“Polling finds 52% of Gen Z thought UK would be better place if ‘strong leader did not have to bother with parliament and elections” [Guardian 27 June 2025]

According to polls we’re seeing a generational collapse in support for democracy. 

This is the bitter fruits of the failures of ‘capitalist democracy’ – which has always been distorted and hypocritical. 

The reality is that the apparent basis of capitalist democracy (voting for parliaments or presidents every few years, a ‘free press’ and civic life) has been significantly reduced  in recent years. Today many people in the world live under authoritarian regimes or outright dictatorships. 

China has 18% of the world’s population and is a dictatorship run by the CCP which rules over a capitalist state. India, 20% of the world’s population still has elections but has systematic racism and corruption built into its polity now under Modi and his Hindu chauvinism. 

Russia has 144 million people  and has a de facto dictatorship under Putin despite the elections which are widely regarded as a sham, as opposition parties and civil society groups are routinely persecuted and their activists imprisoned. 

Authoritarian parties and figures increasingly dominate in the west. Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban in Hungary. They sit alongside ‘libertarians’ like Milei in Argentina who want to shrink the state massively whilst also reducing civic engagement and democratic norms. 

The Economist Intelligence Unit which produces the World Democracy Index concluded in 2023 that “Less than 8% of the world’s population live in a full democracy, while almost 40% live under authoritarian rule — a share that has been creeping up in recent years. The increasing incidence of violent conflict has badly dented the global democracy score and prevented a recovery after the pandemic years of 2020-22.” 

And this is before Trump’s re-election. 

What is causing the crisis? 

Democracy under capitalism has always been distorted and narrow. Distorted because money is decisive and the influential media is controlled by the capitalist class. So you can never really say any election is “free and fair” when the ideological underpinning of any election is always based on a populace that exists within capitalism and the dominant ideas of the ruling class.

It is narrow because the range of options in most elections is between different ways of managing capitalism. “They are all the same” is the lament of voters, exhausted from a narrow range of cookie cutter politicians who all accept a lot of the consensus views, with only differences on a few issues.

In addition, electoral parliamentary or presidential democracy replicates passive political relations of experts  or “politicians” doing things for you. It is also based on the divisions under capitalism between the exploited labourers (both paid and unpaid) and concentration of power by the ruling class into a police-military-bureaucracy that sustains and defends their rule. 

At the same time it  does allow for some reforms to occur to maintain capitalist hegemony and sustain it as a system. Capital plus electoral parliamentary democracy is what often sustains capitalism as a system, the tyranny of capital ruling over us with the veneer of democratic controls. This  creates a culture of depoliticisation and general dissatisfaction (nothing changes/they’re all the same). 

 The working class in Britain had to fight for the vote throughout the 19th century, with massive battles, riots, strikes and even armed uprisings (e.g. Newport 1842) as working people who were excluded from politics fought for the right to vote and to have working class representatives in the parliament. 

There were several reforms throughout the 1800s before the First World War in 1914-18. After that horrid imperialist slaughter, the ruling class were terrified of the impact of the Russian revolution of 1917 and introduced universal manhood suffrage in 1918 and then for all women (over 21) in 1928. 

Working class organisations like trade unions formed the Labour Party to represent their interests in parliament. This was intended to subdue revolutionary enthusiasm with the prospect of ‘gradual reforms’. But Labour ended up totally wedded to the capitalist system and keeping it functioning, acting to redistribute some of the wealth and introduce some better conditions for people whilst keeping (and in order to keep) capitalism functioning properly. 

But in many parts of the global south the idea of ‘democracy’ never even got off the ground. Subjugated as colonies, beaten and brutalised, they were then patronised as children unable to rule their own affairs, and shoe-horned into countries artificially created by ‘chaos with maps’. Then when independence happened, the previous colonial rulers constantly interfered (assassinations of heads of state, backing coups, economic manipulation etc). Not surprisingly, many post colonial countries struggled to establish stable democratic regimes. This was the consequence of the violence of colonialism and the continued interference even after formal “independence..”

Capitalists in the west have valued parliamentary democracy as a way of legitimising their rule and managing the contradiction that their system creates. As the socialist Oscar Ameringer pointed out “Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.” 

Lenin argued against seeing parliamentary democracy under capitalism as a perfect or complete system, since whoever wins the election, Capital still controls our economy and therefore our society “The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament.”

Despite the claims to be in favour of democratic rule, capitalists can also happily discard it if they want, as we saw in fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Franco’s Spain in the 20th century. The capitalist class are thoroughly elitist but tolerate “politics” in a separate sphere as long as it doesn’t interfere in any serious way with their profits. 

Despite this, socialists have often been in the situation of defending even the limited democracy of capitalism from the capitalist class and the media barons. This doesn’t mean slavishly following liberal democratic politicians: it means defending the principles of democratic life even whilst pointing out that under capitalism it cannot be properly implemented (like so many other ‘rights’ that allegedly exist). 

Why are we seeing a particular deterioration now in the idea of democracy as a way to run society?

The current situation 

Firstly the assertion of the supremacy of the market and the reduction of all of us to consumers instead of active engaged citizens is a central part of the neoliberal shift from the 1970s. Neoliberalism was a counter-offensive by the capitalist class to tear down social democracy, the welfare state, the mixed economy and trade union power. It was largely successful, which has led to a less engaged population and also an incredibly rich layer of billionaires who are actively engaging in politics for their own interests.

More than a decade of austerity has had an impact. It has increased the scarcity mindset that “there’s not enough money to go around”  If an element of politics is voting to see what the state can provide (or not), then the years of austerity and roll back of the public sector, can lead to a cynical and depressed view of what is possible, narrowing people’s horizons and  turning them against each other to fight over the scraps. 

The global rise of the authoritarian far right has to be seen in that context. It’s a product of the deterioration of late stage capitalism, the enshittification of everything and a lashing out against the complacent liberal establishment. Demagogues emerge with easy answers and promise to protect you from various enemies (migrants, transpeople, ‘cancel culture’, feminists etc) and restore a natural order to society where there are rigid and clear hierarchies and privileges. 

In periods of crisis, many people yearn for strong leaders with easy answers. Leaders who tell them not to worry, go and enjoy your life, they’ll handle the “enemies” who are making things worse. These strong leaders of course protect the real people in power, the increasingly rich capitalist class, by deflecting blame onto marginalised, less powerful groups. It’s a tale as old as time. 

We also cannot discount the role of China in this situation. China shows a capitalist world where you apparently don’t need democracy. There has been an explosion in online discussions about how good China is compared to the USA, how its people have better housing and social security. In that context with many young people angry about what is going on in the west and their stolen futures are tempted to look at Xi’s regime and see that the grass is greener. Maybe we don’t need democracy – after all it got us Trump? 

There isn’t time to go into the complexities of modern China here but what we do need to discuss is the reality of life in China and the growing problems there which are not dissimilar to the West, see this interview with a Chinese socialist for instance.

A better world 

Despite being critical of the fact that democracy is something of a sham under the tyranny of capitalism, we mustn’t collapse into not caring about this issue.

It was interesting to see in the survey that 47 per cent agreed with the statement “the entire way our society is organised must be radically changed through revolution”. We 100 per cent agree! The tired, collapsing capitalist system is draining life from us and the planet – working until we are 70 on low pay, exploited and oppressed, living in conditions of scarcity whilst the rich are living unimaginable luxury. In the words of Audrey Lorde, we cannot use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, we need new power, new organisation and new economics to ensure we have a good life for everyone. 

Being able to make decisions about the world you live in and how it functions is a crucial part of the realisation of the complete human being. Feeling that you have a voice, that you can have some input and engagement in wider society means that you can rise from being only a consumer of things, or a worker, to being a person operating alongside others in democratic decision making. 

This means having to remove the capitalist class from power; we could agree with Lenin here that  “democracy, in essence, means the abolition of class domination”.  We have to relentlessly fight for the principle of an active, engaged population, with time to participate both practically and intellectually in decision making. This is crucial because we face problems on this planet which cannot be solved by any autocrat or demagogue, problems of wealth inequality and global warming which will require us as a species to work collaboratively to overcome.

Our creative energies in a participatory democracy are a crucial part of that new world, free from class oppression and exploitation we can achieve wonders. But that means a fight here and now to defend the principle of democracy and explain how we can organise society differently.

NB Alt text used for inline image also applies to featured image