![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() 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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