Paradoxes of Democracy and De-democratization

Paradojas de la democracia y desdemocratización

In this article, I sustain the philosophical thesis that a “crisis of democracy” is not a circumstantial phenomenon. Quite the opposite, de-democratizing tendencies are structural in capitalist democracies. The main reason for this is that de-democratization processes are inherent to broader dispossession processes aiming to privatize the decisions on the production and reproduction life, and to remove responsibility over those decisions. De-democratization is the tendency to the loss of decision power over one’s own destiny, both on the individual and collective level. Thus, the democratic paradox is not, as traditionally understood, between human rights and popular sovereignty. On the contrary, capitalist democracies themselves have a de-democratizing structure that neutralizes popular sovereignty to make it harder to effectively guarantee vulnerable people’s rights.