**This is not my original work. I received it in an email from a group I joined called “Simplifying Socialism.”**
We’re told capitalism is freedom because it gives us choice. Thousands of products, dozens of brands, endless options. Pick your sneakers, your streaming service, your fast-food meal. The market is democracy in action, right?
But peek behind the curtain and you’ll see how “free” the choices we make actually are.
Abundance as Illusion
Walk into any grocery store and you’ll see aisle after aisle packed with competing brands. Twenty different cereals, fifty kinds of chips, hundreds of drink options. It feels like abundance. But behind the labels, the vast majority of those products are owned by the same handful of corporations. Nestlé, PepsiCo, Unilever, Kraft Heinz — a tiny cluster of companies control most of what fills the shelves.
What looks like competition is often monopoly in disguise. The “choice” isn’t between different visions of production or different systems of ownership. It’s just which logo you want stamped on the same profit-driven structure.
This isn’t just food. Tech is the same story. We’re told we have freedom because we can pick Apple or Samsung, Android or iPhone. But each comes with its own traps (proprietary software, built-in obsolescence, surveillance baked into the product). The decision is narrowed to surface-level differences while the real power remains untouched.
The illusion of abundance is shoved down our throats as we are relegated from humans to consumers.
Essentials Without Real Options
The illusion gets crueler when we look at the choices that actually matter for survival.
- Healthcare: You can choose between insurance plans, but every option is unaffordable, confusing, and leaves you vulnerable. Millions still go bankrupt over medical bills. Your healthcare is often tied to your employment. Where’s the freedom in that?
- Housing: You can pick your landlord, but the rent keeps climbing. You can choose between renting forever or drowning in mortgage debt. Owning a home isn’t a dream for most — it’s a chain and shackles.
- Work: You can choose which boss to sell your labor to, but you can’t opt out of selling it entirely. Unless you’re independently wealthy, your “choice” is which workplace will exploit you. Fear not, you can make the choice to go into business for yourself (if you have good credit).
Capitalism calls this freedom, but it’s a false freedom. A choice within limits you didn’t set, with outcomes you can’t control. Real freedom lies not in the illusion of choice, but in the ability to live day-to-day without the worry of hospital bills or rising rent prices destroying our dignity.
Manufactured Desires
Even when options exist, they’re shaped by advertising and cultural pressure. “Choice” becomes less about what you want and more about what you’ve been convinced to want.
Do you really need a new phone every year, or has marketing manufactured that need? Do you choose fast fashion because it’s what you want, or because the industry deliberately conditions you to keep buying at the pace of their profits? Do you have any use whatsoever for Birkenstocks, or do you want them because they are trendy right now?
Capitalism sells us the story that we’re sovereign consumers making rational decisions. But in reality, our desires are engineered, our needs distorted, and our choices narrowed to what generates profit. Capitalism wins when companies succeed at turning our wants into needs, or at least by making us think that we need things we absolutely do not.
Freedom vs. Necessity
Here’s the Marxist insight: freedom isn’t about picking between products; it’s about control over the conditions of your life.
Choosing between Uber and Lyft is not real freedom.
Choosing between ten brands of sneakers is not real freedom.
Choosing between healthcare plans that all bankrupt you is not real freedom.
Freedom is having power over how your labor is used, how resources are distributed, and how your community is shaped. It’s the ability to decide not just between products, but between systems, to collectively govern the economy instead of being governed by it.
That kind of choice, democratic, collective, meaningful, is what socialism points toward. A society built on real collaboration instead of false competition is what we are missing out on by continuing to accept capitalism. Our labor keeps the machine going but instead of reward we are met with a whip to the back proclaiming that we must “work harder!” That is the reality of capitalism.
Conclusion
Capitalism hands us a menu full of small, shallow choices while stripping us of the big ones that matter. We can debate endlessly about which streaming service to pay for, but we have no say in whether housing is affordable, whether our cities are polluted, or whether our labor enriches us or someone else.
Socialism isn’t about taking away freedom. It’s about making real freedom possible. Because the ability to pick between fifty cereals means nothing if you can’t afford breakfast. We can, and we must, leave capitalism in the “museum of antiquities,” as Engels put it.
The future belongs to us, but it will not be handed to us.
Sisyphus Shrugged 