The paper examines liberal democracy as a contradictory social formation. On the one hand, liberalism coevolved with capitalism and its alienating, exploitative, and oppressive structures dynamics. On the other hand, just because capitalist property relationships were alienating, exploitative, and oppressive, workers and colonised people were forced to fight back. The democratic side of liberal democracy is largely a result of these struggles. From this perspective, democracy is not so much a particular political form as it is a deeper set of social relationships. The protection and deepening of democracy today must root itself in the history of struggles to reclaim collective control over universally required liferesources.
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