Democracy in Troubled Times

Authors

  • Jeff Noonan

Abstract

The paper examines liberal democracy as a contradictory social formation. On the one hand, liberalism coevolved with capitalism and its alienating, exploitative, and oppressive structures dynamics. On the other hand, just because capitalist property relationships were alienating, exploitative, and oppressive, workers and colonised people were forced to fight back. The democratic side of liberal democracy is largely a result of these struggles. From this perspective, democracy is not so much a particular political form as it is a deeper set of social relationships. The protection and deepening of democracy today must root itself in the history of struggles to reclaim collective control over universally required liferesources.

Downloads

Published

2020-07-16

How to Cite

Noonan, J. (2020). Democracy in Troubled Times. Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research, 31(1). Retrieved from https://alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/article/view/22515

Issue

Vol. 31 No. 1 (2020): Populism, Power and Protest

Section

Interventions

License

Articles are published in Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research under the Creative Commons "Attribution/Non-Commercial/No Derivative Works" Canada licence.

The copyright for the articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal. By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles may be used, with proper attribution, in educational and other non-commercial, not-for-profit settings. The submission of a manuscript to Alternate Routes will be taken to mean that the author understands and agrees to the following:

  • the manuscript represents original work not previously published;
  • the manuscript is not being considered elsewhere for publication in the same language (publication elsewhere in an alternate language does not preclude acceptance of submission to Alternate Routes); 
  • appropriate written copyright permissions have been secured for republication of any copyrighted material contained in the manuscript; 
  • copyright for this article is retained by the author, with first publication rights granted to Alternate Routes; 
  • by virtue of its appearance in this open access journal, it is understood that the article is freely available for use, with proper attribution, for educational and other non-commercial purposes; 
  • reuse of the article for commercial purposes by anyone other than the author requires permission of the author; 
  • the author agrees to cite Alternate Routes as a source whenever h/she later republishes or reuses the article in other platforms.