I read with great interest the op-ed by Taj Donville-Outerbridge, published on August 26. While I am certainly not the only socialist in Bermuda, it is refreshing to have another socialist also contributing to our political discourse, adding their own unique perspective to the conversation.

While that piece was nominally concerning the Free Democratic Movement and the potential risks that their libertarian ideology poses, I felt that it raised some interesting questions for socialist strategy in the Bermuda context, which I would like to expand on somewhat here.

The key questions that I felt arose are: the role of the state; the role of unions and the party; whether socialism can be realised in Bermuda; and the problem of lesser evilism. Each of these issues could fill whole books, if not bookshelves – as such I will only try to trace out mere outlines for further discussion here.

The role of the state is a key question, and one that is foundational to any socialist strategy. The state predates capitalism; however it has since been co-opted by it to the point that one can generally refer to the current form as a capitalist state – indeed, one may well argue that if the state did not exist, it would be in capitalism’s interest to invent it.

In Marxist terms, the capitalist state, be it our parliamentary democracy, or more authoritarian forms, can be described as the dictatorship of capital. It serves to protect and maintain the capitalist system of accumulation, in its various forms, with protection of property law as a key aspect. It also includes a monopoly of force, with which it maintains itself in power against rival forces – both internal and external.

While in some forms (such as Bermuda pre-emancipation, and even for some time after) it can be seen as a simple tool of capitalists (in Bermuda’s context, maintaining slavery and then Jim Crow).

In its more mature forms one can see it as more nuanced – inasmuch as capitalism is more developed in Bermuda today. That is, there are competing capitals, while in earlier times the differentiation of capital in Bermuda was far more simplistic.

Of course, there remain some key capital factions, that we can roughly describe as international business, banking, tourism, construction, retail, landlords (both residential and commercial) and restaurants (with lesser forms of capital such as agriculture, etc).

The capitalist state in this sense serves to balance the competing interests of these rival factions in such a way as to maintain the general capitalist system – even if this or that capital is more dominant at this or that time.

And this is somewhat reflected in our political parties – while international business has been the dominant faction of capital for decades, cultivating relations with both main parties, each main party is assembled of a different combination of respective factions. This can be further divided between Black and White capital, itself reflected in our parties.

The state, however, is not necessarily directly under the thumb of capital – it retains a degree of autonomy. This is necessary for the benefit of capital generally to balance the competing interests of the rival factions. And in this sense, the state can itself be a field of the class struggle – both internally, and externally, in the sense that it also helps regulate the clash of competing interests between capital and labour.

The state can be used to reign in the excesses of capital, and to serve the interests of labour. Its role in such areas as labour law, trade union law, the length of the working day, public holidays, health insurance and pensions are the more obvious aspects of this, however pretty much all legislation and enforcement touches on matters of relevance to labour. Capitalism may be totalitarian in the sense of touching all things, but so is labour.

We see this in the past, where Bermuda’s government practised both an extreme form of affirmative action for Whites and its opposite in the form of theft of labour and resources from the enslaved and oppressed Black and First Nations peoples. The ending of formal oppression did nothing to change the inequity that this history produced – it continues by inertia in what we today would call structural racism.

The class struggle is still played out accordingly – the Progressive Labour Party retains an organic connection to labour, and thus pushes to address this historic inequality, albeit only marginally and largely ineffectively, inasmuch as it refuses to challenge the logic of capital itself, reducing its room for manoeuvre to address structural racism – I would argue it cannot be addressed within capitalism itself.

Political parties that are less connected to labour are more prone to introduce policies that benefit capital over labour even more so, either overtly or covertly through non-intervention altogether.

Thus, why the One Bermuda Alliance, like the United Bermuda Party before it, is seen as structurally racist – their policies serve to either reinforce structural racism or to do nothing about it, thus maintaining it with their colour-blind philosophy. The failure of the PLP to match their rhetoric, hamstrung as they are by the logic of capital, leaves space open for more extreme ideologies that, clothed in rhetoric of “freedom” is but freedom for capital, and in practice further strengthens structural racism, and even encourages neo-segregationism.

Ultimately, the state today is a capitalist state – however it does reflect the class struggle, and thus it cannot be ignored. It can, indeed, be “captured” by labour, to varying degrees, and used to counter or mitigate aspects of capital for the benefit of labour, by protecting past victories and consolidating new victories won by the class struggle.

However, the conquest of state power is not in itself sufficient, and comes with its own risks, something that I will look to address later in this series.

• Jonathan Starling is a socialist writer with an MSc in Ecological Economics from the University of Edinburgh and an MSc in Urban and Regional Planning from Heriot-Watt University