Essential to its functioning, public power is part and parcel of the institutionalized societal order that is capitalism.

Nevertheless, the maintenance of political power stands in tense relation with the imperative of capital accumulation. The reason lies in capitalism’s distinctive institutional topography, which separates “the economic” from “the political.” In this respect, capitalist societies differ from earlier forms, in which those instances were effectively fused—as, for example, in feudal society, where control over labor, land, and military force was vested in the single institution of lordship and vassalage. In capitalist society, by contrast, economic power and political power are split apart; each is assigned its own sphere, endowed with its own distinctive medium and modus operandi. The power to organize production is privatized and devolved to capital, which is supposed to deploy only the “natural,” “nonpolitical” sanctions of hunger and need. The task of governing “non-economic” orders, including those that supply the external conditions for accumulation, falls to the public power, which alone may utilize the “political” media of law and “legitimate” state violence. In capitalism, therefore, the economic is nonpolitical, and the political is non-economic.

Constitutive of capitalism as an institutionalized societal order, this separation severely limits the scope of the political within that order. Devolving vast aspects of social life to the rule of “the market” (in reality, to large corporations), it declares them off limits to democratic decision making, collective action, and public control. The arrangement deprives us of the ability to decide collectively what and how much we want to produce, on what energic basis and through what kinds of social relations. It deprives us, too, of the capacity to determine how we want to use the social surplus we collectively produce; how we want to relate to nature and to future generations; how we want to organize the work of social reproduction and its relation to that of production. By virtue of its inherent structure, then, capitalism is fundamentally anti-democratic. Even in the best-case scenario, democracy in a capitalist society must perforce be limited and weak.

—Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism, (London: Verso, 2022), 121-122.