According to one of the most solid theories of historical interpretation, dialectical materialism, symbolic phenomena are expressions of a society’s material basis, its means of production and consumption. After Marx’s death, his followers and detractors introduced variations ranging from Max Weber to the Marxists Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and the Frankfurt School.

Twentieth-century Marxists focused on the idea that the symbolic superstructure is not a mere consequence of the conditions of production and consumption but possesses relative independence and influence over the material basis. This Marxist critique of Marx generally established that these institutions, ideas, and ideologies, independent of economic systems, had the objective, when dominant, of confirming the interests of the benefiting social class. One of the concepts I would like to introduce here lies in the strange and seemingly contradictory dialectic between (1) the symbolic translations of the material basis of societies and (2) those ideas that are, in principle, inconvenient and even foreign to them. I am referring to the two dominant ideological dogmas of the Modern Era: capitalism and democracy. For generations, it has been a common understanding in the United States that the two are the same, just as socialism and dictatorship―or capitalism and Christianity―are.

Liberalism, the ideological articulation of the ancient feudal lords and later slaveholders opposed the concentrated political power of monarchies. It did not oppose parliamentary monarchies that protected the new bourgeois elite (the old nobility) but rather absolutist monarchies (dictatorships) that did not respond to their direct control, represented, as in imperial Athens, by a minority of elected officials, if not by a hereditary senate. The purchase and seizure of state power (the monarchies) by their enemies, the liberal nobility, guaranteed the new ruling class a brutal force of repression against previous communal revolts and peasants dispossessed by the privatization of land through the enclosure system (Flies in the Web).

By definition, capitalism is antidemocratic, since its sole objective lies in the concentration of capital. No democracy is genuine if the freedom of its citizens is limited to a minority that gives orders and a majority that receives them. Without power, there is no (social) freedom, and without money, there is no power. Most members of a capitalist society are wage earners, professionals, or small merchants―that is, they are not capitalists. The power to decide, legislate, buy, and sell goods, services, narratives, and wills is concentrated and privatized. In the United States and any neo-colony, a handful of white men own as much wealth as half the country and dedicate themselves to buying senators and presidents or writing laws directly. The model of slave societies remains intact: everyone has, as in the days of shackled slavery, freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution (as long as the formula P=d.t is met); all have been equally bound by the same mythological dogma (national and religious), by the exact obedience to hard and practical work as the highest value. The corporations that grew rich during slavery survived the legal abolition of the slave system by hijacking the libertarian sermon to present it as their own and claiming credit for the freedoms that former shackled slaves enjoy today.

Historically, capitalism has also always been antidemocratic. Since its birth in the 17th century, in the name of market freedom, individual liberty, and democracy, capitalism has specialized in destroying the freedom of its subjects and slaves. It has been tasked with destroying market freedom, where it existed, to establish the dictatorship of capital and its empires. It has been tasked with destroying democracies, replacing them with banana republic dictators on every continent, whom it vampirized with cannon fire, massacres, and the corruption of oppressed societies, only to then present itself as the exemplary model of development, freedom and civilization.

Another problematic hypothesis is that, unlike Protestantism, democracy contradicted the capitalist system from its material foundation. Why would an idea, an ideology, become the banner of its opposite, capitalism and imperialism? How was it possible for the ideas of democracy to coexist so persistently with ideas such as racial superiority, as was the case with Theodore Roosevelt and all the imperialists of the modern era?

My first answer is that the Enlightenment reflected the profound perplexity caused by the discovery of indigenous democracies in the Americas and, as in the previous cases, set out to hijack them. How? Through the Greek or “Western” precedent. In fact, Rousseau, at the same time as Benjamin Franklin, was fully aware of the experience of American democracies, but he chose to cite the ancient Greeks. Franklin suffered from the same racial prejudice.

The assemblies of Ancient Greece (Ecclesiastes) were composed only of male citizens, similar to American democracy during its first century of existence. In both cases, only 15 percent of the inhabitants participated in elections. Within that percentage, another wealthier minority dominated.

Native American democracy, trafficked by the Jesuit chronicles to Europe, must have had the same psychological and cultural effect as Vespucci’s chronicles in the new antagonistic tradition of social utopias, such as Thomas More’s Utopia. Depending on the power of the new ideas, the ruling class will either hijack or demonize them.

In Iroquois democracy, men and women had a voice and voted in decisions that were made by consensus. Every decision had to be considered the principle of “The Seven Generations.” Athenian democracy was more individualistic, while indigenous democracy established the harmony of the One with the All, translating into greater political and social stability than in Greece or the liberal democracies.

Perhaps the impact of the experience of the “American savages” was greater in 18th-century capitalist Europe because the continent’s historical memory recorded a “vernacular” example, that of Greece, which over time became established as a natural form of replacement for absolute monarchies with the previous tradition of feudal nobles, that is, modern liberals.

Another phenomenon that we will problematize as a working hypothesis can be summarized as follows: All imperial systems are characterized by the politics of cruelty because their main objective is the fear of losing control, even when they represent themselves as civilized, as were the Pax Romana or the Pax Americana. It would be enough to recall the cruel spectacles of the Roman circus, where the unequal fight between a gladiator (a slave) and a lion was exciting for the emperor and the general public. Then, we could continue with the cruelty of empires as diverse as the Mongol, the Aztec, or the more recent Anglo-Saxon empires with their invasions, wars, and massacres in the colonies.

Is true democracy (as was the millennia-old case of the Iroquois) incompatible with geopolitically dominant political systems? I understand it is.

Jorge Majfud, April 2025