All the features we today identify with freedom and liberal democracy (trade unions, the universal vote, free universal education, freedom of the press, etc.) were won through a long a difficult struggle on the part of the lower classes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—in other words, they were anything but the “natural” consequences of capitalist relations.

Recall the list of demands with which The Communist Manifesto concludes: most of them, with the exception of the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, are today widely accepted in “bourgeois” democracies, but only as the result of popular struggles. Those who claim a natural links between capitalism and democracy are cheating with the facts in the same way that the Catholic Church cheats when it presents itself as the “natural” advocate of democracy and human rights against the threat of totalitarianism—as if it were not the case that the Church accepted democracy only at the end of the nineteenth century, and even then with clenched teeth, as a desperate compromise, making it clear that it preferred monarchy, and that it was making a reluctant concession to new times.