Democratic Multiplicity Under Capitalism

Abstract The call to recognize democratic multiplicity, that is, that democracy exists in spaces other than the state, rightly underlines the social dimension of collective governance in modern societies. Capturing this rich diversity of experience and theorizing its impact is an important counter to traditional top-down state-centric democratic theory. Yet there is a danger that in the pursuit of particular spaces of democratic activity, the broader capitalist landscape upon which it is enacted may be obscured. As the state level is a crucial guarantor of the capitalist social relations that condition individual and collective behavior work exploring democratic multiplicity must grapple with the state if it wants to understand the concrete potential and limits of such democratic endeavors. By exploring how capitalism uniquely shapes politics we will see how the multiplicitous spaces of smaller-scale democratic practice are not separate from the state but an entangled element of a broader relational struggle over “actually existing democracy” in a specifically capitalist setting.