The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy

Abstract

The relationship between advanced capitalism and democracy contains two paradoxes-one Marxist and one bourgeois. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as both political practice and constitutional debate clearly demonstrate, prevailing bourgeois opinion held that democracy and capitalism (or private property) were incompatible. In modern times, however, since at least the outbreak of the Cold War, bourgeois ideologists have maintained that only capitalism is compatible with democracy. Bourgeois democracy has been attained by such diverse and tortuous routes that any straightforward derivation from the basic characteristics of capitalism would be impossible, or at best seriously misleading. Bourgeois democracy is no mere accident of history, and capitalism does contain a number of tendencies which are conducive to processes of democratization. Democracy developed neither out of the positive tendencies of capitalism, nor as a historical accident, but out of the contradictions of capitalism.

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