Is Democracy Possible? A Dialectical Materialist Approach

“It is easier,” wrote Mark Fisher in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism, “to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.1” Sixteen years and several metastasising crises later, the fatalistic idea that there is no alternative still has considerable sway. All we can do in response to the multiple crises around us is cross our fingers and hope for a technical fix; or for a more sensible, more competent, less failure-prone government to swoop into power and save the day2. In this contribution, I wish to put the case for a more vibrant imaginative landscape – to, as Fisher put it, “destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’” and “reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency.3” To properly answer the question is democracy possible? necessitates two things: a rejection of capitalist “realism” and, at the same time, the avoidance of wistful and utopian flights of intellectual fancy. Successfully navigating between those two poles requires a suitable legal method (an elusive term to which I will return in Section Six) and, in particular, a method that empowers us to move seamlessly from legal critique to realistic and considered action. I shall argue that the method of dialectical materialism, properly understood and shorn of its mechanistic and teleological connotations, provides us with a conceptual apparatus for thinking about the possibility (indeed necessity) of democracy. When applied to the study of law in general, and constitutional law specifically, it allows us to see things that other methods tend to obscure or exclude; and it gives us at least the outlines of the tactics and strategy necessary to win a democratic future – in other words, it is an indispensable method of constitutional critique and of constitutional praxis.