Today’s political consensus insists stridently upon the affinity between capitalism and democracy. For ideologues of the free market, any substantial restrictions on the freedom of capital to do as it pleases must lead societies down the “road to serfdom,” as Friedrich Hayek famously called it. Liberals and social democrats who believe that markets can and should be regulated still concede that a system based on private ownership of economic resources is essential if freedom is to be preserved.

Yet the merest glance at the historical record shows that capitalists have been major backers for some of the most notoriously authoritarian regimes in history, from Hitler’s Third Reich to South African apartheid and the juntas of Latin America. Even if we define “democracy” in the most minimal sense, as a set of procedures for alternating government teams through formally peaceful methods, there is clearly no necessary link between capitalism and such a political framework; their coexistence is possible but by no means inevitable.

At a time when right-wing authoritarian forces are rearing their head once again, even in the most long-established capitalist democracies, a realistic assessment of where capitalists stand in relation to democracy is vital. Capitalist classes are neither irreducibly hostile to, nor invariably supportive of, democracy. Rather their political interests, like that of other classes, flow from their specific structural location within class relations and from the concrete circumstances of the class struggle.