Are Democracy and Capitalism Compatible

2012 Words5 Pages

In contemporary times, the rise of capitalism as a dominant economic trend and its ravenous demand to accumulate sources from new markets, has led to the idea of merging political and economic power into one, which is democratic capitalism or otherwise illustrated as “a system where markets allocate income according to efficiency while governments redistribute income according to political demand."(Iversen, 2006). The advancements mentioned earlier, have given ground for questions concerning the possible compatibility of the political ideology which is democracy and the economic ideology capitalism and how would they affect one another. This mergence could be examined in recent times, whereas in the past around the start of the nineteenth century it was considered as inappropriate and unlikely to happen. This paper aims to demonstrate to what degree are democracy and capitalism compatible, by examining the various areas of conflict of the two ideologies, how has capitalism affected the democratic system in the United States and does actually global capitalism have an impact on the developing countries democracies.
One of the scholars who didn’t support the idea of a mergence between capitalism and democracy was the famous Karl Marx, who thought that it either wouldn’t happen or if it did it would have evaporated quickly. In his work he portrayed his opinion on capitalist democracy as ‘only the political form of revolution of bourgeois society and not its conservative form of life.” On the arena of politics it appears to be that there are numerous moments of clashes between both the economic ideology capitalism and the political ideology democracy and this is an opinion stated by various scholars including Karl Marx. According t...

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...t Democracy in a Neoliberal Order: Doctrines and Reality, Z online Magazine
Iversen, T., (2006), Handbook of Political Science, 1st ed, Spi Publisher Services. Pp 614-615
Koelbe, T. and Lipuma, E. (2008), 'Democratizing Democracy: A PostcolonialCritique of Conventional Approaches to the 'Measurement of Democracy', Democratization , Vol.15, No.1, Pp. 16-18
Przeworski, A., 2004. Capitalism, Development and Democracy. Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 24, No. 4 (96), Pp. 489-497
Sherman, H., 1995. Democracy and Capitalism. Reinventing Marxism, JohnsHopkins University Press, pp. 177-192
Street, P. Capitalism and Democracy "Don't Mix Very Well": Reflections on globalization, February, 2000. Z online Magazine: http://www.iefd.org/articles/capitalism_and_democracy.php UNDP (2004), Arab Human Development Report 2004: Towards Freedom in the Arab World
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