Democracy and Capitalism Are Heading for a Breakup

Once upon a time Marxist-Leninists said that the state, after its seizure by the proletariat, would wither away. Instead, big government grew more oppressive in communist countries. In our own deeply ideological age of global capitalism, the state was supposed to yield to the logic of the free market, while being a self-effacing facilitator of private investment.

Fittingly, global capital initially found its best investment climate in a country recovering from Marxist Leninism: China, where a nominally Communist regime gave subsidies and tax breaks to exporters and foreign investors. The unelected regime’s lack of democratic accountability helped in this process of marketization, especially in the swift and largely unpublicized suppression of peasants and factory workers.