Capitalism has no necessary political form but tends toward parliamentary democracy

Evidence

Other approaches recognize that there may well be “tendential combinations”: combinations which, while not prescribed in the fully determinist sense, are the “preferred” combinations, sedimented and solidified by real historical development over time. Thus, as is clear from, say, the Latin American case, there is no “necessary correspondence” between the development of a form of capitalism and the political forms of parliamentary democracy. Capitalism can arise on very different political foundations. Engels himself showed how capitalism can also harness and adapt very different legal systems to its functions. This does not prevent us from arguing that the advent of capitalism has frequently (tendentially) been accompanied by the formation of bourgeois parliamentary democratic regimes: or even from accepting Lenin’s percipient observation that parliamentary democracy provides “the ‘best possible’ political shell for capitalism.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 624

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my economics reading on institutional variation — capital adapts to divergent legal systems, echoing Milgrom on medieval trade law evolving independent of state. — connects to: The capitalist enterprise is politically autocratic, not democratic. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 549; Capitalism has no center, only entities incapable of responsibility; Neoliberalism now openly abandons its claim that capitalism and democracy go together — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2001