How Reform Rebrands Power Without Redistributing It

Notice: This is not an endorsement of Mr. Reagan. What strikes me is how long it’s taken some folks to catch on—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was never the political outsider she was marketed to be. I remember watching these videos years ago. Even then, it was clear her role was never to disrupt the machinery, but to redirect dissent—to shepherd disillusioned voters back into the Democratic fold. The Justice Democrats weren’t a rupture; they were a renovation.

You can’t change the system from within.

Vladimir Lenin, drawing from Karl Marx in The State and Revolution, wrote:

“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!”

This wasn’t merely a condemnation of bourgeois democracy—it was a warning. Electoral choice, under capitalism, functions less as liberation and more as choreography—a ritual that preserves the machinery of exploitation while dressing it in democratic theater.

Lenin continues:

“But from this capitalist democracy—that is inevitably narrow and stealthily pushes aside the poor, and is therefore hypocritical and false through and through—forward development does not proceed simply, directly and smoothly, towards ‘greater and greater democracy.’”

This isn’t just a rejection of liberal optimism—it’s a confrontation with the myth that incremental reform within capitalist structures leads to liberation. Lenin insists that the path to genuine democracy doesn’t meander gently through congressional corridors. It ruptures. It demands the dismantling of the very institutions that masquerade as democratic while serving elite interests.

The illusion of democratic choice obscures a deeper reality. As Marx observed in The Communist Manifesto,

“The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”

This isn’t rhetorical flourish—it’s a structural diagnosis. Political institutions, no matter how progressive they appear, operate in service to capital. Justice Democrats, marketed as insurgents, ultimately functioned more as stewards of continuity. Their revolution was branded, packaged, and routed through the very mechanisms they claimed to oppose. Reform, in this light, becomes capitalism’s self-cleaning cycle.

And this cycle isn’t exclusive to the centre-left. It’s bipartisan—stretching from Roosevelt’s calculated compassion to Trump’s industrial nationalism. Reform, again and again, has served as capitalism’s crisis management.

As Michael Parenti writes in Democracy for the Few, “Actually, the New Deal’s prime dedication was to business recovery rather than social reform.” His critique slices through the mythology surrounding FDR, revealing a strategy of containment rather than transformation. Reform, as Parenti makes clear, didn’t threaten capitalism—it rescued it. The programs that followed were not steps toward redistribution, but reinforcements of an unstable order.

Trump’s reindustrialization plan echoes the New Deal’s underlying priority: stabilizing capitalism in crisis. This time, the threat is deindustrialization. The prescribed remedy? Tariffs, subsidies, and a rebranded industrial nationalism. His administration seeks to reshore manufacturing, redraw trade hierarchies, and revive domestic production—not to redistribute power, but to fortify it. The language of revival cloaks a defensive posture. It’s not a bid for economic justice; it’s insulation against disruption.

The parallels to Roosevelt’s strategy are striking. FDR’s programs pacified unrest and restored confidence in a shaken order, but never challenged its foundations. Aid was deployed like ballast—heavy enough to steady the ship, never enough to alter its course. What passed as rupture was, in reality, a recalibration.

The language of revival masks deeper continuity. Tariffs serve as instruments of leverage, not liberation. Industrial policy becomes geopolitical chess, not a reckoning with class power. And the working class? Still posed as emblematic backdrop—symbolically invoked but structurally sidelined.

So the machinery hums on. Reform is marketed as resistance, but its seams are stitched with compromise. The system doesn’t fear insurgency—it absorbs it. What’s branded as resistance is often just renovation. And all the while, the machinery hums, unchanged.

—Tina Antonis