Democracy for the Rich Versus Democracy for All
Capitalism has turned democracy into its opposite—democracy for the few and brutal dictatorship over the many.
The U.S. touts itself as the quintessential leader of democracy in the world yet it costs tens-of-millions-of dollars to win an election here—and this true for all capitalist countries who call themselves democratic. Whether they have a parliamentary system, or a presidential system within a federal republic like the U.S.—it is the wealthy elite who rule over the majority. This is also true for countries who do not call themselves democratic.
The exception is Cuba—a tiny country with very limited resources. While they have a single “leader,” industry is nationalized and based upon production for need, not profit. They also have community councils that democratically govern community concerns at the ground level. Unfortunately, they are also in a severe economic crisis due to a worldwide U.S. blockade and embargo stripping them of their ability to trade for the things they need to improve the quality of life for the Cuban people—and everything to do with thwarting their ability to carry out the gains of the Cuban socialist revolution.
The U.S. war on Venezuela (and Cuba, Palestine, Syria, Nigeria, Sudan, to name a few) exposes the true nature of U.S. “democracy”
The assault on Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries the U.S. military is targeting has nothing to do with bringing democracy or economic stability to the people and everything to do with gaining control over their natural resources for U.S. private investment interests.
The U.S. first started investing in Venezuela in the 20th century spurred by major oil discoveries in the 1920’s making it a major oil producer with U.S. corporations claiming ownership of Venezuelan oil and the territory it sits on. In a December 18, 2025, New York Times article by Sam Sifton titled, “Is It About the Oil?” the author explains:
“…Trump remembers a past when South and Central America were open markets. Before Venezuela nationalized its oil industry in 1976, foreign companies accounted for 70 percent of production there. American drillers like Exxon, Mobil and Gulf Oil were major players. (Today, only one American company, Chevron, still operates in Venezuela.) … Stephen Miller, the White House homeland security adviser, recalled that bygone era on social media. … ‘American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela,’ he wrote. ‘Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.’”
And in a December 17, 2025, New York Times article by David E. Sanger, titled, “For Hegseth, There Is One Boat Strike He Doesn’t Want the Public to See,” (specifically, the U.S. murder of two survivors of a U.S. targeted boat strike who were seen clinging to flotsam and waving for help then blown up by a U.S. drone.):
“Mr. Trump suggested the real objective [of the boat strikes] was to get Venezuela to return ‘all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.’”
So, the U.S. owners of corporate investments everywhere in the world claim that their ownership gives them the right not only to the natural resources, but to the very territory they sit upon or are extracted from.
This includes the U.S. factories around the world—in China, India, Vietnam, to name a few. U.S. corporations claim the right to invest in virtually every country where there is a profit to be made.
According to capitalist democracy, it is the democratic right of corporations to compete for and own property anywhere in the world they so desire. And this right is claimed not only by major U.S. corporations, but by corporations everywhere—placing U.S corporations in the forefront of fierce competition with corporations from other countries.
The right of the private ownership of the means of production under capitalism supersedes all other rights and can be enforced by any means necessary, including nuclear war.
Capitalists make the laws—including laws regarding democratic rights—and enforce them through the threat of war, the police, the courts and incarceration.
The democracy they fight for is the right of the rich to privately own and control the wealth and resources of the whole world at the expense of everyone else—the masses of the poor and the working class.
That’s why, under capitalism, only they can own and control the means of production. Only they can lay claim to the tremendous profits produced by our labor—our sweat and blood—and all too often, our lives in the case of war.
The democratic rights of workers under capitalism
The democratic right of the masses—all of us who do not own the means of production—is the right to vote for one wealthy representative of the capitalist class over another.
As a Democratic or Republican candidate, you must support capitalism to survive in any capitalist party—to garner the millions of dollars of donations from wealthy capitalists in order to win an election.
We do not live in a democracy. We live in a capitalist dictatorship of the wealthy over the poor.
There is no democracy on the job. The boss is in charge, and workers have no right to vote on who will be the boss. Just as we have no right to vote on how much pay we earn; how much our rent is; how much we must pay for healthcare or education; how much in taxes we must pay or how much we must pay for a stick of butter. Prices are dictated to us by the corporations and enforced by the government—the police and the military.
Worker’s democracy
Worker’s democracy is defined by majority rule. A strike is an expression of worker’s democracy on the job. A strike is effective only if the majority of workers participate in it. And this depends on how well workers are organized in their own defense against the controlling minority—the capitalist class.
A victorious strike reinforces the reality that unity and solidarity toward a common goal can be victorious over the bosses because workers are the majority and if we go on strike and don’t work, the capitalist engine of production stops and so does their flow of profits.
Strikes are also an example that we who do the work could, in our numbers, completely control production without the capitalist class.
If workers were in ownership and control of production, we could stop the production of products designed to break down—creating not only financial hardship by having to replace things over and over again but creating trillions of dollars in waste of materials that become mountains of trash that pollute our environment.
In just the last ten years I have had to replace two refrigerators, a stove, two washing machines and two dryers that broke down and were unrepairable in spite of the “protection plans” I had been paying for regularly—the plans simply didn’t cover the specific parts that were planned to break down first!
Capitalist production is irrational because it is production for nothing else but profit. Having to buy products over and over again because they are designed to break down benefits the owners of the means of production—to the detriment of the owners of the shabby products they produce and to the horrendous detriment of our planet’s environment.
If the working class owned and controlled the means of production, we could produce products built and designed to last and that can be repaired instead of replaced. We could make waste obsolete.
It’s the workers who know how to run the factories, stores, hospitals, schools, construction, power and water services, farms, railroads, airlines—workers know how to work—proving that capitalists are completely superfluous to production. Their only role is to keep control of the profits, and that’s what they designed the capitalist state to do.
Unions
The major labor unions in the U.S. are run by a labor bureaucracy that acts in partnership with the bosses. They funnel union funds into the Democratic and Republican parties—the parties of the bosses—claiming that donating these union funds to capitalist party candidates will strengthen the union’s partnership with the bosses which will benefit the workers in the long run.
These labor fakers are paid many times more than the average worker in their industry. In the case of the auto industry, labor leaders earn around four-and-a-half times what the average auto worker makes.
United Auto Worker (UAW) President Shawn Fain earned a gross salary of $229,514, with total payments (including expenses/benefits) reaching $274,407. The average auto worker’s pay varies, but generally falls around $23-$28 per hour or $49,000-$50,000 annually, though top-tier union (UAW) assembly workers at the “Big Three” (Ford, GM, Stellantis) can earn much more, with experienced workers hitting $33+ per hour and total compensation potentially reaching $90,000+ with benefits, while newer hires start lower, around $17 per hour.
The high salaries for union leaders tend to conservatize them making them more likely to want to maintain the status quo of partnership with the bosses rather than putting up a real fight for better pay and benefits for the majority rank-and-file membership.
And far too often, workers are asked to vote on contracts, sight-unseen, upon the recommendation of the labor leadership. Union meetings are too frequently called to rubber-stamp decisions already agreed upon between the union leadership and the bosses behind closed doors.
This really puts a damper on union attendance by the rank and file and, without their participation in the decision-making process, the bosses essentially have no opposition.
To correct this, unions have to be democratized. Contracts should be negotiated and discussed and voted upon by the whole membership in detail, and labor leaders chosen based upon their independence from the bosses and their agreement with the decisive vote of the membership on the contracts. All union leaders and officials should come from the rank and file who have had experience actually working on the job. Shop stewards should come from the union membership not from graduates of “labor studies” courses in college.
Labor leaders must carry out the will of the majority of the rank and file. Labor leaders should be paid no more than the highest rate of pay of the average worker and the membership should be able to change that leadership if they do not carry out the will of the majority.
Workers are the majority and we should have the right to control our organizations without interference from the capitalist class.
We are the majority; we create all the wealth in the world and should have the right to own and control that wealth for the benefit of all of us.
Political organizations
Today we find ourselves splintered, divided, blinded by bigotry and hate to our universal common interests of freedom, justice and economic and social equality—the right to all the necessities of life and happiness—free from capitalist exploitation, starvation and war.
The only solution is to create an economy based upon production for the needs and wants of all by ending production based upon the private ownership of the means of production benefiting only the wealthy while condemning us to a life of servitude and ever-increasing poverty.
We need to build workers’ organizations that empower the entire working class to control our own destiny by rejecting capitalism’s minority rule over us.
We must, as the most powerful class in the world, reject bigotry of all kinds, unite in pursuit of our common interests—through cooperation, democratic discussions of the issues we face in common and democratic decision-making that allow we, the majority, to rule our own lives and livelihoods to benefit all of us everywhere in the world.
All workers’ political organizations—from united front coalitions to independent working-class parties—must be organized and run democratically—one-person-one-vote and majority rule.
Capitalist rule is from the top down—the wealthy rule—and the masses of workers and the poor must serve this tiny minority or starve.
Only well-organized, democratically run organizations of the working class and our allies can turn capitalist rule upside-down and take the control of our social structure and resources out of the hands of the capitalist class and into our own hands.
United Front-type organizations
United fronts are powerful tools for organizing massive support for particular issues that affect masses of people such as immigrant rights, free speech, the right to protest, the fight against war and genocide, LGBTQ rights, democratic rights, the right to healthcare, education, housing, etc. anyone can be a part of a coalition no matter who they are if they support the demands of the democratically organized coalition. They need not agree on other issues to form a powerful battle for the demands they do agree upon.
Participating in a united front type of organization should be a lesson in democratic decision-making including planned conferences and conventions, free and open discussions that include the right of the minority to participate fully in debates, etc., and ultimately, the right of the majority and the leadership it chooses, to rule until the next planned conference or convention.
The majority must have the right to carry out their program. That means that while the minority has a right to their opinions, they are obligated to respect and carry out the will of the majority until the next democratic decision-making body has had the time to evaluate the effectiveness of their program in the real world.
Again, any compensation paid to the leadership of any workers’ organization must not exceed highest wages of the average worker. And the rank and file must have the right to remove leaders who do not carry out the decisions of the majority.
A labor party
An independent labor party can represent the most rational alternative to the capitalist parties that are dead ends on the road to social and economic equality and freedom and justice for all.
Any labor party must, first and foremost, be completely independent of all capitalist parties. Capitalism, by its very nature, is undemocratic. It’s the rule of a tiny minority over the lives of the overwhelming masses of people in the world through the use of force and violence—to maintain their rule over us and the vast wealth produced from our labor—of which we get only a tiny portion. And we have to fight bitterly for every penny we get.
An effective labor party can bring the united front organizations together with the unions to democratically develop a common program to fight against war, violence, racism, sexism, and bigotry—all the things that capitalism has devised to divide us and make us feel helpless—and fight for the common needs and wants of all.
United, we will have the power and the strength we need to rid the world of the despotism of capitalism’s tyranny and establish a socialist society under the democratic control of we who do the work, to create a bounty of wealth we all can share.
1 History of U.S. involvement in Venezuela’s petroleum industry
2 CBS News and Reddit.
How much does the average auto worker make