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Democracy vs. Capitalism

It’s common to hear social democrats and others on the moderate end of the Left spectrum say “we want to change society, but we don’t believe it’s necessary to have a revolution – we want to advance our goals through democratic politics.” Statements like that are based on assumptions about our political system that are rarely questioned, even by people on the Left. But figuring out how that system works should be the starting-point for any serious left-wing strategy.

Liberalism then and now

What should we call it, first of all? Names are rarely neutral in politics, and a simple term like “liberal democracy” can be picked apart by anyone familiar with history. Far from being synonymous, liberalism and democracy were traditionally enemies. In the nineteenth century, the great liberal parties of Britain, France or Germany were hostile to democracy. They wanted to do away with absolute monarchy and any form of arbitrary rule. They wanted a political system based on written laws, with government accountable to a parliament elected by a section of the population. But they were totally opposed to granting the vote to everyone – liberals insisted that voting rights should be based on a property qualification.

The reason for that position was very simple. Both liberals and conservatives were sure that if the masses with no property gained the right to vote, they would use it to confiscate the property of the rich. Every time the British House of Commons debated a proposal to extend the franchise, even to a small number of Britons, there were strident warnings that reforms of this sort would inevitably lead to the collapse of the social order.

So what happened, to bridge the gap between liberalism and democracy and give us our hybrid “liberal democracy”? As time went on, many European politicians began to re-consider their view of universal suffrage. They could study the example of the United States, where voting rights had been granted to all white males, and capitalism was still alive and well. It also struck many that if the masses weren’t given any kind of political representation, their anger might build up into an irresistible explosion – blocking democracy might accelerate revolution, rather than hinder it.

As usual in politics, this shift in position didn’t happen overnight: it was a gradual, halting process, speeded along by pressure from below. Britain proved to be the classic example. The franchise was extended in stages over the course of the nineteenth century – eventually the whole population was brought into the political sphere at the end of the First World War (with the exception of women under the age of 30, who still couldn’t be trusted to behave like responsible citizens).

At the time, few people recognised that Britain was pioneering a model that would be adopted by its neighbours. In the years leading up to the First World War, many socialists were convinced that capitalism and democracy could never co-exist. The German radical Rosa Luxemburg, for example, believed that the age of liberalism and parliamentary democracy was coming to an end – either the working class would take power and establish socialist democracy in Europe, or else the ruling classes of Europe would shift towards authoritarian rule. As a prediction of what was going to happen between 1918 and 1939, Luxemburg’s argument was spot on – but the political landscape changed dramatically after the Second World War, when the British model of liberal, capitalist democracy became dominant in Western Europe.

Checks and balances – Capital’s insurance policy

So what was the character of that system, which Winston Churchill famously described as the “worst possible system, apart from all the others that have been tried from time to time”? Why had the economic elites and their political agents accepted that the masses who sold their labour to survive should be allowed to choose the government of the country? They had been willing to take the gamble because there were and are a number of safe-guards built into the system to prevent an elected parliament from being used against the power of capital.

To begin with, the power of government to manage the economy has always been strictly limited. Some industries might be taken over by the State (the extent of this penetration has varied from country to country), and governments usually have the power to set taxation and interest rates. But everywhere and always, the bulk of economic production has remained under the control of private capital. With this commanding position firmly in their hands, the big property owners are able to exert pressure on whoever finds themselves in office. Any government that displeases the “business community” must reckon with the threat of capital flight and an investment strike.

Secondly, large parts of the State machine are unaccountable to the population as a whole: the appointment of senior civil servants, judges, police and army officers usually takes place beyond the reach of citizens. The rigid selection procedures for these positions ensure that most of the key decision-makers come from the upper levels of the social ladder. Even when people from humble backgrounds are able to jump through the hoops and reach the highest level, the status and incomes they now enjoy mean they have become part of the upper classes.

Because of this in-built class bias in the structures of the “democratic” State, it can never be a neutral tool available for the use of any government, left-wing or right-wing. At the most basic level, civil servants can frustrate government policy by ensuring that its implementation is stalled or sabotaged during the passage from legislation to practical action. Judges can rule against laws that encroach on the privileges of their class brethren. In the most extreme cases, the army can step in to overthrow the elected government and remove any threat to the dominance of capital.

This assumes, of course, that there is a government willing to take steps that harm the interests of the capitalist class – thus requiring sabotage of one kind or another from within the State. But the members of that class would prefer to avoid such messy situations, which is why they use their position in society to influence the whole process of government formation. This is the third safety-net which has helped reconcile capitalists to a certain kind of democracy.

Big business can influence the outcome of elections in a very direct manner, by subsidising parties that represent its interests and giving them a massive advantage over their rivals. The value of such aid is not to be under-estimated. But it is reinforced by an even more powerful tool of influence: the dominance of private capital over the print and electronic media.

The explosive growth of these industries since the beginning of the twentieth century, and the so-called “mediatisation” of society that has followed, makes life very difficult for parties, movements and campaigns that conflict with powerful economic interests. They are almost certain to find themselves subject to a relentless campaign of vilification and mockery – and the existence of small pockets of the media with more honourable standards is never enough to compensate.

It’s not simply a question of newspapers telling people to vote for this or that party. That kind of bias is easy enough to spot. But when the media is used to promote an entire world-view, when story after story is reported within the assumptions of an ideological frame-work and that frame-work is hammered constantly home by editorials and opinion columnists, it becomes hard for even the shrewdest reader to escape the influence of the mass media. And that influence is usually deployed against progressive ideas and causes.

This is just one aspect of the power of capital in civil society. Generous donations from business are used to maintain a network of right-wing think-tanks and to direct academic research in certain directions, thus maintaining an intellectual climate aggressively hostile to “anti-business” policies. Advertising, too, plays its part – as well as selling a certain product, most ads help to perpetuate an ideology of consumerist individualism that undermines left-wing principles of class identity, solidarity and collective action.

What kind of democracy?

Finally, we must consider the form assumed by democracy in the developed capitalist societies – a form that makes conservative dominance easier to maintain. Another quick glance at the history books will remind us that democratic systems have taken on many different shapes from one era to the next. The earliest democracy, in ancient Athens, saw mass assemblies of citizens debate matters of public concern. But in the modern age, political architects have been very keen to discourage such direct engagement with the system. Citizens are meant to transfer their decision-making powers to elected representatives, and then allow them the freedom to direct government policy as they see fit.

The Chartist movement which campaigned for democratic reform in Britain during the early nineteenth century demanded annual elections. But no capitalist democracy has been willing to contemplate such a step – the usual term for a national assembly is four or five years. Still less have the designers of such systems been prepared to imagine any structures that would allow voters to recall their representatives if they break the promises on which they were elected.

This striking deficiency, usually taken for granted but not at all common-sensical, helps elected politicians to strike a balance between the desires of the voting population and the demands of the capitalist class. To put it bluntly, the job a politician must usually perform in a capitalist democracy is to appear to be representing the masses while actually serving the elites. If they only have to face the voters every few years, if the resources of big business can be used to manipulate the electoral process, and if there’s no way to sack politicians in the meantime, that job becomes a whole lot easier.

When citizens do attempt to pressurize their representatives between election-time, they are often told that such efforts are “undemocratic”. The implication being that the rights of free speech and free assembly guaranteed by liberal constitutions are just there for show – not to be exercised, or at least not to be used with the expectation of being heard. It’s perfectly natural and healthy, though, for businessmen to click their fingers and politicians to come running – that’s what the game is all about.

The centralisation of power is another standard feature of these systems. In principle, there is no reason why the management of the health service, for example, could not be devolved to elected assemblies of delegates at a local level – once the national parliament had decided how much money to allocate, such assemblies could use their superior knowledge to make all the nitty-gritty decisions. But that would have the effect of bringing citizens into decision-making on a much grander scale than any defender of capitalist interests could feel comfortable with. Instead, power is usually devolved to committees of unelected bureaucrats (“quangos” as the British call them).

In some countries of course, power is also devolved to regional governments or local councils. These structures usually make little contribution to the democratisation of society, though – they face all the pressures and obstructions endured by national governments when they conflict with economic elites, with even fewer powers to overcome them. In a number of cases when local councils have refused to capitulate to these pressures, they have simply been abolished by the central government.

Last but not least, parliamentarians and (still more) cabinet ministers always enjoy salaries that are far above the average for the people they represent. A politician who achieves high office can expect to find himself or herself in the wealthiest ten or twenty per cent of the population. This may not be the most important reason why parliaments in capitalist democracies tend to favour the interests of the well-heeled, but it is surely more than trivial.

The radical potential of democracy

As we’ve seen, people may have the chance to vote for their political leaders, but any politician with the desire to challenge powerful economic interests and legislate on behalf of working people and the poor will have to jump through a series of hoops. If they want to get elected in the first place, they will have to win a contest against conservative parties with generous sources of funding and strong media support for their ideas. If they overcome this barrier and win a majority in parliament, they will encounter relentless obstruction and sabotage from allies of big business embedded in the state bureaucracy. The capitalist class itself will have the power to trigger economic chaos if it so desires.

In the face of such pressures, it is expecting a lot of any man or woman that they should stay true to the course – especially when the people who voted for them with high hopes have no immediate way of turfing them out of office when they bend the knee to capital. More often than not, the pressure tells in the long run and political parties end up serving capitalist interests. And that was never truer than it is today, when every “party of government” from Dublin to Athens and from Washington to Auckland has fallen in behind the neo-liberal agenda.

But this doesn’t mean we should despair. It’s worth remembering that the ruling classes of Europe only conceded the limited form of democracy we have today because they were forced to – their first response to the tide of democratisation came in the form of fascism and other right-wing authoritarian systems. It was only the disaster of WW2 and the spread of Communism that drove them to embrace capitalist democracy after 1945.

That reluctance is not hard to explain. Their instinct told them that there is always something dangerous about granting people the right to make decisions about the way society is organized – no matter how carefully you limit that right. When you grant basic political freedoms and allow the popular classes to develop their own parties and organisations, there is always a danger that they will use that freedom to transform society from top to bottom, dismantling all the old class structures and paving the way for genuine, radical democracy.

Despite all the pressures and limitations that were summarised above, mighty social movements have arisen time and again, shifting the balance of power in favour of the masses, winning important reforms and expanding the range of freedom. The obstacles that stand in the way of such movements today may be different from those encountered by their predecessors fifty or a hundred years ago, but they are surely no more invincible.

Lefts Old and New

If the power of social resistance has never yet been strong enough to abolish capitalist power once and for all, it surely owes a great deal to the political forms and strategies adopted by progressive movements in the twentieth century. On the one hand, the dominant current in the workers’ movement was social democracy. The social democrats argued that it was possible to gradually reform capitalism out of existence. Over time, that long-term goal was itself gradually transformed into a relic of the barely-remembered past, and finally abandoned altogether.

The evolution of the social-democratic parties owed a lot to their naïve and unrealistic view of capitalist democracy. The leaders and theoreticians of social democracy argued that the state was a more or less neutral tool that could be used by a left-wing party to change society, just as soon as that party had a majority in parliament. The record of social democracy in government can be read as a long historical experiment demonstrating how short-sighted that notion was: whether it was the British Labour Party, the German Social Democrats or the French Socialists, social-democratic parties have shown the difference between finding yourself in office and actually exercising power.

This is not to say that parties of this sort have never achieved anything worthwhile: they have sometimes left behind real social reforms that improved the living conditions of millions of people. But more often than not, progress of this sort came at a time when the elites feared revolution if they did not make concessions (that’s why the years immediately following WW2, when Communism was at its peak, proved to be such a valuable time for workers in Britain or France).

At other times, when capitalist elites have gone on the counter-offensive, looking to roll back concessions made in the past, social democrats have tended to offer pitiful, inadequate resistance. That is, if they weren’t joining the attack on working people themselves. After a century spent operating at the heart of bourgeois-democratic systems, playing the game of capitalist democracy strictly by the rules and absorbing all its influences, social democracy in Europe has completely abandoned its original mission to transform society and become an agent of social regression (the “New Labour” party of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown is the clearest example of this).

On the other hand, the radical wing of the workers’ movement recognised that social democracy was a dead-end long before Tony Blair was even born – the great split between the two wings of socialism took place after the First World War, when radicals horrified by the eager patriotism of the social-democratic leaders and their willingness to line up with opposing class interests broke away to form new anti-capitalist parties. But the evolution of the Communist movement (as it became known) hampered its ability to challenge either capitalism or social democracy.

The split between communists and social democrats was inevitable and could not have been avoided. But it was not inevitable that the new communist parties would allow themselves to be subordinated to the new Soviet government – for almost three decades, Moscow had the power to set the overall line for the whole movement, to oust leaders that challenged its authority and to over-ride the needs of working classes outside the USSR in pursuit of its own foreign policy. Even after the death of Stalin and the “thaw” in international communism, the Soviet Union weighed down heavily on communists everywhere.

That interference did incalculable damage to the parties that usually monopolised radical, anti-capitalist struggles. But perhaps even worse, the Soviet Union corrupted their own understanding of what socialism meant. If the social democrats erred by taking the claims of capitalist democracy at face value, ignoring the barriers to real democratic control over society, the communists went to the opposite extreme and dismissed the whole idea of democracy as a bourgeois fraud. Their support for brutal one-party dictatorship in the USSR and its satellite states turned countless people against communism. It allowed the banner of democracy to fall into the hands of right-wing elements who had previously despised it.

Along the way, too many socialists lost sight of the idea that capitalist democracy could be challenged, not in the name of dictatorship, but in order to replace it with a higher form of democracy that allowed much broader opportunities for people to shape their own destiny. When the communist parties of western Europe began to distance themselves from Soviet authoritarianism in the 1960s, they ironically ended up embracing the same illusions about a parliamentary road to social transformation that had led their social-democratic rivals up a garden-path so many times before. The ex-communists of Italy now share the same political ground as Blairites elsewhere.

Their democracy and ours

Having considered some of the lessons history can offer, the vital thing now is to work out an approach to capitalist democracy that can see progressive social movements realise their potential. It seems unlikely that a strategy of pure abstentionism can work. The political structures in place across the developed capitalist world have put down deep roots in society and still enjoy a great deal of legitimacy, despite popular cynicism about politicians and falling electoral turn-out in many countries. A failure to make some use of the representative structures that exist today will most likely keep radical forces in a marginal ghetto.

But if socialists and other progressive currents decide to make use of electoral politics in some shape or form, they must not repeat the errors of parliamentary socialism in the last century, or they will soon run into a brick wall. Political leaders will never overcome the power of capital on their own, without the support of mass movements challenging power relations at every level of society. Parliaments and council chambers will be most valuable as platforms to promote this kind of activity – not as the main battleground of social change. The capitalist class has never been reckless enough to rely on the force of parliamentary majorities to defend its interests. Social movements aiming to break with capitalism must recognise well in advance that winning an electoral victory will not give them the power needed to change society.

When people begin to mobilise outside the normal channels of parliamentary politics, that raises the prospect of a new, expanded form of democracy. Every time a strike or a demonstration takes place, the Left must always be ready to say “this is not a challenge to democracy – this IS democracy, popular power in action.” Social struggles contain the seeds of the popular, grass-roots democracy that can take the place of today’s stunted, malnourished form.

Any socialist democracy worth fighting for will have to found itself on basic democratic freedoms – the right to free speech, free assembly, a multi-party system. But it will also have to bring economic production under democratic control, breaking the dictatorship of capital in the factories and offices that shape people’s lives. Whatever strategies are adopted, whatever organisational forms are used, that has to be the guiding vision of the Left.