The Becomings of Capitalism and Liberal Democracy: A Materialist,Micropolitical Contribution to Political Sociology

Introduction

Recent commentaries have suggested that liberal democracy is under increasing threats from authoritarian tendencies, populist movements, resurgent nationalisms and the growing influence of super-rich elites who appear to operate with diminishing accountability to democratic institutions (Borg, 2024, p. 18; Diamond & Skrzypek, 2024; Milner, 2021; Pearce, 2025; Pylvänäinen, 2025; Wolf, 2023). Historical parallels have been drawn with the interwar period of the 20th century, particularly the rise of fascism in Germany and elsewhere, where democratic institutions proved unable to contain anti-democratic forces that emerged within ostensibly liberal societies (Abraham, 2025; Pearce, 2025).

The aim of this article is to unpack the dynamics linking capitalism and liberal democracy, to explore how these threats may undermine core elements of a liberal democratic capitalist state. To this end, it applies a materialist and monist analysis of capitalism and liberal democracy that cuts across the economy/polity dualism that has constrained previous efforts. It thereby intervenes in a long-standing but unresolved debate concerning the relationship between liberal democracy and capitalism (Bowles & Gintis, 1982; Milner, 2021). While liberal democracy has been presented as capitalism's natural political counterpart (Khan, 2023; Wolf, 2023): a marriage of convenience that secures individual freedoms, market coordination and political legitimacy, critical traditions have challenged this view (Edozie, 2021; Klein, 2018; Wagner, 2011). According to this latter analysis, capitalism's imperatives – accumulation, competition, commodification and inequality – sit uneasily alongside democratic commitments to political equality, social welfare and collective decision-making. Despite decades of debate, this question remained unresolved (see e.g. Boyer, 2008; Crouch, 1979).

To address this aim, the article adopts a perspective grounded in post-Deleuzian ethology and micropolitics (Deleuze, 1988, pp. 125–127; Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 213). ¹ Ethology (which will be fully presented later in the article) asks of any entity (physical or abstract) not what it is, but what it can do – its capacities. Ethology focuses on ‘affects’ between humans and also between human and non-human matter, understood as ‘capacities to affect or be affected’ (Deleuze, 1988, pp. 125–126). Meanwhile, a micropolitical focus asks: what relations of power or resistance are enabled or disabled by these capacities? This ontology is well-suited to both empirical and theoretical inquiry into what social formations such as capitalism and liberal democracy actually do. While dissolving essentialist distinctions between the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’, it recognises that some capacities in these assemblages affect the distribution of material resources while others shape the distribution of power, status or influence.

For Deleuze and Guattari (1988, pp. 424–473), the state is the micropolitical arena within which these economic and political flows and capacities are negotiated, mediated and integrated. ² From this standpoint, a first task of this article will be to assess the heterogeneous and rhizomatic dynamics within and between capitalism and the state, to provide insights into how – from within a monist ontology – economics and politics articulate (Fox, 2025, 2023). This is achieved via an ethology of ‘capitalist liberal democracy’ (CLD) – that is, an account of its assemblages, affects and capacities.

The second task of this article is to assess what happens when one or other of the assemblages of CLD are challenged, as might be the case with the emergence of authoritarianism, populisms or nationalisms (Diamond & Skrzypek, 2024). To this end, it considers two case studies in terms of capacities and micropolitics: terrorist attacks on minority ethnic groups and the rise of platform capitalism. These micropolitical assessments supply the material for the article's concluding section, which synthesises these two analyses to re-assess the micropolitics of capitalism and liberal democracy and how this may shift in the face of social, political or economic challenges.

Liberal Democracy and Capitalism: A Review of Literatures

Neither capitalism nor liberal democracy may be simply defined, as both have been theorised variously: capitalism by classical economic and Marxist theories; liberal democracy from ‘procedural’ and ‘substantive’ perspectives (Wegner, 2009). Later, this paper moves beyond essentialist definitions to instead identify what capitalism and liberal democracy can do. For the purposes of this brief literature review, however, capitalism may be described as an economic mode based on a competitive free market for commodities and labour, within which capital accumulation derives from the added value created by human effort during the production process (Cogliano & Foley, 2024; Marx, 2000 [1902]). Liberal democracy may be minimally typified as a political formation that is founded on free and fair elections and universal suffrage (Miller, 1992), though scholars have suggested it may also encompass constitutional and limited government, the rule of law, separation of powers between lawmakers and judiciary, the protection of individual rights and liberties of speech, assembly, religion and property, the progressive reduction in social and economic inequality, and the provision of health, education and welfare systems (Heise & Khan, 2019; Merkel & Croissant, 2004; Stahl & Popp-Madsen, 2022; Zakaria, 1997).

The theoretical limitations of such descriptions are pellucid, taking no account of the historical evolution of these economic and political formations nor assessing the divergences of these characteristics from other economic/political modes. However, with these descriptive definitions in mind, the literature on the interactions between liberal democracy and capitalism may be explored. This relationship has been a central concern in social and political theory, yet it remains theoretically unsettled and empirically contested (Schumpeter, 2013 [1943]; Thomas, 2017; Wagner, 2011).

There is broad agreement in the literature that capitalism exerts a powerful influence on democratic institutions (Bellamy, 1991, pp. 518–519; Bowles & Gintis, 1982; Schumpeter, 2013 [1943]), particularly since the expansion of neoliberal governance. Other scholars emphasise mutual causality: democratic movements, policies, and institutions have historically reshaped capitalism, even as capitalist power constrains democratic possibilities (Khan, 2023; Streeck, 2011; Wagner, 2011). Liberal democracy and capitalism are heterogeneous, historically variable and internally differentiated social formations (Boyer, 2008; Thelen, 2012), and their articulations cannot be reduced to a single causal logic or stable equilibrium (Edozie, 2021; Thelen, 2012, p. 155). Instead, the literature converges on an understanding of their relationship as dynamic, mediated and crisis prone (Edozie, 2021, p. 114; Streeck, 2011; Wagner, 2011, p. 2).

Drilling down, three broad theoretical traditions dominate contemporary debates on the interactions between capitalism and liberal democracy. Critical theory and Marxist approaches emphasise structural tensions and contradictions between democratic ideals of equality and participation and capitalist imperatives of accumulation, commodification, and inequality (Jessop, 1978; Streeck, 2011; see also Crouch, 1979). From this perspective, democracy is continually strained (and constrained) by the expansion of market logics into social and political life, giving rise to recurring legitimacy crises and democratic struggles.

Varieties of capitalism approaches, by contrast, foreground institutional diversity and national variation, analysing how different configurations of labour markets, welfare states and production regimes shape the compatibility – or otherwise – of capitalism and democracy (Boyer, 2008; Thelen, 2012). Rather than assuming a singular capitalism, this literature demonstrates how democratic capacities are variously conditioned by institutional complementarities and coalitional arrangements within diverse capitalist economies.

Political economy and régulationist perspectives focus on power relations, accumulation regimes and regulatory frameworks, examining how states mediate conflicts between economic and democratic demands through institutional design and policy intervention (Boyer, 2008, pp. 3–5; Rueschemeyer et al., 1992).

While these traditions differ in emphasis, they are not mutually exclusive. Critical theory identifies fundamental structural tensions, varieties of capitalism approaches explain how these tensions are institutionally organised and differently expressed across contexts, while political economy perspectives analyse the power relations and regulatory mechanisms that shape structural outcomes. Across these perspectives, there is broad agreement that the relationship between capitalism and liberal democracy is neither automatic nor harmonious, but historically contingent and politically mediated (Rueschemeyer et al., 1992).

A notable feature of this literature has been its sensitivity to crisis. Analyses frequently cluster around moments of disruption, such as the oil price hikes and industrial unrest of the 1970s (Wagner, 2011), the global financial crisis of 2008 (Klein, 2018; Streeck, 2011, pp. 20–23) or – more recently – the global emergence of authoritarian populisms and nationalisms (Edozie, 2021; Marenco, 2022; Milner, 2021, pp. 1097–1098). These nodes have been treated as critical junctures that expose latent contradictions and prompt institutional reconfiguration. The post-1970s era, in particular, is widely regarded as marking a decisive shift in capitalism/democracy relations, characterised by financialisation, weakened labour power and the reorientation of states towards market-conforming governance (Boyer, 2008; Crouch, 1979, pp. 15–16).

The growth of authoritarian neoliberalism, surveillance capitalism and populist movements mentioned in the introduction underscore what is now being described in scholarly and popular literature as a crisis for liberal democracy (Borg, 2024, p. 18), while capitalism faces its own challenges as many national economies struggle to sustain economic growth and productivity stagnates (Fernald et al., 2025). The remainder of this paper aims to unpack these latter challenges by means of a monist ontology that cuts across the economics/politics dualism present in almost all the literature reviewed. The next section sets out this ontology and methodology.

An Ethological Ontology and Methodology

To address the interaction between capitalism and liberal democracy, this paper adopts a materialist, more-than-human, and micropolitical ontology to examine what capitalism and liberal democracy can do, both independently and in combination. This approach is situated within a broader ‘turn to matter’ in social science: a post-anthropocentric and relational shift that challenges human-centred, representational and structuralist ontologies (Diener, 2020). The turn to matter encompasses a diverse set of theoretical approaches, including affect theory (Anderson, 2009), assemblage theory (Buchanan, 2021), agential realism (Barad, 2007), ethology (Deleuze, 1988), new materialism (Coole & Frost, 2010; Fox & Alldred, 2017), non-representational theory (Thrift, 2008) and posthumanism (Braidotti, 2013). Despite their differences, these approaches share a set of core ontological commitments that underpin the analytical framework of this paper.

First, these approaches advance a relational rather than essentialist ontology. Rather than treating entities – whether bodies, objects, or substances – as possessing fixed properties or inherent essences, they emphasise the capacities that emerge through relations and interactions (Deleuze, 1988). From this perspective, the central analytical question is not what a body or object is, but what it can do in a given situation. Capacities are therefore understood as context-dependent, fluid and contingent upon specific configurations of relations. This shift foregrounds processes, interactions and emergent affects over stable categories or predefined attributes.

Second, the ontology adopted here is explicitly post-anthropocentric. It recognises that agency is not an exclusively human property but is distributed across human and non-human matter alike (Braidotti, 2013). Non-human entities – such as technologies, substances, infrastructures, or environments – are acknowledged as possessing their own capacities to affect and be affected. This stance challenges long-standing humanist assumptions in sociology and political science that privilege human intentionality and solidify dualisms such as nature/culture, subject/object, or human/non-human (van der Tuin & Dolphijn, 2010). By dissolving these binaries, post-anthropocentric ontology opens analytical space to examine how social and political phenomena emerge from heterogeneous relations between human and non-human actors.

Third, the approaches associated with the turn to matter reject depth ontologies and structural explanations that posit hidden mechanisms or overarching systems operating ‘behind’ or ‘beneath’ everyday life (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994; Fox & Alldred 2018; Latour, 2005). Instead, they adopt a monist or flat ontology in which the social and natural worlds consist solely of relations and interactions within a singular material plane (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 35ff.). From this standpoint, causation is not linear, hierarchical or predetermined but rhizomatic and non-linear (Ash, 2020; Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, pp. 5–6), in which outcomes arise from complex, multi-directional interactions.

This relational, post-anthropocentric, and monist ontology is operationalised in the paper through the Deleuzian concept of ethology (Deleuze, 1988, pp. 125–129; see also Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, pp. 256–257). Ethology provides a methodological orientation grounded in four interrelated concepts: affect, assemblage, capacity and micropolitics. Affects are the capacities of human and non-human matter to affect or be affected (Deleuze, 1988, pp. 125–126). They are the fundamental drivers of events, encounters, and interactions, and thus the basic forces through which social and material realities unfold.

These interactions constitute assemblages: temporary, contingent groupings of heterogeneous elements that emerge around specific events or practices (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 88). Assemblages are not stable structures but dynamic configurations in constant flux (Potts, 2004, p. 19). Within this framework, assemblages themselves – rather than individual humans or objects – constitute the primary unit of analysis. The affects circulating within assemblages generate matter's capacities, shaping what bodies and other matter can do in particular assemblages (DeLanda, 2016, pp. 143–144).

Finally, the distribution and circulation of affects within and between assemblages produce the micropolitics of assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 213) (see endnote 2). Micropolitics refer to the shifting flows of power, resistance, constraint and possibility that operate at the level of everyday interactions. These flows may have transitory or more lasting impacts on how matter interacts: what capacities are privileged or suppressed; what constraints or possibilities for action (territorialisations and de-territorialisations) are established (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, pp. 88–89); and how matter is aggregated into narrow socially-defined categories (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984, pp. 286–288) or freed to pursue what Deleuze and Guattari (1988, p. 508) called a ‘line of flight’.

This monist and materialist ontology provides the starting point for the remainder of this paper, beginning with a summary of Deleuze and Guattari's micropolitical sociology of capitalism and the state.

Capitalism and the State: A Flat Ontology

The section situates Deleuze and Guattari's theory of the state alongside a long sociological tradition, in which thinkers including Durkheim, Weber, Marx, Parsons, Elias and Bourdieu developed accounts tied to their individual theoretical perspectives, though consequently failing to enable an agreed understanding (Dobratz et al., 2011). Deleuze and Guattari's intervention on the capitalist state in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, pp. 424–473) offered a distinctive, monist alternative that rejected the classical economy–polity dualism and instead analysed the state as integral to the micropolitics of capitalism. Rather than treating the state as a superstructural institution standing above an economic base, as in Marxist and neo-Marxist traditions (Surin & Hasty, 1994, p. 19), Deleuze and Guattari conceptualised states as ‘strata’: highly organised material assemblages that structure matter, limit and enable its capacities and territorialise flows and intensities among their components (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 40, pp. 351–352). In this ontology, capitalism and the state emerged together, as a consequently of specific material conditions and opportunities.

Deleuze and Guattari offered a typology of three discontinuous socio-economic formations: territorial, so-called ‘primitive’ societies that remained stateless (such as some indigenous and nomadic peoples); despotic regimes organised around kinship and rigid hierarchy, as exemplified by ancient empires and feudal Europe; and capitalist nation-states and supra-national formations (such as the European Union) characterised by free flows of money, commodities and labour (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, pp. 427–434; Patton, 2000, pp. 89–91). These differing societal formations are in no way an evolutionary sequence from simple to complex, from impoverished to affluent, or from ‘barbarian’ to ‘civilised’. Rather, they are qualitatively different formations defined by specific material flows (Surin & Hasty, 1994, p. 19).

Each of these differing formations has its own micropolitics that shapes the social and economic affects between humans and the material world. Stateless societies employ a micropolitics that connects humans to the Earth (Patton, 2000, p. 89), and anticipates and prevents the emergence of a state (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 432). As imperial and despotic regimes conquered, colonised or otherwise assimilated stateless peoples, a micropolitics of ‘over-coding’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, pp. 427–428) transformed previously unownable territory into ‘land’, ‘activity’ into ‘work’, while replacing barter with money (Adkins, 2015, p. 221). These new relations between human and non-human matter enabled the development of economic formations such as land rent, taxation, surplus value (profit) and surplus labour, and in due course ‘capital’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, pp. 440–445). ³

Deleuze and Guattari (1988, pp. 453–454) offered a novel explanation of how the despotic over-coding of land and labour unintentionally established the conditions for the subsequent emergence of capitalism and the capitalist state. While the aim of this overcoding was to accumulate the resources and wealth to sustain power and control over internal or external threats, it also had the side-effect of more generally freeing up (or ‘de-territorialising’) these flows for other citizens (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, pp. 448–449). For instance, when land became available for rent or sale following enclosure of tied manorial farmland during the late English mediaeval period, this meant tenant farmers could acquire land from ‘lords’ of the manor, trade agricultural products in towns and cities for profit, thereby enabling them to accrue further land to increase their farm size while employing others as their labourers (Harman, 1989). This further de-territorialised flows of labour, land and money from what had previously been a restrictive and hierarchical feudal society. Enclosure also created an army of landless peasantry, who either earned a wage as farm labourers or migrated to the cities to provide labour in the factories or service industries (Comninel, 2000, p. 44; Harman, 1989).

When these decoded flows were sufficiently strong, Deleuze and Guattari (1988, p. 453) argued, ‘a threshold of de-territorialisation’ was reached that finally established the possibility for capitalism to emerge from the overcoded regime of feudalism and European city-states. These flows swept away the constraints upon exchange between citizens, who were now enabled to sell their labour or purchase foods and services, irrespective of social position (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984, pp. 222–225), thereby enabling the ‘international/ecumenical’ social formation of contemporary capitalism to develop (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 435) in its variant manifestations (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 255). ⁴

Alongside this shift towards a free market in raw materials, commodities (goods/services) and labour, a capitalist state formation that was integral to an economy founded on these free flows of human and non-human matter gained hegemony. In place of a despotic state machine devoted to territorialising bodies and material resources for the benefit of the ruler, the emergent capitalist state was merely one element in capitalism's on-going de-territorialisation of money, commodities and labour (Adkins, 2015, p. 226), operating through social technologies such as private property and consumer culture (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, pp. 456–457; Adkins, 2015, p. 227). As Guattari and Negri (2010 [1985], p. 26) put it, society was collapsed into the logic and processes of capitalist development, producing a planetary system in which work, subjectivity and culture are organised according to the imperatives of accumulation. ⁵

From this perspective, all capitalism needs from a state is the maintenance of the free flows of money, commodities and labour that enable it to accumulate capital (Fox, 2025). This raises a problem for conventional political theory: if capitalism and state are immanent to one another, what analytical space remains for understanding liberal democracy as a distinct political institution? The next section seeks to address this, delving deeper into the micropolitics of capitalism and liberal democracy.

An Ethology of Capitalism and Liberal Democracy

Drawing on relevant literature, this section applies the Deleuzian ethological ontology and methodology set out earlier to identify the assemblages, affects and micropolitics first of capitalism and then of liberal democracy, asking the ethological question: what are their capacities?

Case Study 1: Terrorist Attacks on Minority Ethnic and Religious Communities

On 14 December 2025, two gunmen opened fire on a Jewish Chanukah celebration near Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, killing 15 civilians. This attack, which has been treated by the Australian government as an act of antisemitic terror, may be situated within a broader pattern of recent violence targeting religious and ethnic minority communities. It has become one affect within a wider global trend in which identity-based hatred has manifested in lethal forms (Vergani et al., 2022). Other high-profile antisemitic attacks include the 2019 Halle synagogue attack in Germany, the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, the Jewish Museum of Belgium shooting in 2014, and multiple attacks on synagogues in London and Manchester in 2025 and 2026.

Meanwhile, anti-Muslim violence has intensified in various regions, underscoring the reciprocal and often interconnected dynamics of religious hatred. The 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, which killed 51 worshippers, remain one of the most devastating examples of Islamophobic terrorism in recent history (Every-Palmer et al., 2021). Other European attacks, including a car-ramming outside a mosque in Finsbury Park, UK in 2017 and – in Hanau, Germany – the shooting dead of nine customers of shisha bars by a far-right extremist, reflect a persistent pattern of exclusionary nationalism and racist violence targeted again Muslim communities. Baider (2023) has argued that antisemitism and Islamophobia, while distinct in their historical roots, often emerge from overlapping ideological ecosystems characterised by conspiracy thinking, racism and political polarisation.

In the Australian context, the 2025 Bondi Beach attack intensified scrutiny of rising antisemitism nationally. Reports of harassment, vandalism of synagogues, and online abuse had already been increasing prior to the attack, with community organisations warning of a deteriorating climate of safety for Jewish Australians (Beazley, 2026). This rise was partly coincident with the devastating military action taken by Israel against Palestinian militants and civilians in Gaza and the West Bank following the murders and abductions of 251 Israelis and others by Hamas fighters in October 2023. Subsequent global circulation of images, narratives and grievances through digital media appears to have contributed to heightened tensions and, in some cases, the targeting of Jewish diaspora communities.

The establishment of a Australian Royal Commission into antisemitism in early 2026 reflected the level of public and state concern with these developments. Alongside on-going police investigations and judicial proceedings, the Commission was tasked with examining whether existing legal frameworks, law enforcement practices, media discourses, and civil society responses have been adequate in protecting Jewish citizens (Biddle & Gray, 2026, p. 1). The terms of reference of the Commission suggested it would address issues including a perceived failure across multiple sectors to respond effectively to escalating threats, and the capacity of liberal democratic states to safeguard minority rights in periods of geopolitical tension and domestic polarisation (Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, 2026).

If the latter are found wanting when the Commission reports, it will suggest that the affects associated with acts of violence, harassment, intimidation and hate speech are undermining micropolitically the liberties, rights and participation assemblage (see CLD assemblage 3 in previous sections), to the extent that liberal democracy is failing the Australian Jewish community's capacities to live free and secure lives and participate fully in society. More generally, it will indicate that the increasing climate of hate speech and violent attacks upon minority ethnic and religious groups pose challenges to the capacity of CLD to guarantee universal liberties, rights and participation to citizens in contemporary liberal democratic jurisdictions. Meanwhile, responses by lawmakers in the wake of terrorist atrocities have sparked debate about what tightened laws mean for other civil liberties, such as freedom of expression and assembly and firearm ownership (Every-Palmer et al., 2021, pp. 281–282).

Case Study 2: The Rise of Platform Capitalism

In recent decades, platform capitalism has emerged as a significant organisational form within advanced and emerging economies, restructuring production, exchange and social interaction around digital infrastructures. Firms such as Amazon, Google, Netflix, Shopify, Uber and eBay exemplify this model, functioning primarily as intermediaries that connect users, businesses, workers, and advertisers within international markets. Rather than producing goods or services in a traditional sense, these platforms derive value and enable capital accumulation from facilitating interactions, harvesting and analysing data, and creating monopolies that entrench their market positions (Standing, 2021, pp. 213–214).

As Christophers (2021, p. 181) has argued, platform capitalism may be understood as a contemporary form of rentier capitalism, in which firms extract a top slice of income by means of fees, commissions, advertising revenues, licences or control over digital infrastructure, without directly engaging in productive activity themselves. Not only land owners but also publishers, estate agents, shopping malls, literary agents, management consultancies and employment agencies may all be considered as forms of rentier capitalism (Christophers, 2021, pp. xxx–xxxi; Standing, 2021, pp. 23–25). What is new, however, is the emergence of digital platforms facilitated by the internet, mobile technologies and AI algorithms that have linked providers and customers to extents previously unimagined (Fox, 2024; Standing, 2021, pp. 210–214).

A defining feature of platform capitalism is its capacity for rapid scaling. Unlike industrial firms constrained by physical production processes, digital platforms benefit from low marginal costs, allowing them to expand globally with limited additional investment (Törnberg, 2023, p. 4). This scalability has enabled platforms to achieve market dominance and, in some cases, quasi-monopolistic status. Once entrenched, they are able to set the terms of participation for other economic actors, effectively governing access to markets and shaping competitive dynamics (Fox, 2024, p. 8; Törnberg, 2023, p. 5). This has prompted renewed concerns regarding monopoly power, particularly given the limited regulatory frameworks available to address such digitally mediated forms of concentration.

The rise of platform capitalism has also fundamentally transformed labour relations. The proliferation of gig work mediated through platforms has introduced new forms of flexibility while simultaneously eroding traditional employment protections. Workers engaged via platforms such as Uber ride sharing or delivery services are often classified as independent contractors, shifting risks associated with income volatility, job security, and social protection away from firms and onto individuals (Christophers, 2021, pp. 216–217; Standing, 2021, p. 214). This reconfiguration of labour has been widely criticised for exacerbating precarity and undermining established labour standards (Montgomery & Baglioni, 2021, p. 1012).

More broadly, platform capitalism has contributed to the concentration of economic power within a relatively small number of firms and individuals. The accumulation of wealth by platform founders and major shareholders has given rise to what Bresser-Pereira (2018, p. 1) describes as ‘idle owners of capital’, whose income is increasingly detached from productive activity. This dynamic not only intensifies economic inequality but also raises questions about the allocation of capital within the economy. As Berry (2024, p. 33) and Srnicek (2021, p. 39) suggest, platform firms may divert surplus value away from productive sectors towards rent-extracting activities, potentially constraining innovation and long-term economic growth.

Micropolitically, platform capitalism exploits the affect associated with ‘supply and demand’ discussed in the previous section (see ‘Capitalism Assemblage 2: Exchange’) by requiring businesses in a competitive market to pay a fee or commission to gain access to the consumers using these digital platforms (cf. Piketty, 2014, p. 423). As global productivity and economic growth flatline (Berry, 2024, p. 36; Fernald et al., 2025), the monopolising inclinations of platforms (Christophers, 2021, pp. 204–209) has put them on a collision course with the affects in the pluralism, governance and accountability assemblage of CLD (see ‘CLD Assemblage 4’ in the previous section). Moreover, the harvesting of users’ data challenges the liberties and rights assemblage CLD3 (Marenco, 2022, p. 138). In the longer term, the negative impact of platform capitalism on productivity and industrial investment poses a threat to the capitalist economy and state more generally, as both Törnberg (2023, pp. 5–6) and Standing (2021, p. lxxxi) have argued, with implications for democracy, future global political stability and the potential for shifts towards authoritarianism (Marenco, 2022, p. 139; Pearce, 2025; Zakaria, 1997).

Discussion

This article has departed from conventional dualisms of economy and politics to invoke Deleuze’s (1988) monist, ethological ontology of assemblages, affects, capacities and micropolitics. This focus addresses the flows of power and resistance in economic and political assemblages: flows that cut across what have conventionally been treated as distinct micro-, meso- and macro-levels. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988, p. 453) conclusion that capitalism became viable only when flows of money, commodities and labour reached a threshold of de-territorialisation was further augmented by this author's (Fox, 2023) ethological analysis of capitalist assemblages that identified the more-than-human affect linking the capacities of commodities with consumers that underpins the potential for capital accumulation.

The extension of this ethological analysis to the assemblages of capitalist liberal democracy (CLD) in this article has allowed a fresh look at the complex relations between capitalism and liberal democracy, with an emphasis upon the social territorialisations and de-territorialisations, aggregations and dis-aggregations that these two formations establish. With this micropolitical foundation in mind, this discussion now turns to consideration of the flows of power and resistance between capitalism and CLD consequent upon these micropolitics.

First, as was just noted, capitalism became possible only once the unintended de-territorialisations of money, commodities and labour by earlier state formations surpassed a threshold. But this does not equate to absolute de-territorialisation, and in the late medieval period, societies remained deeply territorialised by gender, class, racial and religious divisions and prejudices. Demands for labour created by industrial production, the demand for consumer goods to serve a society with disposable income, and the demands of entrepreneurs for ever new means of capital accumulation have progressively produced further de-territorialisations and ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 508) into new opportunities and becomings over the past three centuries. These becomings had the side-effects of emancipating women as citizens, workers and consumers (Wood, 1988, p. 15), secularising society and removing exclusions of religious minorities from rights and citizenship (Turner, 2012). They created multicultural citizenries following mass immigration programmes used by rapidly expanding European capitalist economies to source additional labour from colonies in Asia, the Caribbean and Africa (Jacob-Owens, 2025, p. 9; Robinson & Santos, 2014, pp. 2–3), and may have played some part in the end to slavery in the Americas (Betancourt, 2025, p. 299; Mathisen, 2018, pp. 681–683). These later de-territorialisations are reflected in the representation (CLD1) and liberties and rights (CLD3) assemblages described earlier in the article.

Second, each of the assemblages of CLD reflect and support different aspects of Deleuze and Guattari's assertion of the state's principal objective as sustaining and broadening the flows of money, commodities and labour. Universal suffrage (CLD1) supplies a means to hold a particular government to account for its success in sustaining and growing the capitalist economy. The rule of law and constitutional limits on government (CLD2) establish a firm footing for a free market economy, contract law and the ownership of private property. A framework for citizen rights and participation (CLD3) helps to assure the free flow of labour through the economy; provision of education and training, health and welfare services support a labour force that is fit and skilled for work; and unemployment benefits establish a reserve army of labour. Finally, the pluralism, governance and accountability assemblage (CLD4) supplies a framework for capitalist enterprise, reduces corruption and corporate crime, assures the safety of commodities and workplaces while also generating taxation income from business and consumers. This analysis gives weight to the assertion that – rather than being ontologically separate from capitalism, CLD is integral to the capitalist state ‘stratum’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, pp. 351–352). ⁶

Third, from an ethological perspective, CLD has been revealed not as a coherent formation, but a coalescence of distinct assemblages that produce very different capacities: in human bodies, in the flows of money, commodities and labour through the economy and society, and in capitalism itself. Each assemblage (and their principal affects) plays a part in establishing the distinctive becomings of CLD; but were one or other of these affects to be weakened or removed, the overall formation would not simply evaporate: rather it would mutate into another capitalist variant. For example, remove the liberties, rights and participation affect and the new variant would be ‘illiberal democracy’ (Zakaria, 1997); expunge the pluralism, governance and accountability affect and a corrupt neoliberal variant might emerge. Were the electoral representation affect to be removed, this would invoke an authoritarian or oligarchic regime. Abandon the law and constitutional limits affect and a free market based on consent and contract would descent into lawless anarchy peopled by criminal gangs and militias, rampant corruption, poverty and famine, and vulnerability to external coercive force: conditions manifesting variously in so-called ‘failed states’ (Call, 2011).

Together, these three assessments indicate that liberal democracy is not capitalism's political opposite or moral corrective, but an historically contingent, micropolitically produced configuration of capitalist power – fragile, internally heterogeneous and always capable of mutating into other, less liberal capitalist forms. This provides the means to address the apparent threats to liberal democracy from authoritarianism, populism and fascism with which this article began. Ethological analysis of CLD has revealed that the four distinct CLD assemblages support and sometimes underpin the assemblages of capitalism and the primary objective of the capitalist state.

In some ways this monist and micropolitical analysis offers reassurance that CLD is relatively secure from such threats because it has become so integral to the continuity of Western capitalism. However, the two case studies explored in this article also recognised how different assemblages of CLD are already being undermined by internal or external forces that disrupt their core affects. This suggests the vulnerability of the CLD stratum, and the potential for what appears to be a relatively stable formation to morph into a different capitalist formation, especially where a number of different assemblages are undermined simultaneously.

For progressive actors and organisations in contemporary liberal democratic economies, this analysis indicates a need for both vigilance and political intervention to protect these assemblages by deepening commitments to the different elements of liberal democracy and taking threats to liberal democracy very seriously. It also suggests that – in a time of polycrisis (Diamond & Skrzypek, 2024), there is a need to widen recognition that CLD assemblages and affects supply valuable re-territorialising forces that continue to mitigate some of the negative consequences of capitalist de-territorialisations of everyday life, including social inequalities, job precarity, climate change and business uncertainty (Fox, 2023).