Democratic Capitalism Research Articles

Taking the Right Lessons from Lenin and the Russian Revolution

Eric Blanc's article, “Taking the Right Lessons from Lenin and the Russian Revolution,” critically examines the enduring influence of Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution on socialist movements, highlighting the challenges of applying revolutionary strategies in parliamentary contexts. Blanc argues that while Leninist parties have played significant roles in advancing working-class interests, their revolutionary approach has been less effective in advanced capitalist democracies. He emphasizes that the Russian Revolution demonstrated the potential to overthrow capitalism but warns against overgeneralizing its strategies. Blanc critiques the myth of Bolshevik exceptionalism and the rigid organizational discipline often associated with Leninism, proposing instead a more flexible and inclusive approach to building socialist movements. By analyzing the experiences of socialist parties across the Russian Empire, particularly in Finland and Latvia, Blanc illustrates the effectiveness of uniting radical and moderate socialists within broader workers' parties. He argues that a strategy rooted in democratic socialism, adaptable to varying political contexts, offers a more viable path to socialist transformation than the insurrectionary models promoted by early Leninists. Blanc concludes that the key to advancing socialism lies in scaling up working-class and socialist organization through transformative reforms and democratic engagement, rather than adhering to prescriptive revolutionary strategies.

Hating Women: A Constitution of Hate in Plain Sight.

In April 2023, the U.K. government announced that misogyny would not be categorized as a hate crime stating that this "may prove more harmful than helpful." This article argues that before and beyond hate crime, misogyny, understood as the hatred of women (from the Greek misein [hate] gynae [women]), is the foundational logic of our legal, social, and political order in the west. This constitution of hate relies on the active dehumanization, exploitation, and ownership of women's bodies by the institution of white men through making women the object of the "colonization of the everyday." This exhausting hatred is enacted through repetitive, unceasing, and everyday violence toward women. Simply put, patriarchal, colonial, capitalist democracy is only sustained through violence against women. Hating women is, therefore, not a pathology of society but rather is the necessary existence condition of our legal-political constitution, clear to see yet hiding in plain sight. Misogyny ensures the precarity of women's bodies and women's status as trespassers in everyday spaces that are deliberately always already misogynistic. Given the foundational nature of misogyny, did the government have a point in excluding endemic violence against women from hate crime as "more harmful than helpful?" Is hate crime merely constitutive of a cultural matrix of misogyny? This paper enacts a decolonial feminist prism to disrupt the cultural condition of misogyny by thinking hate crime together with legal-political constitutional and cultural change. The paper explores violence against women set against the historical emergence of misogyny from Greek dehumanization, to medieval persecution of "witches," the muzzling and banning of women from public spaces, Shakespeare's "Taming," to contemporary femicide rates. Interrogating hate crime through this prism offers nuanced routes for how to disrupt the legal-political constitution of misogyny that is neither hidden nor new. Misogyny is enduring.

The politics of the minimum wage: Explaining introduction and levels

AbstractThere is much economics research on the effects of minimum wages, but little research on their politics. Yet, ever more advanced capitalist democracies have introduced minimum wages, and the setting of minimum wage levels has become increasingly politicized. This article is the first comprehensive study of the politics of the minimum wage: We analyse the determinants of adopting minimum wages as well as what explains variation in their levels over time, based on a dataset of 33 OECD countries from 1960 to 2017. We find that the decline in collective bargaining is the main driving force behind the introduction of ever more minimum wages. At the same time, left‐wing parties in government are most likely to adopt a minimum wage when bargaining coverage is low. Left governments are also associated with higher minimum wages, especially when the government has full control over level‐setting.

Political Deliberation vs. Social Media Branding in Crisis-Prone Capitalist Democracies

Political Deliberation vs. Social Media Branding in Crisis-Prone Capitalist Democracies

From Romanian Communism to Capitalism: the Representation and Ideology of Women’s Bodies

This article analyses the representation of women’s bodies in the narratives of Și se auzeau greierii (And Crickets Could Be Heard) by Corina Sabău, ca și cum nimic nu s-ar fi întâmplat (as if nothing has happened) by Alina Nelega, and Viața e a mea (The Life is Mine) by Emilia Faur. It explores how the portrayal of maternity, sexual abuse, abortion, and gender identity changes from Romanian Communism to the capitalist democracy. If the socialist women were submissive to the pronatalist desiderate, being oppressed because of the insalubrious abortions (Sabău) or because of the fear to affirm their gender identity (Nelega), the capitalist advertisement with its sexist standards of beauty, doubled by the postnatal depression, imposes the fatality of death (Faur). My objective is to connect feminist aesthetics with ideological critique by identifying the abstract model of a feminist Bildungsroman (Rita Felski) in the three novels under consideration. However, on a formal level, I will analyse how in the case of Faur's and Nelega's novels, the free indirect style, a blend of affect translated into impersonal form (Moretti), mediates a socio-political commentary for increased awareness and active engagement in dismantling the adaptable patriarchy inherent in any political system, while the first-person narrative (Sabău) shows how the social fabric is internalised by the narrator, following her inner turmoil.

The Big Tradeoff averted: five avenues to promote efficiency and equality simultaneously

Society as a whole faces a host of economic tradeoffs, many of which emerge around economic policies. An example of tradeoffs that any society faces in many economic realms is the tradeoff between economic efficiency and income equality (aka the efficiency-equality tradeoff). This tradeoff has been called “the Big Tradeoff” by the esteemed economist Arthur Okun, who also termed it “the Double Standard of a Capitalist Democracy.” Although the efficiency-equality tradeoff is more or less an inevitable tradeoff in most societal settings and economic contexts, there are still some special circumstances in which this tradeoff can be avoided. This paper identifies five such avenues and elaborates on why and how the tradeoff between these two somewhat contradictory societal goals—efficiency and equality—can be deftly averted under the mentioned circumstances. These avenues with their transformative potential can and should be used so that a capitalist society as an integrated whole can promote both efficiency and equality at the same time under these scenarios and avoid facing the Big Tradeoff in cases where it is evitable. Static and dynamic economic models are developed, solved, and applied to facilitate the articulation and exposition of the main points of each solution with formal rigor and logical coherence. Finally, policy implications are discussed.

Community and Japanese Developmental Capitalism: A Scaled and Sociological Political Economy

Japan has a standard framework for local communities, neighborhood associations, which request all households in the same residential district to belong to one community unit that plays a local management role through closely working with authorities. By framing a concept of ‘societalization’ in Bob Jessop’s state theory using Neil Brenner’s ‘scaled’ political economy project, we decipher Japanese neighborhood associations as a scaled strategy for community-oriented societalization. This strategy formally presents itself as ‘voluntary’ but asks all households to participate, and this ‘compulsory’ community norm was strong until the 1970s and 1980s. The renaissance of neighborhood associations after World War II gave Japanese developmental capitalism – a statist but democratic capitalism – a scaled and sociological platform for generating community-based social cohesion and upscaling this effect from the local to the national. After considering a sociological debate in Japan in the ambit of Gramscian and Lefebvrian regulationism, we argue that neighborhood associations became administratively versatile as they were standardized, functionalized, and nationalized until 1945; this past helped the Japanese developmental state – an integral state project – societalize state space from a micro unit of locality and propel statist development with grassroots consent; and progressive/radical voices advanced the democratization of the associations through local activism.

Unleashing a Monster? Causes and Consequences of the Knowledge Economy in Advanced Capitalist Democracies

Unleashing a Monster? Causes and Consequences of the Knowledge Economy in Advanced Capitalist Democracies

The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

Doug Elmendorf of Harvard University reviews “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism” by Martin Wolf. The EconLit abstract of this book begins: “Promotes the argument that economic disappointment is one of the chief explanations for the rise of left- and right-wing populism in high-income democracies, focusing on what can be done to restore the relationship between capitalism and democracy.”

The crisis of democratic capitalism; Crack-up capitalism: market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy

The crisis of democratic capitalism; Crack-up capitalism: market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy

Deleuze and Guattari on the French Revolution: Problems, Universal Minority, and the Bourgeoisie

Abstract: This article explores Deleuze and Guattari's theory of revolution in light of their comments on the French Revolution and intersection with the work of Marx. I argue that Deleuze associates revolution with a reformulation of the "problems" that condition experience, something Deleuze and Guattari then complicate through their insistence that institutional practice remain subject to the unfolding of an "indeterminate" yet collective revolutionary identity. I argue that the most important aspect of their theory for contemporary political thought is its argument for the necessity of uniting disparate forms of political experimentation without introducing institutions grounded in general conceptions of the subject, and conclude by discussing the emphasis they place on overcoming the "cogito of communication," a discursive "subject in general" essential to contemporary capitalist democracies.

Integrating three theories of 21st-century capitalism

Purpose This study aims to help develop “business principles for stakeholder capitalism” in two steps. First, the study defines internal logic of three theories of capitalism and two variants within each theory. Second, it examines approaches to integration into modern democratic capitalism. Treating the three theories as substitutes identifies relative strengths and weaknesses; complementarity and partial overlap approaches to integration study the institutional settings within which stakeholder capitalism operates. Empirical outcomes reflect competition between market and stakeholder businesses for participants, with institutional conditions determining the scope of collective action. Design/methodology/approach The approach aligns three typologies in a unique conceptual arrangement defining the three theories of capitalism: forms of capitalism, potential failures of each form and associated types of goods. The first method examines the internal logic of each theory of capitalism. The second draws on traditional narrative review of references documenting each theory of capitalism and variants together with modern Marxist anti-capitalism. Findings Three typologies align uniquely with the theories of capitalism, each having two variants. Both variants of stakeholder capitalism are compatible with compassionate capitalism, constitutional government or polycentric governance but not with self-interest capitalism, dictatorship or Marxism. A theory of modern democratic capitalism allocates roles for private, club and social goods with empirically variable mixes occurring across countries. Competition among different types of enterprises provides an empirical test for comparative advantages of stakeholder capitalism. Future research should consider approaches for testing the proposed conceptual scheme in practice concerning capacity to deal with grand challenges, wicked problems and black swan events. Research limitations/implications Research approach is limited to logical examination of theories and literature documentation without direct empirical confirmation. The study does not address practical implications for managers and public officials or social implications concerning private incentives, stakeholder cooperation or collective action. Originality/value Originality lies in shifting terms of debate about stakeholder capitalism from advocacy of substitute theories to understanding of its relationship to market capitalism and collective action capitalism. Value lies in explaining desirability of theoretical integration of three types of capitalism into a comprehensive framework for modern democratic capitalism.

The Fading Light of Democratic Capitalism: How Pervasive Cronyism and Restricted Suffrage Are Destroying Democratic Capitalism as a National Ideal…and What to Do about It

The Fading Light of Democratic Capitalism: How Pervasive Cronyism and Restricted Suffrage Are Destroying Democratic Capitalism as a National Ideal…and What to Do about It

Political Deliberation vs. Social Media Branding in Crisis-Prone Capitalist Democracies

This review essay discusses Jürgen Habermas’s recent reflections on the threats to deliberative politics by a new structural transformation of the public sphere. Renewing his 1962 concept, he analyzes “crisis-prone capitalist democracies” as the necessary condition for transforming the public discourse of self-determined citizens into political branding that seeks to manipulate the citizen as a consumer.Habermas then identifies social media’s blurring of the private and the public realms lready in the perception of democratic deliberation as the sufficient condition for today’s commodified discourse in a new political public sphere that has been colonized by the digital marketplace.

Religious and Moral Ideas in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Journalism

The paper uses journalistic works (op-ed pieces for the media, speeches, press conferences, interviews, etc.) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to reveal the formation and development of religious and moral issues in the writer's worldview. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn continued the historical line of Russian political and social thought, which had always been characterized by polyphony, ambiguity, and variability. The writer himself had repeatedly drawn attention to how important it is to understand the dependence of philosophical attitudes of a thinker on their life experience and age. In the mature period of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's career, the main aspects of his religious idea can be highlighted. Firstly, the opposition to the ideological legacy of the rationalist philosophy of the modern age and the criticism of the idea of constant progress as an example of “delusional philosophy”, the desire to legitimize the sacred in the political discourse, the postulation of the need to abandon the political language in reflections on social problems and return to the language of spiritual and moral writings can be mentioned here. Secondly, this is the recognition of the organic connection of religious consciousness with the national cultural type, the critical attitude to globalism and unification, the desire to preserve the national identity as a guarantee of the spiritual development of mankind, since a nation emerges around a religious idea and preserves it. The paper also examines Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's understanding of the phenomenon of the nation and the intelligentsia, as well as the reasons for the writer's skeptical attitude to the prospects of cultural convergence between East and West. According to the writer, both competing models of sociopolitical development — bourgeois democratic capitalism and the communist utopia of economic equality — are based on the same spiritual foundations: rationalism and naive Rousseaism in understanding human nature, cosmopolitanism and recognition of the issue of the distribution of wealth as the key issue of human existence. The convergence of social systems suffering from the same vices in their slightly different forms would lead to nothing but the multiplication of these vices.

Opacity and Transparency

Abstract I present the contours of an explanatory model of legitimacy that directs the focus away from normative questions and onto specific mechanisms of reality construction at play in constituting social orders. The key assumption informing the model is that stable orders rely fundamentally on their capacities to construct separate spheres of social reality, by which they exempt critical parts of reality from the burden of legitimation. I argue that an order's legitimacy ultimately depends on its ability to confine the question of legitimacy by relegating authorship of reality to opaque sources that are separated epistemically from the institutional order. The effective reification of critical zones of reality is shown to be a functional precondition for institutional stability. I show that capitalist democracy, in particular, depends on this mode of constructing ‘passive legitimacy’, which constitutes a key obstacle for any attempt to transform it towards an ecologically and socially sustainable formation.

Understanding Novak’s Spirit of democratic capitalism through “the corporation”

Abstract Many social theorists hold that the corporation is the key institution of the modern world. Novak wrote four books on the corporation, viewing it as the chief instrument of innovation within “democratic capitalism”, and the concrete entity in which its three systems (political, economic, moral-cultural) converge. We look at Novak’s account with its roots in Maritain, and at Novak’s intention to ground this account in the ideals of the American Founding, and in a Christian understanding of grace. “The corporation” turns out to be an excellent pathway into Novak’s thought and a safeguard against some fundamental mistakes in interpreting him.

Michael Novak, wealth and virtue: Work, creativity and the poor in democratic capitalism

Abstract The idea of this paper is to discuss the role of virtues in promoting general wellbeing for the common people. This is meant to contribute to the debate about possible linkages between overall wealth and individual character. My main source of inspiration is Michael Novak’s perspectives on the cultural basis for capitalism.

The overview of Michael Novak’s economic and political theory in the context of his relations with Poland

Abstract Michael Novak’s concept of democratic capitalism in Poland aroused great interest for several reasons. The most important of them consisted in its close relation to the teaching of the Polish Pope John Paul II. The second was its temporal coincidence with the start of a political transformation in Poland, when a model of development consistent with Polish tradition and social expectations was sought. The third was related to its Slavic roots and origin, which gained in importance given a perceived civilizational backwardness of the countries belonging to the former socialist bloc. For Polish Catholic thinkers, the concept of democratic capitalism initially seemed to promise a smooth transition to a market economy, protecting society from the shock of a possible collision with predatory capitalism. But the discussions of Michael Novak’s conception which took place in Poland at that time were unfortunately burdened with fears of cultural pluralism and with leaving individuals too much freedom in implementing their own ways of achieving happiness. Polish conservatives, who were in power at that time, did not seem to understand the important need for a dynamic moral and cultural system in a society that was just starting its modernization processes. It is paradoxical, but in these discussions what was most feared was the weakening of religious traditions in Polish society. According to the author, this fear caused distrust of the democratic conception, and especially its moral foundations, which continues to this day. This paper, therefore, also contributes to reflection on to what extent the teachings of John Paul II have been absorbed in Polish conservative circles.

Michael Novak’s understanding of capitalism

Abstract This paper examines the work of Michael Novak, a prominent American philosopher and theologian with roots in Central Europe. The study focuses on Novak’s understanding of democratic capitalism and its role in promoting economic growth and human flourishing. Novak argues that when properly understood and practiced, capitalism can lead to a more just and prosperous society, as it is based on the human desire for freedom, creativity, and self-expression. However, he emphasizes that the success of capitalism depends on the presence of moral and spiritual values, which he believes are necessary for it to function properly. This paper explores Novak’s arguments and evaluates them in the light of current knowledge. It also examines which values Novak deems important and why. The paper concludes that while Novak’s understanding of capitalism has some limitations, it offers valuable insights into the relationship between economics and morality. Novak’s framework provides a starting point for future discussions on how to ensure that capitalism operates ethically and promotes the common good.