Interview


Mutual Aid Isn’t a Handout — It’s a Framework for Resistance

The co-directors of a new docuseries offer their theory of change for transcending capitalism and the state.

By Ella Fassler , 

Truthout

August 16, 2026

After neighbors took care of neighbors during the COVID-19 pandemic, the concept of mutual aid suddenly catapulted into the national spotlight. The speed and nimbleness with which mutual aid projects emerged was a strength, but it also meant many participants did not have preexisting relationships, trust, or shared political commitments.

What has happened to the mutual aid movement since then? Maroon and Cassa, longtime organizers with Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, are well-positioned to tackle this difficult question. They are co-directors of a new four-part docuseries, The Elements of Mutual Aid. After conducting more than 60 interviews for the series and embarking on an ongoing six-month speaking tour, they’ve taken the time to reflect on what they’ve learned.

In the conversation that follows, they discuss the mutual aid movement’s trajectory in recent years, strategies for tackling burnout, and offer their theory of change for transcending capitalism and the state.

A volunteer watches protesters from a mutual aid van on August 14, 2020, in Portland, Oregon.  Nathan Howard / Getty Images

The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ella Fassler: To start, could you tell the readers why you’re both using aliases for the interview?

Maroon: Yeah. We’re using aliases because, as anarchists, we’re more interested in promoting the work than our personal identities as filmmakers. We also know that this work is being highly surveilled by fascists, and so we also want to have some layer of illegibility to protect ourselves and our community.

So, in the first episode, you asked a lot of your interviewees to describe mutual aid in a few words. I figured I’d pass the baton to you. How would you describe it in brief?

Cassa: I would define mutual aid as a practice and value of meeting each other’s needs, caring for each other, and building power outside of the state.

Maroon: To add to that, mutual aid comes from our fungal, plant, and animal relatives, and Indigenous people have been practicing forms of mutual aid for tens of thousands of years.

Mutual aid as a concept and practice was popularized during the pandemic. Now democratic socialists are gaining momentum and popularity with platforms advocating for the state to provide people with basic necessities like health care and affordable housing. Why are you advocating for mutual aid rather than increased reliance on the state for getting our needs met?

Maroon: The nation-state model is a relatively new model of social organization that comes from European settler society. But there are many different forms of social organization that preexist and will outlast the state. It makes sense that people who live within states right now want the state to become more equitable, but we believe in a world beyond the state, and the experiments that we’re seeing right now that are the most exciting for us — led by Indigenous people — are those that are thinking far beyond state formations and thinking more about how to build territorial co-governance in ways that do not reproduce European social structure.

Mutual aid as a framework allows us to move in a way that’s horizontal rather than hierarchical or vertical, and it gives us a framework to be able to empower the agency of each other instead of creating these top-down formations. We want to create social structures from below and to the left — as the Zapatistas put it — where we take care of each other.

What are some of the experiments you mentioned that excite you most, particularly those covered in the series?

Maroon: One of the more exciting projects (or network of projects) that we got to interface with was the centers of mutual aid in Puerto Rico, where people — specifically Indigenous people — were taking territory from the state and reclaiming it for themselves, and building up a territorial analysis of self-reliance and self-governance.

It was really beautiful to be able to bring the film back to those communities four years later. To go back to Puerto Rico and get to see independent movements that are still thriving and still holding down the territory that they reclaimed after Hurricane Maria. They’ve been building up cooperative economic infrastructure, an Indigenous ideology and self-governance, and thinking about how they care for each other at a communal level rather than just giving people stuff.

While watching, I was curious about whether those networks in Puerto Rico survived. It seems like there’s a lot of turnover with mutual aid projects in the mainland United States. What do you think has allowed for networks to persist in Puerto Rico?

Cassa: The mutual aid centers’ initial tactic of occupying abandoned buildings in a moment of crisis is a huge reason why those projects have been able to sustain themselves and grow. In the mainland U.S., access to space is so expensive and scarce. So we’ve been talking with a number of groups here about the differences between Puerto Rico’s context and our context here and how to prepare for opportunities to take back space. When we do have physical space to hold that container for community, it really magnifies how much we’re able to do and what types of projects we’re able to take on.

The series also includes interviews with the Reclaiming Our Homes Movement, which occupied a number of homes in Los Angeles for several years, although those have since been taken away by the state.

We need to keep pushing for reclamation of buildings, housing, and land by and for communities because taking back resources is essential to our ability to take care of each other in the long term. It’s challenging under the thumb of empire, where private property is so highly policed. But we know different opportunities will emerge as crises continue to unfold.

Yeah, definitely. The reality of needing to sign a lease to rent space rather than occupying space centralizes power in groups that would have been more decentralized otherwise too.

Cassa: Yeah. I’ll also add that having a strong social fabric is essential to defending anything that we occupy. That’s something we’re tasked with rebuilding right now so that when opportunities do emerge, we have community identity with a stake in the places that we take back and the relational capacity to sustain those occupations.

Have you come to any new insights about the mutual aid landscape in the U.S. while filming and touring? What have you learned?

Maroon: So the two of us were able to be a part of Mutual Aid Disaster Relief’s workshop tour back in 2018, where we got to interface with dozens of communities around the country, learning from the way that they were responding to crisis and offering our theory of change. People back then were mobilized around the term a lot more deeply along the lines of anti-authoritarian and anti-fascist politics, and there was a lot more fresh energy at that time on the heels of Ferguson, Standing Rock, and Trump’s first presidency. The social shocks at that time also felt farther apart, and the state still had this veneer of decorum.


When there’s great need … how do we not allow our relational infrastructure to be compromised and our political edge dulled in the name of distributing goods?

In 2020, the term was popularized. There was an emphasis on the one-way distribution goods while the relational aspects and the fight back elements took more of a back seat.

So, the question we are asking right now is: When there’s great need — like [during] a natural disaster or global supply chain breakdown — how do we not allow our relational infrastructure to be compromised and our political edge dulled in the name of distributing goods?

We think that the low to the ground, long-term relational infrastructure is the sharpest part of mutual aid, rather than ideology as a driving force. People just “doing” — and I say doing with huge quotation marks around it — mutual aid on the weekends is far different than having communal infrastructure that builds resiliency, like neighborhood assemblies, tenants’ unions, collective housing, jail support, urban farms, radio networks, gun clubs, disaster hubs, etc. We’re seeing there’s a deep burnout with the concept of mutual aid right now because of this emphasis on distribution over the other critical elements of mutual aid.

How have those discussions been going on tour? When you’ve been bringing up that point, is it connecting with people?

Cassa: One of the main conversations we’re having with a lot of communities is how to break down the divide between givers and receivers of aid. How to be in real relationship and real community with people and understand our work as being actually mutual. A lot of communities are stuck on that question and it’s a hard one. It requires us to address power dynamics, think critically about how we’re showing up, and rebuild trust when there’s understandably a lack of it.

We need to be spending more time prioritizing these types of conversations. We need to be reflecting and strategizing together, and onboarding new people into these values. We can’t just show up at the food share, give away food, and then go home. It has to go deeper than that and be more strategic.

Yeah, for sure. In my experience with mutual aid projects over the years, there has been a lot of focus on day-to-day tasks at the expense of the bigger picture strategic questions. People may want to discuss and ask those questions, but there is a lot of burnout. There are issues with capacity. There’s a lack of affinity or trust. So, it’s this tricky chicken-or-egg situation where you want to ask those questions, but that takes extra capacity and your group is barely surviving.

Are there any projects or networks in the U.S. that you think are handling that problem well?

Cassa: We were just in Beacon Hill, Seattle, where they’re holding potlucks every month that also usually tackle a discussion question. They’re creating opportunities for people to be in real relationships with each other and reflecting on their conditions and how to address them. We think it’s really important to see more communities gathering, breaking bread together, and creating opportunities to process.

Maroon: Yeah, and relatedly, the popular gathering infrastructure is something that we really encourage people to lean into.

In 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, people in Minneapolis started to experiment with the popular assembly model of organizing in their neighborhoods. Over the last six years, they’ve built up relational and mutual support infrastructure — building out interconnected networks of care that allow for many working-class people to take care of each other, so that they can build up a collective analysis and power together.

Then when the ICE surge happened in their city, they were able to fight back. It wasn’t organizations that were taking the forefront of the defense of their communities. It wasn’t ideology either. It was these relationships and the practice that people had of shutting down their streets to throw block parties, of taking care of their neighbors’ kids. That’s how they were able to do the work of protecting their neighborhoods; because they have been practicing it on a day-to-day level and building up an ethic of mutual aid that had a “fight back” element to it.

I’d love to cover that growth trajectory in more depth. Sometimes popular assemblies kick off with a lot of energy and then wither away.

Cassa: I’m sure that there were definitely low points. Sometimes I bet it was just a few people holding it down, but it still plants seeds, and that’s worth something at those rupture points.

Definitely. So, you interviewed a couple former Black Panthers in the film. The Black Panther Party seems to have set up one of the most robust mutual aid networks in United States history. They were feeding 20,000 kids every day before school, for example. I wonder if you have thoughts about what made that possible? What lessons can we learn from them?

Maroon: Yeah, we interviewed two prominent former Panthers, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin and JoNina Abron-Ervin, who later became anarchists in their lives. They both reflect on the party with a sobering analysis. They don’t romanticize it. They’re willing to critique it.

It’s true that the Panther Party was able to coordinate not just the free food for kids program, but also bus rides to prisoners and cop watch. They were able to do medical support like sickle cell anemia testing. There were so many different elements to their survival programs, and we can remember it because it had a central party identity. There was the name, it had membership, and it was highly disciplined.

This was also a downfall, and this is what the comrades who are our elders are warning us about, is creating a party politic that centralizes charismatic individual leaders and can be decapitated. That’s precisely what happened with the Black Panther Party. Infighting, conspiracy, and repression led to the downfall of the leadership, which then led to the destruction of the organization.

Many of our Panther elders talk about decentralization as a winning strategy. Illegibility is a winning strategy for us because if the state is able to identify key independent leaders, and then decapitate them from the movement, the movement is lost. We see people who were part of the Black Liberation Army, such as Ashanti Alston, who was also a former Panther, coming to the same conclusions. Through that time period of heightened struggle, there had to be an underground element, a less-visible element that the state was not able to repress.

It’s impressive to talk about the Black Panther Party survival programs and all the mouths they were feeding every day. And at the same time, so many people are being fed by the movement for mutual aid right now, and it doesn’t have a single leader or a single party politic behind it. I think that diffusion of work is actually the winning strategy, rather than creating a single form that we should follow.

Thanks so much for that. I agree that it’s harder to decapitate less-legible decentralized movements, but I question whether disconnected nodes lacking a coherent and coordinated strategy can build the power necessary to challenge the massive forces of the state and capitalism. For example, Rojava — a territory in north and east Syria of millions practicing decentralized organizing — was initially set up by the political party the PYD. What do you think about that?

Maroon: Yeah, that’s a great question. We just read James Stout’s work Against the State, where he talks about anarchists that have gone to war in Spain, Myanmar, and Rojava. One of the main points that he focuses on is scale and the tension of the anarchist politic of decentralization and refusal of hierarchical power being at odds with the capabilities to contest formal military power, and also the maintaining of large-scale territory once liberated from the nation-state.

He talks about the escalation ladder of moving up from small guerrilla bands and rebel militias into more formalized structures that are able to maintain a decentralized command-and-control model that doesn’t reproduce a hierarchy upon people who are engaged in militant struggle — and certainly not upon the people. I think there’s a lot to be learned from his analysis, which is coming from direct relationship with people in Rojava and Myanmar. They are thinking about what it looks like to build a libertarian socialist society that has gender liberation, ecology, and decentralized decision-making from below and to the left at the core of it. And so we agree — we do believe in creating larger structures that are legible to the working class, but illegible to the state, and are responsible and mature enough to handle territory.

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks so much for your time. Is there anything else you want to discuss? Where can people find you and the series?

Maroon: Thank you once again for your thoughtful questions. One thing that we didn’t mention was that we created a discussion guide to go alongside the film. We designed it in a way so that groups can read it together and co-facilitate.

We’ve got our website and Instagram. The series is free on YouTube and the open-source platform Kolektiva.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Ella Fassler


Ella Fassler is an independent journalist based in Providence, Rhode Island. Their work on social movements, labor, technology and the carceral system has been featured in Teen Vogue, The Boston Globe, The Nation, Vice, The Appeal, Slate, Mic, In These Times, and elsewhere. Follow them on Twitter or Bluesky.

A Transgender Gospel Against Western Civilization

Nicky Reid

 August 14, 2026

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They say that the arch of history bends towards progress but as a trans person in the midst of the second decade of the twenty-first century, I find myself torn at the crossroads of an increasingly bewildering age. On the one hand, transgender and gender diverse people in the West have never experienced a greater level of exposure and popular acceptance. On the other hand, these same trans people, my people, have also never faced a greater threat of state-sanctioned violence and outright erasure.

The Human Rights Campaign has found in recent polls that 41% of American adults report to personally know at least one person who openly identifies as transgender and another 85% of Americans claim that they accept that trans people should be afforded the same rights and protections as anyone else. This includes a full 76% of Republicans and the pop-cultural zeitgeist seems to concur.

Flipping through any random barrage of TV channels and/or streaming services, you will certainly find more than your fair share of programming presenting transgender people in a positive if exceedingly narrow light.

With all that being said, it can be a little hard to feel the love of statistical bromides and cultural tokenism beneath the flame of a state-fueled blowtorch.

The Republican Party has been on the warpath for some time now, openly seeking to annihilate all things trans for at least a decade, and the Trump Administration seems to represent the zenith of this campaign. A litany of executive orders signed by Trump since 2025 have directed the Federal Government to define gender as an immutable binary determined exclusively by a single document inked at birth while also commanding the most powerful government on earth to use every piece of regulatory and penal machinery at its disposal to erase anything and anyone who defies this edict.

Compulsory schools have been ordered to deprive trans children of even the most basic human dignity. Prisons and juvenile detention centers have been ordered to forcibly detransition inmates in what can only be legally described as medical experimentation. And foster homes and other related youth services have been given the green light to use all manner of religious quackery to torment the trans youth grossly overrepresented under their so-called care.

It shouldn’t take a goddamn human rights organization to tell you that this concerted campaign of forced erasure from public life qualifies as nothing less than genocide, but the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has done just that, warning that such policies and rhetoric as mentioned above match the early stages of a genocidal process based on what has been historically documented across the globe over the last century.

How in the hell is this kind of disconnect between governance and popular sentiment even possible and how did we get to such an absurdly dichotomous place as a nation, actively seeking to eradicate a people the majority of the country shows very little outward animosity towards?

The reason for the violence is fairly simple, at least to any committed student of historical collapse. The American Empire is in the early stages of the kind of long, slow disintegration that ultimately befalls all imperial hegemons. Our nation is not only rapidly losing the faith of its own citizenry, it is losing the faith of many of its own proxies who are showing increasingly bold signs of going rogue with the barbarians at the gates.

Traditionally, under such dyer circumstance, collapsing empires frequently appeal to small but fanatical death cults within the upper echelons of their polluted societies. For Pax-Americana under the reign of Imperator Trump this means riling up the Christo-Zionist Millenarians of the Evangelical Movement.

In order to keep this powerful minority engaged and committed to a series of increasingly pointless and unwinnable wars, the Empire needs to feed them a juicy scapegoat now and then and thus they rally the doom seekers around the spook of the evil, mincing, transgender groomer lurking in a women’s room near you.

On multiple occasions, I have seen Donald Trump cornered in the Oval Office with offensively polite questions about his abject failure to reign in a thrice decapitated third world nation in the Persian Gulf only to witness that soiled Ceasar bark incoherently about ‘men in women’s sports’ and some conspiracy to ‘trans all the children.’ This rhetoric isn’t for the general public; it’s for a very specific moneyed faithful amongst the petite bourgeoisie. The kind of people willing to drop nukes on Gaza just to see Jesus ride back to earth on a dinosaur.

But what of the silent tolerant majority? What happened to all that glorious acceptance we soaked up under Imperator Biden?

Sadly, regardless of popular sentiment, it was all little more than worthless rhetorical platitudes; the desperate byproduct of a rival attempt to save the bad name of the same empire now busy erasing us.

Every empire consists of a constant contest between competing elites. These elites tend to share virtually identical goals. They tend to struggle to protect the same institutions that empower all of them. They just don’t always agree on the best strategy to do this. Some of them will even go so far as to vigorously compete for the highest position on their mountain of skulls and that is what we are witnessing here with this facetious war over trans rights.

In spite of their hollow rhetoric, the Democrats do not support Queer people. They fund the exact same prisons and compulsory school system that serve to enslave and marginalize us as their Republican rivals do. The Democrats simply seek to use the spook of ‘LGBTQ tolerance’ to prove that the Empire which thrashes us is capable of humanitarian inclusion. After all, how can the Devil be a monster while he’s petting a kitten?

This kind of imperial inclusion has done nothing to serve my people. Quite the contrary, it has only made us appear complicit in the corruption of our tormentors. Transgender people have become associated with a morally bankrupt society by conservatives in the same fashion that many Christians have by those on the left.

We have all become human shields in a culture war between different factions of elite imperial casualties and that is a revolting shame. Your average redneck Jesus freak cares far more about Palestine, Ohio than Jerusalem and your average tranny lunatic cares far more about the gulags of their own local wing of the Prison Industrial Complex than Putin’s Russia. But we are all compelled to warfare, both with each other and the world, in the name of strikingly similar concepts of Western cultural universalism.

I myself inhabit a decidedly vexing space in this manufactured cataclysm as I happen to be something of a Christian as well as something of a transwoman. In fact, both of these disciplines are inspired by the same commitment I owe to Gnostic Sophiology and both of those seemingly divergent phenomena predate what we now know as Western Civilization.

Christianity was just one of many schools of ancient Gnostic mysticism to spring from the battlefields of the Levant onto the streets of Rome before that Empire, the very same empire that crucified Christianity’s namesake, decided to use that particular school popular among the urban Roman working class to justify their struggling empire’s continued existence and endless expansion.

In the process of assimilation, entire Gospels were purged from the Bible while others were censored and manipulated beyond recognition and from this manipulation modern Western Civilization was born.

In spite of the fact that Christ made zero reference to the third genders which existed both in Europe and the Levant during his lifetime, the newly Roman Catholic Church and its colonial Protestant progeny in England blasphemously used the name of Christ to erase all trace of any form of gender expression that existed outside the binary.

As Christian law gelled into a single dictum across Medieval Europe, rigid gender norms were enforced that essentially rendered women into breeding stock and viewed all forms of fluidity between male and female as a threat to an order designed to reduce the womb into a glorified soldier factory to populate the battlefields of an endless crusade for more church property.

The Enlightenment only served to reinforce this rigid gender binary by declaring that construct be a science and rendering it to a distinction that could only be determined by the state. Thus, the tyranny of the birth certificate became sanctified by liberal secularism.

The Enlightenment also fostered the rise of chattel slavery and indigenous genocide with its similar breakthroughs in scientific racism, opening the door for missionaries to erase even more ancient third genders from the face of multiple continents. Be they two spirit or hijra, they were all sentenced to the same fate as the so-called eunuchs of the Gospels; marginalization to the point of erasure.

But both wings of the West failed and we are still here, fighting yet another wave of imperial subjugation on our own, while the elites compete over their kingdom of skulls in another pointless midterm election circus.

And here I stand with you today, during what has been declared Transgender History Month by some corporate monolith or another, as a devout Marian witch, a post-civ genderqueer anarchist, and perhaps above all else, living, spitting, hissing proof of the failures of Western Civilization in all its secular cabals and devout renditions.

They all failed. They failed to contain the Holy Spirit beneath the jar of a single tyrannical church, and they failed to contain the human spirit beneath the jar of a manufactured gender binary, just as they have failed to contain the Axis of Resistance beneath their bombs.

My message to you, my dearest motherfuckers, and to any agent of imperial bureaucracy surveilling this screed, is that the Christo-Zionist horde is right about one thing and that is that gender outlaws like me are the bane of Western Civilization.

To this slur I proudly shout, ‘your goddamn right we are and we’re here to finish the job that the third world started!’ You can pass all the laws and royal edicts you want. The writing is already scrawled in Venus Extravaganza’s blood all over the temple walls; your stadium church is a massive tomb of material emptiness and your empire’s days of rape and honey are numbered.

Death to the old gods! Long live the ancient gods! And long live those of us compelled to transgress in their honor, for we shall inherit the ruins of a blasphemous era and bring forth a new age of tribal diversity in stiletto heels and smeared lipstick.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.

Usury is Politics, Not Economics

David S. D’Amato

 August 14, 2026

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Photo by Francesco Alberti

Last fall, Pope Leo made an address in which he stated that “[t]he phenomenon of usury points to the corruption of the human heart,” condemning the practice as bringing crisis to families and enslaving the poor and powerless. Though it is almost never discussed today by those who comment on matters public and political (they are afraid to offend their captors), usury is among the defining features of our entire social, political and economic system.

Recent court cases have put a spotlight on usury and state laws meant to combat it. Earlier this month, for example, the Fourth Circuit denied an attempt by the lender TitleMax to stop a consumer protection lawsuit, opening the way for a Pennsylvania government agency to pursue over $50 million in penalties for the unlawful practice of usury. In one of the instances covered by the case, TitleMax issued a loan of $7,751.39 to a Pennsylvania man, charging an interest rate of over 132%, with the result that his interest on the loan was over $33,000. He took out the loan in Delaware, but under Pennsylvania’s usury law, the interest on the debt would have been less than $1,000.

A case out of Colorado, currently before the Tenth Circuit, implicates a similar fight over a state usury law that sets a cap on interest rates; the case involves state-chartered banks partnering with fintech companies to give personal loans all over the country. These banks and companies argue that they have a right to export interest rates applicable and legal within their own states, and that Colorado’s local usury rules cannot apply. One of the implicated banks, FinWise Bank, approved loans with interest rates of 160%, legal in Utah, for example, but a felony in Colorado.

Importantly, one need not accept the Pope’s Christian faith in order to oppose usury as a social relationship of unjust, exploitative power. And it is a relationship of power rather than one of mere economics, as if the latter exists in a sphere separate from the former. It may surprise some that one of American history’s most ardent and consistent proponents of free markets and individual liberty was also one of its greatest critics of usury. The anarchist Benjamin Tucker set forth to confront “a most momentous question,” the question of who receives “the surplus wealth that labor produces and does not consume.” For Tucker, usury was the key characteristic of capitalism, but it was the result of political power, not economic relationships of free and voluntary exchange.

The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously wrote a lengthy Defence of Usury near the end of the eighteenth century. For Bentham, usury was not a proper subject of legal prohibition, because, he argued, free adults should be able to engage in whatever kinds of economic activities and exchanges they like. Yet Bentham reckoned only half of the whole story, much like those who still today misguidedly defend capitalism on the grounds of freedom and strong individual rights. They are not sufficiently careful to keep context; their mistake is to believe that the relations described by this apparently innocuous term, relations of domination and coercion, emerge from conditions of mere voluntary exchange for mutual benefit. But it would be very strange indeed for such an authoritarian arrangement to grow up out of libertarian ideals and means. In fact, historically, the usurious conditions of our system of political economy, whatever called, are right in line with bygone systems of power and privilege, with those of feudalism and mercantilism, for example.

Defenders of capitalism seem to be able to apply the much-vaunted economic law of supply and demand to everything but capitalism itself. The defenders of usury are not liberal in any meaningful sense; they deploy the language and concepts of economic rights and freedom in the service of a system that is akin in its actual, material dimensions to forced labor. That is, they stand liberalism on its head and make it a cynical, ideological cover for what is actually a program of political extraction and indentured servitude. This state of affairs passes unremarked upon because the right wing of our current politics says that this is a system of freedom with which the state must not interfere, and the left wing of our politics insists that only the state can hold capital at bay. Both of these narratives are fundamentally confused, preventing a proper understanding of the system’s history and dynamics.

To wrap a violent system such as capitalism in the language of freedom and “free markets” is a high crime, based on the confusion of useful idiots and the malice and contempt of the ruling class, always shrinking relative to the size of the population, always distancing themselves from the people. Very few of today’s liberals have cared to notice what Benjamin Tucker and other anarchists did, because they are often members of a class of laptop “professionals” who serve to protect the power of that ruling class. This is sadly among the major structural reasons that Donald Trump was able to pull the wool over the eyes of so many in the working class. Liberalism on its face became less about justice, freedom, and equality than about protecting the unearned social prestige of the puppets of a billionaire ruling class—a class that has never had any use for free markets and uses the state however and whenever it can.

If the objective and mechanism of actual free markets might be something like equilibrium and the efficient allocation of resources, then capitalism historically has meant the endless and auto-reproductive accumulation of surplus value. If free markets would mean that rent, interest and profit always tend toward a zero value, then capitalism means they must always grow and accumulate without end or limit. If free markets would mean no barriers to market entry and infinite substitutes of products and services, then capitalism has always seen high, state-manufactured barriers and deep structural and legal moats around powerful capital.

If the role of the law in a free market is to play the exogenous and neutral referee, then in capitalism it is to be an endogenous and active architect of legal inequality. If in a free market, information and ideas cannot be owned and belong to humanity as a natural birthright, then in capitalism they are made the exclusive property of a privileged few through so-called intellectual property rights. And if participation in any organization or firm is fully voluntary in free markets, then under capitalism, participation is structurally coerced by extra-economic violence (peasant dispossession and land monopoly, police and private security attacks on strikers, etc.). If risk in free markets is borne by those who create it, then in capitalism it is foisted through the state onto the population at large, with only benefits concentrated. In short, these systems, freedom and capitalism, are opposites, if we care to take the historical record at all seriously. In genuine free markets, the presence of usurious profits itself acts as an immediate signal and spur to eager competitors. Capitalism is a system that outlaws competition, as Tucker once said. Capitalists work “by abolishing the free market,” not working fairly within it.

A free market is measured, in the final analysis, by one’s right to leave it, as a truly voluntary system could only be one it is possible to exit at will. In our political and economic system, the state prohibits, or limits, or licenses, or otherwise meddles with any shred of a possibility of independent survival or self-sufficiency. Its laws cover everything and draw power to organized capital and corporate special interests. Subsidies, privileges, restrictions and professional licenses give the individual no power and no choice but to participate in a centralized, financialized corporation economy that is fully the creation of state power. Even the most cursory examination of the history of the corporate system reveals that its reason for being was and remains the prohibition of free-market competition for the benefit of a small privileged class.

Participation being mandatory for survival, there is no free market as such, and the relationship between the individual and the corporate system is not in the nature or form of a real contract. It is a relationship of political capture and submission. Defending capitalism with the language of pure economics or liberal freedoms is a ridiculous and cynical narrative for a ridiculous and cynical system. We must notice again what Tucker did, that liberty and equality—and thus libertarianism and socialism—are natural complements. Perhaps it would be appropriate to adopt Bentham’s defense of usury in a free-market system. But we don’t have such a system. We have capitalism.

David S. D’Amato is an attorney, businessman, and independent researcher. He is a Policy Advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation and a regular opinion contributor to The Hill. His writing has appeared in Forbes, Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, The Washington Examiner, and many other publications, both popular and scholarly. His work has been cited by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, among others.