Saying that socialism is to the left of liberalism is obvious, but it can also be misleading. The image of a right-left spectrum may suggest that we can get from liberalism to socialism just by keeping on in the same direction. We can’t. We may expect socialism to follow liberalism historically, but that’s not to say that socialism is liberalism plus some good stuff, minus some bad stuff. The divide runs much deeper. This has important implications for how to point out what’s wrong with the world we have, and for how to conjure up the world we want.   

To see why that is the case, let’s look at the claim—somewhat popular of late—that the Left should appropriate and build on liberal theories of justice. American philosopher John Rawls was the foremost liberal theorist of the second half of the twentieth century, and his theory of “justice as fairness” would be a prime candidate for such a salvage operation, at least in light of its unparalleled influence within Anglophone academia. Rawls’s basic idea is that we should distribute resources and opportunities as you would cut a cake if you didn’t know which slice you were going to get. He illustrates that idea with a thought experiment: picture some people choosing how to organize the basic institutions of society from behind a “veil of ignorance,” as if they didn’t know the social positions they’d end up occupying. They better not risk allowing steep inequalities, just in case they turn out to be on the losing end. Or at least that’s what Rawls argues they would think if they gave due consideration to both their self-interest and their sense of fairness. Once we lift the veil of ignorance, we’ll have a society with solid individual liberties and equal opportunities, and where social inequalities are allowed only if they are to the benefit of all, and especially to the least advantaged. 

On any plausible reading of Rawls’s theory, his ideal society would be far more egalitarian than any society we’ve known. As Rawls himself clarified late in his life, it would be more egalitarian than mid-twentieth century social democracy: private control of productive assets would be much more limited, wealth would be much less concentrated, and so on. Is this not just a few steps from socialism?

There are two related reasons why it is not. The first has to do with how liberals and socialists think about human emancipation. By and large, for even the most left-leaning liberals, emancipation is to be pursued by tying capitalism to a ball and chain: we should take our present drives and inclinations as given—including the greed and fear that power so much of the “free” market—and design institutions that will mitigate or nullify their worst outcomes. Our sense of justice will tell us what outcomes are undesirable, and individual freedom will be maximized when we can lead our lives shielded from the worst consequences of our own market-based choices. For Rawls, those are the outcomes we’d want to rule out when we design a society’s basic structure without knowing our place in it. For example, we’d want to severely limit the inheritability of wealth on grounds of fairness. 

We could go further. We may want to stop people from accumulating enough wealth to control the labor power of others. That seems to be the scenario self-described “liberal socialists” have in mind when they counsel supplementing Rawlsian distributive justice with an account of the power of capital. But I want to suggest that it is no coincidence that most actually existing left-liberals stop well short of such a vision, and struggle to make sense of why social democracy turned out to be a short-lived anomaly in the history of capitalism—not another step in the unstoppable march of gradual social progress, but a temporary concession. 

Besides, there are conceptual reasons why “liberal socialism” is bound to stop short of human emancipation. If we start from liberal premises, it is hard to see the power of the market as anything more than an aggregation of our free individual choices, at which point it becomes hard for moral intuitions about fairness to overcome moral intuitions about freedom. Sooner or later most liberals start asking whether it really can be right to redistribute so much of the money they “freely chose” to work for, and so on. One can’t have it both ways: liberal moral intuitions about freedom may support distributive interventions in the economy in the name of fairness, but will struggle with more fundamental challenges to capitalism.

That brings us to the second problem with the attempt to graft socialism onto liberalism. Why can’t moral intuitions and the sense of justice reliably take us where we want to go? The answer has to do with another way in which liberalism cannot take power seriously: ideology. Liberals simply take desires, preferences, and moral intuitions as given. That’s the problem with their “justice talk”: it’s largely a discourse delimited by the dynamics of capitalism. It is constrained by the ideas and sentiments that are already prevalent within society as it is. 

Take the recent debate on “limitarianism”—the view that private wealth should be capped at around ten million dollars. Limitarianism uses widespread moral intuitions about fairness and equality to arrive at a proposal far more transformative than any of the anemic remnants of social democracy that still find their way into the platforms of mainstream political parties. You may think this is a clever way to present radical change as a mere corrective to capitalism. Yet the existence of other widespread moral commitments, such as freedom and autonomy—not to mention different interpretations of the moral commitments espoused by limitarianism—have been used to push back against this view.

So, even when discussions of justice manage to deviate from the mainstream, they are unable to bring anything decisive to the table. All they generate is intractable disagreement. There are severe limits to how radical a proposal really can be if it has to wrestle in the slippery mud of moral “common sense.” Even setting aside the issue of whether moral ideas really can drive social change, “progressive” critiques typically run into a massive wall of pro-status quo moral commitments, or else degenerate into competitive outrage—which explains why “social justice” discourse is dominated by identitarians, including plenty of radical liberals cosplaying as Marxists.      

What, then, is the alternative to moral talk and theories of justice? It’s simply to get things right, to describe human capacities in a non-ideological sense and reveal how the world actually works. Freedom, for instance, isn’t the ability to satisfy whatever desires we may happen to have here and now, in a world where so many of our priorities and even our tastes are dictated by the need to cater to the whims of the market. Market preferences under capitalism aren’t a good indication of what we really want, because so many widely held commitments—moral, political, aesthetic—are the self-serving product of the power of an otherwise barely visible ruling class.   

If there’s a single ideal that guides the materialist Left, it isn’t a moral ideal. It is an aspiration to strengthen our grasp of how the world works and how present dynamics limit our imaginations, to improve the position from which we make political choices. This is the sense in which our conception of emancipation is different from the liberal one: rather than striving for the freedom to get whatever we want here and now, we try to create conditions under which our desires are truly our own. That requires radically dispersing power as widely as possible, away from the elite of owners and bosses, and in ways that don’t let the profit motive become a primary drive. The aim is to genuinely leave people to their own devices, in the hope—and this really is little more than an educated hope—that they will be able to figure out a better way to live together, as individuals. The freedom to try to fulfill one’s individual preferences while at the mercy of market forces will be transformed into the freedom to collectively self-determine our priorities, to create space for genuine individual flourishing.

If we take seriously this open-ended account of human development, we can begin to make sense of Marx’s famous pronouncements for “the ruthless criticism of all that exists”, and against “writing recipes… for the cook-shops of the future.” Power distorts our desires and our moral values more than it distorts our faculties of observation because the former two are more important to social control than the latter. That is why, until we are in a position of lesser subjection, we should stick to a sober, if radical, realism, limiting ourselves to figuring out how things work. In turn, that will tell us which distorted commitments to discard, and what alternatives may be open to us.   

Liberals produce moralistic theoretical abstractions that prop up the status quo, or are as radical as they are politically toothless. Socialist theory and practice work together to channel our collective power to rid ourselves of the material structures that distort our values and desires. Theory tells us where to look: it helps us locate those structures, and those with the potential to overcome them. Practice—our concrete experience of fighting to improve our lot—tells what to look out for, and how to go about creating change. It is precisely this unity of theory and practice that can point us towards concrete, appealing political solutions to overcome the forces that prevent us from fully and freely developing our potential to imagine and build a radically different world. Recall: Marx said we shouldn’t write recipes, not that we shouldn’t start cooking.

Enzo Rossi teaches political theory at the University of Amsterdam.