Liberal democracy uses the concept of “civil society” to refer to a realm where everyone is equal because they all have one vote. But we’ve seen how dominant power structures continue to circulate within and through their civil society.
Under this system, the State has total control to moderate conflict to guarantee equality, it defines and sanctions the official, formal, legal forms of domination. If there’s a question about a dominant power structure, whether something is legal or illegal, it falls on the state to adjudicate it. This ignores class and other forms of dominant power.
We should be able to conceptualize something without collapsing everything else into it as well. We don’t want to simplify the broader context into a single concept. In our theoretical framing, dominant power structures and mechanisms of domination are distinct from classes and class factions. By not maintaining this distinction, some theories of class end up being overly simplified, ignoring not only the dynamics that exist between classes but also the dynamics internal to each class.
