“Capitalism”, wrote Ellen Meiksins Wood, “is a system of social-property relations in which survival and social reproduction are dependent on the market; a system that is, therefore, driven by the imperatives of competition and a relentless drive to improve the forces of production.”¹

The structural consequences of such a system became increasingly apparent with the end of the postwar boom. Since then, advanced capitalist economies have been marked by a persistent crisis that many analysts describe as structural, a crisis that has reinforced the discipline imposed by markets on social policy and living conditions. 

For Wood, capitalism redefines the very meaning of democracy by reducing it to liberalism. Because exploitation now operates through market mechanisms rather than through extra-economic forms of domination, the economic sphere appears relatively autonomous from legal and political institutions. Capitalism thus establishes a historically specific separation between the political and the economic: formal political equality can coexist with an economic order governed by private property, competition, and the imperatives of accumulation, largely insulated from democratic control. Liberal democracy thus becomes compatible with the maintenance of the mode of exploitation, since democratic freedom is essentially reduced to political and civil rights. It therefore constitutes a historically specific and intrinsically limited form of democracy, which protects certain political freedoms while leaving intact the relations of power and coercion specific to capitalism.

Yet the present conjuncture also serves as a reminder that this separation does not guarantee that liberal democracy is inherent to capitalism. As authoritarian forms of politics proliferate, as social and political rights are eroded, and as states intervene ever more openly to secure the conditions of accumulation, the partial uncoupling of economic and political power appears increasingly strained.

In this context, Meiksins Wood suggested that imagining “a humane, ‘social,’ truly democratic and equitable capitalism” is more of an unrealistic utopia than socialism.² The recent development of global capitalism, characterized by persistence of competitive constraints, intensification of geopolitical rivalries, mounting inequalities, democratic erosion, and increasingly authoritarian political forms, decidedly underscores the continuing significance of this warning.

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of her passing, this conference seeks to pursue Meiksins Wood’s work. Indeed, the late eminent theorist transformed and deepened the debates and the scholarship that continues to fuel our reflections and strategies: the historical specificity of capitalism as a system of social property relations; the centrality of class and class struggle; the state and imperialism in historical perspective; the social history of political thought; the democracy against the imperatives of the market; and the contemporary horizons of socialism and human emancipation.

¹ Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘The Question of Market Dependence’, Journal of Agrarian Change 2, no. 1 (2002): 50.

² Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 293.

Conference Overview

Democracy Against Capital: A Conference in Honour of Ellen Meiksins Wood will be hosted at York University in Toronto, November 27–29, 2026. The event will feature plenary lectures by keynote speakers and panel sessions. Organized by PhD students and faculty in the Department of Politics at York, the conference aims to bring together scholars, students, and activists interested in the theoretical and historical debates inherited from Meiksins Wood.

Programme

Who Was Ellen Meiksins Wood?

Ellen Meiksins Wood (1942–2016) was “one of the most important political theorists writing in the English language”³ and one of the international left's “most original voices” in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.⁴ Born in New York to a family of Latvian Jewish socialist refugees, she was early influenced by the political commitments of the antifascist left.

After studying at the University of California, Berkeley, and earning her PhD in political theory at UCLA, she moved to Toronto in 1967 with her husband and intellectual collaborator, Neal Wood, to teach at York University, which remained her institutional home throughout her career. There, she helped found the Social and Political Thought program, where she developed what she called a “social history of political thought.” Her work thus spans both the history of Western political theory (from ancient Greece to Locke, Rousseau, and Mill) and contemporary debates within Marxism.

Wood was a central figure in what came to be known as “political Marxism,” a current associated in particular with Robert Brenner. She participated actively in debates on the origins of capitalism, arguing that capitalism is a historically distinct system of social property relations structured by the imperatives of the market and competition.

Her scholarship addressed themes as varied as the origins of capitalism, the nature of the capitalist state, imperialism, democracy, and the social history of political thought. A long-time contributor and editor of the New Left Review, the Socialist Register, and the Monthly Review, she was also a rigorous critic of postmodernism and of attempts to detach democratic aspirations from a materialist critique of capitalism. Throughout her career, she remained committed to the idea that a genuinely radical democracy requires confronting and overcoming the anti-democratic character of capitalist social relations.

³ Larry Patriquin, ‘Introduction: The “Method” of Ellen Meiksins Wood’, in The Ellen Meiksins Wood Reader, by Ellen Meiksins Wood, ed. Larry Patriquin, Historical Materialism Book Series 40 (Brill, 2012), 1.

⁴ Frances Abele et al., ‘Socialism and Democracy: The Political Engagements of Ellen Meiksins Wood’, Studies in Political Economy 97, no. 3 (2016): 320.