2022/06/17 by James Muldoon, Dougie Booth · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Critical Theory and Philosophy #Political Economy and Marxism #Political Philosophy and Ethics
paper · doi:10.1177/01914537221107403
openalex publication_date 2022/06/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Contemporary democratic theorists have tended to assume that democracy is compatible with and even requires a capitalist economic system. Rosa Luxemburg offers a democratic criticism of this view, arguing that the dominating effects of a capitalist economy undermine the ability of liberal democracy to actualise its ideals of freedom and equality. Drawing on Luxemburg’s writings, this article theorises a model of socialist democracy which combines support for public ownership and control of the means of production with a plural multi-party electoral system and a defence of civil liberties. It recovers Luxemburg’s conceptualisation of a socialist democracy as the extension of democratic principles to major social and economic institutions currently governed by nondemocratic authority structures. It defends this version of socialist democracy from the liberal objection that it violates citizens’ property rights and the Marxist objection that it retains the dominating structures of the state and a coercive legal system.