The excerpt below is from For A Left Populism. I found the book a bit underwhelming to be honest, but the idea of approaching politics as a radicalisation of democracy appeals to me. I'm particularly interested in how this would play out in corp gov / ownership issues, where I agree that genuinely radical ideas would not necessarily even be conceived as being "anti-capitalist".
"The current move by the defenders of the status quo to label all of the critiques of the neoliberal order as 'extreme left', and to present them as a danger to democracy, is a disingenuous attempt to impede any kind of challenge to the existing hegemonic order. As if the choice was limited to accepting the current neoliberal hegemonic formation as the only legitimate form of liberal democracy or rejecting liberal democracy altogether...
"Despite the claim of many liberal theorists that political liberalism necessarily entails economic liberalism and that a democratic society requires a capitalist economy, it is cleat that there is no necessary relationship between capitalism and liberal democracy... It is within the framework of the liberal state - the division of power, universal suffrage, multi-party systems and civil rights - that it will be possible to advance the full range of present-day democratic demands. To struggle against post-democracy does not consist in discarding those principles but in defending and radicalising them...
"The process of radicalising democracy necessarily includes an anti-capitalist dimension as many of the forms of subordination that will need to be challenges are the consequences of capitalist relations of production... There are many points of antagonism between capitalism and various sectors of the population, and this means that, when this struggle is envisaged as an extension of the democratic principles, there will be a variety of anti-capitalist struggles. In some cases they may not even be perceived as being 'anti-capitalist' by the people involved in them and many will be conducted in the name of equality and conceived as struggles for democracy.
"People do not fight against 'capitalism' as an abstract entity because they believe in 'laws of history' leading to socialism. It is always on the basis of concrete situations that they are moved to act. If they struggle for equality it is because their resistances to various forms of domination are informed by democratic values and it is around those values, addressing their actual aspirations and subjectivities, and not in the name of anti-capitalism, that people can be mobilised."
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