The Left must embrace freedom Notions of fairness and equality won’t cut it

The new year has dawned on a world that is hurtling towards a new Dark Age. Technologies that could free us from drudgery, poverty and environmental collapse instead make life worse for most people in most countries. The great humanist ideologies that drove social change over the past three centuries now lie in ruins, with fascist tropes making an energetic comeback among those with the most to lose. Amid all this, the Left lies defeated, marginalised and divided — a throwback to a world it failed to change.

As a dyed-in-the-wool Leftie, I think I have the right to say this: if Trump is in the White House, it is our fault. If too many Britons blame migrants for a secular stagnation that has nothing to do with them, it is the Left’s fault. If Europe is fragmenting and warmongering, yes, you guessed it, that too is on us. If green investments are despised on an overheating planet, it is because the Left failed to wrestle the green transition from the clutches of Wall Street types who profit from phoney pollution markets.

Am I being too harsh on us Leftists? Not really. Big Finance and Big Business did not, of course, need us on their boards to devastate people’s lives in 2008. They did it all by themselves. But we on the Left had the tools to see the crash coming and to push sensible policies afterwards to tend to the wounded majority. Instead, we fell in love with our own voices as we delivered fiery speeches at otherwise splendid gatherings: Occupy Wall Street, Indignados, and Aganaktismenoi. While we wasted our energy debating irrelevant issues, the likes of Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and Europe’s social democrats were concocting — often in our name — schemes to transfer the bankers’ losses onto the shoulders of society’s weakest. In short, we had the opportunity to shield the many from the greed of the few. And we failed, resulting in the surge of nativist proto-fascism that masquerades as unbowed patriotism and realist geopolitics.

But here is the greatest paradox of our era. Though never before has the Left been so weakened and discredited, never before has it been so necessary. The reason is that only the Marxist Left is even interested in rethinking the one thing that can re-align our technological capacities with our need for freedom and prosperity: property rights over machines, algorithms and scarce natural resources.

Where are we at today? Capitalism was defeated in 2008 almost as decisively as Soviet communism was in 1991. Since then, austerity for the masses and state “socialism” for Big Business and Finance inadvertently funded the explosion of Big Tech’s cloud capital: machines that produce no commodities but generate enormous power directly to modify our behaviour.

The resulting permanent stagnation reflects the post-2008 Twin Peaks problem: a massive pile of monies (the first peak) that won’t flow into productive investment, and an equally vast pile of public and private debt (the second peak) that such investment could have cancelled. Rising discontent and the return of the ultra-Right were inevitable — it’s what happened the last time Wall Street collapsed, in 1929.

A new technofeudal ruling class, using its cloud capital and power to shape our behaviour, seized control of markets and siphoned off profits as rents, deepening systemic stagnation. Competitive markets are now infeasible, except in communist China. Across the Western world, capitalist markets are shrinking while cloud capital threatens the very idea of the liberal individual and the neoliberal fantasy that growth could come from shrinking the state. Social democracy is also dead in the water, a sad reflection of how welfare states can never be funded by taxing mercurial tech lords and unhinged private equity outfits who own both our states and the means directly to modify our state of mind.

As cloud capital develops its AI powers further, it is overriding what remains of our property rights over our thoughts, intellectual output, even our audio-visual image. By privatising the dollar through stablecoins and the military-industrial complex through the combination of drones and AI, our tech lords have begun to develop a new transhuman ideology — techlordism — which will replace neoliberalism.

Regulation, anti-trust laws, and wealth laws cannot rein in these exorbitant, feudal-like powers. In a world where technofeudalism advances by masquerading as dynamic capitalism, all other ideologies — liberalism, neoliberalism and social democracy — are now as extinct as the feudal ideals of chivalry or the divine right of kings.

The old ideological clash between free-market ideologues and social democrats no longer describes our reality. True political power comes from control over property rights — the only way to make our brilliant new technologies serve humanity is to democratise control over them, particularly in the workplaces where they are deployed. Who else but a revitalised Left can make that case?

But first the Left must regain the trust of a deeply sceptical society. It can only do so by distancing itself from five cardinal sins.

The Left fell into the trap of welfarism once it abandoned its ambition to drive social progress by intervening in the workplace. Having forgotten what makes production tick, social democratic parties ended up as the parties of pensioners. Redistribution is essential in any civilised society, but a society stuck in a welfarist mindset won’t stay civilised for long.

Then there’s labourism. As William Morris so eloquently warned, the celebration of mind-numbing work as virtuous is stultifying and misguided. Industrial robots and cloud capital, once wrested from the tech lords, must be the Left’s tools for liberating labour from labourism and for steering the masses toward creative, artisanal work that not only satisfies the soul but also produces high-quality stuff.

Green Keynesianism is theoretically splendid but severely circumscribed in practice. As Michal Kalecki predicted decades ago, even if the ruling classes permit the state to boost their aggregate profits through public investments in socially necessary projects like green energy, their dominant strategy is to take advantage of public monies but end Keynesian policies well before the majority benefit from them.

Accelerationism can also be useful in the right context but is a disaster when applied unthinkingly. The idea that, if things get much worse, the majority will come to their senses and rise up to protect their interests, is as deluded as the tech lords’ conviction that we shall all become happy and glorious if their AI-driven cloud capital takes over the planet tomorrow. Preventing the deterioration of society’s circumstances through redistribution and Keynesian policies in the short run is essential as long as the Left does not fall into the trap of seeing welfarism and Keynesianism as permanent solutions.

But perhaps our worst sin has been that which we rose up to defeat but ended up embracing with grim gusto: authoritarianism. Those of us who spent our youth in Leftist circles can recount the horror stories. But the rot began earlier when our precursors, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels among others, failed to foresee that our powerful prescriptive texts attract disciples and believers. Before long, Leftists abused comrades, built their personal power base, deplatformed rather than out-argued opponents, sought positions of influence within the system they were supposedly fighting against, bedded impressionable students, took control of the Politburo and threw anyone who resisted into some gulag, actual or metaphorical.

Assuming that we are capable of putting these sins behind us, the task ahead is clear: to demonstrate that the radical democratisation of workplaces and core economic infrastructures is not merely a radical ideal, but a practical requirement for authentically freer, richer, and happier lives.

Any theory of change must begin with a vision of a future worth fighting for. But it can’t end there. To be useful, the Left must outline the tangible steps it would take to get there — not just tomorrow, or in six months’ time, but in one year or five years from now.

Beginning with the long-term vision, the Left needs to inspire confidence that technology can become a liberator, rather than the handmaiden of exploitation and oppression: that it will forever be as long as machines are owned by the 0.001%. It must, then, illustrate what this means for how corporations function, how money is created and how land and other natural resources are used. To explain fully how these three realms — production, money and land — are to be managed by an empowered demos, would take many pages. Indeed, I had to author a political science fiction novel to outline them.

Nevertheless, the foundations of any long-term Left vision can be summarised in a single word: democratisation. First, that means democratising corporations by means of new corporate laws that incorporate the principle of one-employee-one-share, and one-person-one-vote, alongside citizens’ juries (as opposed to bureaucratic overlords) that would oversee newly democratised corporations. Second, that means democratising money, by deploying digital payments systems to establish a monetary commons which harnesses our collective capacity to create money. This would be a decisive step toward providing a non-inflationary trust fund for all. Finally, any serious Left must democratise land, and other scarce natural resources, via a new system of land use that divides socialised land into commercial and social zones, using proceeds from the former to invest in the latter.

With production, money and land democratised (but not nationalised), there is no limit to imagining a realignment between humanity’s technological capacities, our collective interest and our personal freedom. Indeed, the only limit is the hard question: OK, even if we agree that this is where we want to go, how do we get there? The answer must include tangible, verifiable goals every step of the way, from tomorrow morning to the next decade or two.

These steps must include practical solutions to the aforementioned Twin Peaks problem (the transformation of idle cash into productive, non-damaging investments); the termination of fake electricity markets; the revival of our depleted (health, educational, environmental) commons; the task of restraining Big Finance and the technofeudal ruling class; the liberation of swathes of people from the shackles that hold them back; and the misunderstandings that cloud their thinking.

At the level of ideology and prose, meanwhile, the Left must correct the great mistake that, in the first two decades of the 20th century, caused it to veer off into a mire of authoritarianism and, inevitably, failure. Though the Left has its roots in the emancipatory movements of the 19th century — from women’s liberation to the trades unions — sometime around the Great War both the communist and the social democratic traditions ditched liberty in favour of something nebulous and ill-defined that Karl Marx rightly rejected: equality. In this way, the Left gifted freedom to the liberals (who only cared about their freedom, not that of the majority) and itself drifted into authoritarianism and, eventually, ill-repute.

The Left must now ditch airy-fairy notions that it cannot define, like fairness and equality, and instead proclaim as its highest calling the universal freedom from others’ extractive powers — powers that, in modern society, stem from highly skewed property rights. Put slightly differently, property rights must be the main plank of the Left’s programme, along with the defence of freedom from concentrated (corporate or state) power and intolerance (including the intolerance of the intolerant).

In this technofeudal world, where capital has triumphed by mutating into a variant that controls our minds directly, we do not even own ourselves. As the 21st century’s dystopia unfolds, a libertarian Marxist mindset is the Left’s last chance to be relevant and useful to a species struggling not merely to reform a problematic system — but, ultimately, to survive as a species capable of both freedom and prosperity.

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