The specific combination of factors in the historical formation of U.S. society—dominant “biblical” religious ideology and absence of a workers’ party—has resulted in government by a de facto single party, the party of capital. The two segments that make up this single party share the same fundamental liberalism. Both focus their attention solely on the minority who “participate” in the truncated and powerless democratic life on offer. Each has its supporters in the middle classes, since the working classes seldom vote, and has adapted its language to them. Each encapsulates a conglomerate of segmentary capitalist interests (the “lobbies”) and supporters from various “communities.”
American democracy is today the advanced model of what I call “low-intensity democracy.” It operates on the basis of a complete separation between the management of political life, grounded on the practice of electoral democracy, and the management of economic life, governed by the laws of capital accumulation. Moreover, this separation is not questioned in any substantial way, but is, rather, part of what is called the general consensus. Yet that separation eliminates all the creative potential found in political democracy. It emasculates the representative institutions (parliaments and others), which are made powerless in the face of the “market” whose dictates must be accepted.
If the claim was that they were the same in the support of capitalism, the economic system primarily responsible for making us the juggernaut that we are, then I would have not said anything. But when it comes to social, environmental, and how to use (if at all) that generated wealth to support the less fortunate among us, they differ drastically.
You are literally doing the second paragraph I quoted in your reply here. You cannot seperate capitalism and the laws of accumulating capital from social and environmental issues. They are intrinsically linked. Just as the second paragraph said, you did not even question this so “seperation”, you just accepted it as the general consensus.
