Tag: Lenin

Why the Soviet Union Lost the Cold War
The experience of the Soviet Union is bound to confront every Marxist at some time or another. If Marxism is able to see further than liberalism, and socialism is superior to capitalism, shouldn’t the first Marxist state still be with us today? Unfortunately for many, the failure of the USSR to win the Cold War is proof enough of socialism’s inferiority and the story ends. But human history is one of trial and error, and the sheer force of the Russian revolution and the magnitude of change it rained down on the world speak volumes to its power.

The American Revolution of 1776 was successful. The United States did not carry the heavy baggage of inherited feudal institutions and the ambition of revolutionaries was relatively limited, motivated by slaveowners demanding tax breaks. Bourgeois attempts at revolutionary republics in England in 1649 and France in 1789 were quickly overturned. The Soviet Union, by contrast, lasted for 70 years. It faced powerful external hostility every day of its existence, it inspired Keynesian economics and the welfare state, it spurred millions of revolutionaries around the world to take up arms for national liberation.

Wealth and Power

For the Soviet Union, any conceivable path to Cold War victory was narrow. The Tsarist Russian Empire was an incredibly impoverished and economically backward state at the time of the revolution. The vast majority of the country was comprised of an illiterate peasantry and Tsar Nicholas had steered the country into one disaster after another, including ill-fated wars against Japan and Germany. After the Bolsheviks took power, they were immediately plunged into a brutal civil war supported by a multinational invasion force, provoking famine and terror. Anticipating another invasion from the West, Stalin aggressively pushed rapid industrialization upon his country. There was a human cost that paid for this policy but the USSR did prevail over the largest invasion force in history and Stalin is regarded as a national hero in Russia to this day.

Although they basked in the glory of victory after World War II, the Soviets had lost 27 million lives to war and Holocaust and eastern Europe was in ruins. The loss of human life and infrastructure in the war set them at a much lower pole position relative to the United States. The USSR clocked impressive achievements in space exploration, military technology and human development programs, but they were unable to break through their inherited disadvantages against western economies despite their status as a leading global power.

Witnessing first-hand the violence of imperial governments towards workers’ movements, Karl Marx did not believe that the construction of socialism was feasible without access to the most advanced capitalist technologies at the outset.¹ The Soviet Union had hoped to make up for these deficiencies by finding a tipping point in the global balance of power. If just enough countries had Marxist-Leninist revolutions, then the capitalist world would be starved of global markets, their economies would violently contract and liberal governance would wither. The Soviets devoted such large quantities of resources toward affecting this outcome that the entire Soviet project effectively became one big bet on global revolution.²

Despite rapid advancements under socialism in one country, there was a core problem with the structure of the Soviet Union post-World War II, summed up here by Zhang Xiaotong:

The main reason why over-expansion undermines national security and interests is the inefficient conversion between wealth and power, wasting too much wealth without acquiring the expected power. The collapse of the Soviet Union was largely due to its insufficient economic base to support diplomatic, strategic, and military expansion. It was a failure of Soviet economic statecraft and a triumph of American economic statecraft.³

For every ally that the Soviet Union acquired, there were expenditures attached in the form of military and economic aid. Almost every Marxist-Leninist state had emerged from conditions of chronic underdevelopment and, often, vicious civil war. Newfound Soviet allies required assistance just to become viable trading partners.⁴ On the other hand, the United States made money from its clients. Although frontline states of the Cold War in Europe and Asia received copious amounts of aid in the years following World War II, this was easily offset by the rapid expansion of US capital into global markets under the Bretton Woods system.

Structural Imperialism

Across Latin America, US corporations expanded profitable mining operations and fruit plantations. In Africa, decolonization on the part of Britain and France opened vast territories to American capital and new opportunities for resource extraction and arms sales. But the real prize for the United States was their partnership with countries of the Persian Gulf. The British had been heavily involved in the Gulf during the colonial era, pioneering oil projects in Iran and the United Arab Emirates, holding a mandate on Iraq and establishing protectorates over Bahrain and Kuwait. British power gave way seamlessly to American influence after World War II, as fledgling monarchies in the region found common cause with the United States opposing atheistic Soviet-style socialism.

The relationship between the United States and Gulf countries experienced episodic setbacks, such as the 1973 oil embargo against Israeli allies and the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. However in the 1970s agreements were struck between the United States, Saudi Arabia and other fossil fuel-rich Gulf states that created the “petrodollar system” as we know it today. The United States would provide security guarantees to the Gulf in exchange for their pricing oil in US dollars—and only US dollars. Profits from the oil trade would be used by these states to accumulate American bonds, inflate sovereign wealth funds and purchase securities from New York exchanges.

The petrodollar system put a money pump right into the veins of American finance. With this system, Washington managed to secure a reliable supply of energy while guaranteeing that profits from all Gulf customers flowed back to the United States through stock and bond sales. Because oil is the bedrock resource of the industrial economy, the petrodollar system has secured the global reserve status of the US dollar for decades.⁵ In turn, this has allowed the US government to exert obscene levels of power over global financial markets, including the ability to sell near-limitless government debt and isolate sovereign-seeking nations from the world economy. No other country in history has had anything like it—and certainly not the USSR.

In sum, the United States was able to convert their wealth into power, and their power into still more wealth. Between 1960 and 2020, $152 trillion in value has been transferred to western countries from developing nations in the Global South—with the United States grabbing the largest slice of the pie. In contrast, the Soviet Union had the inverse arrangement; as they acquired more allies, their annual cost in subsidies ballooned from $1.7 billion per year in 1970 to $23 billion in 1980 (84.5 billion in today’s dollars). The US grew richer with their client states while the Soviets became poorer with allies.

Since every Marxist-Leninist country during the Cold War was primarily running a nationalized economy, the Soviets had no mechanism to exploit the labour or resources of allied nations. The more allies they converted, the more subsidies they paid out. Their pursuit of allies, their quest for an anti-imperial tipping point, led to military expenditures dragging heavily on Moscow’s economy. The final straw for the Soviet Union was a military intervention supporting the communist government of Afghanistan. This operation was made incredibly expensive by the CIA who funded the Islamic mujahideen that fiercely opposed Red Army forces. Yet again, the Soviets found themselves exchanging a large quantity of resources for nothing.

The Rise of Nationalism

By the 1980s, the Soviet economy was exhausted by serious imbalances between civilian and defence production. For decades, military budgets had eaten up half of government expenditures and swiped double-digit percentages from the gross national product. In contrast, the United States had a money pump valued in the trillions of dollars plus the global reserve currency status that came with it.⁶ This is what enabled the United States to recover quickly from the Vietnam War. The US could go dollar-for-dollar with the USSR, they could wreak havoc on socialist economies through sanctions and they could meet them with proxy militias in any field of battle—all this, at a fraction of the cost to their economy.⁷

Although 78% of Soviet citizens had voted to preserve the union, the leadership understood that they were on the losing end of a multi-decade bet on international expansion.⁸ Their entire economy was ordered around it. Instead of a serious reassessment of Soviet spending priorities, nationalists from the Soviet Union’s 15 republics blamed stagnation on their union with the others. Boris Yeltsin, for his part, sincerely believed that Russia’s economy was burdened by the other 14, exclaiming in 1990: “Enough feeding the other republics!”⁹

The nationalists were, of course, wildly off-base because the actual cause of Soviet inefficiencies was its incredibly taxing wealth–power conversion and the futility of direct competition with the United States. With a nuclear deterrent in place, there needed to be a tactical retreat from the arms race, socialist autonomy for Warsaw Pact countries, reimplementation of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, greater direct democratic experimentation and cadre accountability, construction of a vibrant worker cooperative sector and revitalized public infrastructure at home.¹⁰ The Soviet Union held immense global power and influence—too much— without an adequate civilian economy to hold it up. Serendipitously, the United States now finds itself following in the footsteps of its former Soviet foe.

The failure to locate the economic contradiction between wealth and power ultimately led to an irruption of nationalist causes that burst into the upper echelons of the ruling Communist Party by the late 1980s. A nationalist political class combined with an empowered bureaucracy to restore capitalism. Seeking personal profit by looting state assets, corrupt Soviet bureaucrats sold off the union to the highest bidder and plunged eastern Europe into catastrophic economic turmoil.

The Soviet Union was a pioneer that charted waters never sailed before or since. Its transformation of a feudal backwater state into a spacefaring nuclear superpower in the span of three decades is a historic achievement. They made catastrophic mistakes by allowing themselves to become embroiled in a dollar-for-dollar arms race with a colossal imperial power and moving too confidently into a system of absolute state ownership and central planning. Their victory over Nazi Germany likely led the Soviet Union to overestimate their strengths at a time of material weakness relative to the United States.

What China learned from the Soviet experience is that socialism is not a light switch to be be flipped on. The task of socialism is not only to fight capitalism but to make it obsolete—to go beyond it. To do this requires access to the most advanced capitalist technologies and putting them to use in ways that serve human flourishing rather than profit. Only then can socialism predictably outperform hostile imperial countries and become a self-sustaining reproductive system.

We leave the world of capitalism only once the notion of selling ourselves for a wage becomes as unthinkable as selling ourselves into slavery. In this multigenerational struggle toward capitalist obsolescence, the Soviet experiment is at once a heroic inspiration and a cautionary tale. As Deng Xiaoping said on his Southern Tour:

I am convinced that more and more people will come to believe in Marxism, because it is a science. Using historical materialism, it has uncovered the laws governing the development of human society. Feudal society replaced slave society, capitalism supplanted feudalism, and, after a long time, socialism will necessarily supersede capitalism. This is an irreversible general trend of historical development, but the road has many twists and turns. Over the several centuries that it took for capitalism to replace feudalism, how many times were monarchies restored? So, in a sense, temporary restorations are usual and can hardly be avoided. Some countries have suffered major setbacks, and socialism appears to have been weakened. But the people have been tempered by the setbacks and have drawn lessons from them, and that will make socialism develop in a healthier direction. So don’t panic, don’t think that Marxism has disappeared, that it’s not useful anymore and that it has been defeated. Nothing of the sort!

Thanks for reading!
1. In “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” New-York Daily Tribune, July 22, 1853, Marx wrote: “Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.” ↩︎
2. A comparison between US and USSR military expenditures makes the unsustainability of Soviet spending clear: the Soviets consistently spent more than double the United States as a percentage of GNP. From World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1994, in Norman Schofield, “Power, prosperity and social choice: a review,” Social Choice and Welfare Vol. 20, No. 1: 97. For more on the Soviet strategy and Brezhnev Doctrine, see “The Soviet Union’s Global Strategy” published by Santa Clara University. ↩︎
3. Zhang Xiaotong, China’s Modern Economic Statecraft: A Wealth-Power Dialectic (Routledge, 2025): 8. ↩︎
4. For a snapshot of Soviet subsidies through the 1970s see: U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, USSR: The Cost of Aid to Communist States, June 1, 1981. The public-facing information dispersed by the CIA is obviously horrible propaganda, but their internal documents tend to be reliable. ↩︎
5. Arya Joshi draws a straight line from the original petrodollar agreement brokered with Riyadh by Henry Kissinger in 1973 and sustained American global hegemony: “How has the US maintained hegemony in the international oil trade through its control of the Middle East?” Journal of Global Faultlines, Vol. 10, No. 2: 136-140. ↩︎
6. The per annum value of the petrodollar is difficult to ascertain, as it is an economic force multiplier. But it has led to a situation whereby trillions of dollars of US assets are held by Gulf sovereign wealth funds, plus tens of billions in annual arms sales. See: Andrew Mills, “Gulf trio review sovereign wealth investments to offset Iran war impact,”Reuters, March 11, 2026 and Vijay Prashad, “A Primer on the Petrodollar and the War on Iran,” Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, April 16, 2026. ↩︎
7. Schofield, “Power, prosperity and social choice,” 97. ↩︎
8. The chasm between leadership and the citizenry is highlighted in Mark Kramer, “The Unintended Revolution,” Journal of Modern European History, Vol. 10, No. 1: 6. ↩︎
9. The disastrous years in Russia following Soviet dissolution discredit the idea of a Russian economy shackled by the union. In fact, regional economic integration was one of the few efficiencies of the Soviet system that allowed it to industrialize and persist as a major power for decades. ↩︎
10. With one of his few good ideas, Mikhail Gorbachev implemented the Law on Cooperatives in 1988, but by then it was too little, too late. ↩︎
05 Oct 26
In Brief: Revolution is Inevitable
In Capitalism and the Death Drive, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that “revolution is impossible today” because any resistance to the neoliberal order either quickly dissipates or becomes absorbed by corporate mass consumerism.¹ Commodified Che Guevara T-shirts come to mind, as do counterculture movements like punk rock and Burning Man.

In the age of social media our personal absorption into the commercial sphere is even more ubiquitous; we put ourselves under surveillance and freely subject our activity to data harvesting and resale. Han writes:

System-preserving power has now taken on a smart, friendly form, and it has thereby become invisible and unassailable. The subordinated subject is not even aware of its subordination. It believes itself to be free. This technology of rule is a highly efficient way of neutralizing resistance.²

In the absence of polling data, this view is likely mainstream even on the left where it is echoed by Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Fredric Jameson and Mark Fisher.³ While nobody would rule out revolutions in economy and culture, it is that all-important political revolution that feels forever achingly out of reach.

It is easy to forget about the movement of tectonic plates once accustomed to the ground under our feet. Even Lenin was once discouraged about the prospects of revolution—with similar doubts over the level of adequate resistance to Russia’s ancien régime. But the absolute monarchy of the Tsar was doomed once industrial production began melting away the feudal relations in countries to Russia’s east and west. This caused Tsarist Russia to lose badly in wars against Germany and Japan. The question of revolution was never an “if” only a “when.”

To understand why revolution is inevitable, we need only turn to one of the most important paragraphs that Karl Marx ever wrote:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.⁴

For Marx, a social revolution is not simply a change of government, policy or cultural norm—it is a complete change of ruling class. Notice that he does not speak of “adequate resistance” when he lays out the conditions of revolution. Revolution appears as a tectonic economic shift away from the existing ruling class, first and foremost.

This occurred in the West when royal authority and the landed aristocracy became an impediment to merchant capital accumulation. It happened in Russia and China after their industrialized neighbours attacked, pecking at the morass of decaying feudal orders. It happened intercontinentally, across the Global South, as colonial regimes experienced diminishing returns from ransacking the economic productivity of their subjects.

The revolutionary potential of the West has been non-existent for almost a century now. The last time it emerged was during Great Depression. This was when the rapidly industrializing Soviet Union garnered the appeal of unemployed masses and western governments swiftly countered with a barrage of social democratic compromises, including public works projects and social security payments.

The next economic catastrophe will not experience the same social democratic outcome. Liberal capitalism emerged as the political analog to economies dependent on territorial expansion and the steady opening of new markets to capital interests. Almost single-handedly, China is now melting down the western dependency on rent-seeking profits. Vertical integration of supply chains, overproduction of renewable energy, suppression of private financial capital, managed deflation and strategic technological development are saturating the world with low-cost goods and medicines and high quality open source software. The addressable market for western conglomerates is shrinking, evermore reliant on debt and speculation to fund operations. Western governments are flailing, pouring money into the furnace of war and doubling down on fossil fuels in the faint hope of maintaining dominance with atavistic 20th century strategies.

The liberal paradigm cannot conceptualize this technological levelling of the global economic pyramid. It is collapsing inwards like a dying star. Drone warfare has seen ragtag armies grind the world’s mightiest militaries to a halt. Cheap solar panels bring miniature power plants to even the most remote of African villages. Open source A.I. is shredding the U.S. Big Tech profit model to pieces. Multiparty “democracy” has factionalized society into camps of superficial enemies, denying even the possibility of long-term strategic planning. Rampant inflation is quietly brandished as an escape from heaving debt loads handcuffing public and private entities. U.S. dollar dominance is declining with the overuse of criminal sanctions. Social media has turned “free speech” into a vector of weird conspiracies, sensational propaganda and pornography. “Free market” ideology has become the ramparts of financial monopolies and homelessness and hardcore drug addiction.

In short, the social relations of the West are in open contradiction with the new productive forces being unleashed. This is the smoke signal for revolution.

The technological levelling described above means that the liberal order will not be able to rejuvenate itself with a social spending package and a war, as it did during the Great Depression. The rent-extracting platforms of the current ruling class of CEOs and financiers are cracking. When they finally break, the only way out will be a political order that subsumes the new powers of production and seizes the means of finance, construction, resource extraction and strategic industries. Only then will it be possible to fix the underlying mechanical problems hampering our historical progression on a livable planet.

As it disintegrates before our eyes, movements rejecting liberalism will grow. We must embrace long-term planning, direct democratic implements, international cooperation, green development, abundant housing and services, livable communities and expedient public infrastructure. The capitalist ruling class will be supplanted as a political authority or else destitution will result. Some countries have discovered this already and some will take fascistic detours before arriving at the right destination. It is inevitable.

Thanks for reading!
1. Byung-Chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive (Polity Press, 2019): 15. ↩︎
2. Ibid, 17. ↩︎
3. The inescapable totality of capitalist consumerism is one of the primary focuses for each of these thinkers. ↩︎
4. Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. ↩︎
24 Jun 26
In Brief: China’s Marxian Paradigm
In China today, the fingerprints of American capitalist excess are hard to miss, as the golden arches and the KFCs stand lined up next to Walmart stores. The history of China’s economic development is a pretty simple story as told in the West: Mao’s Soviet-style economy was abandoned by Deng who swung open the doors to western capitalism and everything we see in China today is the mere culmination of decades of market magic. With this story lodged into our heads by so many western journalists, whose understanding of Marx is even less than their understanding of China, it is no wonder why Beijing’s trajectory is wide open to interpretation.

The sequence of human history is one of modes of production. Societies organize around productive forces and, as these forces evolve, so does a new social formation eventually sublate the previous one existing. The Greek polis represents a sublation of Neolithic communal society, just as Medieval Europe represents a sublation of the Roman Empire.¹

The process is not mechanical and it has varied wildly depending on the region in question. For example, the capitalist mode of production was concretized only after a significant period of violent primitive accumulation driven by erstwhile feudal merchants who amassed vast sums of wealth at the expense of European peasants, African slaves and New World Indigenous clans. What capitalism has allowed us to do by way of revolutions in technology, science and philosophy, is gain a self-awareness of this historical process and ask the question: if capitalism is a sublation of the feudal mode, what might represent a sublation of the capitalist mode?

The capitalist mode of production has brought with it a material abundance previously unknown to humanity. This helps to explain widespread resistance against any effort toward revolutionary change. On the other hand, capitalism has also carried over imperial tendencies toward warfare, environmental destruction and the deracination of the community. It is these noxious aspects of capitalism that have formed the basis of western populist demands and global revolutionary politics.

Marxism-Leninism emerged from an impoverished Russian Empire long-mismanaged by Tsars wielding absolute power. For the Soviet Union, it expressed the post-revolutionary desire for rapid modernization without the capitalist hallmarks of colonial extraction and working class exploitation. With near-universal public ownership of production, these two aims were largely successful and the USSR experienced an improbable rise to superpower status, all the while providing housing, healthcare, free education and employment to all.

Mao Zedong was obviously heavily influenced by the Soviet experience but he recognized that his China of 1949 was even less developed than 1917 Russia, thanks to the compounded effects of Japanese invasion, civil war and a century of humiliation at the hands of European colonial powers. At its founding, the People’s Republic of China was almost an entirely illiterate, agrarian economy suffering from a massive drug addiction epidemic and in a state of chronic famine.

Mao set his modernization program along the lines of mass literacy campaigns, accessible medicine and large-scale irrigation projects. He recognized the feudal landlord class as a vestige of feudalism and a barrier to progress. That class was eliminated with land reforms. But, as a historical materialist, Mao also saw the bourgeoisie as an important ingredient to Chinese modernization. Adopted in 1949, the Chinese flag even includes a star each for the national and petit bourgeoisie, against a red background representing the revolution.

Soviet socialism was a sublation of Russian feudalism that practically skipped the capitalist mode altogether. But it collapsed under a heavy burden of economic embargoes and repeated military confrontations against combined capitalist powers that had centuries of wealth accumulation under their feet.

Relieved of sanctions in 1979, China has been determined to build socialism in the East along the timescale of how capitalism was built in the West: a period of wealth accumulation and technological advancement that will make it possible to transcend the global capitalist economy. Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, rejected western capitalism and he modelled his own reforms on Lenin’s New Economic Policy.

China has not engaged in foreign colonization or the subjugation of other lands. As a Global South country long-preyed upon by the West, they have recognized that their path to modernization must necessarily be different than it was for imperial states. With particular attention to Volumes 2 and 3 of Marx’s Capital, Beijing has instead constructed a public sector designed to capture the surplus value of their capitalist workforce and channel it toward the development of new productive forces.

As Marx described liberal states, the surplus value produced by workers is claimed as rent, interest and profit. In liberal states, the disposal of this enormous surplus is decided by the private whims of financial firms, landlords and corporations—leading to the socially disruptive practice of outsourced labour and the curious phenomena of “dead money.” In addition, the circulation of surplus value in the form of loans, banking fees and debt-financing are tallied as part of the national gross domestic product—despite producing no value whatsoever. This has led the economist Michael Hudson to decry GDP accounting in the United States as “a travesty that credits the financial sector with producing a product, not as imposing zero-sum transfer payments.”²

As a Marxist state, China treats surplus value as a social product rather than a private gain. Because much of the banking, resource, construction and manufacturing sectors are under state ownership, they are able to convert surplus value that is captured in the form of interest and profits and push a dramatic material transformation of the entire country. Where private ownership exists, party cadres operate within the enterprise to ensure compliance with national planning. China’s ability to build at breakneck speed is also facilitated by maintaining an extremely low cost of goods and services through strategic deflation and the “purging of rent-seeking profits” from the economy.³ This conscious suppression of price and profit are virtually unthinkable for a liberal country.

The fault line between China and the West is therefore not one of “capitalism vs. socialism” but “liberalism vs. Marxism.” At this point in history, every country on Earth contains elements of both socialism and capitalism. In liberalism, capital accumulation is treated as an end in itself—and the result is a sprawling financial services sector that cannibalizes national industry in exchange for abstract financial products. In Marxism, capital accumulation is treated as an evolutionary step between industrial capitalism and socialist transformation. The result of this treatment is a country that looks like China.

By compressing surplus value formation into material production rather than financialization, China is betting on a transformation of productive quantity into social quality, one that will eventually lead to a sublation of private capitalism by public socialism. This is not meant as an explicit endorsement of vanguardism, nor is it meant to praise each aspect of Chinese governance or policy decision made by Beijing. We should take lessons from China and adapt them to our own national circumstances. But that can only be done with recognition that their meteoric rise is resultant from the application of Marxist theory at the commanding heights of the economy.

Thanks for reading!
1. John Bellamy Foster explores the communal aspects of antiquity in “Marx and Communal Society,” Monthly Review, Vol. 77, No. 3: 47-64. ↩︎
2. Michael Hudson, “Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism: The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover” in Review of Radical Political Economics, 2021: 12. ↩︎
3. See: Kevin Walmsley, “Top China execs forecast more deflation and falling profits ahead,” Substack, Nov. 2025. ↩︎
11 Jun 26
Ask the Editor: Is Democracy Compatible with Capitalism?
To the editor,

Is political democracy compatible with capitalist economies?

Thanks,

Matt.

[Sent via email]

Hi Matt,

This is a complex question that hinges on subjective definitions of democracy. Democracy literally means “people rule,” derived from the ancient Athenian concept of demokratia. The basic definition is straightforward but the practice has varied wildly along with popular conceptions that are serpentine, at best.

For example, ancient Athenians would dismiss elected representatives as non-democratic and oligarchic by nature. Athens had a direct democratic system that filled bureaucratic posts by lottery and passed laws with an assembly open to all citizens. On the surface, this appears even more in the spirit of “people rule” than what we have today. But when we adjust for the exclusivity of Athenian citizenship, only about 25% of the population was enfranchised since women, slaves and foreigners were forbidden from political participation. For older and more inclusive examples of “people rule” we could look to the consensus-based decision making among many tribal societies.

Democratic models antiquity and beyond only takes us so far, however. The argument could be made that “purer” forms of democracy which developed in the context of a tribe or city-state are simply not compatible in a modern world of teeming metropolises and complex nation-states. There is merit to this argument from a historical materialist perspective.

Consensus-based decision making is a logical outgrowth of highly interdependent individuals that hunted, gathered and sheltered as small communities. Cohesion and cooperation between members was the best guarantor of productivity and individual survival. In antiquity, on the other hand, the exploitation of slave labour was the productive basis that made a caste of citizens in the polis possible. This economic dependency on slavery elevated the role of military conquest and contributed to the confinement of women to the domestic sphere. Citizenship in the classical world was inextricably linked with military service and politics became the sole domain of a kind of warrior caste.

What these historical examples illustrate are models of democracy that arose from economic practicality rather than lofty idealism. The same is true of modern democratic forms, which were spawned by a nascent bourgeois class looking to wrest control of government from the European aristocracy of the 17th and 18th centuries. This is why property qualifications were an important feature of early voting rights across the West, just as military service was an important feature of citizenship in antiquity. Capitalism favours commercial expansion and classical slave economies favoured military conquest, and this is reflected in the democratic forms that each system produced.

A unique aspect of industrial capitalism is the massive leap in productive capacity and potential. This has largely made material scarcity artificial and wholly dependent on access to money as the medium of consumption. Because of this, class struggle within capitalism has produced some benefits for the restive masses, including universal suffrage and a basic social safety net.

Whereas strict parameters used to be put around those who can vote, it is now a case of parameters around those who can feasibly win office and pass legislation. Liberal governments all over the world are managed by financial elites with the ability to fund political campaigns, media networks, lobbyists and public debt. Capitalist democracies therefore achieve the appearance of popular legitimacy through multiparty elections but the actual governing process is nonetheless channelled by elite class interests.

Is democracy compatible with capitalism? If throwing a ballot every few years into a system subordinated to moneyed interests is the working definition of democracy, then yes—democracy is not only compatible with capitalism, it is capitalism’s “best possible shell,” as Lenin wrote.¹ On the other hand, if we were to define democracy as “people rule” with popular decision making that extended from the workplace up to specific line-item national legislation, then capitalism is completely antithetical to it. Outside of tribal society, direct democracy is an unrealized ideal that awaits a radical economic transformation to give it shape.

In sols.

Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

Footnotes:
1. Vladimir Lenin, “The State and Revolution” in Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is To Be Done? And Other Writings (CreateSpace, 2012): 382-3. ↩︎
09 Apr 26
Liberal Democracy is a Sham
The concept of civilizational decline has been a staple of the far-right at least since the rise of fascism in Europe a century ago. While the right has always fixed its consternation with fast moving cultural changes and the erosion of “traditional values,” they are ideologically incapable of linking their grievances to the capitalist economic system that constantly revolutionizes our way of life.¹ But the first quarter of the 21st century has had the experience of successive wars and economic crises and political realignments against the backdrop of a rising China. The anti-capitalist left has therefore embraced the decline narrative, given the extraordinary challenges of environmental deterioration and affordability amidst a rising concentration of wealth and power into the hands of an elite western oligarchy. Throw in the demoralizing Epstein revelations and a rupture to the political order by a berserk President Trump and even western liberals are acknowledging decline.

If there is one shibboleth of the West that deserves scrutiny at this moment in history, it is liberal democracy. Liberal democracy has been the veneer over western capitalism; a moral ornament obscuring the ransacking of colonies around the world and used to coordinate a unified western response to competition from emergent powers. This has not always been a bad thing—the alliance between liberal capitalist states and the Soviet Union was fruitful in tearing down Nazi Germany, for example.

In the period post-World War II, western liberal countries could lay claim to progressive achievements on the home front—such as civil rights, accessible education and affordable housing—even while supporting many heinous regimes abroad. Free speech and multiparty elections appeared as great strengths under a regime of centralized news media that gave citizens a common information platform, while high union membership in domestic manufacturing ensured a reasonable distribution of profits.

Today that regime has changed. Private sector unions have fallen off a cliff and the digital age has turned media consumption into a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story. In a dialectical reversal, yesterday’s free speech and partisan competition have become forces that propel their own demise: conspiratorial misinformation, foreign subversion, online mobs of neo-Nazis, unchecked corporate power, the ascent of dictatorial right-wing populists into office. While smartphone apps and AI models rush out like a waterfall, public infrastructure is achingly slow to build. In Canada it can take 41 years to cut the ribbon on a simple light rail transport—to say nothing of badly needed doctors, schools, energy generation and bridges. The refusal to scrutinize liberal democracy out of some fear that its only alternative is dictatorship must be admonished because capitalism has already put us on an openly authoritarian trajectory with accelerating speed. If the democratic veneer that the West has placed over its society is no longer compatible with the communications technology and global economic structure in existence today, then it is high time to say so.

Washington’s Warning

In his farewell address, the first president of the United States foresaw exactly why liberal democracy would cease to function. George Washington argued that partisanship would fragment the common interest into competing factions. A citizenry that identified with a political party rather than the country would lose its principles; they would fail to identify policies affecting the common interest and concern themselves only with gaining power at the next instance. Political parties turn society against itself and create countries within countries: “Thus the policy and will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.” In the partisan political environment, Washington said, jealousies prevail and a “spirit of revenge” takes over, clearing the way for “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” to take over on the back of “foreign influence and corruption.”

“I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.” George Washington warned that partisan animosity would destroy national unity and invite the foreign subversion of national interests.

The body politic is now terminally ill with the viruses that Washington identified centuries ago. Liberal societies divided by political allegiance has turned the digital space into a playground for foreign actors. While weaker countries like Georgia and the Philippines are sites of proxy wars between East and West influence, the president of the United States openly accepts foreign bribes and Canadian separatists collaborate with agitators from the U.S. government. Elections have turned into sports matches where the politicians are the players, the voters are the fans and corporate CEOs own the teams.

The Brexit referendum was dominated by Britain’s wealthiest individuals and the OECD has already acknowledged that capital interests have saturated public discourse through industry-funded think tanks, lobbying and direct corporate political advertising. Representative government is powerless to reverse these trends because it is baked into the system; whoever holds power has necessarily benefitted from the existing framework or they wouldn’t be in office. Major reforms therefore hold little incentive but face massive pushback from an elite minority eager to retain its influence.

Contemporary liberal governance aligns with Washington’s description of “a frightful despotism” that negates the common interest in favour of permanent minority rule. In Canada, pollution reduction measures have been rolled back while oil companies have received billions in new subsidies—despite a two-thirds majority favouring clean energy and climate protection. A full three-quarters of Canadians give failing grades to their government in assisting with the cost of living crisis. The Canadian government does not possess the tools to meaningfully direct economic outcomes and the majority of people are plunged daily into the hazards of the market. Meanwhile, Canada’s central bank receives no input from labour or consumer stakeholders and the CEO-drenched Business Council of Canada has emerged as the prime minister’s top advisor.

When majority opinion is fragmented between multiple elected parties, it is only economic elites who maintain consistent influence through successive governments. In the United States, this is especially true; studies analyzing popular opinion and political legislation have concluded that average Americans “have practically zero influence on government policy.”

On policy, Democrats, Independents and Republicans agree with each other far more often than not. Large majorities in the United States favour public health insurance, ending the embargo of Cuba, ending mass incarceration, avoiding confrontation with Iran and Venezuela, reducing military expenditures, cutting support for Israel and adopting a pro-Main Street economic approach. Yet this is ignored by administration after administration resulting in rock-bottom public trust in government. As little as 17% of Americans trust their government “to do what is right most of the time.”

A United States that was subordinated to the popular will of Americans would immediately be a gentler, more sustainable global power with an economy that doesn’t cannabilize its own people for profits. But a government anchored by popular opinion would hurt margins across multiple industries—which is a red line for the capitalist regime. Partisan competition therefore exists to exploit wedge issues and keep the democratic majority as far from power as possible.

Toward a People’s Democracy

In The State and Revolution, Lenin described liberal democracy as “the best possible political shell for capitalism” because it allows corporate oligarchs to establish their power “so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois democratic republic can shake it.”² The western dictatorship of capital donned respectable attire for the purposes of winning hearts and minds during the Cold War. But since the dissolution of the Soviet Union it has shed its clothes once again.

Although the People’s Republic of China is derided in the mainstream as an authoritarian country, their decision-making process gathers more input from their citizens than most western countries do. Through online platforms, opinion polling, surveys, telephone hotlines and direct elections of local officials, the people of China give their local governments long lists of actionable items and provide guidance to the strategic Five Year Plans that have modernized their country at warp speed. This does not mean many aspects of the Chinese political system would be palatable to western society but it does expose the arbitrary criteria by which one country is deemed “democratic” while another is smeared as “authoritarian.” After all, if the “democratic” label can apply to a country that grants its citizens zero input in legislation and locks up more of its own people than any other in history, what good is the label?

The object of liberal democracy represents a major barrier to class consciousness, even among the left. A misplaced faith in this unworkable system has led to disastrous outcomes for the economic security of western workers; for the debt loads of governments; for slums of the Global South; for the biosphere. This is not a world designed by the democratic majority. To earn the label of democracy, the West must rethink the utility of career politicians making decisions on behalf of the population. Corporate influence must be ruthlessly suppressed and a public sector economy servile to the material wants and needs of the democratic majority must be constructed. With the commanding heights of the economy under public control, fertile ground for cooperative enterprises can finally be laid.

If a one party state is a bridge too far, we should consider alternative power structures that could exalt the great mass of working people over special interest groups. For example, power could be vested to non-partisan people’s assemblies chosen by lot. Such assemblies would supervise the bureaucracy and hire expert panels that implement the laws and economic plans determined by direct referenda. It is this, direct democracy, that reconciles the people with their government instead of alienating them from it.

Contrary to the musings of thinkers like John Stuart Mill, the “tyranny of the majority” is not a historical reality. Every tyranny in history has rested on minority power and the forfeiture of rights to elites. Capital interests have co-opted the democratic title and deformed the concept beyond recognition. But liberal government must be viewed as an enemy in the struggle against elite power. As Marx and Engels said, “the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.”³ As things now stand, that “battle of democracy” has yet to begin.

Thanks for reading!

Footnotes:
1. Recalling Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto (Arcturus Publishing, 2017): 37. “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.” ↩︎
2. Vladimir Lenin, “The State and Revolution” in Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is To Be Done? And Other Writings (CreateSpace, 2012): 382-3. ↩︎
3. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 85. ↩︎
06 Feb 26