Leftist defeat became inevitable once capitalism’s inefficiency case was lost.

Evidence

Circumspect, though not glum, the three of us agreed we were witnessing a defeat made inevitable once our side had lost the conviction that capitalism was iniquitous because it was inefficient, that it was unjust because it was illiberal, that it was chaotic because it was irrational. Falling back to basics, I asked Mum and Dad what freedom meant to them. Mother replied: the ability to choose your partners and your projects. Father’s reply was similar: time to read, to experiment and to write. Whatever your definition might be, dear reader, being free to lose in a variety of soul-crushing ways can’t be it. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 107

Categorization

• APHORISMS: “Being free to lose in a variety of soul-crushing ways can’t be [freedom]” reads as a durable deflation of formal liberty.
• XREF: connects to: Declaring the economy incomprehensible has immobilized the left’s response to the crisis. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 40