program in the early seventeenth century, it is worth trying to understand what historical processes led to its inclusion as part of the liberal tradition.

After Cromwell’s death, the republican government floundered and was overthrown by Royalist forces. The monarchy that was “restored” was fundamentally different from that which had come before, as can be seen in King Charles II’s Declaration of Breda, which concedes important powers to the parliament.[17] It was the 1688 “Glorious Revolution”, though, that established the great compromise: the state would be wielded in the interests of the bourgeoisie, and the aristocracy could keep their property and political positions so long as they did not conspire to turn back the clock.

For the bourgeoisie, such a compromise was not counterposed to their victory. The main obstacle to the further development of capitalism, after all, had been the superstructural institutions of the aristocracy – the feudal state. With that obstacle cleared out of the way, the bourgeoisie could make further inroads through economic means, safe in the knowledge that they would control the institutions of power in any future political conflicts.

There was another great pressure which pushed the bourgeoisie towards compromise – the lower elements of the popular classes. In the English Civil War there emerged political projects that went beyond the bounds of what the bourgeois forces were willing to countenance. The most famous were the programs of the Levellers, who campaigned for universal suffrage, and the more marginal Diggers, who called for the abolition of property altogether.

In light of this more fundamental threat, those forces of the bourgeoisie that had only reluctantly supported the revolution changed their strategy. As Albert Weisbord puts it:

The progress of the Civil Wars had revealed what a small proportion of the population they actually constituted. They hastened, then, to make peace with all possible elements, whether royalist or democratic.[18]

This entailed religious tolerance of the different Protestant denominations that made up these various forces. A slightly more thorough religious tolerance (it included Jews to an extent, but still proscribed reactionary Catholics) was enacted in the Dutch Republic after the end of the political and religious conflicts of the Thirty Years War in 1648.

It was in this context, in 1689, that John Locke penned A Letter Concerning Toleration, in which he states:

This narrowness of Spirit on all sides has undoubtedly been the principal Occasion of our Miseries and Confusions. But whatever have been the Occasion, it is now high time to seek for a thorow Cure… Since you are pleased to inquire what are my Thoughts about the mutual Toleration of Christians in their different Professions of Religion, I must needs answer you freely, That I esteem that Toleration to be the chief Characteristical Mark of the True Church.[19]

Locke is a foundational thinker of the Enlightenment and, subsequently, the liberal tradition. That his desire for toleration comes from the experience of the English Civil Wars is explicitly laid out in the text. Thus, even the progenitors of liberalism understood that their philosophies were not plucked from the ether but were developed in specific social and historical contexts.

Religious tolerance – which, it must be said, remained highly restrictive for much of liberalism’s history – was one such historical development.

Against conservatism and radicalism

History also forced liberalism to define itself against rival political tendencies. This did not happen overnight, but was a messy process of developments inside of and against the mainstream liberal tradition. Ultimately, the main political traditions that liberalism defined itself in opposition to were conservatism and radicalism.

It can be argued that modern conservatism is a fundamentally liberal ideology. No conservative (at least since the halfway point of the nineteenth century) seriously wants to destroy capitalism and revert to feudal politics and economics. Conservatives are also just as likely as liberals to invoke key thinkers of the Enlightenment and liberal traditions to support their arguments.

But there are dynamics which put conservatism at odds with liberalism proper. It is true that they are both capitalist frameworks. In some ways, conservatism is the more pragmatic framework of the bourgeoisie. If liberalism is the perspective of abstract capital, conservatism can perhaps be said to be the perspective of actually existing capital, concerned with the dirty business of ruling. Thus private property is sacrosanct for conservatives, but on freedom, rights, and formal equality the tradition is much more ambivalent. For a conservative, order is much more important than these airy ideals.

At some point, then, the philosophies of the bourgeoisie developed in (at least) two different directions. The development of conservatism is easy enough to understand – once capitalism has conquered its feudal forerunners, the main purpose of politics is to justify that victory and defeat threats to that position. The two-sided nature of the bourgeois ideology in the revolutionary period gave way to a more one-sided approach as the threat of feudal counter-revolution receded.

But the developing split with liberalism was not made explicit until social processes forced them into view. Most central was the revolutionary process of the late eighteenth century – the American Revolution, and particularly the French Revolution. Both revolutions were fought under the banner of identifiably liberal ideas, and although the French Revolution wavered first left and then right, the ultimate settlement of both revolutions produced fundamentally liberal regimes.

The American and French Revolutions, coming later in the bourgeois revolutionary period, had the benefit of learning from the previous examples. In both cases, the transmission belt of ideas is quite clear. Enlightenment thought, informed by the Dutch Revolt and English Civil War, was widely discussed in the salons of France, and by the drafters of the American Declaration of Independence.

There are plenty of texts which have accurately demonstrated the hypocrisies of the liberalism of the American revolutionaries. The first section of Domenico Losurdo’s book Liberalism: A Counter-History is a compendium of evidence that early American liberals never took the question of slavery seriously. Losurdo says this is because “‘class interests’ – principally of those who owned large plantations and a considerable number of slaves – played an important role”.[20] This is true enough, but requires some additional explanation.

Conservatism implicitly existed at this time. In fact, Edmund Burke, who is rightly considered the father of conservatism, professed sympathy with the aims of the Americans (though never with their actual struggle).[21] The American bourgeoisie, though, did not take up a conservative framework in its struggle against British rule. Their project was distinctly liberal, not just capitalist.

Liberalism was the framework of the American revolutionaries because it provided something for their social project. It was a political philosophy that fitted capitalist existence, yes, but one that particularly fitted their capitalist existence. The American bourgeoisie, unlike the English, needed to throw off the restrictions of their colonial overlord in order to fully realise their own capitalist development. The ideas of liberalism were useful tools for this project, as they have been for many similar projects since. Additionally, liberal ideas could motivate other class forces dissatisfied with British rule to fight alongside the more outright bourgeois ones.

Simultaneously, the central freedom that the Americans fought for was obviously the freedom of property owners. This is the real crux of the matter with slavery, as Losurdo correctly points out. It is worth considering, though, the positive side of the American Revolution, and particularly how it contributed to the formulation of modern liberalism.

The American Revolution was not one of the bourgeoisie overthrowing feudalism, but a budding national bourgeoisie overthrowing a restrictive capitalist overlord: a bourgeois revolution against another section of the bourgeoisie. This dynamic meant the thinkers had to define themselves against a rival capitalist philosophy. Although there was a previous ideological struggle inside the Enlightenment tradition between more liberal and more conservative thinkers, the revolutionary process in America started to solidify a tradition that was distinct from the dominant politics in England.

The distinction between liberalism and conservatism, though, is made clear in response to the much deeper revolutionary process that shook France, starting in 1789. Unlike the American Revolution, in which the masses never played more than an auxiliary role, in France the Parisian artisans and proto-working class asserted themselves from the beginning of the revolution.

At first, the liberal wing of the revolution was not primarily hostile to these layers. A kind of uneasy alliance existed between the bourgeois revolutionaries and the popular masses who were mobilised against the old regime. It is hard to imagine how the liberal forces could have come to power without the storming of the Bastille, or the women’s march on Versailles.

Nonetheless, the liberal leadership of the revolution was not oblivious to the threat that the masses could get beyond their control. Less than a fortnight after the women’s march, they instituted martial law to prevent future mobilisations.

On the other side, the liberal forces were up against the reactionaries. The king and his family attempted to flee the country many times, and rumours of aristocratic conspiracies against the new government circulated widely. It was primarily this that forced the liberals into more decisive action against the old order.

When the aristocratic ruling classes of the rest of Europe intervened militarily into France to aid the counter-revolution, the dynamics of the ensuing war pushed the liberals out of power. Their commitment to compromise and tolerance had run up against the realities of an obstinate aristocracy on one side and the adamant popular masses on the other. Paris would eventually fall under the political leadership of Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobins.

Much could be said about the political project of the Jacobins. It will suffice for our purposes to recognise that there were differences within this political current (and Robespierre’s politics themselves were not static), but Jacobinism can broadly be understood as the hard left of the bourgeois revolutionary tradition – a kind of bourgeois radicalism.

The Jacobins oversaw the period of the Terror, which still today remains the bogeyman of both conservatives and liberals. The Terror was a campaign of arrests and execution of those who were considered traitors or threats to the revolution. While later, when the bourgeois radicalism of Robespierre had also run up against its limits, it was turned against the left, the primary motivation for the Terror was to end the counter-revolution of the aristocracy, the Church and agents for foreign powers. It was also in this period that the masses forced the government to institute price controls for basic goods such as bread, thus impinging upon the rights of the free market.

Though it was written in 1790, before the Terror solidified conservative opinion against the revolution, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was a clear-sighted conservative argument for a hostility to the French Revolution, to revolutions in general, and to liberalism’s part in such processes. In this text, Burke rewrites the history of the English Revolution by asserting that the English constitution of 1688 was “in its fundamental principles for ever settled” (as if a revolution had not settled it), and declaring that the rights of the “subject” cannot exist without the monarchy, as they are “bound indissolubly together”.[22] This allows him to go on to attack the French Revolution as completely unlike that of his own country.

Burke’s political attacks on the women’s march on Versailles are obviously consistent with the philosophy laid out in Reflections, as is his open support of the monarchy and the reactionary Catholic Church. Burke developed conservatism, then, specifically with the formulation that liberals undermine their own political project; that by questioning any social order they undermine social order in general.

So, Burke was explicit that despite some propertied classes supporting the revolution, the dynamic would threaten the right of property in general. As Neil Davidson puts it, “Burke understood, from very early in the process, the logic of escalation that would come to dominate the revolution and drive it further than the bourgeoisie intended”.[23]

In later years, liberalism would denounce the “excesses” of the French Revolution. Conservatism, following Burke’s lead, denounced the entire process, including the role played by the liberals.

Eventually, the most radical phase of the French Revolution was restrained by more moderate bourgeois forces, who in turn handed the reins over to Napoleon. The Napoleonic era, and the short restoration of the Bourbon royal family afterwards, was one of internal counter-revolution. But it should not be understood that this counter-revolution overturned the newly forged capitalist state, let alone capitalist relations in France. It was a period of reactionary conservatism, but on a bourgeois basis, not a feudal one.

So, by 1830, when another revolution overthrew the restored Bourbons, the liberals found themselves wedged between two political projects they detested. On the right, the threat of capitalist but reactionary politics that ran counter to the fundamentals of freedom, rights and equality. On the left, the radicals (some of whom would soon describe themselves as “socialist”) threatened to undermine the very basis of the new order – private property. Of these, it was clear which the liberals feared more.

Thus the arch-liberal Lafayette, who had been a general in George Washington’s army and then drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen during the French Revolution, decided to pledge his loyalty to a Bourbon cousin, so that the monarchy could protect liberty against the threat of social disorder:

Monsieur de Lafayette, realising the assembly’s growing indecision, suddenly charged himself with renouncing the Presidency: he handed the Duc d’Orléans a tricolour flag, advanced onto the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, and embraced the Prince in full view of the astonished crowd, while the latter waved the national flag. Lafayette’s republican kiss made a king. A strange ending to the life of the hero of Two Worlds![24]

Liberalism had spawned both conservatism and radicalism. Conservatives, though, at least after capitalism had thoroughly conquered state power, were not a fundamental threat to the capitalist class basis of liberalism. Individuals within the radical tradition, on the other hand, took the abstract principles of liberalism so seriously that they came to the (correct) conclusion that private property was a barrier to their realisation.

Gracchus Babeuf, who was executed in 1797 by the counter-revolutionary regime in France, took these politics the farthest: “Babeuf usually described his position as the advocacy of ‘true equality’ or ‘common happiness’. But his aim of a society based on economic equality and common ownership of property is clearly recognisable as what later became known as socialism”.[25]

Insofar as radicalism did question private property, it marked a break with the liberal tradition. This break was necessarily limited, though, before a different class could be found on which radical politics could base itself.

Democracy and social liberalism

In the nineteenth century, the working class emerged as a political force. It was, as Marx put it, a “class with radical chains”.[26] The perspective of the working class allowed for a totally different kind of politics from liberalism. The social position of this class, as a propertyless and collective class, laid the basis for a radical politics that could overcome the paradoxes that liberal radicalism remained mired in.

Ever since the working class was first constituted as a social layer, their struggles had impacted liberalism. We have seen how the earliest proto-working class movements were important in pushing radicalism to its limits in France. But with the consolidation of capitalism, the working class grew in numbers and political importance. Historically, it was the struggles of the working class that forced liberalism to formulate its positions on two important themes: democracy and the “social question” (inequality and exploitation; basically, class).

There had always been a strand in liberalism that supported democracy and the “general good” of humanity. The Levellers in the English Civil War, for instance, campaigned for universal suffrage, without opposing property rights. The democratic forces, though, were a smaller opposition to Cromwell’s more mainstream bourgeois politics of limiting the vote to property holders. In the French Revolution, the liberal phase from 1789–91 gave the vote only to “active citizens” of property, and it was only under the more radical National Convention of 1792 that universal male suffrage was introduced.

The democratic tradition of these forces, despite being opposed to the mainstream, did not break fundamentally with liberalism. Theirs was a framework which supported universal male suffrage and a redistribution of wealth to the poor, but within the logic of liberal philosophy. Thomas Paine is a fitting example, particularly in his most radical work, Rights of Man – Part Second, Combining Principle and Practice.

Paine in this text denounces all hereditary offices, supports universal suffrage, and even goes so far as to suggest that: “When, in countries that are called civilised, we see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system of government”.[27] His conclusion is to distribute wealth to the poor, and he spends pages detailing how this could be done (reducing military spending, rationalising government offices, clearing out corruption).

All this was a challenge to the mainstream of liberalism at the time, certainly, but Paine’s reasons for supporting both democracy and social welfare were liberal ones. Individualism, rights, and formal equality were the starting point. Indeed, Paine was quite explicit in Rights of Man that these values came from the commodity form itself:

The invention of commerce…is the greatest approach towards universal civilisation that has yet been made… Commerce is no other than the traffic of two individuals, multiplied on a scale of numbers; and by the same rule that nature intended for the intercourse of two, she intended that of all.[28]

Ultimately, it was that great historical test, the Reign of Terror, which proved that Paine was incapable of breaking with liberalism. He disavowed the radicals’ execution of the royal family, denounced the influence that “Paris” (read: the radical sans-culottes) had on the government, and opposed price controls.[29] That is to say, despite being abstractly for democracy and social equality, he opposed the concrete measures that went the furthest in this direction in Paris.

Despite this opposition to Jacobin radicalism, Paine’s ideas were still seen as too radical by many liberals. His democratic and social ideals remained outside the mainstream of liberalism until the working class threatened to find their own path to democracy and equality.

The practice of liberalism in the nineteenth century was a backward step from the heights of Paine. The 1848 revolution in France, and then the period of radical reconstruction after the Civil War in America, saw liberal forces at first fight for democracy and social justice, only to later compromise with conservatives against threats to private property, the nation or social order. So in France, the liberals crushed the workers’ uprising in June and then accommodated themselves to Louis Napoleon’s dictatorship. In America, those liberals who had been against slavery (many liberals had actually defended the South’s right to “liberty”) allowed the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow segregation in the South.

By the turn of the twentieth century, though, a new current had emerged. In Britain, the “social liberal” philosophy of John Stuart Mill was beginning to gather a following. A similar project would later become mainstream to American liberalism. Both had similarities to Paine, but were much more informed by working-class politics.

Matt McManus has claimed that Mill can be understood as a socialist, partly because of his self-identification as such.[30] The politics that he articulates, though, fail to go beyond liberalism and thus fail to challenge capitalism.

Firstly, it is important to state that insofar as democratic and/or social liberalism were ever taken up by sections of the ruling class, it was for two reasons: fear of the class struggle, and to justify specific economic changes that were beneficial to capitalism.

In Britain, the history of the early nineteenth century was one of thunderous working-class revolts for the vote, reaching its height with the Chartist rebellion in 1839. The revolt was so serious that one British general feared an insurrection, and was not confident in his ability to put it down if it eventuated.[31] These struggles caused some sections of liberal politics to consider introducing universal suffrage so as to prevent social revolution. This project was implemented piecemeal over the next half-century, by liberals who won the support of a defeated and more politically moderate working class.

British capitalism had also developed by the twentieth century to the point where it was beneficial for capitalism to have an educated workforce. For the purposes of social discipline and technical instruction, schooling was expanded. The state, having invested resources into educating workers, was also compelled to keep them alive and able to work for as long as possible, and thus health care and welfare accorded also with this period.

The ruling class more broadly, then, was open to the ideological arguments that the social liberals were making. This was never uncontested, though, and part of the eventual acceptance of social liberalism into the liberal mainstream in the twentieth century was the process of political demarcation against its insistent conservative rival.

It is useful to return to Mill briefly, as an example of the limits of a politics that fails to break with liberalism. Mill’s politics are in some ways more radical than Thomas Paine’s (though not really in his practice – Mill was a true believer in reforms rather than radical struggle). He was an early proponent of women’s suffrage, denounced the power of the capitalist class over politics, and articulated support for workers’ control of their workplaces. Nevertheless, his program is utopian, while simultaneously failing to go beyond the bounds of capitalism.

The core of the problem is that Mill accepts private property, and merely seeks to make workers the collective owners of that private property via a system of worker cooperatives.[32] Thus, in Mill’s formulations, competition and private property remain.[33] This means that Mill’s framework cannot deal with the problems of the anarchy of capitalist competition, or the subsequent economic crises.

Mill is also fundamentally elitist, which leads him to an anti-working class prejudice against democracy and racist support for colonialism. This elitism also informs an attitude that the current form of the state could be a positive good, if only the corrupting influence of individual capitalists could be purged from it. For Mill, the state must educate the workers, to make them morally virtuous enough to accept socialism, while administering their health care and welfare from on high.

All this is consistent with liberalism as the perspective of abstract capital. Like Paine, Mill is able to articulate support for democratic rights and social justice using liberal values. But his framework accepts the commodity form at a fundamental level, and also maintains the need for a minority state that maintains the monopoly of violence over both individuals and the masses (such force, remember, is required for generalised commodity production).

In short, the social liberalism of Mill does not reject the perspective of abstract capital for the perspective of the working class, but instead seeks to put workers in the position of abstract capital. This is an impossibility in the real world, and so the grand, lofty ideas of Mill are instead used to justify the pittances of liberal welfare state politics.

Both Paine, who takes the abstract values of liberalism to their most radical conclusion, and Mill, who is strongly influenced by working-class politics, fail to break with the fundamentals of the liberal framework. Failing to reject the perspective of abstract capital, and accepting as natural the commodity form, means their politics are incapable of challenging the fundamentals of capitalism.

Conclusion

For the purposes of this article, I have attempted to focus on the foundational properties of liberalism. This has meant leaving aside much that is worthy of discussion – most glaringly the development of liberalism in the twentieth century, and the emergence of particular bourgeois political traditions, such as reactionary nationalism and fascism. Nonetheless, I believe that the framework provided here can help to illuminate liberalism’s relationship to these developments.

An understanding of liberalism is necessary for Marxists, mostly in order to politically combat it. Despite the many twists and turns of the liberal tradition, it has not escaped its fundamental basis in abstract capital. Because of this, any innovation in liberalism is trapped within the capitalist framework, regardless of what the theorists who come up with those innovations might think.

Liberalism, as the perspective of abstract capital, inherits the contradictions of the commodity form. Freedom, enforced by authority; rights, for property and its owners; and formal equality, which must by definition ignore the reality of material inequality.

The framework of liberalism was not handed down from God. Nor was it, as liberals are more likely to suggest, some pre-existing supra-historical truth that was “discovered”. Liberalism was developed by human beings in specific social contexts. That is to say, liberalism is developed and utilised by specific (bourgeois) class forces.

Early bourgeois thought developed inside feudalism, and was articulated by the social forces involved using the existing frameworks. The Renaissance dressed itself in a Roman toga, and the Protestant Reformation claimed its authority from the Bible. Nonetheless, these relatively half-formed ideas proved capable of politically arming revolutions such as the Dutch Revolt and the English Civil War.

These early revolutions revealed the Janus-faced nature of the rising bourgeoisie: restricted by the old feudal order on one side and threatened by the popular masses on the other. Once in power, the bourgeoisie compromised with the defeated aristocracy and eventually liberalism produced its sibling, bourgeois conservatism, in order to maintain social order.

The high revolutionary period of the late eighteenth century forced liberalism to identify itself against this conservatism, and then against the more dire threat of bourgeois radicalism. Opposition to the politics of both reactionaries and radicals became definitional to the liberal tradition.

By the mid-nineteenth century, liberalism was more or less codified. Chartism and the 1848 revolutions would turn liberalism thoroughly against revolutionary means, and the later acceptance of democratic rights was in pursuit of this anti-revolutionary goal. Social liberalism was similarly informed by working-class politics, and even then was only taken up by mainstream liberalism when its most tame policies became beneficial for capital accumulation.

The social basis and the history of liberalism makes it clear that there is nothing to be redeemed in these politics. Liberals might honestly support freedom and equality, but these ideals cannot be achieved while capitalism reigns. Marxism, on the other hand, can explain why liberalism is incapable of fulfilling its own aims. Ultimately, only a Marxist framework is capable of politically arming the struggle against the quandaries of bourgeois philosophy and politics, against the reality of world capitalism, and for the liberation of humanity.

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[1] Marx 1867, Chapter I: Commodities, Section 1.

[2] Marx 1843, Part 5 (e): The Estates, “The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea”.

[3] Pashukanis 1924, “Introduction”.

[4] Marx 1847, Chapter I, “Bourgeois and Proletarians”.

[5] Barker 2019, “Violence and commodity producing societies”; “States and force”.

[6] Locke 1690, Chapter II, “Of the State of Nature”.

[7] Hobbes 1651, Chapter XIII. “Of the naturall condition of mankind, as concerning their felicity, and misery: The Incommodites Of Such A War”.

[8] Hobbes 1651, Chapter XIV, “Of the first and second naturall lawes, and of contracts: Right Of Nature What”.

[9] Locke 1690, Chapter II, “Of the State of Nature”.

[10] Weisbord 1937, I, “The English Civil Wars”.

[11] Machiavelli 1513, Chapter IV, “The disunion of the Senate and the people renders the republic of Rome powerful and free”.

[12] Harman 1989, “The class struggle and the transition”.

[13] Harman 1989, “The class struggle and the transition”.

[14] Weber 1905, Chapter 5, “Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism”.

[15] Brandon 2007, “Popular Reformation”.

[16] Manning 1991, pp.72–101.

[17] British House of Lords 1660, “The King’s Declaration”.

[18] Weisbord 1937, “I. The English Civil Wars: 4”.

[19] Locke 1689, “To the reader”.

[20] Losurdo 2011, p.30.

[21] Burke 1775, “Speech On Moving His Resolutions For Conciliation With The Colonies”.

[22] Burke 1790, p.8.

[23] Davidson 2012, p.78.

[24] de Chateaubriand, BkXXXII:Chap15:Sec1.

[25] Birchall 1996.

[26] Marx 1843, “Introduction”.

[27] Paine 1779–92, Chapter V, “Ways and means of improving the condition of Europe interspersed with miscellaneous observations”.

[28] Paine 1793.

[29] Paine 1793.

[30] McManus 2021.

[31] Foot 2006, p.100.

[32] Mill 1870, Chapter VII: “On the probable futurity of the labouring classes”, §6.

[33] Mill 1879, “The Socialist Objections to the Present Order of Society Examined”.