Liberal Illusions in an Age of Violence
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world… Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
—George Bernard Shaw
Liberalism presents itself as the rational center, a measured alternative to extremes, the bearer of universal values and incremental progress. In reality, it is centrism at the heart of a profoundly sick system, offering only moral relativism in a world facing absolute limits. The result is a society caught in dizzying and lethal contradictions. Those most responsible for planetary destruction and social domination appear to have the only seat at the table to negotiate our survival.
The polite moral flexibility of liberalism creates a vacuum of principle just as we face cascading ecological, social, and political breakdown. Liberalism adapts endlessly to protect the status quo, reshaping its ideals to match the shifting needs of capital. In doing so, it erodes the foundations of life—community, belonging, the connection to place—and forces people to constantly scramble to keep up with systems built to extract, expand, and discard, thus alienating ourselves from each other and life’s natural cycles. Rather than bending our values to fit an ever-shifting Overton Window [A “shorthand
for the state of American politics”—a way to address the loss of a common middle ground during the Trump era.]1 being shaped by MAGA Bros and our tech overlords, we must return to solid ground. That means following our core values of liberty, equality, justice, and sustainability to their logical conclusions—not stopping at the point where they become inconvenient to the dominant order.
This failure to act on root principles is why liberalism fits so comfortably within what environmental writer Rob Nixon calls “slow violence:” harm that unfolds gradually and invisibly, through climate collapse, structural neglect, and systemic inequality. It is the violence of poisoned rivers, eroded soil, abandoned communities, and displaced lives—quiet and continuous, but no less deadly. Liberal responses manage and monetize symptoms, not causes, always too little, too late, and never disruptive to the underlying logic of exploitation and accumulation. Crucially, slow violence is not separate from fast violence. The attrition of life through poverty, pollution, and precarity sets the stage for wars, forced migrations, genocides, and state repression. One form masks the other, but both are sustained by the same hierarchical systems—economic, racial, imperial, and ecological—that liberalism refuses to confront.
One need only look at Gaza. Entire families are crushed under rubble, hospitals bombed, a people caged and massacred in full view of the world. Children are sniped by colonizers as if fish in a barrel and then look at the liberal establishment’s response. Western leaders murmur about “restraint,” condemn only the most egregious “excesses” of obvious fast violence, and harp on the “right to self-defence” and the need for “peace” between the occupier and occupied—or as Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani put it, “between the sword and the neck.” Liberal society is not much better, it applauds lip-service by complicit politicians and vague apolitical Instagram stories by celebrities, while condemning the true acts of resistance which materially disrupt our collective oppressors to force them into action.
Well over a year into this genocidal onslaught, the political-media establishment still refuses to even name the carnage for what it is: genocide. They tout human rights, free speech and democracy as fundamental, but these principles vanish when inconvenient. The same pattern plays out with the global ecological crisis. Year after year of record-shattering heatwaves, apocalyptic wildfires, floods and droughts ravage vulnerable communities, and the liberal order offers up technocratic half-measures and corporate-friendly pledges—“net zero by 2050,” carbon trading, philanthro-capitalist initiatives—while fossil capital and imperial interests carry on with business as usual, converting living ecosystems into profit and death.
This stark disconnect between liberal rhetoric and reality is no accident or simple hypocrisy. It’s a symptom of what reactionaries have mockingly called the “woke mind virus”—but here the term unexpectedly hits on something. By “woke mind virus” I mean an ideological affliction that lets people feel morally righteous about surface-level concerns (celebrating diversity, using the correct language, tweaking policies) while remaining wilfully blind to the structural violence that liberal capitalism—and its “imperial mode of living”—creates and depends upon. This leads to people feeling alienated, as they are deprived of basic necessities of survival, housing, healthcare, food and water, and are then looked down on for their lack of concern for the environment or pronouns. The right wing capitalises on this and flings the term “woke mind virus” as a crude insult, misrepresenting the problem as excessive concern for justice, however, they are more right than they realise, liberalism itself is a virus, transmitted to us by our parasitic elite. Not because it demands too much justice, but because it strips politics of meaning and coherence. It co-opts the language of liberty, justice and equality and sterilises it through selective application. It tells us that social change comes through personal virtue and polite behaviour, not through solidarity and collective power. This is one reason so many working-class people feel alienated. They are not wrong to wonder why the media spends more time lecturing about pronouns or celebrity outrage than about the fact their wages are flat, rents are through the roof, and their quality of life has disimproved in the name of linear progress, and they are left behind in the name of inclusion. They react—sometimes angrily—to a world where they’re constantly talked down to and moralized at, expected to perform tolerance and civility while the people doing the lecturing moralize downward and extract upward. The elites demand politeness from those they themselves oppress, and liberal culture scolds the oppressed for any incivility or “unreasonableness” in their protest.
Deference to hierarchy
This is a deliberate strategy. Liberalism teaches deference to hierarchy, not resistance to it. It turns political questions into questions of etiquette. We’re told that if we ask the ruling class nicely, perhaps they will toss us a few crumbs of the bread we baked for them. The system rewards the appearance of decency while shutting down anything that might actually shift power. As the late anthropologist David Graeber observed, “We are constantly being told that radical change is impossible, and then we are punished when we act as though that might not be true.” Business as usual continues by fragmenting us into competing moral camps and telling us to fight over symbols, language and identity. We are instructed that any real change must be slow, sensible, and approved from above. Meanwhile, as we argue over relatively insignificant issues and performative gestures, the basic crises of our time—inequality, ecological breakdown, housing, hunger, war—are left to fester. It’s like watching kindling pile up in a bone-dry forest. Everyone sees the danger escalating, but instead of controlled burns as part of a continuous adaptation to shifting social, ecological and economic realities, liberalism allows the system structure to rigidly resist anything that might threaten elite privileges. It preserves itself, losing its resilience and setting the stage for an inferno. When the blaze inevitably erupts—as it did on October 7th in Palestine—the powers that express shock and focus only on condemning whoever struck the match. Yet the fire was coming either way. Until we confront the system that built the pyre in the first place—a world order built on domination, extraction and endless elite accumulation—the world will keep edging closer to conflagration, whether that be through war, famine, sickness or environmental breakdown, all of which fellow humans on Earth are experiencing at this very moment.
Our job is to try and move past the reactionary temptation of judging these issues, or ourselves in isolation, and move past the incremental improvements of the symptoms, whilst the disease at the core of the economic system beneath us moves into its terminal phase. We must understand that a world designed for profit, perpetual growth, and elite accumulation and preservation cannot produce justice, peace, or sustainability. To heal the world, we must change the system that is making it sick. This allows us to move past the divisive rhetoric which seeks to pit progressive social movements against one another, and instead embrace our interconnectivity and interdependence, and unite coherently under the banner of consistent application of a basic universal principle—the rejection of domination in all of its forms.
A world-system built on contradiction
To understand liberalism’s fatal limitations, we must place it in its historical world-system context. The late sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein reminded us that modern liberalism was born alongside the capitalist world-system and still carries those birthmarks. After the French Revolution, three broad ideological currents emerged—conservatives, liberals, and radicals—each claiming to fulfil the revolution’s promises of liberty, equality and fraternity. Conservatives wanted to slow change and keep power in traditional elites’ hands. Radicals urged uprooting the old order entirely. Liberals positioned themselves as savvy centrists: change, but not too fast; progress within order; rights balanced with property. Over time, this liberal center swallowed the extremes, co-opting watered-down versions of both conservative caution and radical reform. It maintained existing power structures by draining the energy from social movements with limited concessions. For nearly two centuries, liberalism reigned as the dominant geoculture of the capitalist world—the default common sense of governments, intellectuals and even opposition movements.
This supposed triumph, however, had a dirty secret. Liberal capitalism’s promise of gradual progress was built on profound inequality. In fact, according to inequality economists like Thomas Piketty, global inequality is higher now than in 1820, despite all of the social progress. As Wallerstein noted, liberal regimes in Europe and North America “succeeded” in improving life for their own citizens largely by plundering the rest of the world, thus strategically externalizing their internal contradictions, just as neoliberal globalization did a century later. Slavery, colonialism and imperialism were not aberrations to liberal progress—they were the conditions that allowed liberal
societies to grant modest welfare concessions to their working classes while maintaining profit margins and accumulating capital. The surplus value extracted from the Global South financed welfare and stability in the Global North. “All men are created equal,” said the liberal creed—but it was tacitly understood that some men (the colonized, the enslaved, the brown, Black and poor at the periphery) were far less equal than others. Liberalism preached “equal rights for all” even as it consigned half the planet to serve as sacrifice zones for cheap labor and raw materials, justified by a racist logic that those backward “barbarians,” with their values of connection and collaboration, needed civilizing by the most violent societies ever known.
This is the core contradiction of liberal capitalism: it speaks the language of universal human values while sustaining a deeply hierarchical and uneven global order. It grants selective rights—to women, to Black people, to queer people—but only when such inclusion can be absorbed without disrupting the flows of capital and elite power. Liberalism long promised that eventually everyone would “catch up” and enjoy prosperity. Woodrow Wilson’s lofty talk of self-determination, and the post-WWII rhetoric of development aid, suggested a linear path: the peripheries would gradually become more like the core; former colonies would replicate the West’s success, but as Wallerstein observed (and as geographer Gillian Hart, anthropologist Jason Hickel, economist Thomas Piketty, and countless others have shown), this model collapses in material reality. The world economy does not consist of discrete national blocks on separate tracks, some “developed” and others “developing.” Rather, it is an integrated system of interdependent geographies, where prosperity in one region is directly linked to dispossession and exploitation in another. Capitalism at its core is a two-tier system, workers and capitalists, in a zero-sum game whereby the accumulation of one is dependent on the extraction from the other. This is an antagonistic contradiction that can only be overcome through displacing the contradiction onto the working classes abroad. There is no Global North without active processes that produce and maintain a Global South, in fact, as many Global South leaders have pointed out, if everyone on Earth consumed like we did in the Global North, industrial-consumer society, humanity and complex life on Earth, would likely already be a relic.
By the 1960s, newly decolonized states and revolutionary movements were demanding structural equality and true liberation and sovereignty—not just inclusion on the system’s terms, but liberalism, bound to the imperatives of capital, had no answer. By 1968, it became clear that governments weren’t delivering better lives “bit by bit.” The project of global development faltered. The center began to fracture under the weight of its own contradictions, reaching a bifurcation point. The world-system could have evolved toward genuine emancipation—but instead, the revolutionary energy was absorbed and diverted. Liberalism contained the upheavals just long enough for capital to launch a counter-offensive: the neoliberal restoration to deregulated, globalized, privatized capitalism led by the likes of Thatcher and Reagan, under the doctrine of Milton Friedman.
Fast forward to today, and those old contradictions have widened into gaping chasms. Global inequality, both internationally and domestically has reached obscene levels—a billionaire class accumulates grotesque wealth (and converts it into political power) while billions struggle for basic needs. Globalization allowed unions in the core to be busted, removing the political power of the working class, as it outsourced production to where workers were the easiest to exploit, and compensated this through cheap, mass-production powered by exploiting its own foundations of labor, nature and energy, in particular unsustainable use of fossil-fuels and agrochemicals—two key pillars of “The Great Acceleration.”
The liberal establishment wrings its hands about poverty and inequality yet remains wedded to the very system that produces them, whether that be record homelessness in the core or imperialist wars in the periphery. In Gaza, we see a microcosm of the core-periphery dynamic in its most brutal form: a Western-backed settler-colonial regime maintaining an apartheid system over a dispossessed indigenous population, all to secure geopolitical advantage and uphold a regional order that benefits the powerful. Palestinian lives are deemed a reasonable price to pay for one side’s security and prosperity—just as, globally, the lives of Indigenous peoples, sweatshop workers, war-torn villagers or climate refugees are treated as disposable collateral damage of “business as usual.”
This is liberalism’s world-system: a hierarchy of human value starkly at odds with its own proclaimed ideals.
Symptoms at the surface,
catastrophe below
Why does liberalism remain so impotent in the face of atrocities and ecocide? A useful lens comes from systems thinker Donella Meadows, who described our social system as an iceberg.
At the tip of the iceberg are events—the visible crises and tragedies that grab headlines. A massacre in Gaza, devastating floods in Asia, an oil spill in the Atlantic, refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, police brutality in Europe, political kidnappings in the US—these are shocking events that spur public outcry.
Just below the surface lie patterns: recurring cycles and trends. Gaza’s bloodshed, for example, is part of a pattern of settler-colonial violence and Palestinian dispossession ongoing for over seven decades in Gaza, or centuries globally. That “once-in-a-century” hurricane is one of many now happening every year, part of a pattern of climate instability.
Deeper down are the systemic structures producing those patterns—the military occupation and apartheid that make Gaza a powder keg, the fossil-fueled capitalist economy that drives climate chaos.
At the deepest level are the mental models—the beliefs and values that undergird the structures. For instance, the notion that some lives (white, Western lives) matter more than others, that men should be in charge, that endless economic growth is both necessary and beneficial, or that humans are separate from nature and have the right to dominate it for profit as part of a lifelong accumulation competition we call industrial-consumer society, because that’s just how it works.
Liberalism operates at the tip of the iceberg. It reacts to events with noise and concern but rarely digs deeper. Liberal politicians and pundits see the horrors in Gaza and rush to address the symptoms: send humanitarian aid, call for brief ceasefires, maybe condemn “excessive force” and call for peace, but they studiously avoid naming the root causes. They frame it as a tragic “humanitarian crisis” as if it were a natural disaster, carefully avoiding discussion of the decades of colonial domination, the apartheid system, the arms industry, white supremacy and imperial alliances that make such massacres possible. Likewise, when climate disasters strike, liberals focus on immediate relief or market-friendly techno-fixes (more carbon trading, a new green gadget, another international summit pledging vague targets), allowing them to profit from problems without addressing their causes. They’ll spotlight individual “bad actors”—a Netanyahu or a Trump here, an ExxonMobil or Chevron there—and push reforms that sound bold yet leave the overall system intact (and often even stronger). In Meadows’ terms, liberalism is addicted to surface-level interventions that never redesign structures or challenge core worldviews. It’s as if they keep mopping the floor while the tap is left running.
Why this shallowness? Partly because digging deeper would threaten powerful interests—and confront the liberal elite’s own privileges. For all its talk of reason and progress, liberalism has always been about managing change without upsetting the hierarchies. Remember: liberal reformers historically would grant small concessions to quell unrest, but never question who owns the plantation, the factory, or the oil well. That pattern persists. Addressing Gaza’s misery in any fundamental way would mean confronting the entire colonial settler project and its backing by Western powers—unthinkable for the liberal international order, which counts Israel as the imperial linchpin in the Middle East along with the Gulf countries. Solving the climate emergency systemically would mean taking on the fossil fuel industry, the dogma of endless growth, and the stark global inequalities that let rich nations consume the bulk of the world’s resources. So instead, liberal leaders fiddle at the edges. They’ll acknowledge the problem (“Yes, climate change is real and terrible,” or “Yes, innocent women and children are suffering”) but insist these are technical glitches in an otherwise functional, moral system—solvable by innovation, investment, and maybe a benevolent billionaire or two. Anything but naming the capitalist engine at the core, despite the chaos unfolding throughout the world, and the explicit cries of the scientific community urging systemic economic transformation. In this way, action is delayed, deadwood on the forest floor accumulates, and the contradictions deepen, paving the way for a deeper and more transformative crisis.
Scholar Adam Hanieh observes that our fragmented, technocratic approach to problem solving misses the forest for the trees. Hanieh, an expert on the political economy of the Middle East, emphasizes that we can’t treat the climate crisis as a separate “environmental” issue, isolated from questions of empire, war, and profit. The wars in the Middle East and the climate emergency are deeply intertwined—both are products of the fossil-fueled world order. Consider that the great Western powers have propped up dictators and
waged wars for over a century in the Middle East largely to control oil. The United States’ unconditional backing of Israel’s aggression cannot be separated from its broader imperial strategy in the region. Our planet is overheating precisely because the wealthy capitalist powers have burned oceans of oil to fuel their industries, cars, and militaries. Meanwhile those same powers are ready to unleash astonishing violence to maintain dominance over resources and strategic lands—even if it means reducing Gaza to ashes, murdering tens-of-thousands of children, or invading oil-rich countries under false pretenses. Whether it’s the levelling of a Gazan neighborhood or unprecedented wildfires and floods consuming entire regions, these catastrophes are not random—they are the predictable outcomes of a system that treats life as a necessary input in the system, to be converted into profit, power and endless accumulation for those at the top of the value chain of the world system.
Liberalism is hopelessly out of its depth in acting in coherence with our current reality, described by many as the “polycrisis” or perhaps more accurately, the ongoing process of collapse, both fitting descriptions for anyone paying attention. Its proponents want to “solve” crises without naming their cause. They’ll happily chant “human rights” in the abstract but fall silent when called to hold their own allies accountable for grievous violations. They proclaim the urgency of climate action but insist that action must be “pragmatic”—meaning compatible with GDP growth, corporate profit, the existing market order and the bulwark of bureaucracy. It is willful delusion—a mind virus, indeed—sustaining this cognitive dissonance. As long as we accept the liberal frame, we remain stuck swatting at isolated symptoms: protesting one war here, one pipeline there, one police killing over there, endlessly treating the latest outrage while the underlying disease rages on. Meanwhile, far-right forces have been all too happy to exploit popular exasperation. Around the world, authoritarian and fascist movements have built power on the justified frustration and fear of working people. It is up to us, urgently, to step into the vacuum with a coherent alternative that unites the 99 percent of “have-nots” around shared material interests and a consistent application of justice, solidarity and freedom.
Necropolitics: Gaza and earth as
sacrifice zones
If we strip away liberal euphemisms, we begin to see the current world for what it is: a necropolitical system. Power today operates not with enlightened reason or respect for life, but with a cold calculation over who may live and who must die for the status quo to continue. The term necropolitics, coined by philosopher Achille Mbembe, describes how sovereign powers exert control through death—designating certain populations as disposable, to be allowed to die or actively killed. What else is Gaza today, if not a horrific embodiment of necropolitical logic? An entire civilian population is penned in and punished, cut off from food, water, electricity, and basic humanity, bombarded at random with children being picked off with sniper rifles like fish in a barrel as part of some sick sport. Their lives have been deemed forfeit by an alliance of capitalist powers that considers Israel’s geopolitical primacy more important than basic life itself.
Likewise, look at the emerging global ecological apartheid: wealthy classes and nations insulate themselves (for now) with air conditioning, seawalls, private firefighters, armed borders, even doomsday bunkers—while their excess emissions condemn the marginalized, and their own children, to face floods, famine and fire with scant protection. Climate disasters already kill thousands in the Global South (from Pakistan to Mozambique) and displace millions more each year. These are not isolated “natural” disasters; they are the foreseeable results of an economic system that has long externalized its costs onto the poor, and the rest of the web of life on which we all depend.
Capitalism runs on accumulation, externalization of harms, and protecting elite interests at all costs, while liberalism depends on never confronting this reality. This concentrates wealth for the few, while pushing the real costs onto everyone else, workers, colonized peoples, the land, and future generations. When crisis hits, both history and our current reality tell us those at the top don’t sacrifice their power or profits: they protect themselves. They build higher walls, hoard resources, cut jobs, expand surveillance and repression—and when the contradictions reach a breaking point, they turn to fascism. In the lead-up to World War II, liberal elites across Europe enabled the rise of fascist regimes to crush the left and protect capitalist order. From Germany and Italy to Spain and Britain, liberals saw socialism as a greater threat than authoritarianism, choosing dictatorship over redistribution. Liberalism has no answer to problems endogenous to the system, because liberalism was designed to keep the system running. It arose to smooth the rough edges of capitalism—to promise things would gradually improve without changing the basic rules or power dynamics—framing exploitation as a problem to manage, not to end, and treating each crisis as an isolated shock, never as something the system itself produces.
Now the system is breaking down. Liberalism offers lofty speeches and minor policy tweaks while everything around us unravels. The ecologist C.S. Holling described how living systems go through cycles of growth, conservation, collapse, and reorganization. We are in the collapse phase now on multiple scales—economic, social, environmental. The system has become rigid and unable to adapt, desperate to preserve itself. What comes next is up to us. As Antonio Gramsci wrote during another dark time: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” That in-between space is dangerous. It can birth something liberatory in the spirit of Port Alegre2, or something far worse, the spirit of Davos3, as Wallerstein describes. If we want dignity, justice, and even basic survival, we need to step courageously into that space and provide a coherent framework for liberation, to ensure that what comes next is revolutionary and emancipatory—instead of a doubling down on domination.
We see every day how supposedly universal principles are applied selectively by liberal powers. International law, human rights, democracy—liberals invoke these ideals to chastise official enemies or to burnish their own self-image but quickly suspend them for their friends and themselves. The U.S. and EU preach the sanctity of national sovereignty, international law and territorial integrity—except for Palestine, Yemen, Libya, or any place their allies bomb. They extol freedom of speech and the right to protest—except when people protest their wars and injustices (witness how swiftly “free speech” Germany criminalizes pro-Palestine demonstrations, how Britain polices climate protesters as extremists, or how the U.S. treated Black Lives Matter protestors with militarized force). They laud a “rules-based international order”—even as they violate those rules with drone assassinations, coups, and economic sieges of countries that refuse to toe the line. On climate, leaders speak solemnly of responsibility and science, yet year after year they attend COP summits where grand pledges are made and broken, as oil companies literally sponsor the talks and make backroom deals. It is all performance—liberal moral theatre and obsessive optics, designed to avoid systemic transformation. It’s time to acknowledge this abusive relationship for what it is, and accept the truth, that our partner has not, and cannot change.
The harsh truth is that liberalism cannot resolve the crises it helped spawn. As Einstein said, you cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that caused it. You cannot end colonial violence with half-hearted appeals to humanitarianism while ignoring colonialism and material reality. Liberalism’s tools are simply too blunt for the task—or rather, they are carefully crafted to avoid the task. As long as root causes like capitalist accumulation, imperial domination, racial and patriarchal hierarchies, and the human conquest of nature remain unaddressed, the crises will keep multiplying. We can swap out presidents and prime ministers—trade a Trump for a Biden, a Tory for a Labor government—but if they all operate within the liberal-capitalist framework, Gaza will still burn, and so will the planet. We are dealing with antagonistic contradictions, zero-sum conflicts: there is no “win-win” fairy tale solution between capitalism and the environment, between owners and workers, between colonizer and colonized. These relationships will not be reformed into harmony; they are resolved only by fundamental rupture, whereby, as Fanon described in The Wretched of the Earth, “the proof of success lies in a whole social structure being changed from the bottom up.” Ultimately, the tension snaps and things change through crises and struggle—and the direction of that change depends, as Milton Friedman cynically noted, on “the ideas lying around at the time.” Liberalism, by design, works to keep any truly revolutionary ideas off the table.
Toward an alternative: ending domination in all forms
If liberalism is a dead end, what is the alternative? Nothing less than a coherent, structural transformation—a new system that rejects domination in all its forms.
We must be bold enough to name and dismantle every institutional hierarchy underpinning the current crisis-ridden order: colonial domination, racial supremacy, capitalist class exploitation, patriarchal oppression, and human domination of nature. These systems of hierarchy are deeply interlinked and mutually reinforcing. Social Ecologist, Murray Bookchin, taught that the way we treat the earth is a reflection of how we treat each other. In his words, “as long as hierarchy persists—as long as domination organizes humanity around
a system of elites—the project of dominating nature will continue to exist. A society built on domination will always find new victims, new peripheries, new “externalities” to exploit. Conversely, a society striving for true emancipation would reject the idea that some must rule while others obey—whether in the household, the workplace, or between nations. Our goal must be what Bookchin called an “ecology of freedom:” a world in which human communities live in egalitarian harmony with one another and with the rest of nature.
What might this look like in practice? It starts with relocalization and direct democracy—bringing economic and political power back to the level of communities where people actually live and work. The centralized nation-state and transnational corporations have concentrated power in the hands of the few, far disconnected from the communities who bear the consequences of their decisions. This structure, at the root of our problems, has clearly proven itself to be far more capable of exasperating our polycrisis than solving it. These structures will likely have to be dissolved, and the flow of power reversed. Our predicament necessitates that we phase out these top-down, rigid, hierarchical structures that lie at the root of today’s polycrisis and adopt a bottom-up, polycentric style of governance capable of adapting to rapidly changing realities across different scales. Communities should control the resources and decisions that shape their lives. This means workers running their own workplaces, as ten percent of the world’s population already do through workers cooperatives, towns and cities manage their own energy—the necessity of which recently proven through power outage across Spain and Portugal, housing, food and water, life’s essentials, managed through decisions made in community assemblies rather than distant boardrooms or parliaments. This would be the beginning of a real, resilient, regenerative and representative democracy, built from the ground up.
Such an approach confronts not just “capitalism” in the abstract, but the specific way of life it encourages in the Global North—what some scholars call the “imperial mode of living.” This high-consumption lifestyle in wealthy countries depends on cheap labor, cheap energy, and endless extraction of resources from elsewhere. Even working-class people in wealthy nations are pulled into this, often without realizing how much of their relative comfort rests on hidden exploitation abroad. Breaking from this imperial mode of living will require scaling back excess and rebuilding our economies around care, cooperation, and sufficiency—ultimately allowing the world’s majority to regain sovereignty over their own lives. It means the global North consuming much less, so that all communities can have enough.
Crucially, this transformation cannot be imposed from the top. It has to grow through collective decisions in the places people live—through communities taking back power from the elites who have failed them. Alongside relocalization, we must reclaim the commons. The enclosure of the commons—from land and forests to water, knowledge, and public services—was a cornerstone of capitalist domination. Nobel-winning economist Elinor Ostrom documented how communities around the world have long managed common resources sustainably through cooperation and shared rules, debunking the elitist myth that only private ownership or top-down states can prevent tragedy. Inspired by Ostrom’s insights, we can fight to take back our common wealth: establish community land trusts for affordable housing, cooperative farms and gardens for local food security, treat the atmosphere and oceans as a common heritage to be protected by the people (not polluted for free by corporations). Instead of everything being a commodity for sale, the crucial resources of life should be held in trust and stewarded democratically for future generations, shifting our focus away from solving the “tragedy of the commons,” and instead solving what some describe as what Longo, Clark, and Clausen describe as the “tragedy of the commodity.”
We also need to solve the fundamental contradiction of endless growth on a finite planet. We are now about fifty years into ecological overshoot—an inherently unstable state in which humanity uses more resources and emits more waste than the Earth can regenerate or absorb. This cannot continue indefinitely. Our acknowledgement of unsustainable behavior implies that on a long enough timescale, it cannot be sustained. According to the State of the Climate Report, managing this reality requires shifting away from the “perilous” capitalist obsession with perpetual economic growth, and toward an economy that prioritizes human and planetary well-being within ecological limits. We must bring the economy back into balance with nature’s boundaries while redistributing resources to meet everyone’s basic needs. As economic anthropologist Jason Hickel bluntly reminds us, the choice is post-capitalism or unprecedented violence—continue the growth-driven path and face collapse, war and extinction, or choose a post-capitalist, post-growth future that values life over profit and gives us a fighting chance of coherently dealing with collapse.
None of this is utopian dreaming; it is practical and necessary—because the only alternative is the collapse of civilization and possibly the extinction of humanity (and all other complex life forms). We have historical examples to draw hope from, attempts to build sustainable and egalitarian societies even under harsh conditions. In Rojava (northern Syria), amid a brutal war, Kurdish communities inspired by Bookchin’s ideas built a confederation of communes practicing direct democracy, multi-ethnic power-sharing, and matriarchal leadership—a real-world experiment in ending domination that endures against all odds. In Latin America, Indigenous movements are reclaiming territories and reviving commons governance, often in defiance of liberal states and corporations. And everywhere—from Chiapas to Catalonia—ordinary people are organizing mutual aid, cooperatives, and commons-based projects that prefigure a post-liberal, post-capitalist future. The task now is to knit these threads into a coherent fabric of systemic change.
It’s worth noting that even within the imperial core, cracks are showing as more people search for systemic alternatives. In Japan, for example, degrowth scholar Kohei Saito has struck a chord, arguing that nothing short of a drastic shift beyond capitalism will save us from climate breakdown. Saito warns that ostensibly bold liberal policies like the Green New Deal are “just simply the continuation of what capitalism wants to do,” a massive green investment that leaves the logic of growth intact. He calls it “a new opiate of the masses” because it promises jobs and consumer goods without addressing capitalism as the root cause of climate crisis and worker misery. Liberal platitudes about “green growth” or charitable billionaires won’t deliver us; we need a new system entirely. As Saito and others argue, this means embracing a deliberate degrowth of exploitative industries and ultra-consumption, coupled with an expansion of the commons and global equality—in short, an economic paradigm that prioritizes life and dignity over profit, in direct opposition to extractivism.
Solidarity beyond symbolism: from selective outrage to system change
Achieving such a profound transformation is not a task for think-tanks, technocrats, or polite parliamentarians. It requires a mass movement of movements—a groundswell of global solidarity that transcends the polite limits of liberal activism and identity politics and truly unites the 99 percent of humanity who have everything to gain from systemic change. We have to be brutally honest: liberal moral outrage on its own achieves very little. We have seen millions around the world march against the slaughter in Gaza, only for the genocide to continue. How many heartfelt climate appeals and impassioned speeches have been offered, even as emissions kept rising? Protest and raising awareness are necessary—but they are woefully insufficient without a larger strategy for power. We must connect the dots between struggles and target the material systems that enable oppression.
For example, protests demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza are crucial to save lives, but we also have to organize and intervene to end the arms trade, the military-industrial complex and the imperialist mode of production and the relational processes that fuel these wars in the first place. We must hold our own governments to account: if they cannot be truly democratic and meet the needs of their people, then their legitimacy is void and they should be dissolved. Climate strikes that simply plead with leaders to “listen to the science” must evolve into campaigns that directly confront the corporations and financial institutions driving ecological breakdown—through strikes, direct actions, boycotts, divestment, and even community-led takeovers of necessities. In all cases, we have to move from symbolic gestures to material disruption.
Solidarity, in this vision, is not a Twitter hashtag, a black square on Instagram, a one-off donation or even attending a protest. It is a sustained living practice of mutual support and coordinated action across borders and boundaries. It means climate justice activists joining forces with Palestinian liberation activists, and like environmental activists Greta Thunberg or Jason Hickel, realizing that their fights against exploitation and dispossession stem from the same logic of domination and elite accumulation. It means labor unions fighting for workers’ rights continuing to take a stand against genocide, racist policing and environmental destruction as they continue to do throughout the world—seeing that all these struggles are connected by the same systems of hierarchy and profit. It means the movements of the Global South, fighting for sovereignty and reparations, linking up with movements in the North to dismantle neo-colonial arrangements—for instance, pushing to reshore critical industries
and shorten supply chains, implementing real climate solutions and reparative economics, and rejecting the onerous debts and unfair trade deals that strangle poorer nations and keep them from investing in their own sovereignty. We must unite disparate struggles into a common front against the entire system of domination.
This is hard work. It will be messy and will face fierce resistance from those in power—but there is no shortcut. The ruling elites will not miraculously grow a conscience and make decisions that go against their material interests. History, and reality prove this. History teaches that every inch of progress—from the abolition of slavery to women’s suffrage and the eight-hour workday—was won through disruptive collective action by ordinary people, not by politely appealing to the powerful’s better nature or “gotcha” moments on television or social media. We will likely have to employ tactics well outside the comfort zone of polite liberal protest, all of which are already being used with success throughout the world: strikes, mass civil disobedience, and perhaps nonviolent sabotage of the machines of war and ecocide (as groups like Palestine Action are already doing). At the same time, we must also build the new world within the shell of the old—creating community-run food and energy systems, clinics, schools, media platforms, and community self-defense networks. This is especially urgent as the existing system increasingly fails to provide even basic necessities despite its enormous wealth and power.
Our call to action must be both concrete and visionary. Concrete, in that we rally around specific campaigns and coherent demands: shut down weapons factories, businesses and airports supplying brutal regimes; stop new oil pipelines and coal mines; defend Indigenous lands and grant legal rights to nature; institute local Green New Deals and public works for climate adaptation; establish public banks, alternative local currencies, and community land trusts; enshrine the human right to food, water, housing and healthcare; transition from monocrop agriculture to agroecology; and ensure local, equitable access to food, water and energy during the coming disruptions. These struggles must be understood not as isolated reforms, but as part of a broader strategy for systems transformation. The aim is not to preserve what exists, but to make space for something fundamentally different to emerge.
To do that, we must confront the core logic of the system: the capitalist business model. This is not simply a way of organizing companies, but the organizing principle of a world-system built around the endless accumulation of capital. The survival of any firm in this system depends on its ability to grow and extract more value than it did the year before. The business that fails to do so is eliminated by its competitors. This imperative affects everything and everyone. Individuals are kept in precarity unless they accumulate enough to buffer themselves from a shock. Businesses must cut costs, extract more, and outcompete their rivals, until competition itself is destroyed and monopolies emerge, while states are drawn into the same logic, compelled to secure markets and resources through domination or face marginalization. None of this is accidental or temporary. It is how the system reproduces itself. Accumulate or die. If we do not interrupt this cycle, the system will collapse under its own contradictions, but not before it has taken much of the living world down with it.
We must inspire people with the knowledge that a different world is not only possible but is already starting to emerge in the cracks of this one—and that they can help it grow by joining together to sow the seeds of the new society. This kind of inspiration is the antidote to the pervasive cynicism, fatalism and fragmented identity politics that neoliberalism has spread like a toxin.
Finally, we have to shake off the liberal mindset within ourselves. No more performative handwringing about injustice while staying obedient to the status quo. No more treating politics as a consumer lifestyle choice or a purity contest, we have more than enough police in the world to worry about. Solidarity is not a performance or a buzzword—it’s a verb, a commitment, a way of living. It means sticking with the struggle for the long haul, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it seems hopeless, even when mainstream opinion mocks or demonizes us. It means being willing to disrupt “business as usual,” to take personal and collective risks for a greater cause, and it means learning from each other globally to find the common ground that unites us rather than fixating on the details that divide us.
We stand now at a civilizational crossroads. Down one path, the liberal order clings to its fictions of gradual, linear progress and “conscious” capitalism, even as the trash mountains grow higher and the mass graves deeper. That path leads to a future of endless war, climate chaos, and authoritarian backlash—a further descent into unprecedented violence, into what can only be called death, however prettily it may be packaged. Down the other path—difficult, untamed, and lit only by the embers of active hope—lies a profound transformation of our society and of ourselves. It is a path of revolution that upends hierarchies and rebuilds our world on the principles of cooperation, equality, and reverence for all life. On that path, the people of Gaza would be free and safe; the Amazon and Congo rainforests would be protected by those who live in and love them; economies would serve the well-being of communities rather than the wealth of a few. “Never again” would finally mean something, because it would apply to everyone, rather than just privileged groups, and would depend on dismantling the machinery of death and domination—not just weep over its latest victims and then move on once it’s too late.
The choice is clear. Liberalism’s time is up; its mind virus has run its course. The center clearly cannot hold. Indeed, around the world, voters have shown this by abandoning establishment liberals for candidates further to the extremes and while this looks worrying, it is likely our last opportunity to fulfil our ultimate, collective struggle for liberation, as our ancestors before us fought for too. It’s time to cast off the shackles of incrementalism and the selective application of supposedly universal principles. It’s time to follow our ideals to their logical conclusion: to design a system free of domination and contradiction, that alienates only the parasites. In the face of surging inequality, ongoing genocide, and the Earth’s sixth mass extinction event, nothing less will do. The future—if there is to be one—belongs not to the liberal pretenders, but to us.
As Irish revolutionary James Connolly declared over a century ago, “We only want the Earth!”
Daragh Cogley is a Barcelona-based Sustainability & Economics Professor.
—CounterPunch+, June 1, 2025
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/01/liberal-illusions-in-an-age-of-violence/
1 “Escaping the Overton Window”
2 Challenging and transforming the capitalist world system to achieve a more equitable and just global order.
3 Maintaining and reinforcing the current capitalist world system and its inherent inequalities.