FIGHT LIBERALISM! Let’s win back our lives!

by Paolo Barontini

When we think about Liberalism, we can see many different attempts to define it: some call it an economic system, some define it as a philosophical understanding of the state and its relation with the individual, and others define it as an answer against conservatism and reactionary politics. The ideologues of the system are trying to define it in many different ways with the objective of legitimising it. On the other hand, when we try to define and understand it, we shouldn’t fall into these traps. Indeed, we should not understand it only in its economic meaning, as the rule of free market. Rather, we need to describe and analyse liberalism as a system of thoughts, rules, emotions and concepts that is the main ideological weapon of Capitalist Modernity. From top to bottom, it is the way that the system is enforced within and upon society with the aim of weakening society’s capacity of resistance and organization. But to understand it better, we need to look back at history and understand why the system of domination seen it as necessary to tear societal resistance apart.

What did history look like before Liberalism?

Since the beginning of humanity, we can say that society has played a fundamental role in our development as humans. If we look at the way that we are, starting from our biological aspects, we can better understand why society has always been key for us. Humans don’t have natural defence mechanisms, unlike birds have wings to fly away in case of dangers. Nor can we spot dangers and opportunity from hundreds of meters away like certain animals. For this, from humanity’s emergence in the African Continent to their spread into Mesopotamia at the edge of Neolithic Revolution, we have developed society and the organization of it as our mechanism of defence against dangers and insecurity. The collective organisation of basic tasks like gathering food and protecting against external dangers has been both the purpose for the continuation of society and the central means by which it has continued. From this point, a more meaningful understanding of society developed through language, culture, specific ways of living and organising life, and religious beliefs connected with the sacredness of these societies.

In short, when we take a look at the history of humanity we can see that being-a-society has played the condition of “to be or not to be” for us as human species.

This is important to know because when we then move forward to today, we can see that this deep meaning and the value of being connected with society is under heavy attack. The attempt made by the system of domination is to tear apart society, attempting to cement the triumph of individualism by creating a contradiction between the individual and society. This is what we call the ideology of liberalism. It is this most vicious attack against society that we can evaluate as the attempt to achieve a final victory over democracy, destroy fair and free life, and complete the killing of society.

But what does Liberalism mean? What is it expressing?

As mentioned above, we can define it as one of the main weapons of Capitalist Modernity: at its core, it has an understanding of freedom which demands that individual freedom is prioritised and placed in contradiction with communal life. It is the idea that outside the freedom of the formula of “Me, Myself and I”, nothing else is there to be achieved. Liberalism emerged as an ideology during the time of the French Revolution, in which the middle class under the motto “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood)” managed to transform a radical social transformation period and a revolution of the whole people into the beginning of the most individualistic and dangerous times of society and humanity.

Especially as Youth we need to study, understand and discuss further the way that liberalism is trying to reproduce its existence through our lives, bodies and minds. In this way, we can fight it back and play the vanguard role that young women and youth has always had inside revolutions, resistance and in the general defence of society. How do liberal characteristics and attitudes look inside our lives? Which feelings are liberalism creating? Which type of individual are they trying to achieve? To start to answer these questions the point of our lifestyle comes to the front: from the way that we stand up in the morning until the moment we go back to sleep, which system is our lifestyle serving? When we say that we as Youth want to produce a change inside of our societies and communities, we need first and foremost to produce this change inside of ourselves. In this sense, the basic question of “How to live?” becomes for us a compass: for as long as we don’t manage to live daily according to the principles and values that we want to see inside our societies and world, we also won’t be able to play our role as revolutionary vanguards.

In this sense, the development of a lifestyle according to what is beautiful, right and fair needs to sustain us.

On the other side, liberalism wants to push forward a way of life in which we are not in charge of our lives anymore. Starting from the job we do, which university we study in, which desires and ambitions we have in the everyday life choices that we make, we are forced to live a life that is not truly ours.

How are we living a life that is not ours?

Relationships

From our childhoods up until the the present time, we are influenced by the movies that we watch, the TV series that we like, and even more today in the roles that digital media and technologies such as Artificial Intelligence fill in contemporary life. We can easily observe how through media and technology the dominant system is trying to shape the way that we see the world. We can begin from the idea of love, friendships and relationships. Today the system is trying to liberalize it, make it more diverse on the surface by calling it alternative, yet in the end at its essence there is only one colour, one possible only form through which humans can relate to each other. That is to say, we are offered the idea of a hyper-sexualized classical romantic relationship in which our emotions, reflexes, and deep subconscious desires are hidden behind this idea. It feeds us an idea of love – which has one of the most sacred emotions throughout human history – that is corrupted to its core. In a fake, simulated way liberalism is today trying to impose on us the notion that we can only love ourselves and one person at the most and that this is the only way that we can think, feel and express love today. In this way, we are brought to think that this is the “natural” way in which humans have always lived. The patriarchal oppression in the system in this way finds in liberalism its most precious ally.

A “culture” of endless imitation

At the same time through digital media, TV and so on, liberalism tries to impose a culture of endless imitation. From the way we want to look to the products we desire in advertisements through to the dreams we have, liberalism with the usage of mass media is creating a culture of imitation. A culture in which there is no longer any difference between peoples. Liberalism, by selling itself as the freer and more diverse and colorful option that fought and defeated the “one colour way” of Real Socialism, has now created the most repetitive, simulated, unoriginal lifestyle that humanity has ever seen.

School and work

While we grow up and get educated inside of the schools and universities of the system, we can easily see which idea and concepts they are trying to shape our personalities according to. This starts from the idea of success work, which is understood not as something that is benefiting and serving society, but only of finding a way for you as a lone individual to survive and defeat the others. Values like cooperation, empathy, and sacrifice that have always been basic characteristics of any society don’t matter anymore. Instead, they are completely erased from liberalism and the ways of living it offers us.

“Left culture”

Another core aspect of liberalism’s ability to manipulate Youth is through selling them simulations of alternative life. For example, many people might have grown up in more rural areas, in which patriarchal mentalities are more evident and oppressive. When these youths start to study or work in a big city, they might experience contradictions with the environment they come from. Inside of the city, now selling itself as “left culture”, liberalism will try to propose an alternative to the village way of life that looks more modern and progressive. This life is based primarily on the spread of parties, drugs, and so called “alternative relationships”. But in this way, they want to catch and close the potential to search for truly free relationships and life that the more oppressive background of the village wasn’t allowing. But this is no alternative: it’s the same product sold, but only with a new package and more “progressive” colors that will bring no solutions. Like this, liberalism also tries to influence the way that we can think about political organizing and about struggling.

When we take a look carefully at how we feel, speak and think, we can see that as much as we might have changed some superficial aspect, we still realize how deep these concepts are inside of us. We might say that we are socialists or revolutionaries, but we can’t really share our things with others. We might talk about a collective or political organization, but we live alone inside our big apartments so that we can have our “Me-Time” and let off steam in isolation. Or maybe we are still attached to our private money that we don’t want to share with anyone else. And as much as we call many friends “our comrades”, we still have one or two people that we put above all the others. What we want to say here, is that in order to radically change our mentality and to develop a democratic, socialist or revolutionary personality, we need to radically struggle within the most hidden and deep aspects of liberalism inside of us, like the ideas of property, exclusivity and individualism.

So, comrades, what should we do with such a system?

+ Organization

Of course as youth, we need to fight back and we need to find solutions against all these attacks that liberalism is waging on us. For sure, the question of organizing is one of the most important one. If we fight against a system that is trying to make us “one-by-one-by-one”, then our answer needs to be a collective one. But this alone will not be enough, since liberalism plays with our words, emotions, and principles to make them unclear. We need to build our organization with clear principles, clear values and a clear way of struggling together that we organize around. And of course we need to push forward a radical and different lifestyle, outside of the one of the system.

We need to recover the unity inside of our life. We cannot separate the place where we organize and our normal life. There can be no empty moment, no empty space in our lives. Understanding everything inside our lives as a struggle will make us go forward.

+ Education

Education and self education are among the most important tools in our struggle against the system and liberalism. This is not only to study and know better our histories, but also because when we understand education as place of struggle, a place of transforming the wrong, individual and oppressive mindsets into democratic, communal and socialist ones, then the solutions that we will find against the isolation of the system will multiply greatly. Education in this sense is the fundamental of many things. When we are child as much as we learn to count and speak, we also learn a way to feel, see and interpret the world. For this, an education that is capable of transforming the mentalities that the system has imposed inside of us will play a key role. With this, we will build our truthful and original understanding of our lives and the world we want to build.

+ Defense of the Culture and Land

Again a very important element to push forward in our struggles is the idea of connecting back once again with the land that we are from, with the societal values that were cultivated there. We must try to live the culture of this place in a way that is socialist rather than reactionary, meaning a way that is insisting on the humans and society. Leader Apo, Abdullah Öcalan defined Socialism as the strongest antidote against liberalism. Of course when we do this, we should not fall into easy traps like romanticising or idealising everything that is coming from the place we are from. We need to analyse and discuss with our people to understand which values, principles, cultural and societal aspects are democratic and socialist ones and which ones are not. In Europe even, there is a lot to discover back in history that liberalism has erased in order to make it look like the present way of life has triumphed. But it is not like this. The present is the result of what came before, yet it is absolutely open to be changed now.

= Free the life!

As a conclusion we want to add this: to fight against liberalism means to put forward and struggle the most to achieve a personality that is the most connected with Youth characteristics. Struggling against the imposed scheme of feelings, work, success that the system is imposing us, means to refuse them and create new ones. Against the emptiness and the endless repetition of liberalism, Youth means to always renew oneself, never staying the same, refusing the schematism and dogmatism that are nevertheless the same faces of liberalism. We need to find our energy and give strength to each other. In this way we believe we will be capable of moving forward toward a more original way of living that liberalism has taken away from us.

Let’s win back our lives!