To the editor,
Is political democracy compatible with capitalist economies?
Thanks,
Matt.
[Sent via email]
Hi Matt,
This is a complex question that hinges on subjective definitions of democracy. Democracy literally means “people rule,” derived from the ancient Athenian concept of demokratia. The basic definition is straightforward but the practice has varied wildly along with popular conceptions that are serpentine, at best.
For example, ancient Athenians would dismiss elected representatives as non-democratic and oligarchic by nature. Athens had a direct democratic system that filled bureaucratic posts by lottery and passed laws with an assembly open to all citizens. On the surface, this appears even more in the spirit of “people rule” than what we have today. But when we adjust for the exclusivity of Athenian citizenship, only about 25% of the population was enfranchised since women, slaves and foreigners were forbidden from political participation. For older and more inclusive examples of “people rule” we could look to the consensus-based decision making among many tribal societies.
Democratic models antiquity and beyond only takes us so far, however. The argument could be made that “purer” forms of democracy which developed in the context of a tribe or city-state are simply not compatible in a modern world of teeming metropolises and complex nation-states. There is merit to this argument from a historical materialist perspective.
Consensus-based decision making is a logical outgrowth of highly interdependent individuals that hunted, gathered and sheltered as small communities. Cohesion and cooperation between members was the best guarantor of productivity and individual survival. In antiquity, on the other hand, the exploitation of slave labour was the productive basis that made a caste of citizens in the polis possible. This economic dependency on slavery elevated the role of military conquest and contributed to the confinement of women to the domestic sphere. Citizenship in the classical world was inextricably linked with military service and politics became the sole domain of a kind of warrior caste.
What these historical examples illustrate are models of democracy that arose from economic practicality rather than lofty idealism. The same is true of modern democratic forms, which were spawned by a nascent bourgeois class looking to wrest control of government from the European aristocracy of the 17th and 18th centuries. This is why property qualifications were an important feature of early voting rights across the West, just as military service was an important feature of citizenship in antiquity. Capitalism favours commercial expansion and classical slave economies favoured military conquest, and this is reflected in the democratic forms that each system produced.
A unique aspect of industrial capitalism is the massive leap in productive capacity and potential. This has largely made material scarcity artificial and wholly dependent on access to money as the medium of consumption. Because of this, class struggle within capitalism has produced some benefits for the restive masses, including universal suffrage and a basic social safety net.
Whereas strict parameters used to be put around those who can vote, it is now a case of parameters around those who can feasibly win office and pass legislation. Liberal governments all over the world are managed by financial elites with the ability to fund political campaigns, media networks, lobbyists and public debt. Capitalist democracies therefore achieve the appearance of popular legitimacy through multiparty elections but the actual governing process is nonetheless channelled by elite class interests.
Is democracy compatible with capitalism? If throwing a ballot every few years into a system subordinated to moneyed interests is the working definition of democracy, then yes—democracy is not only compatible with capitalism, it is capitalism’s “best possible shell,” as Lenin wrote.1 On the other hand, if we were to define democracy as “people rule” with popular decision making that extended from the workplace up to specific line-item national legislation, then capitalism is completely antithetical to it. Outside of tribal society, direct democracy is an unrealized ideal that awaits a radical economic transformation to give it shape.
In sols.
Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co
Footnotes:
Vladimir Lenin, “The State and Revolution” in Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is To Be Done? And Other Writings (CreateSpace, 2012): 382-3. ↩︎
