Usually, a liberal on the left does not know that he or she is a liberal on the left.

They do not feel entirely comfortable in any political trench. They distrust narratives of collective salvation, absolute certainties, and the constant need to divide the world into good people and bad people. They defend pluralism, tolerance, civil rights, and individual freedoms. And they understand democracy, with all its flaws, as the best known way of resolving conflicts peacefully.

But above all, they start from a simple conviction: personal freedom must be at the heart of any emancipatory project. That freedom is not only political. It is also economic.

Freedom needs resources

Having nothing does not make us freer.

Private property — that which is our own — , savings, a business, a home, or the tools we use to work are instruments of freedom because they reduce our dependence on other people, groups, or the state.

The republican tradition has understood this for centuries: material independence strengthens self-government, freedom of opinion, and the capacity to resist pressure, coercion, or excessive dependence on any individual or group, whether an employer, a political party, a trade union, or any other institution.

This idea is particularly clear in the emancipation of women. Legal and political rights were essential, but the real capacity to exercise them expanded enormously when millions of women gained access to their own income, employment, property, and economic autonomy.

Material independence does not guarantee complete freedom, but material dependence profoundly restricts it.

That is why a liberal left cannot see private property only as a potential source of inequality. It must also see it as a possible condition for individual independence and personal development. To have can make it possible to be; having nothing does not necessarily bring us closer to freedom, but to dependence.

The question, therefore, is not to abolish private property, that which belongs to each of us, but to extend it. To make it possible for more people to save, own assets, create a business, acquire the tools of their trade, or have resources of their own. Distributing property also means distributing power.

Defending the market from the left

A liberal left must lose its fear of defending the market economy.

Not because markets are perfect, but because, despite their imperfections, they are an extension of personal freedom into the economic sphere: people exchanging, cooperating, starting businesses, creating, and making decisions without requiring an authority to constantly plan their activity.

At the same time, a liberal on the left believes that markets should be as free as possible, accessible to everyone, and governed by rules that prevent them from being captured by privileged groups. And this is precisely because, paradoxically, it is often the largest economic groups that seek to restrict the market and restrict competition.

The state, for its part, is neither an enemy nor an end in itself. It is an instrument at the service of people and their freedoms.

Defending the market, then, does not mean defending every company. It means allowing all of them to take part. Nor does it mean favouring concentrations of economic power or privileges.

A market economy ceases to be genuinely free when monopolies, oligopolies, barriers to entry, or collusion between political and economic power emerge.

When a large company uses regulation to make it harder for competitors to enter the market, when it receives privileges, bailouts, or protections unavailable to others, or when it can decisively influence the very rules that are meant to regulate it, it is distorting market freedom and manipulating the market for its own benefit. It is using its proximity to political power to gain competitive advantages.

Against monopolies, not against the market

Part of the critique coming from an anti-capitalist left attributes inequality to too much market freedom, when in many cases the real problem is precisely the absence of a genuinely open and participatory market operating under equal conditions.

The excessive power of some economic actors restricts the economic freedom of others. This can take the form of favourable regulation, bailouts, barriers for small and medium-sized businesses, or a failure to support the citizen-producer.

David Harvey, himself an anti-capitalist, describes capital’s tendency to open markets and later concentrate and monopolise them, much as Adam Smithhad already warned of merchants’ natural tendency to suppress competition through legal means.

This observation, however, does not require us to reject the market. Quite the opposite. A liberal left will defend the market as part of the effort to build a genuinely free market.

That means fighting monopolies; preventing oligopolies from blocking the entry of smaller players; reducing artificial barriers; preventing institutions from being captured by people closely aligned with particular companies, business groups, or economic sectors. And, positively, ensuring that microbusinesses, the self-employed, and small and medium-sized companies can participate under the most reasonable conditions possible.

The point is not to speak on their behalf or to turn them into permanent victims, but to give them access to resources, property, opportunities, and genuine capacity to make decisions about their own lives

A liberal left, in short, can never be anti-business. It must be anti-privilege. It is not anti-capitalist. It is anti-monopoly.

There is also another issue the left cannot afford to ignore: its relationship with the working and lower-middle classes.

Christophe Guilluy has repeatedly drawn attention to the growing divide between sections of the cultural and metropolitan elites that continue to speak in the name of “the people” and working-class citizens who increasingly feel unrepresented by that discourse.

A left that stops listening to those who live from their work, small property owners, the self-employed, employees, and families who simply aspire to improve their lives risks talking about the working classes without actually talking to them.

The point is not to speak on their behalf or to turn them into permanent victims, but to give them access to resources, property, opportunities, and genuine capacity to make decisions about their own lives.

In this sense, a liberal left should not merely seek to protect the working classes. Above all, it should seek to empower them economically.

More than redistribution: distributing the capacity to create wealth

A liberal left should not be satisfied with policies based exclusively on redistributing income.

Such policies may be necessary in certain circumstances, but they are wholly insufficient, because they are palliative rather than emancipatory.

The goal should be for as many people as possible to have the direct capacity to participate in the creation of wealth.

To create and consolidate an economic citizenship that is not only expressed politically through freedom, but is also developed economically through freedom.

A liberal left does not aspire merely to have citizens who vote, but citizens who produce. Citizens who can create a business, work for themselves, join a cooperative, invest, generate income, own assets, or contribute value through multiple forms of ownership and economic activity.

A citizen economy, in short, should be as diverse as possible, combining large and small firms, global and local businesses, shareholder-owned and cooperative enterprises, employees and the self-employed, civil servants and entrepreneurs, without excessive dependence on large corporate groups or particular sectors.

The aim is not for one model to replace another, but to distribute the capacity to create wealth.

To democratise the economy from the bottom up, starting with the capacity to create wealth.

Not more state, but a better state

On the one hand, a minimal state of an anarcho-capitalist kind could leave large parts of society exposed to the excessive power of major economic groups.

On the other hand, an omnipresent state would end up restricting the very freedom it supposedly intended to protect.

Between these two extremes lies another possibility: strong, efficient, and inclusive institutions capable of guaranteeing clear rules, protecting competition, preserving rights, and expanding citizens’ autonomy.

What is needed, then, is a public administration capable of preventing abuses in the market and abuses of public power itself, opening captured markets to citizens and distributing decision-making capacity.

The aim is not to replace multinational corporations with ministries, nor private monopolies with public monopolies.

The aim is to distribute power to people.

A modern and optimistic left

A liberal left should not build its discourse around permanent suspicion.

It should not see all wealth as guilt.

Every company as exploitation.

Every market as domination.

Every form of property as privilege.

It can recognise the virtues of capitalism, its extraordinary capacity to create wealth and expand opportunity, while at the same time acknowledging its risks: concentration, privilege, institutional capture, or unequal access.

It can defend markets without idealising them and defend the state without worshipping it.

It can defend property without embarrassment and seek to extend it as an instrument of emancipation.

The temperament of a liberal on the left is, in this sense, essentially optimistic and oriented towards concrete solutions: thinking about improvements, expanding opportunities, and creating the conditions in which more people can develop their freedoms.

A liberal left that frees people from dependencies, creates opportunities, and places economic freedom on the same level as political freedom, because freedom is one: economic freedom, political freedom, religious freedom, social freedom, and personal freedom.

A liberal left does not speak on behalf of people. It seeks to ensure that people have enough freedom, resources, and power to speak and act for themselves.

A left that once again places freedom at the heart of personal and collective development.

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