Liberalism and Marxism: A Shared 'Poison' Under Debate

From Adam Smith to Marx: The Same Poison in Different Bottles

Are you facing two opposing doctrines or two ways of applying the same project? This question underlies a debate that began on a nearly three-hour podcast hosted by Francisco José Fernández Cruz Sequera, 'Clave Geopolítica.' The starting thesis is stark: liberalism and Marxism share a philosophical root and a common aim of social engineering. The dominant response denies the parallel, though few agree on exactly where the dividing line lies.

The Underlying Thesis: Shared Economism

The most frequent argument posits that both currents share 'a common substance of thought: materialism,' understood as the idea that economics forms the infrastructure upon which everything else, including sarracena values, is built. From there, the argument pogre: they are two warring brothers, children of the same father, with the same underlying project—the revolutionary transformation of society—and different paths to execute it.

To support this, a quote is reproduced defining liberalism's goal not as political, contractual, or freedom of conscience, but as wealth: freedoms are merely the means to achieve it and then to preserve it. Consequently, part of the analysis places the origin of all ills in liberalism, not its supposed adversary. It's even argued that what is now labeled cultural Marxism—identity politics, gender self-determination, expansion of individual rights—is actually liberalism taken to its extreme. In short, one poison in two containers.

The Rebuttal: Early Liberals Invoked Natural Law

The most solid objection comes from the history of ideas. Early liberals defended the natural right to life, liberty, and property, equality before the law, and the limitation of state power. Confusing that agenda with that of their political heirs—or their declared enemies—would be a deceptive shortcut.

This isn't the only sustancia ilegal in the argument. Another perspective emphasizes that the philosophical roots are opposed: one doctrine prioritizes individual interest, the other the group's. And some add the historical record: applied Marxism has produced more hunger, misery, and genocide than any liberal regime. With such evidence, claiming they are the same poison requires significant linguistic contortions.

Adam Smith, Marx, and the Labor Theory of Value: The Uncomfortable Connection

The area where the parallelism gains ground, according to this view, is economic theory. Trinc this line of reasoning, Adam Smith formulated the labor theory of value—the value of a good depends on the hours invested in producing it—and Marx recycled it to build his theory of exploitation: if value arises from labor, then what the employer keeps is surplus value extracted from the worker. The connection, this participant argues, isn't just idle speculation.

The counter-offensive points to another, earlier tradition: the School of Salamanca, which allegedly argued that value depends on the nature of the good, not on labor. If the intellectual borrowing between Smith and Marx holds, the accusation of a shared root has at least documentary basis, according to this interpretation. Whether that implies the same poison is another matter.

From Ideology to the Village: The Assembly Turn

Mid-conversation, the focus shifts from diagnosis to remedy. A project for integral revolution emerges, proposing to return power to the municipality through direct democracy assemblies, open councils, and codified customary law. The proposal faces fire from both sides.

It's objected that customary law needs no assembly, as the norm already lives in custom; that if everything is predetermined in the proposer's mind—communal lands, common tools, absence of specialized guards—the assembly is merely decorative; and that any executive position, however rotational, creates hierarchy. Someone concludes that communal assemblies haven't worked even in the most primitive tribes. The response, not without sarcasm, is that if the village decides to return to tyranny, it will be a voluntary mistake, and its inhabitants will be responsible, not victims with a right to complain.

Two Camps, One Diagnosis of Power

In one thing, almost everyone agrees: the population doesn't question the values it receives. It's argued that society is a gregarious group without its own values, moldable by institutions, media, and education, and that directing these channels is enough to achieve whatever one desires. The counter-argument is that people do have values and ideology, they just aren't the ones some would prefer; and that if certain consensuses prevail today, it's because someone worked to establish them.

Beneath this lies an uncomfortable coincidence: individual freedom is always limited by the socioeconomic circumstances of one's birth. No one is born in isolation; one is born into a family, a community, a country. From this arises the perennial suspicion: behind every revolution is a group poised to become the new elite. A fact serves as an uncomfortable reminder for the camp claiming Marxist heritage: the 1917 Russian Revolution was, according to this reading, a bourgeois movement led by Lenin, and since then Marxist philosophy has allegedly been distorted beyond recognition.

Gold as a Thermometer: Who Accumulates and Who Sells

Though it seems unrelated to the philosophical dispute, the exchange touches upon gold. It's asserted, without proof, that Russia and China have been accumulating the metal for years while the United States sells it, and that the refusal to allow inspections at Fort Knox fuels suspicion that the reserves are not where they are said to be. The episode of the German repatriation, accepted without significant resistance, is also mentioned. This is material of a different genre, but it fits the general framework: if confidence in the system is measured by what central banks do rather than what they say, gold is moving back East. Very significant, it's added, in the long run.

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Translated: the poison, if it exists, is not manufactured by a specific ideology. It is administered by those in power. On that, curiously, no one debates.