State and Democracy in Late Capitalism: Conflicts between Accumulation and Participation

The relationship between state and democracy in late capitalism constitutes the central axis of this study, which seeks to understand the structural limits of political participation in societies marked by the primacy of accumulation. In peripheral contexts such as Brazil, the asymmetry between the interests of capital and social demands intensifies under neoliberal hegemony, which reconfigures the state as an instrument for the reproduction of inequalities and democratic containment. The question guiding this research is how recent transformations in capitalism, combining financialization, dependency, and neoliberal rationality, have deepened the erosion of popular sovereignty and the expropriation of rights. The central objective is to analyze the conflicts between capitalist accumulation and democratic participation, in light of the contributions of Ernest Mandel, István Mészáros, David Harvey, Wendy Brown, and authors in critical political economy and state theory. This research, theoretical and bibliographical in nature and qualitative in approach, is organized around the analysis of the categories of late capitalism, neoliberalism, and dependency, relating them to the tensions between formal and material democracy. The results indicate that the State, by becoming functional to the expanded reproduction of capital, compromises its redistributive bases, intensifies institutional selectivity, and restricts the channels of collective deliberation. It is concluded that the democratic crisis is not episodic, but rather an expression of the structural contradictions of capitalism in its late phase, which reinforces the importance of rethinking emancipatory alternatives for the realization of substantive democracy.