Capitalism, democracy, citizenship – contradictions and insurgencies

Abstract

The aim of this essay was to discuss the relations between capitalism, democracy and citizenship, focusing on the recent transformations in all components of the triad National-State, capitalist market and citizenship, which characterized the construction of Western modernity and generated mass democracy, Welfare State, and regulated market. The globalization of the economy led to the deterritorialization of the production and circulation of goods and capital, in a phase of predominance of the logic of financial accumulation, dissociating the market from the national dimension, under which the political power of the state is exerted. It must be understood, however, that the tensions between capitalism and democracy, and even between democracy and citizenship, are constitutive of such relation, not always being antagonistic contradictions,
because, in specific conjunctures, in the face of social struggles and the accumulation of forces in certain phases of the process of accumulation, it was possible to build a new correlation of forces and to achieve viable anti-hegemonic proposals. The current stage must be understood as part of the aggravation of these contradictions, not as a relentlessly stagnant situation. The proposal is to think, in this juncture, about place of democracy and citizenship.