Socialism and democracy: the political engagements of Ellen Meiksins Wood

Abstract

The untimely death of Ellen Meiksins Wood on January 14, 2016 deprived the Left of one of its most original voices. Following Meiksins Wood’s own approach to political theory, we consider her work about the contradictory relationship between capitalism and democracy, and her commitment to a political program that led beyond capitalism towards a genuinely democratic society, in the context of her life and times.

Keywords:

• Capitalism
• democracy
• political Marxism
• socialism

Photography by Bridget Bygrave.

Introduction

The untimely death of Ellen Meiksins Wood on January 14, 2016 deprived the Left of one of its most original voices. Her work ranged over an extraordinary diversity of themes and historical periods with consistent rigour, independence of mind, and an unshakeable commitment to the twin causes of socialism and democracy. It would be impossible in a short essay to review all of her contributions. Instead, we offer an appreciation of her thought concerning the contradictory relationship between capitalism and democracy, and her commitment to a political program that led beyond capitalism towards a genuinely democratic society.

Throughout, we will apply one of the central insights of her work to her own intellectual career: the importance of understanding political thought in historical context, taking seriously the political engagements and class positions of canonical authors as a necessary means of reaching an adequate understanding of their ideas. Although she did not see herself primarily as a political activist, her work was consistently shaped by her engagement with the politics of the late twentieth century, the changing political economy of advanced capitalist societies, and the evolution of the Left as Soviet Communism declined and fell.

Early academic career

Ellen Meiksins Wood was the child of socialist refugees from fascism,¹ and came of age in New York and California in the aftermath of the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War. Her academic career began and continued against the backdrop of the United States civil rights movement, and then the student and antiwar movements. Meiksins Wood earned her Bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley, the home of the 1964–1965 Free Speech Movement and, later in the decade, a centre of student protest against poverty, racial injustice, and the Vietnam War. By the late 1960s, as these movements reached their apogee, Ellen and her husband Neal Wood, whom she met while pursuing graduate work at UCLA,² accepted faculty positions at York University—even living for a time in the epicentre of Toronto’s youth culture, Yorkville.

The Woods’ choice of York University proved to have important consequences for their intellectual development because the new university was fertile ground for the emergence of novel intellectual approaches and ideas, and attracted a wide range of faculty from across the globe. It is hard to imagine the originality of Ellen Meiksins Wood’s work developing in the confines of a more traditional American political science department.

The Woods were conscious of this, and, indeed, were attracted to York precisely because of the opportunity to build a program that would lead their specialty—political theory—in a different direction. But they also were aware of the dangers posed by the new context in which they found themselves. The rapid expansion of Canadian universities in the 1960s and 1970s led to the hiring of many faculty from outside Canada. While this often brought fresh ideas to the academy, it also raised concerns about the loss of focus on Canadian development and a loss of academic continuity with an older tradition of Canadian scholarship. By the 1970s, these concerns led to opposition to the hiring of American and other non-Canadian faculty, and to the rise of Canadian Studies as an academic field.

Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood shared their colleagues’ concerns about the “Americanization” of the Canadian university, but for somewhat different reasons. Their concern was that importing American faculty would bring with it all that was wrong with American political science. In an essay they contributed to Close the 49th Parallel, an edited collection of essays about the Americanization of Canadian universities, they accused American political science of having lost interest in its central humanistic and practical concerns. It focused exclusively on observational concerns, transforming political action into “behaviour.” Through this lens, human beings appear as responding externally to impersonal social, economic, and psychic forces, such that “no longer did political science serve men by offering probing social criticism and by suggesting a way out of their difficulties.”³ Meiksins Wood and Wood exhorted Canada not to follow down this road, insisting that a country conscious of its newness and of the need for creative, new solutions can ill afford to adopt a reactionary mode of social and political analysis, divorced from pressing problems. Throughout her career, Meiksins Wood exemplified the type of political science she advocated—she sought to preserve interest in the “big questions” of political theory, to ensure that political science remained critical, and to address the central political issues of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Strikingly, Wood did not pursue her vision of engaged political science through traditional activism. Despite her residence among the many popular risings of this period—the Indigenous, environmental, antipoverty, antiracism, and student movements—Wood did not locate herself in any of these burgeoning social movements, or indeed in the currents of Left nationalism then swirling through Canadian universities, York included. Her focus was on a different discussion.

She was interested in the great thinkers of the political theory tradition and in the long conversation among scholars of the Left, predating the 1960s, about how to understand the emergence of capitalism and its impact on democratic development. Her earliest writings focused on democratic political theory, particularly the thought of Locke and Rousseau and the classical Greek philosophers. Her project was not a purely academic one, however; on the contrary, Meiksins Wood sought to uncover the profoundly undemocratic character of much classical political theory. In her view, the theorists she analyzed could not be understood outside the context of the property relations and class struggles of the eras in which they wrote. Putting them in this context revealed the limits of their view of democracy, and so furthered the project of defining what true democracy might look like and how it might be achieved. Like the British Marxist historians in whose work she found inspiration, she turned to historical analysis in order to better understand the evolving dynamics of class relations, the history of democratic movements for economic and social justice, and the conditions under which those movements might be successful.

Meiksins Wood’s contributions to political theory

In collaboration with Neal Wood, and through many publications as a solo author, Meiksins Wood considered most thinkers in the canon of Western political theory—ranging from the classics of Ancient Greek political thought to more modern thinkers such as Locke, Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill. Although she might be best known to readers of Studies in Political Economy for her contributions to debates about contemporary Marxism (and with contemporary Marxists) and to the debate about the origins of capitalism, the history of Western political thought remained central to her intellectual project, as evidenced by the fact that she finished her career working on a three-volume history of political theory.⁴

The link between this aspect of her work and her better-known interventions in debates about Marx, political economy, and the history of capitalism becomes clear when we examine the way in which she approached political theory. The distinctive feature of Meiksins Wood’s (and Neal Wood’s) approach to political theory was their insistence that texts be analyzed in the historical context from which they arose. In arguing thus, she was not advancing a reductionist approach that treated theorists as prisoners of their time who had little or nothing to say to readers outside of their time or class. Nor was she agreeing with the so-called Cambridge School, led by Quentin Skinner, for whom placing theory in historical context amounted to understanding simply the linguistic context in which political theories develop.⁵

Rather, Meiksins Wood argued that placing theory in a broader social context allows one to understand the specific meaning of key ideas that each theorist develops—particularly ideas such as “democracy” and “liberty”—and their links to the political economy and social class relations of their time. Perhaps even more importantly, it allows one to shed light on why it is that political theory developed and flourished in the West.

Readers of Meiksins Wood’s writings on political theory encounter a very different canon from the one presented in most histories of political thought. Plato and Aristotle appear not as early examples of what came to be the discourse of liberal democracy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but as advocates of a political system in which sovereignty is monopolized by a privileged few. Machiavelli is not, as many argue, one of the first “modern” political theorists; instead, he is a defender of the corporate interests struggling against central political authority in the context of precapitalist Florence. Locke, often regarded as one of the intellectual progenitors of contemporary liberal democracy, is revealed also as a defender of the rights of the propertied, an apologist for the appropriation of Indigenous peoples’ lands in the new world, and an opponent of more radical democratic voices active in his time.

Meiksins Wood is not simply dismissing these theorists as propagandists of narrow social interests (although she acknowledges that they were that too, to a degree). She argues that we can learn essential lessons about the nature of genuine democracy and freedom by carefully analyzing what they said and why. She notes that political theory as we know it, particularly the ongoing discussion of sovereignty and democracy, is a product of the Western intellectual tradition. In her view, this is a consequence of the distinctive political economy that emerged first in Ancient Greece and evolved subsequently in Western Europe, eventually resulting in the emergence of global capitalism.

The central feature of that distinctive political economy is the emergence of private property separate from state power. As she wrote in her last book:

The elevation of market mechanisms to moral imperatives was clearly an important development in Western social thought. But capitalism would have even more far-reaching effects in recasting the political terrain. The social map was completely redrawn by capitalism’s distinctive configuration of political and economic power; and ways of thinking about rule and domination, about liberty and equality, were accordingly transformed.⁶

Thus, in the West, exploitation and the appropriation of the surplus-product of the producer took place not simply through taxation and/or predation by the State, but “outside” the state, at least to a degree. The separation of exploitation from the State is completed only with the emergence of capitalism, when the central State was no longer the primary mechanism of exploitation as it had been earlier in the Ancient Greek polis. Political theory is the result of this reality, which problematizes citizenship and raises questions of who should have power.⁷

Meiksins Wood continues to say that not only does the distinctive political economy of the West give rise to political theory and its central concerns, it also has led to a distinctive, and peculiar, discourse regarding key concepts such as “liberty” and “equality.” As she writes in her last published book, “The canon of Western political thought has owed much of its vigour to the fact that the discourse of liberty has belonged to ruling classes asserting their mastery, no less than to those resisting oppression by their masters.”⁸ If appropriation takes place exclusively through the State, debates about liberty and equality inherently represent challenges to appropriation. But, if appropriation takes place wholly or in part outside the State, calls for greater democracy (that is, for sovereignty and for participation in the State) can also be claims by appropriators for control over explicitly political institutions. This, in Wood’s view, is what much of Western political theory has been about.

If we recognize this, Meiksins Wood argues, we learn key lessons about the struggle for democracy and equality. In the West, particularly with the development of capitalism, distinctively political institutions emerge, creating an ostensible separation of economic exploitation and politics. In fact, democracy seems to be part of capitalism; as Meiksins Wood notes in her classic essay on “The Separation of the Economic and the Political,”⁹ surplus appropriation in capitalism appears to have no political basis, making debates about democracy, and equal rights appear to have nothing to do with the issue of exploitation. What is really going on in capitalism, she argues, is the separation of political forms, with some becoming separate in the State and others remaining within production (control of property, authority over the labour process, and so on). In a real sense, capitalism conceals the political nature of exploitation, its basis in power, and conceals the key role played by the State in supporting exploitation (by making the State appear to be separate from the economy). The versions of democracy propounded by classical political theorists did not challenge these arrangements. They accepted inequalities of power in the ostensibly separate economic sphere, confining their attention to discussions of who should participate in “politics” and on what basis. The lesson of Meiksins Wood’s analysis of political theory and its relationship to the historical development of capitalism in the West is that the struggle for liberty and the struggle for equality are inextricably linked.

The origins of capitalism and “Political Marxism”

Wood’s engagement with the history of political theory led her to inquire into the history of capitalism and the historical development of the state and class relations. She became increasingly involved in debates that arose during and after the 1970s within the resurgent New Left. She developed a penetrating critique of the academic and political consequences of the New Left approaches, as they sought to come to terms with the changing patterns of social conflict, the new global geopolitical balance, and the neoliberal phase of capitalism that began in the 1970s. It also led to her emergence as a significant contributor to discussions about the origins of capitalism and the nature of the capitalist state, and as a proponent of what has come to be known as “political Marxism.”

In exploring the historical context in which political theory emerged, Wood developed a groundbreaking analysis of precapitalist class societies and the origin of capitalism. Indeed, if Wood’s understanding of the canon of Western political theory differs from most, this is grounded in the fact that her conception of the history of class relations and forms of state and economy is different even from that of most Marxists. For example, whereas Marxist accounts of ancient Greece and Rome have commonly conceived ancient class relations in terms of the opposition between master and slave, Wood instead identified the central class struggle of the ancient world to be that between landed aristocrats and free labouring citizens.¹⁰ Conceived in this light, the democracy of ancient Athens offers very different lessons, anchoring one end of the as yet unrealized struggle for political and social emancipation by the majority of people over the course of Western history.

Of perhaps more immediate importance to many concerned with the history of class societies was her profound reconceptualization of the origin of capitalism as a transformation unique to England, and occurring in agrarian production rather than in towns. Wood was inspired to pursue these ideas by the implications of work by historian Robert Brenner. In the mid-1970s, Brenner both criticized Marxist approaches that reproduced the “neo-Smithian” conception of capitalism as merely a natural development of increasing commerce, and challenged the idea that a common pattern of historical transition in class relations from feudalism to capitalism was characteristic of Western Europe as a whole.¹¹ In Brenner’s analysis, there was a profound difference between the changes in agrarian class relations in France and England that resulted from the general crisis of medieval feudalism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Only in England did the feudal crisis lead to the long historical process of “enclosures,” by which peasants were removed from household tenancies inherited generation after generation, to be replaced by better-off capitalist tenant farmers who leased large farms on market-determined terms to produce goods for the market.

Brenner’s work sparked substantial debate, in the course of which Guy Bois disparaged his analysis as “political Marxism,” a term that Brenner, Wood, and others came (if reluctantly, at first) to accept.¹² Among the premises of this approach, to which Wood was a main contributor, is that the history of class societies cannot be reduced to any predetermined model or sequence of universal stages—not even within Europe. As Wood argued in her work, capitalism is a distinctive system of market production shaped by and responding to the compulsion of the market, with human productive capacities reduced to being treated as merely another commodity.¹³ In these respects, and with the fetishism of commodities connecting capitalist production everywhere, Meiksins Wood maintained that it was essential to recognize capitalism as qualitatively different from every precapitalist form of society. This, in turn, required keeping the specificity of capitalist productive relations clearly in mind. While Marx never produced an original class analysis of any precapitalist society, his critique of political economy—culminating in Capital—does provide fundamental insight into the class relations of industrial capitalist society, even though it was new and still taking form in his day (even in England, where the transitional class society of specifically agrarian capitalism had uniquely emerged and matured over more than 300 years).

A key point for Wood was that there was no single transition from feudalism to capitalism marking the rise of “modernity,” no common form of “modern state,” no unified ideology of “the Enlightenment.”¹⁴ All of Europe experienced an end to the society of feudalism, but in a range of nationally divergent ways that belie any idea of “Eurocentric” historical development. In contrast to the “economic” development of class relations in England, continental Europe instead saw a variety of class societies in which “extra-economic coercion” remained central, although generally not identical to feudalism. In place of the apparent separation of the political and economic that arose in capitalism,¹⁵ the early modern society of France saw the development of “politically constituted property” in the form of the offices and perquisites of the Absolutist state. Meiksins Wood argued that this very different system of class relations of property provided for a profoundly different historical social context for political theory, leading to fundamental differences between the works of Bodin, Montesquieu, and Rousseau and their English contemporaries.¹⁶ The result of her exploration of the relationship between political theory and historical development was both an insightful critique of classical political theory and an original account of the development of capitalism.

The later years—Ellen Meiksins Wood and contemporary politics

Ellen Meiksins Wood spent much of her academic career writing about the history of political theory, the origins of capitalism in the West, and the relationship between the two. But keeping with her insistence that academic political science be critical and engaged with real political issues, she intervened, increasingly as her career progressed, in contemporary political debates, most notably in debates on the Left regarding the nature of contemporary capitalism and the prospects for its transformation.

With the fall of the Soviet Union and the global triumph of capitalism, Meiksins Wood noted a strange reaction in Left thinking. Just at the moment when Left thinkers were freed from the need to battle the legacies of Stalinism and distance themselves from the illiberal examples of the Eastern bloc, many simply turned their backs on Marxist analysis, or began to elaborate it in nonmaterialist ways. She noted that, even as early as the 1960s, many New Left thinkers (although not, she emphasized, the British Marxist historians) had abandoned the traditional Left emphasis on working class struggle. In its place, these theorists looked for alternative radical forces (for example, students, intellectuals, and cultural revolution) and emphasized the centrality of ideological struggles seen as separate from the material realities of class.¹⁷ Meiksins Wood was scathing in her comments about these rejections of the central tenets of Marxist theory:

There is something odd about the assumption that the collapse of Communism represents a terminal crisis for Marxism. One might think, among other things, that in a period of capitalist triumphalism there is more scope than ever for the pursuit of Marxism’s principal project, the critique of capitalism.¹⁸

One of the points on which Meiksins Wood was most emphatic was her insistence on the continued relevance of class. In a series of articles and in The Retreat from Class (which won the 1986 Deutscher Prize), Meiksins Wood developed a trenchant critique of what she calls “the new true socialism,” which is increasingly inclined to reject the relevance of the working class in particular and class in general. Meiksins Wood notes that one cannot simply interpret this as a response to working class quiescence because there had been an upsurge in working class militancy in the late 1960s, when New Left ideas were being popularized. The theoretical move away from class has deeper roots, dating back at least to the rise of the “second” New Left, which, increasingly, was drawn to ideas about the importance of ideological struggles, looked for other agents of social change, and distanced itself from working class struggle. Meiksins Wood summarized the central elements of the “new true socialists” rejection of class as follows: they see little evidence that the working class has or will bring about radical social change, they question the idea that there is a link between the economic and the political, they increasingly question whether classes even have interests, and they dismiss class politics as narrowly focused on the material; the socialist project, they argue, is grander, focusing on universal human goals and making the struggle for “radical democracy” the real goal of the socialist movement.

What is wrong with this formulation? Meiksins Wood argues that it assumes that the conditions for radical democracy and the fulfillment of universal human goals already exist. But capitalism remains an obstacle to those goals, meaning that a truly radical democratic project must confront the nature of capitalism and its core social relationships. Additionally, by what agency will radical democracy be affected? Meiksins Wood asks:

How exactly should we envisage the process whereby a movement, mobilized precisely on the basis of its abstraction from the prevailing conditions of class and class interest and a deliberate detachment of its aims from a fundamental challenge to the existing structure of social relations and domination, might be transformed into a stable collective force directed against those class conditions and that structure of domination?¹⁹

Meiksins Wood acknowledges that the socialist movement must broaden its scope to include the concerns of “new social movements,” and likely will have to forge alliances with those social movements to be truly hegemonic. But to retreat from class means to retreat from the critique of capitalism and from confronting the exploitative social relationship that is the primary obstacle to the creation of real democracy.

Meiksins Wood also argued for and demonstrated the value of Marxist analysis in her 2003 essay about contemporary imperialism: Empire of Capital. Confronting the imminent invasion of Iraq by the United States, Wood turned her attention to understanding the nature of US imperialism. Characteristically, she did so by examining the history of imperialism and noting what was distinctive in its current form. This history is a long one, she noted, but most imperialisms transferred wealth from the poor to the rich in ways that were transparent—through the obvious use of force and political control (conquest, taxation, etc.). With the development of British imperialism, the nature of the imperial project began to shift, beginning to make the coercion at its core “invisible.” This culminated in the American imperialism of the late twentieth century in which ostensibly direct military and political control has been replaced by the compulsion of markets. The state seems a minor player; indeed, it seems difficult to know how to resist imperial power because it is unclear what the target should be. How does one resist markets?

Meiksins Wood noted that even many on the Left have despaired of the project of resisting this form of triumphant imperial capitalism. Her response was that changes in the form of imperialism do not mean that Marxist ideas are no longer relevant to an understanding of contemporary society. On the contrary, a Marxist critique of contemporary imperialism reveals key contradictions that offer both hope and possibilities for its transcendence. Marxism points to a key parallel between the nature of contemporary empire and the basic social relationship of capitalism—the relationship between capitalist and worker. In each case, coercion is obscured, but in both cases, coercion is central (sustaining the transfer of wealth). Meiksins Wood argues that even though contemporary imperialist appropriation does not take place directly though force, it relies on force to maintain the conditions on which it depends. This means that the nation-state is essential and not irrelevant to the functioning of contemporary imperialism:

For all the globalizing tendencies of capitalism, the world has become more, not less, a world of nation states, not only as a result of national liberation struggles, but also under pressure from imperial powers.²⁰

There is no political force capable of supporting the imperial project other than the nation-state. But this represents an unravelling of the traditional relationship between capitalist exploitation and the State: global capital relies on local states that it controls only with difficulty (and often with very obvious military force); and the local state is forced to intervene more and more directly in the economic sphere in order to preserve the conditions on which imperial capital depends (belying the separation of the economic and political that conceals the nature of exploitation). Meiksins Wood’s argument, here too, is that fashionable “Left” arguments that announce the death of the nation-state and see little promise in popular struggles against those states effectively miss the key contradictions that threaten to undermine the “empire of capital.”

These are just two of the more significant examples of Wood’s involvement in contemporary political discussions. Indeed, by the 1990s, Meiksins Wood and her husband Neal began to spend more and more time in London, beginning a new phase in her career as she engaged more fully and continuously in international debates on the Left. After Neal’s death in 2004, Meiksins Wood continued this work. She also renewed her long-standing friendship with Canadian statesman and former leader of the New Democratic Party Ed Broadbent, also a political theorist by training. Their intellectual engagement included lectures and public debates in Germany, Turkey, and Cuba, and was enlivened by their differing analyses of modern capitalism and social democracy. They were married in the fall of 2014.

Both in her academic work and in her interventions in contemporary political debates, Ellen Meiksins Wood was fiercely committed to the pursuit of democracy. Her work presents an important alternative to those who equate democracy with liberalism by reminding us that real democracy cannot develop unless the undemocratic core of capitalism (capitalist property and class relations) is understood and overcome. Building democracy is not simply a matter of strengthening the institutions of “civil society”—it requires a more radical critique and transformation of the entire capitalist order. Meiksins Wood reminds us of the enduring power of the socialist critique of capitalism and rejects the growing tendency on the Left to argue that the end of Soviet Communism and the triumph of global capitalism means that Marxism is dead and that liberal democracy (and capitalism) will inevitably triumph. This is why she entitled what is perhaps her most important work Democracy Against Capitalism. Unless we understand and promote the conditions under which democracy can thrive, we will be unable to define and develop forms of real democracy, a democracy that could be enjoyed by all.

Notes on contributors

Frances Abele teaches in the School of Public Policy & Administration at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

George Comninel teaches in the Department of Political Science at York University in Toronto, Ontario Canada.

Peter Meiksins teaches in the Department of Sociology at Cleveland State University in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Ed Broadbent for his careful reading of an earlier version of this manuscript, and to Christian Belisle, who prepared the bibliography and provided superb research assistance. All of the authors were students of Ellen Meiksins Wood.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.

Notes

Notes

1 Bella and Gregory Meiksins had been active in the labour and socialist movements in their native Latvia. With the rise of Nazism and its spread to sympathetic governments in the Baltic states, Ellen’s parents were forced to flee Latvia, and eventually settled in New York as the Second World War broke out. After the war, they divorced, with Gregory remarrying and going on to become Chief of Interpretation Services at the United Nations, while Bella moved to Los Angeles, where she too remarried and was active in work with refugee organizations.

2 Abele et al., “A Tribute to Neal Wood,” 15–25.

3 Wood and Wood, “Canada and the American Science of Politics,” 193.

4 Regrettably, only the first two volumes were completed at the time of her death: Citizen to Lord and Liberty and Property.

5 See Wood, Liberty and Property, 28–31 for a summary of Wood’s differences with the Cambridge School.

6 Wood, Liberty and Property, 312.

7 See Wood, Citizen to Lord, Ch. 1 for a summary of this argument.

8 Wood, Liberty and Property, 37.

9 New Left Review, reprinted in Democracy Against Capitalism, 19–48.

10 This is central to Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory, Peasant-Citizen and Slave, and all of Wood’s articles and chapters dealing with the ancient world.

11 Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development,” 25–92; “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” 60–69.

12 Aston and Philpin, The Brenner Debate, 107–18.

13 Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, 35–37; 130–31; 138–42.

14 Wood, Liberty and Property, 27.

15 A separation that Wood emphasized to be apparent, but not real—political power and economic power being but two sides of class domination and exploitation.

16 Wood, “The State and Popular Sovereignty,” 281–315; Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, 34–41; 62–72; 55–57; 87–91.

17 Wood, “A Chronology of the New Left and its Successors,” 22–49.

18 Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 1.

19 Wood, Retreat from Class, 176.

20 Wood, Empire of Capital, 23.