What is Libertarian Socialism?

Socialism without bureaucracy. Freedom without capitalism. This episode introduces libertarian socialism—a decentralized, bottom-up alternative to both capitalist exploitation and state control. Learn how it differs from state socialism, what it looks like in practice, and why it offers a third path beyond chaos or authoritarianism. If you’ve ever wanted freedom and justice, this is your roadmap.

Keywords: libertarian socialism explained, anarchism vs socialism, state socialism vs libertarian socialism, bottom-up economics, decentralized socialism, worker co-ops, anti-authoritarian socialism, economic freedom

Transcript

Let me ask you something simple. When you hear the word socialism, what do you picture? And be honest now. I think for most Americans, the image they picture is probably pretty grim. Maybe you see gray, brutalist megalith buildings or endless bread lines, or some guy in a trench coat assigned by the government to tell you how many socks you're allowed to buy. Or maybe you imagine something even more chaotic, burning cities or smashing windows, or a place where no one's in charge. That vision is not realistic, and neither is it by accident. For the last century, powerful people have poured billions of dollars into shaping how we think about that word, why that's the Soviet Union, they'd say, or that's Venezuela, that's the road to chaos, that's the road to tyranny. It's the road to both. But most of that imagery doesn't come from real socialist practices. It comes from war propaganda, it comes from Cold War cartoons. It comes from political ads designed to keep you terrified of any alternative to capitalism. So today, I thought we should do something different. Let's pause and ask the question, what is socialism really, and is there more than one kind? Because the truth is, there's a long and powerful tradition of socialism that's not really authoritarian and not really centralized and not really violent. In fact, it might surprise you to learn that many early socialists felt betrayed by the Bolsheviks of Soviet Russia or the Maoists of China. Their version of socialism doesn't want state control in your life any more than it wants Amazon to control your life. In fact, it wants neither. This tradition is generally called libertarian socialism. And no, that's not an oxymoron. It's a real name, and it's older than Vladimir Lenin. It's older than Marxism in many ways. And if you've ever felt caught between the cold logic of markets and the suffocating control of a bureaucracy, you might already be a libertarian socialist. You just don't know it yet. But before we try to define it, we need to back up because, despite their differences, all socialists share one thing in common. And to understand the difference between libertarian and say, state socialism, we need to start with what unites them. If you only take one idea away from this entire episode, let it be this. Socialism is not a single blueprint. It's a loose family of ideas, often in tension with each other, but united by a few core principles. And the most important one is that capitalism is the problem. not just because it's unfair, not just because it creates billionaires while leaving the vast majority of people fighting to afford a decent life. But because it organizes society around profit. Under capitalism, it doesn't matter what you actually need. What matters is what can be sold, what's profitable. This leads to a lot of what Marx called economic contradictions, where people can be homeless while a million houses sit empty. People can starve while food is being intentionally destroyed to keep prices up. People can be trapped in meaningless jobs while machines that could free them are being shelved because that kind of technology just isn't as cheap as cheap labor. So at least for the working class, freedom doesn't always pay. Whether you're talking about state socialists or libertarian socialists or even most democratic socialists, they're all going to agree on this. We need to build a system where the economy serves the people and not necessarily just the rich, not only the owning class. That means democracy, not just in voting booths, but it has to be in workplaces. It needs to be in schools. It needs to be in neighborhoods. It needs to be in our supply chain. It means taking back control over the things that shape our lives, things like housing and healthcare and energy production and agriculture, it means solidarity, not competition, care, not extraction, cooperation rather than domination. So all forms of socialism are united at least in that idea. They might share similar traits, similar strategies. They might diverge on many of those strategies, but that core idea runs through all of them. Where they finally start to diverge is when we ask the question of how do we get to that place? How do we get past capitalism? Some socialists are going to say we're going to need a strong, centrally planned system, a powerful state, maybe, to coordinate things at scale because people have been so long a part of capitalism that they just can't be trusted to protect and look after their own interests. They're going to go back to capitalism. They're going to find themselves new lords and new masters, and they're going to fall right back into being slaves. Others are going to turn around and say, like, no, thanks. The state has never been a friend of ours. And if we put all our hopes into some sort of central authority, we're just ultimately trading one ruling class for another. That's not socialism. That's new state capitalism. And that's a huge split. And that's where libertarian socialism really comes in. But before we really explore that alternative, I want to understand the vision that it's reacting to. And that is the idea of state socialism. That's the one that most of us are familiar with. You know, when I say the word socialism, that's the model that's going to pop into your mind, because that's the most popular one in the collective imagination. So what I call state socialism sometimes goes by the name Marxist, Leninism, or, you know, Maoism, or something like that. But this is the model where the state simply owns and controls major parts of the economy, if not the entire economy. It's doing this supposedly in the interest of the people. Instead of markets deciding what gets built, grown, or distributed, a central authority, usually the national government, or a party-controlled agency, will make those decisions through advanced planning. And just so we're clear, this was not Marx's idea of socialism. It comes more out of Lenin and his attempt to implement Marx's critique of capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat into some sort of viable and governing system. Marx never left us a clear picture of how to do that. He was supposedly going to get to it in one of his later versions of Capital, but he died before he completed it. The basic idea here is this. Capitalism concentrates power into the hands of a few wealthy elites. So to break that grip, you're going to need a strong, organized counterpower. You need the state to take control of the economy and direct it toward the common good. Even democracy, in this sense, is too susceptible to capitalist influence to be trusted, and in some ways, the idea makes a lot of sense, especially for those thinkers in the early 20th century. Countries like the Soviet Union or later Cuba they were facing crushing poverty. They had colonialism and hostile aristocratic capitalist powers breathing down their neck. And they used this sort of state socialism to try to rapidly industrialize and to redistribute land, to eliminate the mass hunger that they were suffering, and to guarantee things to the people, like housing and health care and education that they just weren't getting at all. So for many people in those societies, life did in fact improve, sometimes dramatically. Even today, if you ask people in places like Belarus or Vietnam, they may tell you that socialism gave them literacy, dignity, or security that they never had under capitalism and colonial exploitation. But there's an obvious problem here. Concentrated power almost never stays pure. When the state becomes the sole manager of the economy and when dissent is crushed in the name of unity, then socialism stops being democratic. It stops being free. It stops protecting the very people that it was mostly set up to help. It becomes overly bureaucratic or worse, completely authoritarian. If it's a problem for a small consortium of private companies to own all the private property in a country, it's probably an even greater problem for an unelected state bureaucracy to own all of it. So what you end up with is a Draconian police state. In the name of planning, you get surveillance; in the name of equality, you get repression. In the name of the people, you get a small elite, the party leaders who make all the choices for everybody. They end up becoming the de facto owners of the means of production. And instead of bosses in the private sector, you just get party bosses, planning committees, and state bureaucrats that make all the decisions from above. Seriously, it's like the end results of unfettered capitalism. All the problems cranked up to the max because there's only one monopoly and it owns everything, and that is the state. Whoever ends up running the state, then, is the monopoly owners. And it's a form of capitalism. Even Vladimir Lenin called it state capitalism. He thought that they couldn't transition Russia directly into socialism because the people weren't ready, so they had to start with state capitalism. And arguably, they never left it. They never transitioned out of state capitalism. The entire country stayed in state capitalism the entire time. That's not to say that state socialism is always a real nightmare. You know, it's not. It's done some real good for real people, especially in conditions of like war and colonization or other economic devastation. Marx himself never thought that socialism would break out in an undeveloped country like Russia, or Cuba or China. He was thinking of the United States or Britain or Germany. He believed that it would transition to this where wealthy workers who were doing okay saw that they were generating so much wealth for a few people that they would demand their share. Those people would refuse, and the workers would demand socialism. But that didn't happen. And so the people who had the revolutions weren't so much socialists. But for many of us, the idea of treating billionaires for bureaucrats just doesn't feel like any additional freedom. It feels like losing our say in everything, probably a worse way to do things. And that's exactly what libertarian socialism tries to offer from the very beginning. You could call libertarian socialism the quieter, often forgotten, older sibling of the socialist family. Libertarian socialism is anti-capitalist, just like the others, like state socialism. It's also deeply egalitarian, though. It's committed to shared ownership and social provisions, and worker control. But here's where it's different. Libertarian socialism believes that freedom and equality must go together, and that both are destroyed when power becomes centralized, even in the name of the people. Instead of a strong state managing society from above, libertarian socialists imagine a world where individuals govern themselves directly, in their workplaces, in their neighborhoods, and in their regions, through a bottom-up kind of democracy. This doesn't mean that there's no organization here. That's sort of a misnomer. This sometimes gets characterized as anarchy. It doesn't mean chaos. It's not that kind of anarchism in the pejorative sense. It means decisions are made by the people who would be most affected by them, not by some ruling class who's often distant, you know, like distant owners on Wall Street who run your company wherever you live. And it's not done by distant planners in the government either, whether they be boardroom types or, you know, national capital types. So I want to bring this idea down to Earth.. Imagine a workplace where the workers own and run a shop together. There's no bosses, there's no shareholders. There might not even be any kind of manager or overseer. There are administrators of some kind to help facilitate to help coordinate the labor, but they work for everyone at the company. All these workers vote on their schedules, their policies, how to use the profits, including how to pay each position out. There could be differences in the amount that people get paid, depending on how much work and how much effort it takes. No one else gets a chunk of the money, though. So whatever they bring into their business, they get to keep. And so the harder they end up working, the more money they are able to pay themselves. Now, I imagine a city where public housing is owned cooperatively, and no one can be evicted for, say, missing a month of rent. This is a place where grocery stores are maybe worker-run, and supply chains are coordinated through local and regional federations. They're not dictated by the owners of Amazon or Walmart, not by the shareholders looking to increase their bottom line or even a state acting in the name of the workers. So imagine a rural region where farmers share land in a sort of stewardship through local assemblies, where decisions about water and energy and food are made by the people who depend on those things directly, you know, the local consumers, the local farms. And now you're starting to get something of a vision of what libertarian socialism was actually going to look like. It doesn't look that different from modern-day capitalist society. It's just that the exploitation of the working class by the owning class has simply been outlawed. And that's not a fantasy. It's exists. However, briefly, in history, then revolutionary Spain, for example, from 1936 to 1939, there were millions of workers and peasants who collectivized their farms, their factories, their bakeries, all without state coercion. This was not led from the top by party bosses. It was just a bottom-up organization. In Rohava, Kurdish region in northern Syria, communities are building c system based on direct democracy, on women's leadership, and collective control over land and resources, all while at the same time fighting off ISIS in the Turkish military. Even here, in the United States, there are worker cooperatives and mutual aid networks and community land trusts and radical unions that all carry the DNA of libertarian socialism, often without using the name. The core idea of libertarian socialism is pretty simple. We don't need a powerful state to rule us or a boss to discipline us. We do, however, need each other, and we need the freedom to decide together how we want to live. This is not to say there won't be problems with a system like this. Both of these two versions of socialism, like the libertarian and the state version, run into different kinds of friction. And I want to explore that a little bit. There are some real trade-offs here. I want to ask if there's room for some kind of overlap. If you're stuck with me this far, you're probably wondering, can't we just combine these two visions and maybe keep the planning power of the state, but democratize it somehow? Or build some kind of bottom-up socialism while using the state to, say, fund it. And there are people working on that exact project, and maybe we can explore those ideas in a future episode. But for now, I want to be clear, there are real tensions between these two approaches. The first concerns power. Should it be centralized or should it be decentralized? State socialism sees the central government as the the engine of change. The logic here is to transform a complex and diverse society. So you're going to need coordination, you're going to need scale, and that's going to take authority. Libertarian socialism sees that as some kind of trap. It argues that when you centralize power, even for good reasons, it becomes insulated, unaccountable, and ultimately unfair. Freedom requires decentralization. Power should stay as close to the people as possible, at least in all the important aspects. A second divergence concerns economic planning. Should it be top down or bottom up? State socialism tends to rely on planners to manage the economy. That can mean something like production quotas, price controls, or nationalized industries. Libertarians, socialists, on the other hand, reject that model. They favor federated networks of councils and cooperatives, where coordination happens through negotiation, through shared principles, and mutual aid. It doesn't issue commands from above. That's not going to lead to chaos. It just means that people will have to do a lot of talking and work out the differences here. It's democracy at a larger scale, built out like a web, not up like a pyramid. The third divergence concerns ownership. Should the means of production be controlled by the state or by workers and communities directly? This is kind of the key difference, in my opinion. In state socialism, the state owns the means of production. But it's fair to ask who runs the state. Often, it's the party elites or a bureaucratic class, simply making them the de facto owners here. Libertarian, socialism, on the other hand, insists that the workers themselves and the communities that they work in must own and control the things that they depend on directly, not through any kind of representative, that would be another ministry problem, but through their own assemblies, their own unions, their own cooperatives, whatever way you want to think about it. If you don't deal with it directly, you kind of really don't. own it at all. A fourth divergence follows from that last one, and it concerns governance. Should the government be representative or participatory? State socialism often maintains traditional state structures, like elections, parties, ministers, just under a different name. You vote, but the party always leads. Libertarian socialists, however, imagine a world of direct participation, workplace meetings, network councils, neighborhood councils, rotating delegates with limited mandates. It's not just the government of the people. It's more literally government by the people of the people and for the people every single day. To be honest, both visions have vulnerabilities, but they are different, unique to each version. State socialism risks becoming authoritarian. It's a favorite talking point of right wing libertarians and conservatives. Socialism always leads to the gulag, they would say. And history shows us what happens when dissent is punished and the state becomes an idol. And frankly, that happens as much on the pro-capitalist right side of things as on the anti-capitalist left. Alternatively, libertarian socialism risks fragmentation or burnout. It's hard to maintain strong coordination without slipping into chaos or letting informal power kind of creep back in through the back door. People are often very participatory at first, but then after the excitement is worn off, the desire to go to countless meetings and make uninteresting decisions, starts to fade pretty quickly. It's a better design, maybe could help with this, but when things are actually stable, when they're working, participation starts to wane. Now, to be fair, libertarianan socialism doesn't deny these risks. It sees vigilance and experimentation and collective reflection as part of the process, not a threat to it. You might be wondering, why now? Why are we talking about this in 2025? Well, unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably noticed that capitalism seems to be cracking. And the question isn't if something is going to replace it, but what exactly? The old narrative has broken down. We've got rising inequality, we've got climate collapse, we've got burned out workers, we've got runaway landlords. And in the meanwhile, billionaires want to launch themselves into space and penis shaped rockets as millions of people can't afford the tidal wave of rising rents. People are hungry for change. They're desperate for it, both on the right and on the left. But when they start searching for alternatives, the ch choices seem rather bleak. Either we are surrendering to this technocratic feudalism that guys like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel want, where power hides behind faceless algorithms and applications or we face a kind of state socialism, maybe, where there's a promise of equality that gets tangled up in a bunch of red tape, corruption, and repression. Those are not options that any sane person is going to jump for. But libertarian socialism kind of offers an alternative to that. It's a way where democracy doesn't stop at the ballot box, a way where you can own your own work. You can share actually in your own city, your own town, your own neighborhood. You can co-create your own future with your fellow workers and neighbors, a way where there are no bosses and no state who's going to own your life. I mean, that means that you don't get to own other people either. And that does depress some people who would really love to be lord and master over others, but it is a way to protect yourself. Maybe, just maybe, you've already felt this pull towards a vision without knowing a name for it. Well, now you do. It's called Libertarian Socialism or Left Libertarianism, sometimes called anarchism, although that is an absolutely terrible name for it, because it doesn't mean that there's no organizing principle, which is what anarchy really means. There's no organizing principle here. There are organizing principles. There are ways of like, people need to get together and find ways to channel power and do things like that. There are other types of socialism and libertarianism, as we've already said. There's right-wing libertarianism, which simply goes by the name of libertarianism often in the United States. The difference between libertarianism and libertarian socialism tends to boil down to their understanding of the human being and what humans really need. The right wing version often assumes that humans just have no part in the social. They're just simply individuals who are born with no social ties until they voluntarily decide to enter into them at some point. These are people who spring up out of the ground, fully formed. They have no parents. They have no siblings until they decide on who's going to be their parent or not. It's an impoverished version of libertarianism that more often, in my opinion, masks past power as some kind of freedom. On the other side, there's democratic socialism. And, like I said, state socialism. State socialism, we already saw, is really just state capitalism. Even like I said, Vladimir Lenin called it such. State capitalism is, of course, the worst form of capitalism because it concentrates all of the power in that single monopoly ownership of the state. Democratic socialism tries to be different. This is a socialism that's controlled by a democratic body of some kind, maybe a city council or a state or federal legislature. It is, however, subject to many of the same ills. If you don't like Donald Trump or you don't like Joe Biden, do you really want them to to have even more control over the economy? All of those same ills of democracy end up becoming amplified under a sort of democratic socialism. In my opinion, then, the only feasible socialism is going to be libertarian socialism, where ownership rests not with the governments or the owners of capital, but with workers who make the business happen. This individualist kind of socialism is the only one I can imagine that would preserve a sense of the human and is both their private and public nature. It would be the hardest one for overly ambitious people to control and to corrupt, to adapt Rosa Luxembourg here. It'll be a transition to libertarian socialism or we're going to have a regression into one of the many forms of barbarism. There simply are no other options. I'd like to end this episode with a simple image. Imagine waking up in a world where no one owns your time, but you. Think of your job. Think of that thing that you do with about a third of your life. But now it's not dictated by some stranger in a boardroom who's chasing a quarterly profit, but by you and your coworkers, democratically. Imagine your housing situation, not a product to be speculated on, but as a right. It's planned and it's maintained by the people who live there and partially by the people, even next door. Imagine your community that runs its own transit system. Your food is grown nearby by people you might even know. not exploited labor from two continents away or underpaid migrant workers. Imagine when something breaks, you fix it together with your neighbors. and your friends. And when someone struggles, your community shows up for them, not out of charity, but out of a sense of solidarity, because they would want that for themselves. Imagine not having to do everything alone. There are no billionaires in this world. There are no landlords who haven't seen the building in years. There's no CEOs getting rich off your exhaustion, but there there's still creativity. There's still leadership. There's still invention. It's just shared rather than hoarded up. You are more than a cog in some v vast economic machine. You are not a commodity to be sold, and you are not alone. That's not utopia. That's not fantasy. That's the heart of this individual centered socialism, a world where freedom is real because power is shared, and we make it real. This vision isn't about going back. It's not nostalgia. It It's about going forward, past capitalism, past authoritarianism, into something freer, fairer, and more human. We don't have to pick between chaos and domination. The third option here is cooperation. And if you feel even a spark of recognition in that, if this sounds more like the world you want to live in, don't let the name scare you off. You can call it socialism. You can call it freedom. You can call it whatever the hell you want. But talk to people about it. If this episode gives you a new new way to think about power or freedom or the future, then share it. Send it to someone who thinks that all socialism means state control, or who thinks that freedom ends with capitalism, see if they don't also see the appeal, because what matters here is that we build this future together. We're not done yet, imagining about better world. Thanks for tuning in toAmerican Socrates. If today's episode of philosophy got you thinking in new ways, make sure to subscribe so you'll never miss an episode. New, full episodes drop every Wednesday. If you enjoyed the show, leave a review. It helps others find us and it means a lot. And if you know someone who could use a little more practical wisdom in their life, share this episode with them. Want more? Visitrates.rout.com for show notes, resources, and exclusive content. You can also follow me on Facebook, Blue Sky, or TikTok to keep the conversation going. Until next time, keep questioning everything.