Democracy: Antithesis of American Post-Capatilist Corpratocracy

Worth quoting: . I've run across this quite a lot lately, an often implied, sometimes explicit assumption that democracy and the American political system are synonymous. I hope Levi Bryant's brief post over at Larval Subjects will be followed by a serious discussion.

In discussions of French inflected Marxist political theory I often get the sense that democracy is treated as a dirty word or the contrary of Marxism. The subtext seems to be that somehow neoliberalism and democracy are one and the same thing, or that the concept of democracy is identical to the actually existing system of something like American “democracy”. I find this idea very odd. For me Marxism and communism are synonyms for democracy, and the issues that motivate Marxist activists arise from the fact that our actually existing governmental systems aren’t democratic enough. Equating democracy with American “democracy” is like equating socialism with Stalinist socialism. In both cases we have an utter perversion of the political concept and the precise opposite of what these things are supposed to be. What am I missing?