Disassembly Required. Geoff Mann
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must be rejected. Indeed, as the briefest critical glance at everyday life suggests, it is a myth (albeit a very powerful one), and any common sense it has today is a historical product of liberal capitalism. There is absolutely nothing inevitable about it. Even granting the fantastical notion that the state is the sole realm of politics (I suppose it is the sole realm of “Politics”), the claim that the state and the economy do not constitute and determine each other was blatantly disproven by the world in Hobbes’ time, just as it is disproven today.
But we talk about “the economy” in contemporary capitalism as if it were an independent realm, unaffected, or at least potentially unaffected, by the state and social life more generally, a total and complete impossibility. Yet, precisely because this is how the system is widely perceived, it is crucial to consider explicitly the work these ideas do. Ingham is very good on this. He says there are three main ways the state interacts with “the economy,” and, although they are not so easily separable, the distinctions are useful. They are:
1. State provision/production of social peace;
2. State maintenance of capitalist social relations (often via “liberal democracy”); and
3. Direct and indirect state participation in the economy.
Social peace is both a precondition and a goal of modern capitalist hegemony, and the state is a crucial—but not the only—means by which social peace is maintained. This is not to say, however, that capitalism can only develop in a “peaceful” context. Nor is it to say that the coercive power in capitalism sticks happily to its own “proper” realms of social relations, like policing or the justice system, leaving markets and their participants to “peacefully” pursue their interests. There are times, for example, when capitalist markets—which are supposed to be purely “consensual”—can operate in a context of more coercion and less consensus, and forms of coercive power can certainly move into “spheres” of social life where in theory they do not belong—markets in Mafia protection are a good example. Yet, while capitalism can sometimes work in such contexts, they are not indicative of the capitalist state’s relation to “the economy.” Mafia hits in Moscow and Russian oligarchs’ strong-arm expropriation of public wealth via terror and theft is not really hegemony in any meaningful Gramscian sense, and it tells us little about the role of the state.
Successful hegemonic projects necessitate both coercive capacity on the part of the governors and consent on the part of the governed. In other words, the state and the social relations it protects must be granted, at least by a significant part of the population, sufficient legitimacy. Capitalism requires legitimacy. What is not so clear, however, is the means through which it acquires legitimacy: are we fooled into acquiescing to capitalism by cultural institutions like the church, or by transactions that cheat us in ways we don’t understand? Are we “bought off” by the welfare state, basic amenities, and the possibility of upward mobility? Is capitalism the “best possible” or “least bad” system, thus meriting our reasoned endorsement? Furthermore, to what extent does the state participate in the legitimation process? If we are dupes, is it the state that dupes us? Capitalists? Both? If we are bought off, surely the state is important, but in whose interest is it acting? Is it extracting from capitalists in the interests of workers? Or is it appeasing workers in the interests of capitalists? There is, of course, no one universal answer to these questions.
It seems certain that much of modern capitalism’s legitimacy derives from its supposed mutually interdependent relationship with liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is focused on individual rights, freedom of exchange, and procedural consistency (i.e., the rules of the game apply to all members of the polity, including those who exercise state power). It is commonly assumed that liberal democratic states are the optimal means through which to determine, and enforce, the rules of the capitalist game. The provision and protection of property rights is again a great example—without it, capitalist exchange would be impossible. Who would buy something if they could not be sure that after the transaction they will own it? Who would buy something if they could not be sure the seller had the right to sell it? Because liberal democracy did not exist prior to capitalism, many have claimed that the two co-evolved and are necessarily interdependent. According to capitalist reason, it is obvious that you can’t have democracy without capitalism, and you can’t have capitalism without democracy.
This common sense is not entirely disconnected from the real world, but it is based on selective memory and a naïve overconfidence in our ability to know the future. Consider the following: even if it were true that capitalism and democracy have always gone together (and it is definitively not true), this would in no way justify the claim that they will go together until the end of time. Transhistorical claims originating in particular historical modes of production have never proven true, and there is no reason to expect end-of-history claims about the mutualism of capitalism and democracy are any more correct than previous prophecies.
More importantly, there is an overwhelmingly obvious rebuke to the claim that democracy and capitalism are mutually necessary: the contemporary Chinese political economy. Many analyzes of the Chinese experience, from all sides of the political spectrum, describe present-day China as “authoritarian capitalism.”21 If China is capitalist—and not only is it arguably capitalist, but as Slavoj Žižek loves to point out, it appears to be better at capitalism than anyone else—then the inevitability of the democracy-capitalism marriage clearly does not hold.22
The credibility of capitalism’s inherent democratic decency is further eroded by the fascisms that spread across Europe and other parts of the world in the mid-twentieth century. This is certainly no small matter: no account of Italy, Germany and Spain in that period can describe them as noncapitalist. Indeed, Germany’s remarkable performance during the 1930s, when much of the world was down and out, made fascism very appealing to many at the time, including a heck of a lot of capitalists—and, it must be said, quite a few workers too.23 Moreover, one cannot attribute the failures of fascism to its incommensurability with capitalism, as if it were a contradictory system never meant to be. Fascist Germany was a capitalist economic growth machine—cheerfully endorsed by both German capital and much of German labour—that was crushed, thankfully, by the war. However hateful the regime was, there is no evidence that fascist capitalism itself was doomed to failure on its own. Indeed, some have made the compelling argument that fascism helped save German, Italian, and Spanish capitalism in the 1920s and 1930s, by overcoming capital’s resistance to full employment, thus providing a “political” solution to a nominally “economic” collapse.24 When fascism fell, at least in Germany and Italy, it was not due to some flaw in its “variety” of capitalism; it was fascist leaders’ hubris, Allied bombing, and internal resistance that killed it. Indeed, Generalísimo Francisco Franco, whose victory over the Spanish Republicans in 1939 was partially funded by Texaco and other capitalist firms, peacefully “retired” from almost four decades of autocratic brutal-tyranny-in-capitalism in 1973, bequeathing Spain a degenerate constitutional monarchy and decades of political turmoil.
Add to this the unfolding history of developing-world dictatorships propped up by the US and western Europe over the years—none of which are easily classified as noncapitalist—and any claim that capitalism needs democracy is on shaky ground. It may be that liberal democracy needs capitalism, but it is definitely not the other way around. In fact, whatever anticapitalism’s prospects, the future of anything like democracy will depend very much on which of the terms dominates the capitalism-democracy pairing. Even if in the short term it seems democracy is tied to capitalism, there is clearly no necessary mutual dependence between the two. What is certain is that we can no longer leave democracy to the capitalists (see Chapter 8).
But that does not mean it is merely accidental that the two are so often paired. For Ingham, the origins of democracy lie in the political contradictions generated by the capitalist mode of production. The ideological fundamentals of liberal democracy—“universal” human rights, individual liberties, procedural consistency—were the same as those put forward by the proto-capitalist bourgeoisie in their effort to gain some freedom from the yoke of the state. When these classically “liberal” ideas became culturally dominant, they unsurprisingly trickled down from the elites to the workers and other noncapitalists, who mobilized those ideological tools in their own interests.