The contradiction between capitalism and democracy: towards a new emancipatory perspective

Abstract

Various authors through the last decades consolidated a strong "democratic critique" of Marxism. In this paper we will focus on the works of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, on one hand, and Axel Honneth, on the other, who question Marxism from perspectives that seek to reconstruct the reorganization of social relations that emerge with modernity, the "democratic revolution" and modern law. Our objective is to show that the State derivation theory of Antoine Artous allows reformulating in Marxist terms the contradiction between capitalism and democracy. This would, at the same time, reconstruct the processes of extending rights in modernity and open a non-totalizing anti-capitalist project different from what we will call the "organic conception" of emancipation. Since our work is mainly theoretical, our methodology will be the interpretation of texts and the confrontation of reading hypotheses.