Reclassificatory Tensions between Contemporary Democracy and Capitalism

The tensions between democracy and the different forms of accumulation, distribution and organization of modern capitalism are not new. These tensions have appeared, on the one hand, with the challenges to the "formal character" of the type of democracy linked to capitalism and colonial expansion. These critiques have sought greater democratization, even putting capitalist relations in crisis. On the other hand, these tensions have also arisen in moments of epochal transformations of capitalism. There, the democratic framework has seemed to present itself as an “obstacle” to the expansion of capitalist relations, both over other spheres defined as “non-economic”, and in order to promote mutations in the forms of production, consumption and distribution.

Nowadays, several perspectives have been arguing that we are at a crossroads defined by both tensions: the search for emancipatory democratization, and the emergence of new oppressive forms of exploitation ‒for example, through the digitalization of the economy. For this reason, the relations between capitalism and democracy are undergoing a double crisis. How to deal with such complex and distressing crises? This paper will dwell on them through a proposal that focuses on the reclassificatory processes of contemporaneity, that is, their incessant transformations in the ways of dividing, qualifying and hierarchizing the social and natural world. These transformations pose a sophisticated interweaving between social reclassifications in general ‒of different social realms‒ and sociological ones ‒that seek to analyze and intervene in them. Both social and sociological reclassifications mold the very concepts of “democracy” and “capitalism”.