Multiplicity now

At the level of governance, if not democracy, capitalism is already a multiplicitous form of rule. We can see this clearly when we compare how it operates in comparison to the feudal systems of rule it replaced. As Ellen Meiksins Wood points out, the emergence and entrenchment of capitalism as a totalizing system of social reproduction broke the unity of politics and economics that had defined conservative governance under feudalism in western Europe (Wood Reference Wood1995). Feudal systems tended to operate via a form of parcellized, localized sovereignty involving clientelistic relations that spread down to a granular level of social control and surveillance. A monarch would grant local lords political control over the reproduction of society in their geographic area, with the power to offer economic privileges to merchants, levy taxes, require peasants to perform periodic free labor, and adjudicate local legal and social disputes. Political and economic power was united in their hands. In terms of the governance process, there could be no “loyal opposition” to the crown and its delegated authorities in this scenario precisely because organizing to oppose specific economic decisions was a direct challenge to the political legitimacy of those making them. The transition from a feudal political economy to a capitalist one occurred gradually and unevenly across western societies, remaking both the process of social reproduction and the rules governing it (Duby Reference Duby1968; Thompson Reference Thompson and Thompson1991).

If governance under feudalism was defined by the unity of political and economic power in the hands of the crown and its lords, then capitalism can be distinguished by how it severed that connection. The key factors driving this process were the development of private property and a change in the character of the state. Property certainly existed in the feudal era, but it was subject to arbitrary treatment by the state and encumbered with a host of social obligations and limits on its use and alienation. Lords could not easily limit peasant use of common lands and estates, which often could not be sold or divided (Thompson Reference Thompson and Thompson1991). Political reform at the level of the state in this period was designed to free capital and property from such limits by effectively privatizing what were formerly public decisions and rules affecting property decisions (Narizny Reference Narizny2020). Campaigns to limit royal power, establish the rule of law, and redefine property law collectively represented an effort to replace a conservative mode of governance with a liberal order (Dickinson Reference Dickinson1977). By juridically defining new limitations on what government could do to affect what was now dubbed “private property,” capitalists gained enormous new powers not simply over their businesses and property but, crucially, also over those who worked for them (Wood Reference Wood1995). At the same time, the powers of the state to enforce these new rules were aided by a dramatic expansion of standing armies, national police forces, and the transport infrastructure to facilitate their deployment across the state (Goldstein Reference Goldstein1983). These legal and state-led changes severed economic control from social obligations and contributed to increased inequalities of social power in civil society. Of course, in an important way, this separation of economic power from direct political rule did not really mean the economy was separate from politics, as the state acted as a guarantor and enforcer of capitalist “private property” and the market transactions they dominated (Wood Reference Wood1995).

These political reforms meant that capitalist elites and their liberal governing order cared little about what happened to their former peasants, as they had the law declare them not responsible for what resulted from capitalist restructuring (Thompson Reference Thompson and Thompson2001a, Reference Thompson and Thompson2001b). The newly empowered military and police forces were then deployed to limit peasant resistance to the elimination of their common rights by forcibly removing them from common lands and allotments (via enclosures) and responding to organized resistance with violence. And yet an unanticipated consequence of the destruction of the feudal order was a radical remaking of civil society, increased urbanization, and structural limitations on the ability of capitalists to keep up surveillance on an emerging working class in these new spaces. As Eric Hobsbawm recounts, the decline of feudalism forced peasants into newly expanding cities where, for the first time, society’s lower orders lived separately from the upper classes and their constant supervision (Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm and Hobsbawm1998). It was precisely the anonymity of these new urban working-class spaces that created room to organize opposition to state-led capitalist power (Eley Reference Eley2002). Here we can see how capitalism actually created a multiplicitous political space, if not by design, then as a consequence of its governing restructuring of property law and the state. Despite the rise in the capacity of mass surveillance in our smartphone/internet era, capitalist societies retain a radically anonymous character in terms of the many available spaces to operate out of elite oversight (Van Noort Reference Van Noort2024). This too is a material consequence of capitalism’s focus on profits. Surveillance was key to assuring compliance under feudalism, but the capitalist control of private property made such intense forms of social surveillance both less necessary and less possible (with notable exceptions, from a profit-making perspective) (Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm and Hobsbawm1998). These anonymous spaces remain key locales for political organization and democratic innovation.

Unpacking state-centered democracy

The democratic multiplicity approach appears to accept the category of state-centered democracy as a sort of ideal-type—as a recognizable mode of democracy with clear workings and outcomes—seemingly at face value. They name a number of pathologies connected with it (dominance behavior, winner-take-all mentality, etc.) but provide little insight into why it operates this way (Tully Reference Tully and Tully2022: 7–8). They appear to assume that bringing their other modes of democracy into relations with it will somehow alter its behavior and address its shortcomings. But this fails to investigate why so-called state-centered democracy operates as it does, particularly why it is state-centered in the first place.

Historically, we can see that demands for democracy prior to the twentieth century tended to emerge locally, for example, the English Diggers of the 1600s, factions active in the American and French revolutions, the English Chartists of the 1830s, the Paris Commune of 1871, the trade union movement across western Europe and the Anglo-American countries, and so on (Dupuis-Deri Reference Dupuis-Deri2001). But the experience of the nineteenth-century political struggle pushed democratic campaigns to the state level for a reason. Given the expansion of state power, particularly from 1850 on, both in terms of state repression and its regulation of capitalism, it became clear to democratic activists that the state had the power to decisively affect local areas, especially when it focused its might on a specific target. This wasn’t an automatic development as much as a learned response. As noted above, what we see in the nineteenth century is a gradual enhancement and expansion of state power with the establishment of standing armies, national police forces, national transport links, etc. These develop as a reaction to ongoing local struggles over property, common rights, and working conditions, culminating in a host of violent confrontations between popular constituencies and the state across Europe (Goldstein Reference Goldstein1983; Rueschemeyer et al. Reference Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens1992). The violent state-sponsored defeat of the Paris Commune, where the French Army killed or executed an estimated 15,000–20,000 participants, effectively signaled an end to the era of democratic struggle rooted primarily on a local scale (Eichner Reference Eichner2022: 3; Hazan Reference Hazan2015; Downing Reference Downing2018). From then on, we witness the emergence of a left-led, working-class-anchored political project aimed at democratizing the state, precisely because that scale was seen to be where power resided (Eley Reference Eley2002).

Here we see the struggle side of the “democratic struggle” that is often referred to in accounts of the transition from “not democracy” to democracy in western countries. A considerable amount of research highlights that democratic breakthroughs in western states were less the product of gradual evolution or enlightened responses from ruling elites than concessions made in the face of organized threats from the underclasses and trade unions, typically facilitated amid unstable historical events, for example, economic crisis, war, invasion, etc. (Dahlum et al. Reference Dahlum, Knutsen and Wig2019; Hellmeier and Bernhard Reference Hellmeier and Bernhard2023; Przeworski Reference Przeworski2008; Therborn Reference Therborn2020). Geoff Eley notes how the rise of working-class organizations, be they unions or mass political parties, was the catalyst for these changes given their laborious organizing efforts throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Eley Reference Eley2002; Mor and Boix Reference Mor and Boix2024). Still, conventional political elites tenaciously resisted moving in a democratic direction the whole time and only conceded to a minimally democratic opening in the face of the catastrophic social upheaval that accompanied World War I (Dupuis-Deri Reference Dupuis-Deri2001; Losurdo Reference Losurdo2024). In western Europe, the threats involved an increased labor militancy that accompanied the widespread mobilization of the civil society for the war effort, a constant threat of invasion and occupation, and elite fear of a possible contagion effect from the 1917 Russian revolution moving across the war-ravaged continent (Therborn Reference Therborn2020; Lacher and Wamsley Reference Lacher and Wamsley2023: 1060). In the Anglo-American sphere, the direct impact of war was more distant but still impacted the balance of class forces, as making war had mobilized the working class and farmers to a much greater degree. The end result was that by the war’s end (or shortly thereafter) nearly all western countries now claimed to be democracies, opening the vote to all working men (sometimes also working women) and/or parliamentarizing their executives (i.e. making government dependent on elected representatives) (Cottrell-Sundevall and Kristjánsdóttir Reference Cottrell-Sundevall and Kristjánsdóttir2024; von Beyme Reference von Beyme2000; Pilon Reference Pilon2013).

What is important to underline at this point is that these procedural concessions about who could participate in elections or how governments would respond to electorates did not represent a wholesale conversion to democratic rule, especially amongst traditional ruling elites. In fact, the political shifts that occurred across western Europe during the interwar period make clear just how opposed anti-democratic forces were to this new reality, given how quickly they were able to reverse it in countries like Italy, Germany, and Spain, and seriously limit what it could do elsewhere (Pilon Reference Pilon2018). Thus, the struggle over democracy didn’t really end with the achievement of nominally democratic states across the west roughly around World War I; it carried on being contested through the 1920s and 1930s before gaining ground again amid similar wartime pressures in World War II that had granted it standing in the previous world war (Streeck Reference Streeck2015).

Following the flow of these historical events can allow us to gain crucial insight into the workings of state-centered democracy and its important relationship to capitalism. The shifts for and against procedural democracy before and after World War I, and again over a more substantive democracy after World War II, reveal how it is the stark inequalities created by capitalism that continually feed into the political struggles that emerge regularly over time. What we see again and again is that capitalists prefer a liberal or property-centered form of governance and will use their resources to mount campaigns to limit and sometimes topple these limited democracies (Pilon Reference Pilon2018). This is the pattern we saw in the interwar period throughout the west and then beyond the west it in the postwar period (for instance, in Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, and Chile 1973) (Chomksy Reference Chomksy1991). And even where these so-called state-centered democracies didn’t actually fall, they remained highly restricted in how they responded to genuine democratic aspirations, particularly from the working class. To grasp this effectively requires attention to the materialism of democratic struggle. Politics costs time and money, both of which capitalists have and working people do not. Empirical studies of comparative western elections and political parties underline the decided advantage that parties with capitalist financial support and the support of capitalist-owned private media have versus parties that rely on unions or social movements (Chomsky Reference Chomsky1989; Ferguson Reference Ferguson1995; Nichols and McChesney Reference Nichols and McChesney2013; Mutch Reference Mutch2014). On the more democratic side, the material struggle was waged by working-class parties (often with the support of trade unions) that mobilized mass levels of support, both voting and financial, which at various historical junctures were able to wield that to achieve genuine, if partial and temporary, democratic breakthroughs (Eley Reference Eley2002; Rueschemeyer et al. Reference Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens1992; Sassoon Reference Sassoon1996). For instance, Wolfgang Streeck argues that the unique configuration of postwar welfare capitalism was not the product of “skillful social engineers or concerned citizens” choosing from a range of options but instead an “historical compromise between a then uniquely powerful working class and an equally uniquely weakened capitalist class that was as never before on the political and economic defensive …” (Streeck Reference Streeck2015: 53).

Democracy then is not a “one and done” kind of thing but must be assessed relationally. What is called state-centered democracy is less a permanent state of being or accomplished, agreed-upon fact than a continually contested space where organized groups bring to bear material resources in civil society by a variety of means to compete for state power and then affect how state power is used (Pilon Reference Pilon2018). Attention to these material roots of struggle over this “actually existing democracy” at the state level is key to understanding why it is so often coercive and subject to “dominance behavior” and a winner-take-all mentality.

Achieving democratic multiplicity under capitalism

One needn’t research very deeply to discover that what passes for democracy across western countries is pretty thin gruel. Taking in dominant media and political discourse—as well as a good many academic contributions—we are supposed to believe that a vote every few years for parties that most voters have little influence over (even when they support them) is enough to qualify our societies as sufficiently democratic (Dahl Reference Dahl2020; for a critical view of this approach, see James Reference James2024). Again, a material focus underlines how weak such assertions are when employment, education, home life, and a variety of civic spaces remain defined by dramatic economic and social inequalities and rarely bother upholding even a pretense of being democratic (Asara Reference Asara2020). Thus, the calls for greater democratic multiplicity are welcome and, if accomplishable, would undoubtedly enrich our broader society. But the patterns of political developments over the past few decades, despite considerable mobilization along democratic multiplicity lines, appear to be running very much counter to getting there.

Let’s be clear, the call for democratic multiplicity is just the latest in a long line of proposals to make the promise of democracy in western societies more substantive. Going back to the immediate postwar period, the key demand emerging out of World War II from working-class parties was that the state should now respond to their social and economic needs. And the combination of wartime mobilization aiding working-class political organization with the historic (and momentary) weakness of a political right tarnished by its pre-war dalliances with fascism meant that postwar states were pushed in a more substantively democratic direction, providing full employment and more robust welfare states to varying degrees (Sassoon Reference Sassoon1996). But public involvement in these democratic western states remained distant, limited largely to voting. Calls for a more participatory democracy emerged in the 1960s (Pateman Reference Pateman1970) and were given a new impetus in the 1980s and 1990s as the political right regained momentum and launched a number of anti-democratic initiatives (Cuevas Ingram Reference Cuevas Ingram2012; Ellis Reference Ellis2009). Since then, we’ve seen a host of proposals for democratic reform come and go, from the institutional (referenda, voting system reform) to the participatory (participatory budgeting, citizen assemblies) (Della Porta Reference Della Porta2013; Santos Reference Santos2005; Warren and Pearse Reference Warren and Pearse2008). Their failure has been rooted in their ideas-based approach, as if the problem is to just find the “right” set of rules or process for decision-making. The real problem is inequality and the potential danger democracy poses, even a very limited form of it, to maintaining and furthering it. The challenge to democracy of any sort has always been from those who do not want any democracy at all, as the pattern of struggle over democracy over the past century makes clear (Pilon Reference Pilon2018).

Here, Boaventura de Sousa Santos has the most clear-eyed analysis of any of the Democratic Multiplicity authors about where the blockages to democracy really are. He argues that money has infiltrated “electoral processes and democratic deliberations at an alarming rate” (Santos Reference Santos and Tully2022: 83). Specifically, he points to how changes in campaign finance and social media have unlocked some of the previous limits on wealth to influence what happens in contemporary democracies, aided by a politicization of the courts that has boosted anti-democrats. The US Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case in 2010 struck down what few limits existed in that country on how the wealthy could influence and control politics, with devastating impact over the past 15 years. While somewhat more limited in other western states, money has come to have greater influence there too, affecting both who runs for office (mostly upper-middle-class people) and who increasingly fails to turn out to vote (mostly working-class people) (Hemingway Reference Hemingway2020; Nadeau et al. Reference Nadeau, Lewis-Beck and Foucault2019; Solt Reference Solt2008; Westheuser and Della Porta Reference Westheuser and Della Porta2022). Changes in political communication also reflect the increasing influence of money as the now dominant social media companies design secret algorithms that promote consumption by focusing on conflict without any accountability for the circulation of fake news, something that has disproportionately benefited the political right (Santos Reference Santos and Tully2022: 84–85). He also cautions that hopes that some allegedly impartial mediator like courts can intervene to correct this are misplaced. His narrative about how the American FBI and Department of Justice conspired with the Brazilian judiciary to prevent the Workers Party candidate and former President Lula from running again in 2018 underlines how naïve it is to ignore how the supposed institutional safeguards for liberal democracy can be used against it (Santos Reference Santos and Tully2022: 89), if money and imperial influence can be brought to bear.

Santos underlines the material basis of the struggle over democracy, that money is the crucial component fueling the transmission of ideas and people’s perceptions about what ideas are current or dominant, which then in turn affects their willingness to support different ideas. The circulation of ideas in capitalism is not separate from capitalist profit imperatives, as both conventional commercial media and the more recent global social media empires make clear (Ferguson Reference Ferguson1995; Schradie Reference Schradie2019). Thus, not identifying capitalism as a major problem for pursuing democratic multiplicity means we are left with no way to understand the constant cycle of economic and social instability or how they linked to our democratic struggles. Such an oversight denies us an ability to effectively parse the social conflicts that are being fomented on a bedrock of financial insecurity, be they class, racial, immigrant, ability, gender, or sexuality focused. Critical scholars from a variety of traditions have demonstrated empirically capitalism’s consistent tendency toward inequality and its deleterious impact on the quality of democracy (Piketty Reference Piketty2022; Wood Reference Wood1995).

Relatedly, suggesting that we can just create islands of democratic multiplicity within the scope of capitalist states gravely misunderstands how capitalism functions as a totalizing system that does not tolerate the existence of logics foreign to its own, that is, cooperation versus competition. As we have seen repeatedly, capitalists have been able to use the state to target such opposition as it emerges when they deem it threatening (Barrow Reference Barrow2016; Riley Reference Riley2021). Attempts to do an “end run” around the competitive imperatives of the capitalist state are, at best, usually only temporary. Countless examples showcase how the anonymity of social space within capitalism creates both room for experiments and real limits because when such experiments start to succeed, they gain a greater public profile and the predictable capitalist opprobrium. The local planning initiative created by the Greater London Council in the early 1980s is a good example of how success can breed unwanted state and capitalist attention. As this progressive endeavor worked against the grain of the anti-democratic reforms being pursued by Thatcher’s Conservative government, her solution was to simply abolish it (Kosecik and Kapucu Reference Kosecik and Kapucu2008). On the other hand, we can find examples of democratic innovation surviving in states where the state representative process is one that prevents state capture by a narrow capitalist coalition. In Spain, the use of proportional voting at the national and regional level prevents a single party from totally controlling state power, leaving space for publicly popular democratic experiments like the participatory city planning in Barcelona to survive (Evans Reference Evans2023: 10–12). The point is that struggle and context work together, and efforts to expand democratic multiplicity require attention to both the project of engagement and the thinking animating it, as well as the broader structure of state power and its relations with civil society, with particular attention to how capitalist interests can either coalesce or be contested and potentially divided by the impact of popular mobilization.