The fight against corruption has become a defining theme of contemporary politics. Everyone from the World Bank to Donald Trump insists on the need to clean up the swamp and oust wrongdoer officials. Yet from the soft coup that removed former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff to Filipino strongman Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous campaign against supposed criminals, “anticorruption” can take on sharply reactionary hues.

The Left has struggled to offer a coherent response to this problem, particularly when anticorruption politics are mobilized against progressive governments. It has often dismissed corruption as a mere outward expression of capitalism that does not need addressing on its own terms; treated allegations of wrongdoing as nothing but a right-wing smear campaign; or even worse, opportunistically tagged along with the Right’s own anticorruption rhetoric.

Yet if the Left is serious about wielding and transforming state power, it needs to go beyond a moralistic understanding of this question. No one could reasonably advocate “for” corruption. Yet it is only by properly understanding the sources of this ill and the reasons for its ongoing relevance that we can address it as a political problem.