Revolution only occurs when people are willing to die for it. The last few days of May 2020 showed that thousands of people were willing to risk their lives in the struggle against the racist capitalist system. Rage at four hundred years of oppression, exploitation, and denigration, at the systemic murder of black, brown, and indigenous people, and at wanton, visible, and permissible police violence could no longer be contained. Between the virus and the economy, there was nothing left to lose.

This article suggests that a “crisis of democracy” can be understood not simply as a deterioration of specific representative institutions but as a repositioning of democratic politics vis-à-vis other principles of social coordination, most notably the capitalist market, and the attendant decline of democratic subjectivity—people’s attunement to claims appealing to the common good. I trace this process to the post–World War II era. I show that the crisis of democracy was shaped by the substantive imperative of fusing democracy with free-market capitalism. Many postwar democratic theorists believed that the welfare state could manage the tension latent in this fusion. But an analysis of Friedrich Hayek’s theory of neoliberal democracy, which recognizes that tension more acutely, reveals that the incorporation of free-market capitalism creates tendencies that undermine democracy from within.

This research examines the role that myths play in sustaining the institutional position of philanthropy in a context of sector reinvention during the COVID-19 recovery. Specifically, we study discourse around the post-pandemic philanthropic sector reforms to the Disbursement Quota (DQ) in Canada. The DQ is the minimum asset payout rate that philanthropic foundations in Canada must maintain to enjoy charitable status and associated tax benefits. We examine submissions to government, media articles, and public statements by philanthropic sector advocates to analyze the ideological work of DQ-related discourses in creating and entrenching philanthropic myths. Our findings coalesce around three philanthropic myths: (1) the Modernization Myth (2) the Goodness Myth; and (3) the Equity Myth. We argue that these philanthropic myths function to maintain the institutional position of philanthropy in this moment of sector reinvention by obscuring the sector’s colonial-capitalist histories and institutional contradictions.

This issue of Democratic Theory aims to contribute to critical social science by bridging the gap between democratic theory and critical political economy (CPE). Despite a common grounding in a normative commitment to emancipation, these fields have lately spoken past each other. Democratic theory is relatively voluntarist, focusing on the realization of normative principles through institutional design. However, it has often overlooked capitalism's influence on democracy, and accepted the artificial separation of the political and economic realms in ways that constrain the possibilities for democratic expansion. CPE, on the other hand, has developed realist and historical analyses of capitalist constraint and dynamism. It can offer a structural compass for democratic theories’ interventionist energies, while also being moved beyond pure critique by them. The central theme of this issue, “democratizing the economy,” shifts the focus toward a deeper exploration of the potential for democratic designs to transform economic structures.

After analyzing the tension between capitalism and liberal democracy, this article explores two ways that the political left has tried to navigate this tension. Both these strategies prevent parties of the left and the center-left from exposing capitalism's undemocratic implications, while also helping to discredit political democracy. Unable to unify working people and ordinary citizens against the suffering that capitalism inflicts on them, the left inadvertently makes it possible for the far right to channel people's discontent in ways that attack liberal democracy and turn working people against each other. Last but not least, the discrediting of democracy that results from these processes gives rise to a vicious cycle by also encouraging the adoption of neoliberal policies, which further intensify the subordination of democratically elected governments to capitalist interests.

This conversation with Nancy Fraser explores her work on the crises of capitalism, democracy, and participation. Fraser has argued that much scholarship in political science and democratic theory on these issues is hampered by “politicism”—an inclination to view the political in separation from other social spheres, which fails to appreciate the structural nature of contemporary crises. Fraser argues that the political arena is important because it is here that collective regulatory powers are exercised, however it needs to be situated within a broader understanding of the social totality to understand how it is affected by crisis dynamics in other spheres and how it might contribute to attenuating, or resolving, these. Our conversation begins by exploring these arguments in relation to Fraser's recent work on the critique of capitalism, and then traces how this relates to her work on the public sphere, participatory parity, and utopian thought.

The global diffusion of sewing machines required concerted efforts from manufacturers, sales agents, and, most significantly, local consumers, who rendered the machine legible and desirable across diverse social settings. As this article shows, however, in politically volatile contexts, it was manufacturers who most decisively shaped these processes. Focusing on the Singer Company—the largest and most influential of its kind—the article examines how this process unfolded in the Ottoman empire during the Armenian massacres of the 1890s. Occurring when ethnic and religious homogeneity was becoming central to the political order, the Ottoman case offers an especially important early example of global firms’ responses to the emerging pressures of exclusionary—and often violent—political and economic reordering. The article traces how Singer tested adaptive strategies that not only sustained its regional presence but also recalibrated its business model. In doing so, it contributes to global history by demonstrating how seemingly localized episodes of political violence became formative sites of adaptation, attuning global corporations to a world increasingly structured by systemic violence, warfare, and demographic homogenization.

This essay coins and develops the concept of Longevity Capitalism, a biopolitical and financial regime in which both the condition of living longer and the pursuit of longevity are transformed into frontiers of accumulation. As financialisation extends into the domain of ageing, longevity – once a social and fiscal challenge – has been reframed as an investment opportunity. The essay traces a shift from collective welfare management to individualized risk-bearing, showing how uncertainty about life expectancy is converted into a new asset class. Drawing on examples such as financial instruments that profit from longevity risk, the rise of ‘age-tech’, and Silicon Valley’s ventures in life extension, it shows how biological time is increasingly treated as an economic resource. It also examines the speculative pursuit of ‘longevity escape velocity’, where technological innovation is imagined to outpace ageing and death itself becomes a technical problem. Together, these developments reveal a system in which longer life functions as a perpetually deferred investment cycle – an economy sustained by its own postponement. The essay argues that economic and biological time, wealth and health, are now fused within a single regime of managed futurity, reflecting new forms of power over who – and how – gets to live longer.

The English weavers who organized what would become a flourishing cooperative business in 1844 remain famous worldwide. In the second half of the nineteenth century, their story traveled through a newly international labor press, inspiring workers to build cooperatives in the template set forth by the so-called “Rochdale Pioneers.” While scholars have detailed the Rochdale model’s impact on the cooperative movement itself, historians have missed its significance as a vector for wider changes in working-class politics. Drawing on cooperative movement literature and organizational records, this essay traces the transnational circulation of the Rochdale story from Britain to the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. I explore how the Rochdale method’s influence simultaneously standardized cooperative practices, and reflected a protracted shift in anti-capitalist struggles. Against the backdrop of land dispossession and anti-labor violence, the Rochdale experiment captured hopes for a cooperative economic strategy fit to survive in the modern era. Focusing on the rise of consumers’ cooperation in the United States, I show how organizers mobilized a cooperative vision for a post-enclosure world—one consistent with the structure, if not the spirit, of private property and commodity markets. This article explores how the cooperative movement became a vital site for reimagining economic autonomy as industrial capitalism conscripted ever more people into wage labor.