Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

Historian and political thinker Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that theories of “postmodern” fragmentation, “difference,” and con-tingency can barely accommodate the idea of capitalism, let alone subject it to critique. In this book she sets out to renew the critical program of historical materialism by redefining its basic concepts and its theory of history in original and imaginative ways, using them to identify the specificity of capitalism as a system of social relations and political power. She goes on to explore the concept of democracy in both the ancient and modern world, examining its relation to capitalism, and raising questions about how democracy might go beyond the limits imposed on it.

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction, Economics, Philosophy, Theory, Sociology

320 pages, Paperback

Published February 2, 2016

About the author

Ellen Meiksins Wood FRSC (April 12, 1942 – January 14, 2016) was an American-Canadian Marxist historian and scholar. From 1967 to 1996, she taught political science at Glendon College, York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

With Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood articulated the foundations of Political Marxism, a strand of Marxist theory that places history at the centre of its analysis. It provoked a turn away from structuralisms and teleology towards historical specificity as contested process and lived praxis.

Meiksins Wood's many books and articles, were sometimes written in collaboration with her husband, Neal Wood (1922–2003). Her work has been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Romanian, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Of these, The Retreat from Class received the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1988.

Wood served on the editorial committee of the British journal New Left Review between 1984 and 1993. In 1996, she was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada, a marker of distinguished scholarship. From 1997 to 2000, Wood was an editor, along with Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, of Monthly Review, the socialist magazine.

Reviews

[Steffi · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Green eggs and ham. Bonnie and Clyde. Laurel and Hardy.

Some things are so inseparable you can't think of one without the other. For a long time, democracy and capitalism have at least implicitly shared the same connection. Ellen Meiksins Wood is here to disabuse you of that notion.

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.

First, Meiksins Wood dismantles the notion of separate spheres defining the political and economic. 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. 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.

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.

Meiksins Wood tackles these arguments from several different perspectives, which leads to a somewhat disjointed and confusing reading experience, especially for laypeople like myself. 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.

Nevertheless, Meiksins Wood first dives into a defense of Marx and Marxism against all comers, then shifts to the meat of her argument: that the history of "democracy" as currently understood in the West does not derive from the Greek structure that gave us the term, but from anti-democratic plutocrats who sought freedom from overbearing monarchs.

This isn't surprising to anyone who has had to listen to insufferable conservatives parrot that "this isn't a democracy, it's a republic" whenever someone questions their newfound commitment to voter suppression or the Electoral College; nevertheless, it is true that lions of democracy like Hamilton and Washington deeply distrusted mass electoral politics – yet they also knew they had to dress up their suspicions in the language of democracy because the American Revolution was a mass movement that had gotten many Americans used to participating in their own government.

The result, of course, was a series of radically egalitarian statements that this country has continued to view as its political ideal. But Meiksins Wood goes further and argues that the expansion of democracy – the fitful progress of living up to that ideal of equality under the law – only occurred as the position of society's wealthiest property owners became more secure. As the economy became less and less accountable to political processes, expanding those processes became increasingly palatable to those who benefited most from the economic status quo. If "equality" could be limited to "civil society" and not to capitalism, then it's acceptable.

She puts it best:

So the very conditions that make liberal democracy possible also narrowly limit the scope of democratic accountability. Liberal democracy leaves untouched the whole new sphere of domination and coercion created by capitalism, its relocation of substantial powers from the state to civil society, to private property and the compulsions of the market. It leaves untouched vast areas of our daily lives – in the workplace, in the distribution of labor and resources – which are not subject to democratic accountability but are governed by the powers of property and the 'laws' of the market, the imperatives of profit maximization.

Meiksins Wood argued for Marx's prescience, but it's clear she was quite prescient herself. Writing in the 1990s, it's clear she foresaw a world in which "democracy" increasingly expanded to include equality for various ethnic, sexual and religious identities regardless of class – while the class-based inequality necessary for capitalism to survive would continue to grow as fixing it was considered off limits for democratic solutions. Because, as Meiksins Wood notes, capitalism can survive the erasure of previous hardened divisions between races, religions and genders. But it cannot survive the erasure of what causes divisions between classes. Capitalism, therefore, is not the partner of true democracy but its enemy.

Most sobering, Meiksins Wood in 1995 speculated on what would happen when "democracy" became equivalent to "free market capitalism," so that a de facto democratic nation is one in which all major parties, including those who once advocated for the working class, accept unregulated free trade, austerity and ecological damage – even when those positions are supported by an unrepresentative minority of that nation's wealthiest capitalists:

What, for example, will fill the political vacuum left by the defection of working class parties, as the restructuring of capitalism increases the strains along the fault lines of class and creates new forms of insecure and vulnerable labor? More right-wing extremism perhaps?

Hmm, perhaps.

Perhaps Meiksins Wood was on to something, and the cause of our present ills is not too much democracy, as some might argue, but too little – too little popular control of the economic system that encircles our lives.

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

The paradoxical argument here is that the collapse of communism (in its actually existing form that is) has made marxism more important and more necessary than ever, mainly because it is one of the few if not the only mode of critical thought that can accommodate the idea of capitalism. Wood's argument is that other contemporary approaches can critique elements of capitalism and its culture but only marxism can get to grips with both the idea and the practice of capitalism. She is right, and she is also right when she argues that we need new ways of thinking and writing about and acting against capitalism that are grounded in the specific forms it takes. At the heart of all this is an argument that capitalism has narrowly defined democracy (in the words of Eduardo Galeano, democracy is more than an electoral ritual) and that a politics that takes democracy beyond those limits imposed by capitalism is essential to human liberation. With this book she has, in my view, confirmed herself as one of the most significant political thinkers we have.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well it certainly renewed historical materialism for me.

Deserves an actual fleshed-out review I can't provide right now, but suffice to say for now that Ellen Meiksins Wood is underappreciated. Simultaneously unwaveringly marxist and intellectually courageous, not much to say on economic minutiae but all the more on the historic specificity of economic paradigms, their causality and their ideological imprints. Brought to life "civil society" more than any other decent historian I'd hitherto read.

[Peter Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first part of this book is a magnificent re-statement of the relevance and usefulness of historical materialism as an analytical tool. Drawing much inspiration from the work of EP Thompson, Meiksins Wood critiques determinist and structural versions of Marxism. She emphasises instead how historical materialism provides a toolkit for social and historical analysis rather than a rigid straitjacket within which the evidence must be made to fit.

Meiksins Wood stresses the importance of class struggle as both a process and a relationship rather than as a structure. This colours the interaction between 'base' and 'superstructure' which is envisaged not as a rigid hierarchical relationship but as an interaction, something to be analysed in a specific historical conjuncture rather than assumed to fit a pattern.

In the second part, Meiksins Wood draws on her analysis of ancient democracy to contrast the modern concept of 'formal' democracy with ancient politics. The separation of economic from the political under capitalism means that modern democracy has been emptied of any ability to deliver emancipation. As a result radical thought has shifted onto the terrain of 'identity' politics, losing sight of a wider analysis of the impact of class. We can no longer see the

There are similarities here - although I'm sure Meiksins Wood would not agree - with some of Althusser's writing in 'Reading Capital' which highlights how we fail to see the structure of society wrapped around the content. The rules of the game become invisible, and we are left with the assumption that capitalism is something which has been latent throughout history. In fact the rules are determined by the social relations within each epoch, and there is no teleological drive towards capitalism. There is only real history that can be analysed to unpick how capitalism arrived in the specific historical conjuncture. Democracy functions under capitalism because politics is no longer the mechanism through which surplus is extracted from the direct producers. Capitalism can therefore tolerate a broad degree of political freedom because the fundamental structure of society and appropriation will remain untouched.

I am also reminded (slightly tangentially) of a recent Cornelia Parker exhibition at the Whitworth Art gallery which showed us the structure around objects rather the objects themselves.

The book is essentially a collection of essays, with some work put in to make them feel like a cohesive whole. This isn't always successful however, particularly in the second part which makes something of a break from the argument put forward in the first.

Despite this, it is a superb outline of how historical materialism can be used to analyse history. It also provides a philosophical underpinning to more modern thinking on the challenges for the left for example the work by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in "Inventing the Future".

November 2023: Not much to add on second reading. I enjoyed the second selection of essays more this time that I did on first reading. Wood's clearsighted analysis on the impact of the separation of economic and political remains hugely insightful. Overall this remains a great read. For a book with a strong base in the history of the ancient world it is very relevant to modern capitalism.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part 1: Renewing Historical Materialism
The best aspects of this book were where she reaffirms the primacy of class struggle and defends E.P. Thompson's understanding of class formation, as he developed in The Making of the English Working Class. She argues that class formation is not "superstructural", because the relations and powers of classes in society are precisely what determine the mode of production. This is followed by arguments against "productivity" as the motive force of history, which she views as bourgeois teleology that has infiltrated Marxist thought.

Part 2: Democracy against Capitalism
The second half of the book is more about Democracy, and how the Greek idea of Democracy, as it was re-appropriated in the 17th and 18th centuries, was converted into an intentionally elitist idea of "representative democracy", and eventually into an idea of "liberal democracy" in which democracy has become identified with the independence of "civil society". In other words, she traces the intellectual history of how democracy came to be identified with the independence of the economic sphere from state regulation.

A few complaints

1. She pretty vehemently attacks Althusserian structuralism as unhistorical and full of "technological determinism" that diminishes the role of class struggle. But I think she tends to lump all of the Althusserian ideas as infected by this, and throws the baby out with the bathwater. In particular, she dislikes the Althusserian idea that a society can have multiple economic logics co-existing.

For example, I think it makes sense to say something like "different aspects of the feudal economy obeyed different logics, with peasant-lord relations co-existing with an urban mercantilism that operated closer to the logic of modern capitalism." But she would tear this apart for ignoring the historical specificity and unique logic of feudal society, as well as for reading the seeds of capitalism too far backwards in time. To be fair, I haven't done the research on feudal society, so maybe there really was no capitalism lurking, waiting to be "unfettered", but I didn't find her insistence on the matter convincing.

2. She's not great on race and gender issues. While it's fine to argue that capitalism doesn't rely on racism and sexism in a fundamental way, you actually have to give an argument and not just boldly assert it, since lots of feminist and anti-racist Marxists disagree with you! This actually seems like her doing exactly the same Structuralist mistakes she accuses the Althusserians of: constructing an ideal, logical form of capitalism, and arguing that when history doesn't match it, that history is wrong!

[José Pereira · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great demonstration of the strengths of political marxism. Wood does a brilliant job in applying her historical method and her "capitalism as a contingent social formation, particular in its separation of the political from the economic" framework to a breadth of political, and specifically marxist, controversies.
Wood uses this approach to, with particular success, dismiss the (deterministic and teleological) theories of history of both orthodox and analytical marxists, and to demonstrate how capitalism united with liberalism to create the watered-down versions of democracy that characterise today's western political systems.
Also worthy of note is Woods' E.P. Thompson-influenced theorising on base and superstructure - which highlights their inextricability, showing how the legal, the cultural, and the political materialize in (actual) relations of production (the social character of "the material"). And on class, here sketched out as "process and relationship" - class as a dynamic unfolding and matching of experiences, interests, and antagonisms, which stem from collective subordination in relations of production.
Woods conjuntural comments (on the new social movements, and on the state of the Left - leaning ever more to the right on economic policy) are also remarkably lucid and prescient. Definitely (still) worth a read.

[Camilo Ruiz Tassinari · Rating 5 out of 5]

An impressive book. One of the most brilliant defences of a complex and undogmatic Marxism I've encountered lately. The two chapters on capitalist vs ancient democracy are excellent.

[Jason Schulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just as great as it was in its first edition over 20 years ago. If you have an interest in Marxist thought and want to read one of Wood's books, start with this one!

[Maia Mindel · Rating 5 out of 5]

every ellen meiksins wood book starts with six chapters about dense economic disputes between 1970s marxist economists about seemingly irrelevant issues. however, as seen in whatever comes after chapter six, these questions are of paramount importance - particularly, the question of how "class" and the "market" came to be central in economic life having a clear correlate in how the definition of a democratic citizenry narrowed and mutated. identity politics, in this view, is simply the mirror image of what's colloquially known as neoliberalism - an acceptance of liberation from non -economic coercion at the cost of increasing labor exploitation. agree or disagree, the book is genuinely fascinating in its exploration of greece, rome, the us founding, feudalism, slavery, and racism and sexism

[Mrtfalls · Rating 5 out of 5]

From what I understood the central thesis of this book is that the overarching determinant in social and economic is capitalism and that overthrowing it and replacing it with socialism is about extending existing concepts of democracy to all walks of life.
She argues that current conceptions of democracy and capitalism are either not accurate enough to be useful or do not go far enough in their descriptions and analysis.
In particular when it come to capitalism she argues that most historians and political theorists including many that classify themselves as left-wing or Marxist theorists wrongly analyse capitalism as a system of social relations that have existed in a “dormant” form but which were waiting for an opportunity to expand after certain barriers be undone for this to happen. She argues instead that capitalism´s origins come from England in the 18th century, when a set of juridical and economic efforts were made to a) make it easier to have private property, b) for those who controlled private property to appropriate the work of labourers (who were up until then peasants) and c) to make the continued to survival of those who did not hold property dependent on their ability to access a market.
The dominant mode of production before then, feudalism, set up social and economic relations in the following way: a) largely those who worked land has access and controlled their own means of production, b) appropriation of wealth did not take its form in a waged-labour but rather that peasants were legally and physically coerced into paying rent, c) because they had control over much of their own means of production, their continued survival was not dependent on whether they would say have the money to access a market.
However, Ellen Meiksins Wood goes onto critically appraise much more than this and many other theorists. Chapter 2 on “Rethinking Base and Superstructure” largely went over my head, I should probably re-read it, but if anyone can explain that, that would be great.
In further Chapters she criticises technological determinist ideas of capitalism. These are theories that say technological advances (e.g. the steam engine) were the real catalysts for the development of capitalism. EMW argues that this is wrong and that the extent of technological development in a society is not a measure of whether it is capitalist or not and that many big strides in technology happened in many other societies, but they did not bring forth a change in social property relations that would be called “capitalism”.

In the second part of her book, she argues for an Athenian model of democracy with some caveats. She recognised that ancient Athens was reliant on slave labour, however she argues that the extent to which this was significant to the Athenian economy is debateable. But also people should correct me on that, I found a lot of the historical aspects difficult to catch up with.
The Athenian model of democracy is one where all those who are considered citizens regardless of their social status can participate and freely associate in assemblies, and make decisions over production and running of society.
She contrasts this conception of democracy with what she calls the “American definition” of democracy. This conception of democracy neglects the way in which capitalism has transferred many political rights to the market (e.g. access to housing or food), and that the emphasis of it comes down to voting people in who you transfer your political power to.
She goes on to talk about how many left-wing writers now end up talking about “civil society” more than capitalism and class. She argues that this fails to analyse the social property relations and conflicts that are at hand. However, as much as I might agree with her, I think she doesn´t expand on this point and make it as clear as she could.
She goes on to argue towards the end that many things that are not necessarily economic rights but instead “extra-economic” rights, in particular with regards to gender and racial equality, can in theory be compatible with capitalism. She argues that what is unique about capitalism is its indifference to these oppressions, and that they are relevant to capitalism only insofar as that they are used by the capitalist class to sew divisions in the working-class. She argues that this is much different than pre-capitalist societies because political equality in these societies was foreclosed when it came to race and gender by the economic and political constitution of a given body. Whereas capitalism by definition made no judgement about gender or race only insofar as any oppression or gendered or racial dynamic made it easier to maintain capitalism. But that a change in these dynamics are always possible in capitalism whilst maintaining, at least in theory.
I don´t know if I agree with this. I would have thought that a feudal system could also in theory allow for racial and gender equality whilst still maintaining feudalism. Nothing about feudalism as defined above, would preclude. But I would be interested to hear other people´s thoughts on my takes, interpretations and criticisms.

Anyway I recommend anyone to read this book, if they want to become more familiar with what capitalism and democracy is. I recommend to take notes as you read, talk to others as you read it reviews or articles than can clarify any points. It´s definitely a book that you should study, if you want to get something out of it. I didnt really “study” it. I also had the advantage that I read EMW´s book “Origin of Capitalism” before hand, which made the first part of the book much easier (although not completely) to follow.

[Liam Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wood puts the historical back into historical materialism.

She sets the scene like so - by the 1990s, when the book came out, leftist and liberal scholars alike had given up on proper historical analysis and come to see capitalism as an predetermined stage in human development. The right took capitalism as the last stage - “the end of history” – the left took capitalism as a step towards socialism, but both were following the same rigid model.

Wood is having none of that. In part one of the book, she picks up where the mature Marx, and EP Thompson left off, in analysing capitalism as a recent and historically unique system which arose in what was feudal, rural England in the 18th century due to an unprecedented reorganisation of how class power was distributed, land was held, and surplus labour appropriated. This shift from Fuedalism to Capitalism in England was by no means inevitable; France shifted from Fuedalism into Absolutism around the same time. Nor was it simply a product of technological change; the shift occured in rural England, prior to the industrial revolution. Instead it emerged through struggle and class contest. Wood uses this historical insight to re-examine core Marxist concepts of base-superstructure, class and the separation of the political and economic.

In part two, Wood turns her historical gaze onto democracy. Wood draws out the specific form modern democracy but comparing it to Ancient Athenian democracy. In Ancient Athens, citizens – peasants and elite alike – enjoyed direct and substantive power over public affairs (including the production and distribution of goods). The flip side was that citizenship and democratic power were limited to free men (women and slaves were excluded). By contrast modern democracy is far more inclusive, but its power has been diluted. Now citizens elect representatives, rather than engaging in decision making themselves, and democracy does not extend to matters of production, which capitalism has removed from public control into a separate sphere called ‘the economy’.

Wood's historical interventions come with a political purpose. She is insistent on understanding capitalism as a recent and unprecedented social system brought about by specific struggles not only because it’s more historically accurate, but because this shows that further change is possible and where its sources, and barriers, might lie. Similarly her history of democracy gives as a clear sense of modern democracy’s strengths and weaknesses and how useful it may or may not be against capitalism.

A few criticisms. One, the essays are heavy on historiographical debate but somewhat light on actual historical detail. Wood, for example, asserts that capitalism arose from a set of struggles and shifts in rural England without ever spending more than a paragraph detailing the struggles themselves; the key facts and moments. This feels problematic in a book which spends so much time critiquing others for glossing over historical details in favour of pre-determined stories. I’m sure some of Wood’s other work gets into this historical detail, and she also points readers to exemplary, detailed historical work like E.P. Thompson’s “The Making of the English Working Class” but it would have been great to have a chapter in here deep diving into the historical details of the events she refers to at a high-level. Two, the book still very much feels like a collection of separate essays. Key arguments get stated over and over.

Overall though, fantastic. A really appealing corrective to both vague leftist theorizing and glossy liberal histories obsessed with technological leaps and progress.

[Jimmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little bit uneven. The sections about class and the polemics against structural Marxism are interesting and thoughtful. Meiksins Wood's defense of Marxism against Weber is especially well constructed, and her novel defense of Greek Democracy is interesting and thought provoking, and forms a substantial contrast to liberal democracy.

The sections polemicizing against post-Marxism and post-modernism strike me as weak, as does her belief--stated but not well defended--that capitalism is capable of absorbing all social struggles other than those based on class (a claim that seems especially dubious with regards to anti-racist struggles).

The oddest thing to me is there are points where--despite her continued defense of Marxism and privileging of class politics over other forms of struggle--Meiksins Wood comes very close, at least in practical terms, to the political project of her post-Marxist interlocutors.

Certainly worth a read, if not uniformly convincing.

[Nico Cornejo · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I finished reading this essay collection, I was a little perplexed. The title was, I thought, pretty indicative of the book, with a part on Capitalism and another on Democracy, with little connection between both. This is not a problem per se, it happens with many essay collections. However, after thinking about it some more I started to see what was going on.
In the first part, Meiksins Wood mainly focus on a defense of EP Thompson. As a fan of EP Thompson myself, I have to say I deeply appreciated it. I’ve been trying to wade through Poverty of Theory, but it is such a poor book in some senses. Thompson was angry, and the book feels repetitive and unfair towards Althusser. As a historian Thompson is great, but he cannot claim to have the same level as a theoretician. Meiksins Wood, on the other hand, does a great job of cleaning up Thompson’s work, and of discovering the real theory of class and agency that lays behind Thompson’s writings. And the reconstruction makes total sense. The idea of class as “structured process” will remain a key concept for me going forward.
The second part of the book was more difficult to follow. I know next to nothing about Ancient Greece, and the topic of democracy is not something that attracts me particularly. However, I now get what she was doing: On one hand, her study on Athenian democracy shows how bourgeois history has falsified the historical record to accord to its ideological bent, something that is also present in her analysis of Weber. Interestingly, capitalism was turned by Weber and other bourgeois analysts into an eternal phenomenon, identified with markets and commerce. And at the same time, Athenian democracy was vacated of meaning by putting the focus on slavery instead of the democratic part of the system, in which “shoemakers and carpenters” had a say in the government.
This brings us back to one of the key insights of Meiksins Wood and of political Marxism in general: Political power in Capitalism is divided into two parts. One part is the power of the capitalist at the production process, and the other part is the power of the state. Real democracy would involve having power on both realms, like in Athens. Without the slavery and the exclusion of women, one would imagine.
The second part also has one of the habitual rants of Meiksins Wood against the post-fall of the USSR left, or postmodern left as it was known at the time. MW brings a couple of interesting discussions to the fore, although I disagree in some parts. First is the idea that there is no contradiction in principle between capitalism and Gender and Racial equality. Here the words “in principle” are doing the heavy work. Of course, it would be theoretically possible for a capitalist system that does not discriminate against women or minorities. But, is it really possible? Here I think that she confuses the core mechanisms of capitalism, the market imperative, with the actual functioning of the system. The exploitation of extra-economic structures of oppression might not be theoretically needed, but it is pushed by the same market imperative that makes the whole system work.
My conclusion and her on this topic would be similar though: Just fighting for gender or race without socialism is not enough. Not because the fight could win without capitalist oppression disappear, but because the only way in which these “extra-economic” forms of oppression can disappear fully is with a socialist system. The distinction might seem minor, but I believe it has important connotations for our organizing activities.

[KT · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection of essays, particularly the first section that is focused on historical materialism and a critique of political economy that acknowledges the historical and systemic specificity of capitalism and the need to explain what (classic) political economy took as given
Whereas the second section titled democracy against capitalism, which discussed topics including civil society, gender, race and citizenship under capitalism felt disconnected

The book does live up to its subtitle of renewing historical materialism: materialism reiterating that an understanding of the world requires an understanding of the social activity and the social relations through which human beings interact with nature in producing the conditions of life; a historical understanding, which acknowledges that the products of social activity, the forms of social interactions produced by human beings, themselves being material forces

Criticises teleology for viewing capitalism as inevitable and its principles to have always existed, in contrast to capitalism's specificity and historicity as a particular form of social relations

There was also an interesting and illuminating discussion of EP Thompson's interpretation and analysis of class as a relationship and process, which is visible as a phenomenon only in the latter when observed over time as a pattern in social relations, institutions and values, and is the social organisation that creates the material conditions of existence

Also makes a convincing anti-positivist case that social relations of capital can be shown to exist without the need to quantify a surplus or measuring the relative gains of producers and appropriators
The quantitative measure of surplus is not critical in explaining the role of class in history, but rather the specific nature of the compulsion to transfer it and the specific nature of the social relation in which that transfer takes place. For example, in capitalism, the direct producer's obligation to forfeit surplus is a pre-condition for access to the means of production, the means of sustaining life itself, what compels them to produce more than they will themselves consume and to transfer the surplus to someone else is the "economic" necessity that makes their own subsistence inseparable from the transfer of surplus labour

[João Vítor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Considero um livro de grande valor para a discussão que a autora se propõe: a democracia vs. capitalismo. O primeiro bloco de ensaios da autora é belíssimo. Wood desenvolve uma linha argumentativa enriquecida pelas categorias marxianas e também de expoentes humanistas na compreensão das problemáticas do mundo moderno (apelando também, como todo e toda autora de grande calibre, às boas polêmicas e debates).

Entretanto, tenho minhas ressalvas com relação às essencialidades do sistema capitalista propostas pela autora ao final do segundo bloco. As determinações destacadas por Wood são características sobretudo de experiências ocidentais e eurocêntricas, em que ela interpela, justa e corretamente, com conflitos e formas de representação de sociedades pré-capitalistas (como a Grécia Antiga). Se a comparação é válida e pertinente para entender as diferenças que subsistem na sociedade moderna e suas formas de organização, não acredito que as ponderações finais sejam suficientes para dar conta de assimilar e reproduzir idealmente as condições concretas experienciadas na luta de classes através de diferentes países do mundo (seja na periferia do sistema, em que acho que o livro acaba ficando deveras deslocado, seja ainda no centro do sistema, em que as contradições de exploração e extração de mais-valor são mais complexas do que a interpretação do último ensaio demonstram, por exemplo).

[Thomas Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is like leftist brain bleach for anyone who looks at our world's decaying ecological state, rising far-right extremism, and decaying standards of life across the Western world.

Ellen Meiksins Woods clearly and brilliantly makes her case for a reinvigoration of historical materialism which lies at the core of Marxist theory. But putting past incarnations of Marxist theory and it developments over the years, she firmly courses the intellectual and political failings of the left over the past 50 years or so while making an extremely compelling case for a new path.

While she relies a bit too heavily on Robert Brenner's property theory as the key social relationship necessary for capitalism, most else is spot on. And I'll forgive this oversimplification for her bold recentering of democracy outside of capitalism and its regrounding in much, much different terms as the current liberal democracy creates.

In short, if you would love a great intro into the failings of leftist thoughts over the last 50 years, a field guide to the normative strengths of renewing a Marxism grounded in historical materialism, and a wonderful survey on the evolution of democracy from ancient times up past the industrial revolution: read. this. book.

[Brian Doering · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second half of this really nails it's titular assertion. Capitalism, by definition at least, pretends to make the economic sphere autonomous from the political. As such, it is neutral in terms of all identities - race, gender, sexuality...etc. There is no built-in interest in emancipation for identity and this is, in part, why the people must, while not voiding those particularities of identity, rally into the class distinctions (the underlying unifying terms of the masses).

[John NM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some chapters are too in the weeds on narrow arguments about Marxist theory. But much of the book is still quite fresh and urgent.

Found the arguments about the easy comfort between political liberalism and equality and capitalism to be really compelling, in particular that this coexistence has demand a devaluation of political values and claims.

Also found the later chapters on class, civic society, and identity politics to be insightful, particularly after having just read Elite Capture.

[Ethan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chapters 6 and 7 comparing forms of democracy in Athens, Rome, Sparta, and the US were fascinating. Made me reconsider the value of sortition as a democratic practice, and also made me realize I don’t have a framework for thinking about democratic alternatives to republican and parliamentary systems of representation.

[Eurethius Péllitièr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly dense theory but part II picks up. Difficult to accept chapter 9s blindspot but pretty good

[Tam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book because the title resembled the one I had picked for my Philosophy dissertation but with not much hope of it being interesting, and was pleasantly surprised. It is smart, edgy and well written.

Meiksins Wood asks an interesting question: what happened to the concept of democracy? How did we end up using the same name both for a system where every citizen participated and public officers were chosen by draw and for one where public officers are chosen and then virtually execute all power? How did we get here from there? She answers these question not only through philosophical arguments and concepts but using history in a way that's narratively very effective and not too heavy at all.

The debates MW attempts with post modernists and social democrats from a more traditional sort of left are very interesting too, and despite the book's age, I believe, very current.

Strongly recommend this book for anyone interested in democratic theory that wants to read an interesting input from the left side of the field.

[Bruce Foster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Re-started it.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

*intellectual crush intensifies*