So the very conditions that make liberal democracy possible also narrowly limit the scope of democratic accountability. If "equality" could be limited to "civil society" and not to capitalism, then it's acceptable. As the economy became less and less accountable to political processes, expanding those processes became increasingly palatable to those who benefited most from the economic status quo. But Meiksins Wood goes further and argues that the expansion of democracy – the fitful progress of living up to that ideal of equality under the law – only occurred as the position of society's wealthiest property owners became more secure.
#Ellen meiksins wood democracy against capitalism pdf series#
The result, of course, was a series of radically egalitarian statements that this country has continued to view as its political ideal. This isn't surprising to anyone who has had to listen to insufferable conservatives parrot that "this isn't a democracy, it's a republic" whenever someone questions their newfound commitment to voter suppression or the Electoral College nevertheless, it is true that lions of democracy like Hamilton and Washington deeply distrusted mass electoral politics – yet they also knew they had to dress up their suspicions in the language of democracy because the American Revolution was a mass movement that had gotten many Americans used to participating in their own government. Nevertheless, Meiksins Wood first dives into a defense of Marx and Marxism against all comers, then shifts to the meat of her argument: that the history of "democracy" as currently understood in the West does not derive from the Greek structure that gave us the term, but from anti-democratic plutocrats who sought freedom from overbearing monarchs. The book is a collection of essays, some of which were published elsewhere, and it shows, as some chapters are much more concise, much more compelling, much more readable than others. Meiksins Wood tackles these arguments from several different perspectives, which leads to a somewhat disjointed and confusing reading experience, especially for laypeople like myself.
Second, Meiksins Wood rejects arguments on both the left and right that Karl Marx's historical materialist analysis of capitalism is somehow inadequate rather, she spends a good deal of time (perhaps too much) showing how Marx remains remarkably prescient in describing how capitalism works, how within it class relations come to dominate all other considerations, and how a politics focused resolutely on the working class remains the only way to expand democracy into the economic realm. Capitalism, despite affecting all manner of social and political relations, is seen as somehow above and beyond those relations, and therefore left untouched by movements to increase the rule of the people. Such a dichotomy serves capitalism well because it confines democracy to "politics" – even though the relationship of producers to capital, and the rules by whch these groups play, is very much political. Written at the "end of history," when the collapse of communism and the end of Cold War left capitalism unchallenged and democracy the self-evident telos of human governmental organization, Meiksins Wood's Democracy Against Capitalism challenges several assumptions that were widely accepted in the 1990s and are only now being questioned today.įirst, Meiksins Wood dismantles the notion of separate spheres defining the political and economic. Ellen Meiksins Wood is here to disabuse you of that notion. For a long time, democracy and capitalism have at least implicitly shared the same connection. Some things are so inseparable you can't think of one without the other. Written at the "end of history," when the collapse of communism and the end of Cold War left capitalism unchallenged and democracy the self-evident telos of human governmental organization, Meiksins Wood's Democracy Ag Green eggs and ham.
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