Completing the democratic revolution
In the global North, we are indoctrinated from an early age in the ideological morés of liberal capitalist electoralism, the basis for what Francis Fukuyama infamously described as the ‘end of history’ following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Such claims are repeated ad infinitum as though mere repetition was as good as empirical proof, the latest example being those made in opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The fundamental claims regarding the moral superiority of western democracies are thrown about as if to demonstrate Randolph Bourne’s observation to the effect that ‘war is the health of the state’; every neoconservative hawk involved in the 2003 invasion of Iraq is now a dove who loves democracy and hates aggression and war when they happen not to be the principal beneficiaries.
The democratic pretences of fossil imperialists notwithstanding, the existence of economic autocracy alongside political democracy has always been a paradoxical feature of liberal capitalist electoralism. While individual rights, freedoms and responsibilities have been a proud feature of the political sphere in western democracies, the autocratic hierarchies associated with monarchist absolutism, and abolished by democratic revolutions hundreds of years ago, continue to characterise production and distribution. We can no more vote for how production is organised under conditions of class hierarchy than we can vote for or against capitalism itself. Class hierarchy is a prerogative of the aristocracy of wealth.
Liberal democracy assumes capitalism and class hierarchy then as givens, as fait accomplis beyond the scope of the choices its permits. Equality before the law has always meant the equality of the propertied few; women, nonwhites and workers have always struggled for the representation the propertied few have always enjoyed (a monopoly they appear to guard jealously). One practical consequence of this fact is that the electoral system only permits choices between various factions of the aristocracy of wealth at the ballot box; liberalism pushes for a more inclusive class hierarchy, but never for the abolition of the master-slave relationship hierarchies embody as such.
Another consequence is that whatever political rights we have cease at the threshold of work. Where our jobs are concerned, the democratic revolutions may as well have never happened; in the end we do what we’re told, or else, and the alienable rights we’re told exist for us as political actors evaporate are, it transpires, completely alienable if they get in the way of capital accumulation. From the perspective of the transnational corporate class who own and control the global economy, class hierarchies and class monopoly over resources are justifiable in terms of control over the products of one’s labour; Lockean notions of private property have traditionally been predicated on the mixing of labour with the soil for purposes of “improvement,” reflecting its concern with ‘the natural law’ of self-preservation.
In principle the need to control the products of one’s own labour is not wrong; as Alexander Hamilton argued in opposition to burdensome taxation without representation, ‘power over a man’s [sic] subsistence is power over his will.’ To control the products of our labour is to enjoy control over the means of subsistence and economic independence, and thus to have to answer to no one in the process of day to day survival.
As an argument against excessive taxation, Hamilton’s observations also work as a critique of wage labour, land rent and colonial land grabs; while social resources and land are monopolised by an aristocracy of wealth, the rest of us are forced into economic subjection, needing to rent ourselves to survive and pay for the right to a roof over our heads. Class monopoly over resources begets economic dependence as lack of free access to the means of subsistence leaves the majority of humanity with no means of survival save selling our labour power, and thus alienating control over the products of our labour to those who lease it.
Owners of capital lease slaves in the same way that they lease the company carpool, then, and for essentially the same reason—i.e. to reduce capital costs. Furthermore, they are happy to reap the rewards of colossal amounts of unpaid care work from women especially in the home, as they raise children to become wage workers in industry for free. They take a colossal gratuity from care labour and then pontificate about raising oneself up by one’s bootstraps.
If formerly slave owners had to pay for the upkeep of their slaves, now they lease us, pay us a proportion of the product of our own labour back to us as a wage, and let us do the job ourselves. As things like user-pays heathcare tends to demonstrate, our ability to take care of ourselves is left more or less to chance. Before and during the US Civil War, apologists for the South defending chattel slavery on the grounds that owned slaves are taken care of like any other property, whereas rented slaves are used up and then thrown away. We do not need to agree with this argument to see that it was telling.
Competition to keep up with the Joneses, and the personal debt that this tends to beget, keeps the class vassals fighting amongst ourselves and suitably pliant and docile as we run on the wage treadmill to service it. Consumerism creates wants and then markets to them, stealing our freedoms and then selling us back their branded representations; in using consumption to try to deal with life under economic autocracy, we end up throwing an endless torrent of consumer durables into the bottomless pit of our alienation (Baudrillard). This begs the question as to why those who are in theory free need consumerism to cope with our freedom.
Furthermore, the steady supply of consumer goods necessitates a global order divided into affluent North and immiserated South, a transnational class division rooted historically in the legal plunder and piracy perpetrated by European colonialists. Defining ‘civilisation’ on the basis of the ‘natural law’ of enclosure and extractivism, these early architects of the capitalist world order constructed international law in the name of its defence, only allowing subject nations to join the community of the ‘civilised’ to the extent that they permitted the ‘natural law’ of property to be exercised through colonial extractivism.
The process and underlying dynamics remain exactly the same today; to get debt relief, nations of the global South must submit to IMF ‘structural adjustment’ programmes and abandon social supports in the name of allowing a favourable climate for predatory transnational corporations to operate. Consumerism in the global North, as a coping mechanism for liberal democratic freedoms, requires economic coercion and the destruction of national sovereignty at the hands of transnational corporations and their political enablers throughout the global South. The subjection of workers in the global South and the maintenance of favourable business conditions at the expense of everyone else provides opportunity for capital flight and driving down of wages and conditions in the North. Everyone suffers, in other words, save the aristocracy of wealth, whose power renders them mostly independent of national governments, and a private transnational empire in their own right (Hardt & Negri).
Political democracy under conditions of liberal capitalism is already fraught as it is, given the class divisions underlying the much famed ‘general will’ of the population, and the capacity of wealthy minorities to capture the political process and turn the laws to their advantage. The leaders of the French Revolution in particular were adamant that political democracy could only function in general material equality; wealth inequality was also power inequality insofar as wealth itself is a form of power.
Their fears have been realised in no uncertain terms in late capitalism, where corporations have been invested with the rights of persons, and human individuals have to compete with internally totalitarian, predatory and immortal concentrations of private wealth and power for political influence. The rise and rise of mega corporations like Apple and Amazon, and gargantuan wealth funds like Blackrock and Vanguard, alongside the explosion in global wealth inequality, the growing immiseration of the mass of humanity and the conspicuous willingness of western political leaders to service vested corporate interests at everyone else’s expense, reflects the corporate capture of nominally democratic political institutions. As a result of corporate capture, parliaments and allegedly representative houses are reduced to wholly-owned subsidiaries.
The scandals around campaign financing in the US are well known; the 2010 Citizens United case in the SCOTUS, successfully arguing against regulation of donations in the name of free speech, exemplifies the disproportionate power of corporate PACs and their willingness to use their vast economic resources to subvert the political process and ensure political democracy never becomes a threat to economic autocracy, class privilege and wanton, predatory capital accumulation. The role of secret corporate political donations (‘dark money’) in helping to further the ends of corporate capture and neutralisation of electoral democracy has been documented in detail in recent years (Nancy Maclean).
In Australia, prevailing campaign laws mean that a billion dollars in political donations to political parties over the last two decades remains completely untraceable. The result of the circulation of this kind of money amongst alleged political representatives is a bought system, again a wholly owned subsidiary of the entities with a spare billion dollars with which to buy political influence. For all the teeth-gnashing and wailing of conservatives and reactionaries about the tyranny of PC culture and wokeness, they are completely silent on this vastly more overt threat to whatever freedoms electoral democracy was supposed to guarantee.
In light of this state of affairs, several options in terms of responses are apparent: (1) try to fix the system from within, (2) try to replace the bourgeois state with a worker’s state that can suppress predatory capitalism and lay the grounds for something better, (3) try to create the facts of a baseline sane and just economic democracy in the present, developing new ways of thinking and relating to one another as a sort of preparatory ‘revolutionary gymnastics.’
The first approach has no shortage of takers, relying on the mentality that the social, political and ecological consequences of global class hierarchy and predatory class war on the part of fossil imperialists is a matter of correct policy, not systemic faults rooted in hierarchy or unpaid bills of history coming due in the case of the climate emergency. This approach contains the seeds of its own destruction insofar as, in looking to game the system, reformists are instead gamed by it through the compromises with prevailing economic autocracy they make in exchange for influence.
Abandoning systemic analysis, reformists of fossil imperialist capitalism can only reify the nefarious consequences of class and social hierarchy onto individuals, blaming bigots (especially from amongst the working class) for being sponges for hate, while leaving the class system that relies on and generates it as a form of divide-and-conquer amongst the class vassals and rented slaves untouched. Similarly, they are forced to treat global warning, and its root driver in ‘metabolic rift,’ as policy errors, or as the consequence of a broken system—not, as the historical facts surrounding the ecological emergency tend to indicate, a historical fossil extractivist system built on colonial plunder and transnational class hierarchies working more or less as intended for their principal beneficiaries amongst a nascent class of neo-aristocratic corporate oligarchs.
Protecting capitalism in this manner from radical critique and challenge inevitably allows the soil of fascism to fester, reflecting the truism articulated in the midst of the May 68 revolts in France that ‘those who make half a revolution dig their own graves.’ Without economic democracy, political democracy is in danger of falling prey to political reaction as economic autocrats seek to defend their class power and privileges from democracy. The resurgence of the far-right from the US, Europe and Australia to Brazil, India and (no less ironically) the Ukraine is ample evidence of this fact.
The remaining alternative is, then, addressing the problem at the source by pursuing economic democracy. The traditional approach in this respect has been the mobilisation of students and workers by a vanguard party, with a view to capturing the capitalist state and implementing economic democracy from above. Not one of the many attempts made in this respect has succeeded in abolishing either the commodity form, or the autocratic class hierarchies associated with it.
The ‘scientific’ vs ‘utopian’ socialist binary favoured by advocates of this approach silences criticism of the acausal claim that altruistic ends can be had through selfish means by labelling and demonising doubters as reactionaries. The ‘if you think for yourself, the enemies of communism win’ mentality appropriates the ‘if you think for yourself, the communists win’ mentality of those they claim to oppose.
In neglecting to maintain a basic harmony between means and outcomes, using freedom as a means to achieve freedom (as opposed to trying to win freedom by habituating oneself to deference and obedience to the party line), they become everything they claim to oppose. In becoming everything they claim to oppose, they use the same scapegoating logic to defend their declining ideological dominance; the mentality that the truth of an idea is determined by the number of people who believe it upholds teleological binaries like ‘science vs utopianism’ in the name of materialism and empirical rigour.
As against the logics of ‘if you think for yourself, the communists win,’ and ‘if you think for yourself, the enemies of communism win,’ the remaining alternative appears to follow Ghandi’s logic of becoming the change we want to see in the world. It must, in the first instance, avoid the reformist mistake of attempting individual solutions to collective problems. In the second, it must avoid the authoritarian socialist mistake of attempting emancipation by embracing the capitalist myth that altruistic ends can be had through selfish means (e.g. ‘trickle-down’ economics).
It must embrace collective class solutions to the collective problem of elite class warfare through strategies that maintain a basic harmony between means and desired outcomes, using directly democratic organisational forms and strategies to rise above the thinking that creates the problems we face in the world today and to become ‘the facts of the future’ (Bakunin). Competing the democratic revolution by extending political democracy into the economic sphere is anything but something that can be legislated; it can only happen when we develop a greater capacity for individual and collective autonomy. This is a matter of culture and education from the grassroots up; the introduction (or better yet, imposition) of savours and secular faiths only externalises our inner potential and perpetuates dependency on hierarchies. We should no longer believe in closed ideological systems or great leaders, only in ourselves.
In light of the level of insanity, injustice and chaos in the world today, it almost appears as though the experiment in electoralism has failed. Perhaps it is true, as Rudolf Rocker once pointed out, that political democracy shipwrecked on the rocks of capitalism and class hierarchy. If this is indeed so, then the best way to save and extend individual freedoms in a collective and social context can only be to finish the democratic revolution by extending it to where we work. If the history of past failures means anything at all, we can only achieve this using means consistent with outcomes—(1) to avoid the establishment of self-serving and corrupting double standards, and (2) to avoid becoming everything we claim to oppose.
Finding new ways of thinking and relating to one another in these ways—a decolonising of the imagination, as it were—is arguably a necessary first step to navigating our way out of the generalised crises of the 21st century. If, in contrast to the grandiose claims of Francis Fukuyama, history has not truly begun, dealing with this prehistoric interregnum, where the past will not die and the future struggles to be born, demands transcending it. The ideal of economic democracy offers not only a means of attempting redress, but a practical goal and focus for movements organised in line with a vision of the world in which individual freedom is emancipated from its role as a propaganda device in being conflated with class privilege and made a reality for the mass of humanity at long last. In light of the ongoing threat to humanity from the climate emergency, we’re going to need it.
