The contemporary defence of capitalism often begins with a triumphal sentence: capitalism produces wealth. This may be true, but insufficient. A system must not be judged only by what it produces; it must be judged by what it concentrates, what it destroys, what it normalises, and what kind of human being it asks us to become in order to survive within it. Capitalism has produced abundance, but it has also produced a civilisation in which abundance is structurally separated from need. It has created technological splendour beside hunger, financial sophistication beside precarious labour, private luxury beside public exhaustion.
The central philosophical question, therefore, is not whether capitalism works. It clearly works for some. The question is whether it can still be morally defended as the organising principle of a society that claims to value dignity, democracy and human flourishing.
The communist argument begins precisely here: not as a nostalgic return to twentieth-century authoritarianism, but as a critique of the private appropriation of collective life. In Marx, capitalism is not merely an economy; it is a social relation in which labour produces value while capital captures it. In Karl Polanyi, the market society becomes intolerable because it turns land, labour and money into fictitious commodities, treating human beings and nature as if they existed primarily for exchange. In Nancy Fraser, capitalism survives by cannibalising the very spheres it depends on: care, ecology, public institutions and social reproduction. In David Harvey, capitalism is restless accumulation: it must expand, privatise, extract and urbanise, even when human need no longer requires it.
The result is not accidental inequality, but organised inequality.
Globally, the World Inequality Report 2026 states that the richest 10% own three-quarters of global wealth, while the poorest half of humanity owns only 2%. The same report notes that the poorest half captures less than 10% of global income. This is not a marginal imperfection; it is the architecture of the system. It means that billions of lives are lived downstream from decisions made by a tiny class whose power is not merely economic, but political, cultural and ecological.
Capitalism thus produces a paradox: the more productive society becomes, the less socially rational it appears. It is possible to produce enough food, yet tolerate hunger. It is possible to build hospitals, yet deny care. It is possible to educate every child, yet transform education into inherited advantage. It is possible to house people, yet preserve homelessness as a disciplinary spectacle. The communist critique insists that such contradictions are not failures of generosity, but failures of ownership.
I. Inequality as the Hidden Constitution of Capitalism
The first defect of contemporary capitalism is the concentration of income and wealth. Liberal theory often treats inequality as a tolerable side effect of freedom. But this is a philosophical deception. Extreme inequality does not merely distribute goods unequally; it distributes life chances, time, health, education, safety and political voice unequally.
Thomas Piketty’s historical work shows that, when capital accumulation is left largely unchecked, inherited wealth tends to grow faster than wages and productive growth. Pierre Bourdieu helps explain why this inequality reproduces itself beyond money: economic capital becomes cultural capital, educational advantage, confidence, taste, language, networks and legitimacy. The child of the elite does not inherit only property; they inherit the grammar of power.
Brasil is one of the clearest laboratories of this problem. Even after recent improvements, IBGE data show that Brasil’s Gini index for per capita household income remained at 0.504 in 2024; without social programme benefits, it would have risen to 0.542. In other words, the Brazilian state already prevents inequality from becoming even more obscene. The country is not poor because it lacks wealth; it is socially wounded because wealth is badly organised.
This is where communism makes philosophical sense. It refuses to treat redistribution as charity. It asks why the productive structure itself allows so much wealth to be privately captured in the first place. A communist horizon does not simply mean taxing the rich after inequality has been produced. It means democratising the institutions that produce wealth: land, credit, housing, infrastructure, technology, natural resources and strategic industries.
In capitalist society, redistribution is often treated as correction. In communist thought, equality must be built into production itself.
II. Crime, Violence and the Social Manufacture of Despair
A second defect of capitalism is its tendency to criminalise the consequences of its own exclusions. Societies that deny stable housing, dignified labour, education and social belonging then express astonishment when abandonment returns as violence. This does not mean every crime has a simple economic explanation. It means that crime is never merely individual. It is also spatial, historical and institutional.
Loïc Wacquant’s sociology of urban marginality is essential here. He shows how neoliberal states often withdraw social protection from poor territories while expanding penal control over those same territories. The state disappears as school, clinic, housing policy and labour guarantee, then reappears as police, prison and surveillance.
Brasil’s violence must be read through this lens. Ipea and the Brazilian Forum on Public Security reported 45,747 homicides in Brasil in 2023, a rate of 21.2 per 100,000 inhabitants; although this was the lowest rate in eleven years, the figures remain devastating, and the highest rates are concentrated in the North and Northeast.
Communism answers this not by romanticising crime, but by attacking its social conditions. A society organised around common welfare would treat violence prevention as housing policy, school policy, employment policy, mental health policy, urban policy and racial justice. The right-wing answer to crime is usually punishment after social collapse. The communist answer is the prevention of collapse itself.
This is not sentimentalism. The OECD has found that inequality has a negative and statistically significant impact on subsequent economic growth, partly because it damages human capital formation among people from poorer backgrounds. The IMF has also concluded that inequality is a robust determinant of both the pace and durability of growth, and that it is a mistake to “focus on growth and let inequality take care of itself.”
A society with less inequality is not only fairer. It is more stable, more intelligent, less violent and less wasteful.
III. Health and Education: The Moral Proof of Socialism Already Existing Inside Brasil
Brasil already contains, within its own institutions, fragments of a socialist moral order. The SUS is the clearest example. It is founded on the principle that health is not a commodity, but a universal right. According to Agência Brasil, 76% of Brazilians depend directly on the SUS, which conducts around 2.8 billion consultations per year. The Commonwealth Fund also describes Brasil’s SUS as a tax-funded universal system, free at the point of care, covering all residents and visitors.
This is philosophically decisive. When Brazilians defend the SUS, they are already defending a principle that contradicts pure capitalism. They are saying: life must not depend entirely on purchasing power.
The same applies to education. The OECD reports that Brazilian adults aged 25–64 with tertiary education earn, on average, 148% more than those with upper secondary education, far above the OECD average premium of 54%. This shows that education in Brasil is not merely a personal good; it is one of the central mechanisms through which class destiny is reproduced.
A communist perspective does not see education as training for the labour market alone. It sees education as the formation of free human beings capable of participating in collective life. Here Gramsci is fundamental. For him, every class that wishes to govern must produce its own intellectual and moral leadership. Education is not neutral; it is where society teaches people what is possible, what is respectable, what is “natural” and what must never be questioned.
The struggle for education, therefore, is also the struggle over common sense.
IV. War, Empire and the Capitalist Organisation of Fear
Capitalism also has an international form. It does not exist only as private enterprise within nations; it exists as competition between states, corporations, currencies, supply chains and military blocs. Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, despite their differences, both understood imperialism as connected to capital’s need for expansion. Immanuel Wallerstein later described capitalism as a world-system divided between core, semi-periphery and periphery, where wealth flows through unequal global structures.
War cannot be reduced to capitalism alone. Nationalism, religion, territory, ethnicity and state ambition all matter. But capitalism intensifies the material incentives for domination: resources, energy corridors, cheap labour, arms markets, reconstruction contracts, debt dependency and strategic control.
The scale of militarised irrationality is staggering. SIPRI reported that world military expenditure reached $2.887 trillion in 2025, the eleventh consecutive year of growth, with global spending up 41% over the decade from 2016 to 2025.
From a communist perspective, this is not merely a budgetary fact; it is a civilisational indictment. A world that can mobilise trillions for war but hesitates before universal sanitation, climate adaptation, food security and public health is not poor. It is politically deformed.
Communism proposes the replacement of competitive accumulation with planned sufficiency: production organised around need rather than profit, international cooperation rather than imperial hierarchy, and public investment rather than permanent militarisation.
V. How the Right Won the Cultural War in Brasil
To understand Brasil, however, one must not imagine power only as government. This is the core of Gramsci’s relevance. Gramsci argued that ruling classes do not govern by coercion alone. They govern through hegemony: intellectual and moral leadership that makes a particular social order appear natural, inevitable and commonsensical.
The Brazilian right did not gain strength merely through elections. It gained strength by occupying the imagination.
For decades, anti-communism was not presented only as an economic argument, but as a moral instinct. The left was associated with disorder, corruption, atheism, sexual threat, criminal leniency and national decline. Meanwhile, capitalism was translated into the language of family, merit, entrepreneurship, religious virtue, security and individual effort.
This is Gramsci in practice: the transformation of class interest into common sense.
Brazilian media concentration helped form this terrain. The Media Ownership Monitor found that five families controlled 26 of the 50 media outlets with the largest audiences in Brasil, with Grupo Globo alone holding nine of them and reaching an audience larger than the second, third, fourth and fifth largest groups combined. Such concentration does not mean every journalist or outlet is ideologically identical, but it does mean that the symbolic infrastructure of public debate has long been narrow, elite-centred and commercially organised.
Religion also became a decisive field of hegemony. Brasil remains religiously plural, but the 2022 Census data show a major shift: Catholics fell to 56.7%, while Evangelicals rose to 26.9%. This transformation cannot be treated with contempt. Many Evangelical churches provide community, discipline, care, music, language, welfare and belonging in places where the secular state has often arrived late or not at all. But conservative political actors learned to translate economic anxiety into moral panic, and moral panic into electoral discipline.
More recently, digital networks accelerated this process. Studies on Brasil show that WhatsApp became a key infrastructure for political disinformation, including during the rise of Bolsonarism, and research on the 8 January Brasília attack found attempts to manufacture consensus in public WhatsApp groups around anti-democratic narratives.
The contemporary Brazilian right, then, did not simply defend capitalism. It disguised capitalism beneath resentment. It converted economic suffering into hatred of teachers, feminists, artists, Black movements, LGBTQIA+ people, environmentalists, public servants and the poor themselves. As recent Gramscian analysis of Bolsonarism argues, cultural conservatism, anti-globalism, nationalism and conspiracy theory have helped preserve a neoliberal economic agenda by shifting attention away from political economy and towards moral threat.
VI. A Gramscian Route for Brasil
A Gramscian “turn” for Brasil cannot be imagined as a sudden seizure of the state followed by decrees from above. That would misunderstand both Brasil and Gramsci. In complex modern societies, Gramsci distinguishes between a war of manoeuvre and a war of position. A war of manoeuvre is frontal rupture. A war of position is slower, deeper and cultural: the construction of a new historical bloc capable of leading society before it governs it.
For a country like Brasil — continental, unequal, religious, racially stratified, institutionally dense and culturally plural — the communist route would need to be democratic, constitutional, pedagogical and material.
First, it would need to rebuild common sense. The left cannot speak only in administrative language: programmes, budgets, acronyms, ministries. It must produce a moral vocabulary capable of competing with the right’s simplicity. It must say, repeatedly and concretely, that hunger is not fate, rent is not destiny, illness is not a market opportunity, and poverty is not proof of personal failure.
Second, it must form organic intellectuals. For Gramsci, organic intellectuals are not merely professors or writers; they are organisers of feeling and meaning. In Brasil, they would have to emerge from schools, unions, churches, neighbourhood associations, cultural movements, universities, health workers, delivery workers, domestic workers, public servants, artists, pastors, mães de santo, favela leaders, small farmers and digital creators. The point is not propaganda in the crude sense. The point is democratic pedagogy: helping people name the structures that injure them.
Third, the left must stop treating culture as decorative. Culture is infrastructure. Music, television, memes, literature, sport, religion, humour, schools and neighbourhood rituals shape political possibility long before manifestos do. A communist project in Brasil would need popular media, community journalism, public digital platforms, cultural funding outside elite circuits, and a language that does not humiliate ordinary conservatism but patiently separates legitimate moral anxiety from authoritarian manipulation.
Fourth, the economic programme must be concrete enough to touch daily life. It should include progressive taxation of income, wealth, dividends and inheritance; expansion of public housing; universal full-time public education; strengthening of the SUS; public control over strategic infrastructure; green industrial planning; land reform where socially and environmentally justified; incentives for worker cooperatives; public banking for development; and democratic planning mechanisms at municipal, state and federal levels.
Fifth, crime must be removed from the monopoly of the punitive imagination. A communist-inspired security policy would combine intelligence against organised crime with investment in schools, urban infrastructure, employment, drug policy reform, mental health, prison reform and police accountability. The goal would not be naïve pacifism, but the end of the social production of disposable populations.
Sixth, the project must defend democracy more seriously than liberalism has defended it. This means plural parties, free elections, independent courts, press freedom, anti-corruption mechanisms, transparency, participatory budgeting, social councils and constitutional guarantees. A Brazilian communism worthy of the twenty-first century cannot be authoritarian; it must be more democratic than capitalism, or it will deserve to fail.
Seventh, it must construct a new historical bloc. In Brasil, this bloc cannot be only the industrial working class in the classical European sense. It must include informal workers, app drivers, care workers, teachers, nurses, Black and Indigenous movements, women, favela residents, progressive religious communities, small entrepreneurs crushed by monopolies, family farmers, environmentalists and the precarious middle class. Its unifying principle would be simple: no one should have to live permanently afraid in order for others to accumulate without limit.
Conclusion: Communism as the Name of an Unfinished Moral Demand
The case for communism today is not that history has given us a perfect model. It has not. The twentieth century offers warnings as well as hopes. Any serious communist argument must recognise the dangers of bureaucracy, repression, party absolutism and state idolatry.
But the failures committed in the name of communism do not absolve capitalism of its present violence.
Capitalism continues to ask society to accept hunger amid abundance, loneliness amid connectivity, ecological breakdown amid technological brilliance, and obscene wealth amid preventable misery. It tells us that there is no alternative, which is always the sentence spoken by systems that fear being imagined beyond.
Gramsci teaches that political transformation begins before government. It begins when a society stops mistaking domination for common sense. Brasil’s future will not be changed only by winning elections. It will be changed by rebuilding the moral imagination of the country: by making solidarity appear practical, equality appear intelligent, public goods appear sacred, and exploitation appear as archaic as monarchy.
Communism, at its strongest, is not merely a doctrine of the state. It is the insistence that human beings are not born to be managed as costs, ranked as competitors and abandoned as failures. It is the claim that the wealth of a society belongs, in the deepest sense, to those who produce and sustain it.
And in a country like Brasil — so vast, so wounded, so inventive, so accustomed to surviving what should have been politically unacceptable — that claim is not an abstraction. It is perhaps the beginning of a new common sense.