Democracy and the capitalist state Book

Full disclosure: my inner white old man loves his good old orthodox Marxist bashing of all sorts of post-modern theories. I know how progressive and liberating and inclusive much of this identity stuff really is (especially for the nonwhite old men) but if the latter is not theoretically grounded in some kind of materialist framework, it's rubbish and most likely, politically speaking, supportive of rainbow capitalism, glass ceiling 'feminism' and, eventually, hollowed out liberal democracy which is reduced to electoral politics.

Now, I don't quite recall why exactly I ordered this rather classic book "Democracy Against Capitalism. Renewing Historical Materialism" by Ellen Meiksins Wood, first published right after the 'end of history' in 1995, but I think it was mentioned in some other book on the current, rather rapid, decline of democracy (reading FOMO in other words). Given the current rise of oligarchic and otherwise authoritarian forms of power, I have been reading fair bit about the conflict, if not contradiction, between capitalism and democracy and must have come across this classic.

Anyhow, you can approach this issue on various levels of abstraction and theoretical complexity and, obviously, you need to somehow deal with the relationship between the historically specific relationship between the economic and the political in capitalism in abstract terms to get to the core of this. But I am not convinced you need to go down the Althusser versus xyz rabbit hole to get to the point! Then again, the book is, to some extent, a collection of essays, one chapter clustered around historical materialism and once clustered around democracy against capitalism - so there's a lot of theoretical depth in many of the essays that each look at a specific sub-issue of these bigger picture issues.

Side note: I have kind of stopped reading Marxist 'classics' from the 1970s to 1990s which are so uber engaged in taking sides in New Left Review debates (Poulantzas-Miliband, anyone?) which are total intellectual navel-gazing and, at that level of abstraction and complex language, definitively irrelevant and inaccessible for the working class - in whose names all these debates are being fought - as such 😊 I know these were very important debates along the way of carrying Marx past the horrors of the 20th century and fallacies of postmodernism into 'radical democracy' socialism of the 21st century (yes, yes with all the identity stuff). I am much more excited though by the stuff that's coming out these days, which is also a lot more diverse in perspectives and somehow grounded in real-life struggles rather than some abstract 18th century nascent English working class lol. Speaking of, Meiksins Wood is a yuuuge fan of E.P. Thompson whom she cites excessively, so this will be the my next rabbit hole. Hashtag nerdlife.

So, the bottom line is political: in capitalism issues of property, ownership and work have been relegated to the private sector, thus confining the public to the spectacle of electoral politics, hollowing out democracy of its original meaning as the power of the common people, leaving the 99 per cent precariously exposed to market forces. Democracy must include freedom from the dictates of the market, which requires democratic control by those who produce the wealth over the conditions of its production and distribution. This is not the kind of social democracy debates over minimum wage but an acknowledgement that the fundamental problem in liberal democracy is that the key areas of power are outside of the areas of public control because the very means of social existence are privately owned.

This sounds kind of trivial but it's actually based on a pretty awesome analysis of the separation of the state and 'civil society' in the west. I think this ties in somewhat with Gramsci but the point is that the realm of 'civil society' (detached from the formal power and oppression of 'the state') has given private property and its possessors a command over people and their daily lives, a power enforced by the state but accountable, to no one 'which many an old tyrannical state would have envied' - with all aspects of live regulated by the dictates of the market, the necessities of competition and profitability. This is also why the liberal democracy's obsession with a 'civil society' that represents freedom and democracy as opposed to 'the state' is so very flawed (but quite understandable that it experienced its revival after the cold war and in opposition to the oppression of Soviet style communist states). So what the author is suggesting that 'real' democracy would have to encompass the economic, going beyond new forms of ownership towards a new driving mechanism, a new rationality , a new economic logic - essentially one that works in the interest of people, social life, culture, the environment etc. I think we are now in the early 21st century REALLY, really seeing that in capitalism the development of productive forces, technology and productivity, does not correspond with a development of living standards. Profit benefits those who profit, whether or not you try to tax some of this back, which is becoming increasingly impossible given that politics is also committed to the imperative of growth, profitability and competition. The insane levels of productivity and wealth create insane levels of immiseration and destruction. With the retreat of the welfare state in the west, mainstream economics have a harder time disguising this very basic fact and the rise in authoritarianism is also an expression of a world in which the large majorities must be forced to accept a status quo that is working against their own interests and only serves global elites - in true democracies none of this would be possible. While socialism cannot exist without democracy, capital can very well exist without democracy and I think we are about to being reminded of this, after having forgotten this lesson from the 20th century.

Then follows a wonderful chapter on 'civil society and the politics of identity' where the authors takes aim at the left's new obsession with the pluralism and identities but I think since the book was written some 25 years ago, this point was well noted and the leading Marxist theorists of our time have kind of sorted out to integrate multiple forms of oppression such as gender, race, sexuality etc. as well as exploitation of people and planet into an analysis of capitalism and imperialism and a related political project for the 21st century. I guess these early pushbacks against attempts to give up on socialism in favour of a 'pluralist society' (lol) were important to rescue Marxism.