Capitalism Cannot Be Humanised
Only an international revolutionary movement can confront its violence — and without abolishing capitalism, the green movement will fall just as the red did.
I need to be honest about how I’m navigating the weight of personal history, propaganda, and political awakening. As someone on the Marxist left — and as someone who sees DiEM25 as firmly rooted in the broad, internationalist socialist tradition — I want to add a small but important nuance. I don’t believe there is any progress to be gained by shunning revolutionary communist movements worldwide; we share a common struggle against capitalism. For years I was afraid to call myself a communist, but I no longer fear the label.
That said, I would never defend, excuse, or relativize the horrific crimes committed by authoritarian regimes that called themselves “communist.” Those lived experiences — including yours — deserve to be heard without minimization. At the same time, I’m uneasy with the way these tragedies are often reduced to a simplistic moral accounting, as if the complexities of political economy, class struggle, war, imperial encirclement, bureaucratization, and historical context can be collapsed into a single number or label weaponized to discredit the entire socialist and communist tradition.
As a Marxist and anti-imperialist, I understand communism and socialism as part of the same emancipatory tradition. The label that has resonated most with me is internationalist socialist — not as a defender of any particular historical regime, but as someone committed to a global project of liberation. Yet that framing also obscured something for me for a long time: the common struggle faced by the vast majority of people worldwide. It is the shared fight against capitalism — what I often call the dictatorship of capital — that shapes our lives in this capitalist system.
Marxism, for many of us, is fundamentally a critique of domination — whether expressed through authoritarian state violence or through capitalist exploitation — not an endorsement of repression. The tragedies of the 20th century must be studied soberly, but not used to shut down discussions of alternatives to the capitalist order that is today enabling genocide in Gaza and Sudan and sustaining violent imperial, colonial and patriarchal systems globally.
This is exactly why the excitement around Zohran Mamdani’s recent victory has been complicated for me. In my own publication, I wrote about how meaningful his win felt — yet how small it remains in the larger revolutionary struggle. Elina Xenophontos captured this tension brilliantly.
She argued that while democratic socialists like Mamdani seems to believe socialism can be achieved through reforms within capitalist institutions, this rests on an ideological contradiction: expecting structures designed to protect profit-driven capital to simultaneously advance working-class interests. Historically, such contradictions have forced even the most principled democratic socialists to concede to capital, ultimately betraying the very class they aim to represent.
Within the U.S. financialized mode of production, Mamdani’s proposals run into structural limits that go far beyond ideological opposition. Policies that threaten profitability in a city dependent on the FIRE sector will trigger capital flight, investor retaliation, bond-market punishment, or fiscal crisis. Even if reforms are permitted, any gains would be instantly offset by the disciplining mechanisms of capitalism itself.
In these late stages of U.S. capitalist decline — defined by debt, speculation, and geopolitical competition — the state can no longer even offer the welfare concessions it once used to pacify class consciousness. Its only tools are to squeeze the working class further or to socialize production entirely. And the bourgeoisie will choose the former every time.
This is the trap of democratic socialism: it fights on a battlefield designed by its enemy, using weapons set to fail. And when reforms inevitably collapse under capitalist pressure, the blame will fall not on the system but on the reformers themselves — discrediting socialism for a generation.
Elina Xenophontos is clear that reforms have historically played progressive roles; before the October Revolution, they helped build and mobilize the working class. But the material conditions in the U.S. today are vastly different. Failures of figures like Mamdani — even if inevitable — risk undermining faith not only in socialism but in any alternative to capitalism.
All of this reinforces why I see capitalism as irreformable. Any attempt to transform it from within strengthens it, because the system is structurally designed to defend capital. Every meaningful threat will be neutralized — through state violence or through capital’s vast arsenal of tools to stifle progressive and revolutionary movements.
The red movement was crushed, and the green movement will be as well, because they confront the same enemy: capital accumulation. The ruling class will not abandon what generates profit, especially when profit is legally protected and endlessly expandable.
This is also why I’ve decided to decrease my, so far, very active engagement with DiEM25 and redirect my political energies toward the revolutionary communist international. I do not say this lightly. DiEM25 has offered an important space for internationalist, democratic critique, and many of its members are committed to building a better world. But the more I study the structural limits of reform within capitalism, the clearer it becomes that movements rooted in social-democratic or left-reformist strategies cannot confront the fundamental contradictions of capital. I think Yanis Varoufakis rodeo with Syriza confirms this with emphasis.
What we are fighting cannot be defeated with ambiguity. Capitalism is not simply a set of bad policies; it is a global mode of production sustained by exploitation, accumulation, imperial domination, and state violence. Any project that attempts to humanize capitalism while leaving its foundations intact inevitably stabilizes the very system it seeks to transform. That includes electoral-left projects, which are structurally compelled to compromise, dilute their politics, or retreat under pressure from markets, capital flight, and repression.
For me, the task now is to engage in a movement that is explicit about the need to overthrow capitalist social relations rather than reform them. A movement rooted in Marxist theory, internationalist solidarity, and a clear-sighted analysis of class struggle. A movement that understands that socialism cannot be grafted onto capitalist institutions but must arise from their abolition. This is why I’m choosing to politically align with a revolutionary communist international: to join a struggle that is unambiguously committed to ending exploitation, dismantling imperialism, and replacing capitalism — not patching it, not apologizing for it, and not negotiating with it. Only by building an organized, militant, international working-class movement can we confront the enormity of what we face.
At the same time, lived experience with authoritarianism sharpens one’s sensitivity to propaganda and injustice everywhere — not just from one ideological camp. Wether it be Russia’s invasion to recognizing Western complicity in Gaza — reflects this. It shows that authoritarianism and state violence are not tied to any single ideology; they arise wherever concentrated power goes unchallenged.
As someone on the Marxist left, I simply want to emphasize that our critique of capitalism and imperialism comes from the desire for a world free of domination — whether that domination is enforced by markets or by a one-party state.
This text was something I needed — above all to understand for myself why I’m drawn to the internationalist, democratic, anti-authoritarian politics that movements like DiEM25 strive to articulate, even as I now commit to a more revolutionary path beyond the limits of reform into which the DiEM25 struggle seems to have settled. I will remain a supportive member, and I hope the movement grows bolder. I hope this text offers you, my dear reader, a thing or two to think about.
Our shared struggle.
In solidarity,
Adam
*Originally this is published through Adam’s life which is my personal publication where I publish a collection of my personal stories that gives hope in our shared struggle, remember hope is a discipline.