The Class's Answer to Evrim Ağacı's Question
Why Doesn't the Opposition Win?
Why Doesn't the Opposition Win? The Class's Answer to Evrim Ağacı's Question
In its video "Why Can't (Don't) Opposition Parties Win?", Evrim Ağacı explains with thermodynamics, evolutionary biology, and game theory why, in multiparty systems, the main opposition stays forever in opposition. The model is cleverly built; but one word never appears in it: class. We will put that word back in and look again at what the model itself is saying.
Dear Young Comrades,
In a half-hour video published on 6 September 2026 (Why Can't (Don't) Opposition Parties Win?), Evrim Ağacı takes up a fact everyone in Turkey senses but cannot name: the same government, the same main opposition, a tableau unchanged for decades. The video drew more than two hundred thousand views in a day. The question itself is the right question and a timely one; let us concede that from the start.
The video's thesis is this: under the wrong institutional and electoral incentives in multiparty systems, remaining the main opposition for a long time is a more profitable, less risky, and evolutionarily "fitter" survival strategy than taking office. Government is like an organism that constantly spends energy against entropy; the opposition is like a "satellite male" that circles that organism and takes a share without paying the cost. When a simple payoff matrix is set up, staying in opposition is the dominant strategy, and both opposition parties staying in opposition is a Nash equilibrium. Katz and Mair's cartel-party theory reinforces this equilibrium; Italy, Japan, Israel, South Africa, and Australia are said to confirm it. Three exits are proposed: leaders taking risks, voters organizing to punish parties that are "comfortable in opposition," and the government losing control.
This essay was not written to polemicize against the video, but to continue from where the video left off. For the video, in its own words, looks at "the mechanics of the thing," and looking at the mechanics it truly sees something chilling. Our claim is that what it sees has been wrongly named. Beneath the mechanics there is not thermodynamics but class relations. And when those relations are made visible, both the riddle of "eternal opposition" is solved and the exits the video proposes lead somewhere else.
We will proceed in three steps. First we will look at what the video's model says and what it does not say. Then we will reread the video's own examples through a class lens. Finally we will replace the question "how does the opposition take power?" with the question "whose opposition, whose power?"
Part One: What Does the Model Say, and What Does It Not Say?
Naturalization: translating politics into biology
At the outset the video makes an honest caveat: parties do not evolve like living organisms; the claim is not that biological evolution explains politics. That caveat is valuable. But what is done after the caveat is exactly what the caveat forbids: the governing party is narrated as an "apex predator" and "dominant male," the opposition as a "satellite male," the voter as "environmental conditions," the political field as a "fitness landscape." The caveat is a footnote; the metaphor is the text itself.
This is not a matter of stylistic preference. Translating social relations into the language of natural laws is among the oldest topics of Marxist critique. In his 1875 letter to Lavrov, Engels objected to applying the Darwinian concept of the "struggle for existence" to society as follows: bourgeois economics first carried Hobbes's "war of all against all" and Malthus's population theory into nature; then the same doctrines were brought back from nature to society, this time as "eternal laws of nature." The cycle is this: a particular historical form of society (competition, the market, property) is projected onto nature; when it is read back from nature, it no longer looks historical but natural.
That is what the video does. "Governing a country" is described as a struggle against entropy: the economy, foreign policy, infrastructure, justice, border security… all of them require maintenance, require energy; government spends that energy, the opposition does not. In this picture, what holds society up is the "budget, bureaucratic effort, political capital, and sleepless nights" spent by the governing party. But where does that budget come from? Who builds the infrastructure, who runs the hospital, who digs the mine? In the video's entropy metaphor, the labor that produces social order is invisible; order appears as the work of the party that manages it. What Marx called fetishism is exactly this: the product torn from the producer and attributed to the one who manages it or owns it. The governing party does not struggle against entropy; it takes on the management of the order society produces with its labor, and conducts that management in the interest of particular classes. What we call the "metabolic load" is the load of securing the continuity of capital accumulation and of keeping under control the contradictions that accumulation creates — that is, class conflict.
The payoff matrix: the numbers are made up, but the assumptions are not
The video's most pedagogical section is the payoff matrix. The base return for staying in opposition is 6 points: "treasury subsidies, municipal budgets, publicly funded staff posts, parliamentary committees, social prestige." Avoiding responsibility +1, coordination among opposition parties +1. The expected return of playing for power is +5, but the cost is −8: the disruption of internal party balances, alienating the core electorate through ideological concessions. Result: staying in opposition is more profitable under every condition; O–O is a Nash equilibrium.
The video says plainly that the numbers are made up, and we thank it for that honesty. But when the numbers in a model are made up, the model's output is only a restatement of its assumptions. The question to ask is not where the numbers come from, but where the assumptions the numbers rest on come from. And when we look at the assumptions, class, thrown out the door, comes in through the window.
First: why does the opposition's "base return" exist? Why does a state finance from the treasury the parties that oppose it, and give them municipal budgets and committee seats? The video takes this as a datum. Yet the answer is the heart of the matter: the party system as a whole is an organ of the bourgeois state. The treasury subsidy is not a maintenance fee paid to the opposition party, but to the party system itself. The state's financing of all "legitimate" parties — government and opposition alike — is the operating cost of the parliamentary form of class rule. In Gramsci's language: the organization of consent is also a cost, and the ruling class pays that cost through the state.
Second: why is the cost of playing for power 8 points? The video lists two items: disruption of internal party balances and "ideological concessions." But what is this ideological concession? If a party, in order to march toward power, must make concessions that will alienate its core voters, then there is a contradiction between the interest of that party's core electorate and the social coalition that power requires. The name of that contradiction is class contradiction. To take power, a party must promise something either to labor or to capital; it cannot promise both at once. The height of the "cost" is the mathematical translation of the party's avoidance of making that choice.
Third: why is the expected return of power only 5? The video calculates this like the expected value of a lottery ticket. But what a party expects from power is what the class it represents expects from power. If the fundamental interests of the class a party represents — the property regime, the accumulation model, the labor regime — are already secured by the existing government, then the "expected return" of taking office is genuinely low for that party. The opposition does not want to be in power; because it has no objection to most of what the government does. What keeps the number low is not game theory but class consensus.
So when we read the matrix through a class lens, the video turns out to be right, but for a reason other than the one it thinks. Staying in opposition is the dominant strategy; because opposition and government are two fractions of the same class bloc, and competition among fractions is not carried so far as to put the bloc itself at risk. Marx described this in 1852 in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: the Orleanists and the Legitimists, two dynastic parties that appear hostile to each other, are in reality two fractions of property; and both unite under the roof of the "Party of Order" against the proletariat. "Eternal opposition" is a name for the division of labor inside the Party of Order.
The missing half of cartel-party theory
The video draws on Katz and Mair's cartel-party theory, and that is an apt reference. But it takes only the theory's result, not its historical explanation. Katz and Mair's 1995 article is the story of an evolution of parties: from cadre party to mass party, from mass party to catch-all party, from there to cartel party. The mass party, at the end of the nineteenth century, is an invention of the working class: a party financed by membership dues, resting on the class's organizations (union, cooperative, association), looking from society toward the state. The cartel party is the product of the breaking of that bond: membership melts away, state finance replaces dues, the party moves from civil society into the state and now operates as an extension of the state.
So the historical process behind cartelization is the working class's loss of its own parties and the parties' shedding of their class identities to become clerks of the state. The video sees the result correctly — "a symbiotic relationship between government and eternal opposition" — but skips the class content of the process. The cartel is the name of a classless party system; and in a classless party system the opposition has no reason to take power, because what it would do in power is the same.
Ralph Miliband, in Parliamentary Socialism (1961), made a similar diagnosis for the British Labour Party: the party was so bound to the rules of the parliamentary system that being in opposition was a function for it, and being in government had become a temporary bid to manage the system. What Miliband called the "opposition function" is what the video calls a "low-energy steady state." The difference is this: Miliband sought the cause in the party's class character; the video seeks it in physics.
Part Two: Reading the Video's Examples Through a Class Lens
To show that the "eternal opposition" equilibrium is a natural and spontaneous mechanism, the video gives five historical examples. Each of them shows the opposite: what keeps the opposition in opposition is not a spontaneous equilibrium but organized class power.
Italy, 1948–1991. The Christian Democrats in government, the Communist Party in opposition, for 43 years. The video presents this as a Nash equilibrium. Yet Italian political history had given this period a name: conventio ad excludendum, the exclusion pact. The PCI, taking a third of the vote in the 1970s, was Europe's largest communist party, and its coming to power was blocked by the open and organized opposition of the United States, NATO, the Vatican, and Italian capital: intervention in the 1948 elections, Gladio, the "strategy of tension" bombings of 1969–1980, the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro in 1978 while he was advocating the "historic compromise." The PCI stayed in opposition not because it practiced "energy conservation," but because the capital bloc used every instrument of the Cold War to keep it from power. Whether a workers' party takes office is a matter of class war, not of game theory.
Japan, 1955–1993. The Liberal Democrats in government, the Socialist Party in opposition. This arrangement, called the "1955 system," is a joint construction of Japanese capital and the United States after the U.S. occupation, under Cold War conditions. The Socialist Party's inability to take power is the result of the Japanese working class's political containment within the Cold War mold.
Israel, 1949–1977. Mapai/Labor in government, Herut/Likud in opposition. Here the division of labor is reversed: Labor in power, the right in opposition. The 1977 "revolution" came with a class and ethnic reaction by Mizrahi Jews — that is, the lower layer of the Israeli working class — against the Ashkenazi Labor establishment. The equilibrium broke because a class composition changed.
South Africa, 2000–2024. The ANC in government, the Democratic Alliance in opposition. The DA is the party of white capital and the middle class; its inability to take power in a country of a Black majority is not an "equilibrium" but a direct reflection of the post-apartheid class and racial structure. The ANC's loss of its majority in 2024 came not from the DA "taking risks," but from workers and the poor breaking with the ANC.
Australia, 1949–1972. The Liberal–Country coalition in government, Labor in opposition. The explanation for twenty-three years is Labor's split on the Cold War axis in 1955 and the Democratic Labor Party's locking Labor out through the preferential voting system. Again an intra-class split, again the international conjuncture.
The common denominator of the five examples is this: in every case presented as a spontaneous "eternal opposition" equilibrium, the opposition is either a workers' party excluded from power by the capital bloc, or capital's party left in a minority facing the class that forms the social majority. In no example is what keeps the opposition in opposition thermodynamics. Where the video says "natural and spontaneous," there is, every time, an organized class will.
There is also the example the video points to without naming: Turkey. The twenty-four-year equilibrium between the AKP and the CHP. Through a class lens there is no riddle here either. Neither party carries a fundamental disagreement over the property regime, the accumulation model, the labor regime, or the state's class function. The disagreement is over which capital groups share accumulation, and under which cultural-institutional codes. In such a fight the cost of the opposition "playing" for power is genuinely high; because marching toward power requires mobilizing the working class, and once that movement begins it is unclear for whom it will stop. Eternal opposition is the form capital's internal competition takes in a system where the working class has no party of its own.
Part Three: Two Readings, One Video
| The video's frame | The class frame | |
|---|---|---|
| Subject of politics | Parties (organism-like strategic actors) | Classes and their fractions; parties are their organized expression |
| What is power? | Managerial work that spends energy against entropy | The management of capital accumulation and class contradictions through the state |
| What produces social order | The budget and effort spent by the governing party | Labor; the party only manages |
| The opposition's "base return" | Resources the system provides (taken as data) | State financing of the party system as a whole: the maintenance cost of consent |
| The cost of playing for power | Internal party balance and "ideological concession" | Having to make a class choice: labor or capital |
| Power's low expected value | Like the expected value of a lottery ticket | The opposition's class interest is already protected by those in power |
| Cartel party | Government–opposition symbiosis (result) | The working class's loss of the mass party; parties' move into the state (process) |
| Historical examples | Spontaneous equilibria | The capital bloc's exclusion of workers' parties / minority class parties facing the majority |
| The voter | Environmental condition, selection pressure, "demanding customer" | A human who enters the political field from a class position and, when organized, becomes a subject |
| Way out | Leaderly virtue, voter punishment, government error | The working class's own organization and its own party |
Part Four: How Does the Opposition Take Power? The Wrong Question, the Door to the Right One
The video's final section proposes three exits. Let us take each through a class lens; because each hands a correct observation to the wrong subject.
The leader's virtue
The first path: party leaders finding the march to power "virtuous and worth the risk" despite the low score on the matrix; daring to come down from the peak on the fitness landscape and cross the valley. History is full of leaders who dared to cross the valley, the video says; most died on the road, some won.
There is a hidden assumption here: that the leader decides what the party will do. This is the cartel party's own self-image: a party with no base, organized around the leader, taking its decisions from above. In a mass party, "crossing the valley" is not a leader's courage decision but the result of pressure from below. Lenin's party and Gramsci's "collective intellectual" alike rest not on a leader's character but on the organized will of the class. Expecting virtue from the leader is the work of those who have given up expecting organization from the class.
The voter's punishment
The second path is the video's strongest proposal and the one closest to us: voters recognizing this trap, "waking up and organizing"; punishing parties that are comfortable in opposition, even at the short-term cost of being accused of "splitting the vote." The video also adds that governments try to crush this organizing before it grows stronger. Correct.
But notice: how is this organizing conceived? In the language of the video's closing: "a ruthless culture of holding to account based on success and service"; a voter who can tell parties "either put forward a proper vision and take power, or vacate the seats you occupy at once." This is the consumer disciplining the firm. The voter will punish the party like a customer abandoning a brand that gave bad service; the party will "perform" so as not to lose market share. The state is a service provider, politics a service market, the citizen a customer.
In the class frame, organizing is something else. Organizing is not voters supervising parties better; it is the working class carrying its own interest into the political field through its own organization. The union, the workplace committee, the cooperative, the neighborhood organization, and the party that is their political expression. Overcoming the fear of "splitting the vote" does not come from being a braver customer; it comes from a class that realizes the vote will not be split, because the "opposition bloc" to be split was never its bloc. When the video says "social organizing can break this game," it is right. It only does not say which organizing can break it.
The government losing control
The third path: the government turning authoritarian and moving to liquidate the opposition, collapsing the economy, dragging the country into war; these suddenly spike the "expected value of power" for the opposition, and staying in opposition becomes a matter of life and death. Here the video makes another important observation: the government may no longer need that particular opposition inside the cartel; it can establish a new equilibrium with another opposition. That is why the opposition must make its move before the government grows too strong.
This is where the video stands closest to Turkey, and the observation matches the tableau of 2025: the arrest of mayors, trustees, the transfer of media to the TMSF. In our essay on the İHD report we read this as a distributional fight inside the ruling bloc; the video says the same thing in a different language: one side of the cartel may decide it no longer needs the other.
But the class reading has to take one more step here. When the cartel breaks, the "expected value" of power rises for the opposition; correct. But which power? The excluded side of the cartel is forced to turn to the working class to rebuild its class bloc; because it has no other force left. That is the moment when the class can put its own program and its own organization on the table. Whether a crack in the ruling bloc is an opportunity for the working class depends on entering that crack not as an extra in a "democratic front," but with its own demands and its own organization. Otherwise the crack closes, the cartel is rebuilt in a new composition, and game theory finds a new "steady state."
Part Five: The Side Taken by "Neutral Science"
In its closing the video says something: Evrim Ağacı does not look at these topics with a partisan eye; these are problems that naturally exist in human society and can be analyzed scientifically; the presenter's personal view has no importance; what matters is "what science says."
This stance must be taken seriously, without hunting for bad faith. Because it is precisely this stance that constitutes the video's class content. To define a social fact as "a problem that naturally exists" is the opposite of saying it is produced historically and through class, and that claim is not neutral. A frame that reduces politics to a mechanics, parties to organisms, voters to environmental conditions, and organizing to consumer discipline removes the working class from politics as a subject and puts it back as "the masses," "the voter," "the vote." The absence of class is not a gap; it is a result the frame produces.
When Marx wrote the critique of political economy, he objected to bourgeois economists not because they lied, but because they took capitalist production relations as "natural" and "eternal." It cannot be said that Ricardo hid class; what Ricardo did was to take class as a datum of nature. That is what the video does: the cartel, the treasury subsidy, "ideological concession," "the cost of power"; all of them are in the video, but in the guise of a law of nature. The job of class critique is to remove that guise. When the guise comes off, what remains is more chilling than the possibility the video finds chilling: it is not that the main opposition is not trying to take power; between the main opposition taking power and not taking it, the difference for the working class is very small.
And this is not a pessimistic conclusion. Because it shows in whose hands lie the "scores that need changing" the video speaks of.
Concrete Tasks
- Watch the video and have others watch it; then refill the matrix yourselves. The video is a good discussion starter. In a reading group, draw the payoff matrix on the board and ask the question behind every item: why does the opposition's base score exist, to whom is the "ideological concession" made, for whom is the expected value of power low. The numbers are made up; the assumptions are not. Naming the assumptions is the lesson itself.
- Read the "eternal opposition" examples through class history. The exclusion of the PCI in Italy, the 1955 system in Japan, 1977 in Israel, 2024 in South Africa: each is a textbook case of how class power determines electoral arithmetic. Prepare short presentations on these examples; test the video's claim of a "spontaneous equilibrium" against history.
- Read cartel-party theory in full. Katz and Mair's 1995 article is short and accessible. Focus not on the cartel's result but on the parts that narrate the dissolution of the mass party. The question to ask: when and how was the working class's mass party lost in Turkey, and how is it rebuilt?
- Separate "voter organizing" from class organizing. Discuss openly whether the work you do in your union, association, or neighborhood is a "customers' association" supervising parties or an organization carrying the class's own interest. Both may be legitimate; but they are not the same thing, and without the second the first becomes part of the cartel.
- Enter the crack in the ruling bloc with your own program. Since 2025 the cartel has been visibly cracking. Enter that crack not as an extra in a "democratic front," but with concrete class demands — workplace deaths, wages, the right to strike, working time, housing; insist that these demands be written down in every alliance. That is what will change the scores.
- Develop the class critique of science communication as a genre. Channels like Evrim Ağacı shape how millions of young people in Turkey think about society. Treat this content not as an enemy but as an interlocutor: concede the correct observation, show the naturalization, put class back in. This essay is one example; better ones can be written.
Dear Young Comrades,
The video asks why opposition parties cannot win, and builds a clever answer with physics, biology, and game theory: not winning is more profitable than winning. Correct. But profitable for whom? For the state that finances the opposition, for the capital fraction the opposition represents, for the government's ability to present itself as "democratic." For whom not? Not for the 2,105 workers who leave for work in the morning and do not come home at night, not for the millions whose wages have halved in a year, not for the miners whose strike is postponed on grounds of "national security."
The video's matrix is a matrix with no row for the working class. When that row is added, the sentence "staying in opposition is the dominant strategy" is still true; but it is now read as a class choice, not a law of nature. And class choices, unlike laws of nature, can be changed.
Organisms evolve toward what environmental conditions reward, the video says; so we must define what our system rewards. We agree. We only add this: environmental conditions are themselves the product of something. Under capitalism that something is the balance of class struggle on a given day. Changing the balance is possible not by being a better voter, but by being an organized class.
We have understood why the opposition does not win. Now the question is: where is our opposition?
