Democracy as symbol and as ideology: Lefort, Althusser, Poulantzas

This article develops an account of the ideological function of the democratic political scene in contemporary liberal democracies. It does so by confronting Claude Lefort's theory of democracy with a structuralist Marxist perspective. According to Lefort, democracies institutionalise a political scene that symbolically acknowledges that a society's future perpetually remains undecided. Despite this key insight, Lefort exclusive emphasis on the symbolic acknowledgement of contingency blocks us from distinguishing between meaningful conflict with tangible stakes and a limited, managed or market-conforming democracy. In contrast, Althusser and Poulantzas foreground the state's structural imperative to reproduce capitalist social relations. By taking into account both democracy's ‘show’ and its ‘machinery’, I argue that the meanings generated by the construction of the political scene are also always ideological: the symbolic acknowledgement of an open-ended future can serve as an ideological cover that dissimulates the reality of the reproduction of capitalist social relations.