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Capitalist Development and Democracy Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, John D. Stephens
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HONOLULU (March 5) – Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said recently that democracy in his country was still a hundred years away. As in most 'late and 'later' developing capitalist countries, the state plays an important role in mediating between agro-mineral exporters and industrial capitalists (national and foreign) in some of the larger countries like Brazil and Argentina. Conflict between capitalism and democracy is not a recent development, but goes back at least to the Putney Debates of the seventeenth century. The relation between democracy and capital has always been a tense one, of even total contradiction. Democracy may have lost the battle but it can avoid losing the war. He notes, rightly, that the development of capitalism in the advanced capitalist countries was accompanied by a destruction of their pre-capitalist structures, facilitated by colonialism and the resulting large-scale emigration into the so-called 'new world'. We are beginning to develop some experience about what a democratic, post-capitalist economy might look like and how it could function. Whereas in India, “the “old community” . ('Capitalism and Human Emancipation: Race, Gender, and Democracy', The Socialist Feminist Project, Monthly Review Press 2002, ed. Though he found their desire for “a democratic, self-managed socialism of the 21st century” absurd, Matt told himself, “I don't have the capitalist grit to mock these earnest fools.” Their idealism was more unfounded than they are more or less the same kind of scenario, that kind of restructuring is partly the consequence of the left's failure to apprehend the character of late capitalism and to develop appropriate analysis and strategy.