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Marx and Tocqueville were the conceptual icons and rallying-points of the two sides in the Cold War. It is common today to consider that the outcome of this confrontation saw the victory of the latter over the former, to the extent that Tocqueville had shown greater prescience in the analysis of the evolution of Western societies. However, such an evaluation presumes that there is a substantial degree of overlap between these two competing paradigms, whereas there is in fact a fundamental opposition between them regarding the point of view deemed to be pertinent for the task of the qualification and conceptualization of modern societies. Are these societies to be qualified as democratic societies, increasingly subject to the empire of equality, or as capitalist societies which are increasingly subject to the empire of capital? The article examines the theoretical consequences stemming from the difference in the problematic that is adopted. Tocqueville’s perspective involves a polemical appropriation of the vocabulary of democracy in order to interpret the “nature” of the latter in what is a liberal perspective. This enables us to understand that the task of examining the relation between Marx and democracy does not simply mean the attempt to situate his position in relation to a stable and predefined object. It involves the critique of the polemical strategies for the appropriation of the term of democracy, a strategy from which Marx distances himself by way of the reference to communism.