Essay:The Dialectics of Domination

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by Yogthos
Published: 2026-09-23 (last update: 2026-09-22)
10-25 minutes

To understand why liberalism is inherently right-wing, it is necessary to discard the views which liberals hold about themselves, and look at the material basis of their ideology

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To understand why liberalism is inherently right-wing, it is necessary to discard the views which liberals hold about themselves, and look at the material basis of their ideology. Liberalism professes to be a timeless philosophy embodying lofty ideals such as individual liberty, democratic rights, and the rule of law. But a materialist is not interested in what an ideology says about itself; one must ask what relations of production it supports, whose class interests it serves, and what part it plays in the historical development of society. So considered, liberalism can only be seen as the ideological superstructure of capitalism. It exists to justify private property relations by cloaking them under the guise of human liberty. It began as a progressive force, facilitating the transformation of the material basis of society and releasing the productive forces from their feudal fetters. But today it has turned into a reactionary force, acting as the political and philosophical panoply of a ruling class compelled to increase the sum of social violence in order to safeguard its monopoly of wealth. The productive forces once promoted by capitalism have formed a contradiction with its system of private ownership of the means of production. The progressive negation of the moribund capitalist order is not to be found in perfection of liberalism, but in transcendence towards a socialist stage of development.

Liberalism as the Ideology of Capital

Liberalism is the political expression of a certain type of economic system, namely, one based upon wage-labour and the ownership by a few of the instruments and materials which others must use. Beneath all the rhetoric about freedom and equality lies a hard fact that the workers are cut off from the land and raw materials without which they cannot subsist. As a result, their productive powers become a commodity to be sold to those who own the capital and machinery, and those owners, in turn, get to enjoy an unmerited proportion of the product. This condition has come about through historical processes such as the enclosure of land and the creation of laws which prevented people from working except for wages.

The liberal worldview presents the individual as an abstraction rather than as the product of a community of humans in which exchange-value mediates social relations. Legally equal, the worker and the capitalist meet in the labour market to negotiate a transaction which is formally fair. But behind such formalism the capitalist remains dominant since the worker, cut off from the means of production, must sell labour-power to survive. The capitalist, owning those means, can replace any individual worker by drawing on the reserve army of labour, the pool of unemployed and underemployed workers that is created by the normal workings of capital accumulation. Competition for jobs amongst the workers leads to further downward pressure on wages and disciplines those lucky enough to be employed. Thus, the legal equality of the contracting parties hides the structural imbalance between them.

Similarly, the liberal state itself should not be seen as an impartial arbiter standing above class conflicts. As Marx and Engels state, it “is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Its institutions secure the co-operation of all sections of the capitalist class, but do not aim at securing an amicable adjustment of the conflict between capital and labour. Its constitutional safeguards of life, liberty, and property are grounded in guarantees of the sanctity of private ownership necessary for the smooth functioning of capitalist accumulation. The right to property, in practice, is the right of the rich not to share their wealth. Therefore, any democracy which liberalism establishes must necessarily operate within the existing structure of property relations. Periodic elections and parliamentary debate exist to absorb discontent, but the political system can never allow the question of the ownership of the means of production to be raised in a meaningful way. By making the rights of property untouchable and removing them from the sphere of public debate, liberalism reveals its true class character. In material terms, it represents the liberty of capital to exploit labour, and for a minority to enrich itself at the expense of the majority.

Of course, this same liberalism was once a revolutionary force at a time when feudalism, with its fiefs and serfdom, had become an obstacle to further development of the productive forces. The bourgeoisie needed the national market, a supply of labour-power, and the abolition of the parasitical privileges of the aristocracy and the Church. Liberalism provided the ideological weapons for their movement by promoting concepts of natural rights, popular sovereignty, and the conception of the free individual. By abolishing feudalism, the bourgeois revolutions in England and France opened the way for an enormous development of productive power.

The progressive element of liberalism was not destined to survive in the long term because capitalist production, once freed from feudal restraints, quickly found itself faced by its own internal contradiction. Production was becoming increasingly socialized in factories and other large enterprises while appropriation remained private. Factory work breaks down commodity production into steps, with each worker performing a specialized task within a process that depends on the co-operation of many hands across the factory floor. And factories, in turn, require inputs of raw materials to operate the machinery which are sourced on the markets linking that factory to producers and consumers across the globe, making production a collective and even international affair. Yet the means of production themselves, along with the product, belong to individual capitalists who decide what shall be produced, where capital shall be invested, and how the surplus value created by the wage-earners shall be distributed. This contradiction forms the basis of the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The business owners seek to increase profit by driving down wages and prolonging the working day, while the proletariat seeks to increase its wages and shorten its hours. These opposing interests come into conflict at every point of labour organization and economic policy.

Liberalism, as an ideology, itself represents a unity of opposites with its democratic form and its capitalist content existing in a dynamic equilibrium. While it proclaims freedom for all, the wage system compels workers to sell their labour-power to whichever capitalist will purchase it. It proclaims democracy, but the actual power of capital turns the state into an executive committee of the ruling class. Both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are bound together in one social whole, each determining the existence of the other. Thus, the class struggle becomes the primary motive power that drives the development of a capitalist society. As the productive forces develop, the labour force becomes more concentrated and better organized. The contradiction sharpens in turn, and liberalism is forced to strain itself more and more to mitigate and justify the actual state of labour relations.

Capitalist accumulation proceeds quantitatively as capital becomes concentrated and centralized, leading to recurring crises of overproduction that gradually transform liberalism from a progressive force into a mask of reaction. Each subsequent crisis further impoverishes the workers and bankrupts small capitalists who are forced to let go of some of their remaining assets to weather it. Large capitalists, who are in a much better position to weather the economic downturn, end up scooping up these assets, which leads to further capital accumulation. The concentration of capital in fewer hands and the thinning out of competition create the conditions for a growing dependence of wage-earners upon big business and the dissolution of the petty bourgeoisie. These factors combine to produce a qualitative change in the character of the whole social order. A liberal society that could once afford the appearance of openness can no longer do so. As class conflict grows, its parliamentary machinery becomes increasingly ineffective, and the State transitions to open repression. This trajectory is now unmistakable in the United States, where the state increasingly deploys mass surveillance, militarized policing, and persecution of dissent against any elements that challenge the existing property order.

When the workers organizing around their own class interests threaten to break through the confines of bourgeois parliamentarism, the accumulation of their class pressure imposes upon the bourgeoisie the necessity for a change not only of degree but of kind. The pressure grows until the bourgeoisie can no longer govern by consent and democratic illusion, but must abandon the friendly face of political liberalism to reveal the mailed fist beneath. This is the point where liberal democracy transitions into its fascist phase of development. Fascism can be seen as liberalism turned inside out, revealing the coercive core that was always present beneath its democratic facade used to obfuscate the economic basis of class rule. What gets discarded is the superstructure of parliamentary democracy, which becomes a hindrance to the security of the ruling class once they can no longer control it. As Adolf Hitler himself told the German industrialists, “private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality.” Thus, in order to save capitalism in times of crisis, liberalism must abandon its democratic facade.

And so, the class which formerly allied itself with the masses to destroy feudalism now finds them to be the enemy within. The feast given by the City of London to Cromwell to celebrate his crushing of the radicals at Burford serves as the perfect example of this recurrent spectacle. Every time a capitalist regime has been seriously menaced from below, the liberal state has passed into an increasingly repressive, and finally fascist, form. The Weimar Republic's metamorphosis into Nazism, the Pinochet coup in Chile, and the neoliberal regimes of today discarding their democratic facade as they confront mass movements such as the MAS in Bolivia all belong to a single dialectic.

Socialism as the Negation of Capitalist Relations

History, however, does not end with the bankruptcy of liberalism because capitalism itself produces its own grave-diggers. When capitalism did away with the relations of domination between lords and serfs, the market became a new tyrant. Capital collects the wage-earners in factories to increase the productivity of labour through science and machinery, and thereby transforms the proletariat into a class capable of administering production for itself. All these factors lead to the possibility of a new type of system which represents the socialist stage of development.

At this point we need to clearly define what socialism actually refers to in a Marxist sense. Socialism means that the producers of wealth begin to take into their own hands the control of the existing productive forces. It sets in motion the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, a process that can only be completed through the full development of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The goal of the socialist movement is to make production subordinate to human need rather than profit by re-establishing collective control of social life on a higher material basis than that of primitive communism.

But such a new arrangement cannot arrive fully formed because socialism arises from the existing capitalist relations. Thus, it must necessarily proceed through stages which contain within themselves the residues of the old order alongside the seeds of the new. Here we must grasp the essential distinction between socialism and communism, and the role of what Marx and Lenin called the dictatorship of the proletariat. The term does not refer to a policy or a strategy involving the establishment of a particular form of government. Rather, it covers the whole of the transition period to communism. Such a transitional stage is not simply one possible path to be decided upon under certain conditions because it is not a matter of choice. It cannot be abandoned, any more than the class struggle can be abandoned, except in words and at the cost of enormous confusion.

To grasp this properly we must first recognize that State power is the political expression of a single ruling class, and as such it is fundamentally rooted in class dictatorship. Bourgeois democracy is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie while a proletarian democracy is also the dictatorship of a different class. In modern liberal society, State power is held in an absolute way by the capital owning class, who do not share it with any other. From this follows a consequence which is that the only possible historical alternative is an equally absolute hold on State power by the proletariat, the class of wage-labourers formerly exploited by capital. Just as the bourgeoisie cannot share State power, neither can the proletariat share it with other classes.

State power is expressed through the State apparatus in the form of the standing army, the police, the legal system, and the bureaucracy which all serve the interests of the ruling class. Therefore, the working class must tear down the existing machinery of the State, which is the embodiment of the old power structures in order to replace it with one serving its own interests.

Hence, the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a road of transition to socialism, it is nothing other than socialism itself. Communism is the long-term objective, whose achievement stretches over a very long historical period, and to which socialism is only the means. Seizing control of the State power is the prerequisite first step on this road. If this position is lost, then construction of socialism becomes impossible, at least in so far as socialism represents a revolutionary break with capitalism.

The proletarian dictatorship is itself a contradictory stage since, even though the working class holds State power, existing socioeconomic relations have not yet been abolished, meaning that the old capitalist relations persist within the new socialist framework. This should not be seen as a failure of the revolution, but rather as its necessary form where the contradiction between the new State power and the old economic relations acts as the engine of further development. The proletarian rule exists precisely to resolve this contradiction, abolishing the remnants of capitalist production in order to create the conditions for a classless society.

In the dialectical spiral, liberalism represents the thesis acting as the ideological expression of capitalism in its ascendant and dominant phases. The proletarian revolution, the seizure of State power and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is the antithesis. But this antithesis itself necessarily produces its own contradictions between the political power of the working class and the economic relations which still bear the mark of the old order. The synthesis is achieved through the long and difficult process of abolishing class distinctions and transforming the material conditions of production.

The Logic of Reaction

With this conceptual framework in place, we can fully understand the present role of liberalism within modern capitalist societies. Liberalism helped to destroy feudalism and to create capitalism along with its formal political democracy. This task accomplished, the liberal ideology ceases to have any progressive content. It exists to justify an outworn system of exploitation with its rhetoric of freedom and democracy serving to obscure the reality of the material relations. What it means in practice is the right of a few to grow rich at the expense of all the rest and of the earth’s finite resources. Every reference to free markets or individual rights is a defense of the status quo in property and power.

This analysis explains why liberalism is invariably compelled to associate itself with fascism against socialism. Capitalist society is organized through conflicting forces; bourgeoisie and proletariat depend upon each other, but are also in conflict with each other. While the proletariat is weak and disunited, the bourgeoisie can maintain its class rule by means of liberal democracy, distributing small reforms to maintain the fiction of democratic rule. But as the class struggle grows acute and socialist doctrine starts to spread among the workers, the property order itself becomes threatened. At that point, the bourgeoisie is faced with the choice of sacrificing its class rule or abandoning the facade of democratic machinery, which becomes intolerable. Power is then handed over to fascist groups to stamp out opposition and repeal economic safeguards for wage-earners.

History shows the process all too clearly. When the quantity of class pressure reaches a certain threshold, it leads to a qualitative change in the nature of the state, transforming what was liberal democracy into a fascist dictatorship. Ishay Landa has demonstrated that the Nazi regime was in no sense anti-capitalist. It sold off state assets, destroyed trade unions, and won the enthusiastic support of major industrialists. In fact, Hitler looked up to the British Empire as a model of ruthless imperialism, and remarked that “no nation ever prepared better for economic conquest even with the sword. or later maintained it more ruthlessly, than the British” The concentration camps had their models in the British camps for Boer civilians and the genocidal dispossession of Indigenous peoples from colonized territories. Mass detention and racial extermination, far from having been invented by German fascists, were a direct continuation of liberal colonial practice. Fascism is the logical terminus of liberal capitalism when it can no longer maintain its democratic pretense.

This dialectic is accelerating today all across the western world. Neoliberalism, the contemporary form of economic liberalism, has now dismantled most of the social democratic compromises of postwar capitalism, having abolished welfare protections, privatised public goods, and deregulated finance. Workers are exposed to market shocks while austerity imposes misery on many in order to concentrate the wealth in ever fewer hands. The liberal state constantly seeks to extend its security apparatus by using mass surveillance to spy on citizens, by criminalizing dissent, and by prosecuting whistleblowers like Julian Assange for exposing state crimes. The political centre in the West presents itself as the moderate choice between the extremes of left and right. In reality, it defends the status quo of capitalist relations. All the while, the far right is groomed as a backup plan, ready to step in should the status quo start to tilt toward genuine socialism. Hence, the liberal centre and the fascist right should be viewed as divisions of labour within the camp of capital rather than being opposites.

Liberalism belongs firmly on the right, for it is the ideology of a class system based on exploitation. It peddles abstract notions of freedom and democracy as universal goods, while enshrining in law the right to private property. The tangible result is that economic power remains concentrated in the hands of capitalists, who use it to dominate political life. As the crises of capitalism grow more severe, so does the tension within capitalist societies, leading them to abandon their democratic facade to reveal the true face of class dictatorship. The antidote to fascism is the abolition of the capitalist relations for whose preservation liberalism works, an abolition that can only be achieved through the seizure of State power by the exploited class, which is the very antithesis of liberal governance. Today, the fight is for nothing less than the dictatorship of the proletariat, and through it, for a socialist society in which the workers control the means of production.