A senior correspondent with a degree in Politics and History.
American power, unilateralism, interventions…,but nothing about the global capitalist economy in the last 40 years or so and the social reconfigurations in the US and the world. The most Little could say in passing: “In any age of economic stagnation and extremes of inequality, popular trust in democratic institutions corrodes …” Words like economy and China do not feature even once.
The innocent liberals are in denial.
Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley:
The current form of capitalist democracy, characterized by regular universal-suffrage elections and the alternation in power of competing parties of government, was largely an achievement of the post-war epoch. If the cataclysm of the First World War largely destroyed the ancien régime in Europe, it was the Second that opened the way to universal suffrage, under American military predominance, and at least began the process of unravelling Jim Crow in the us South. But a fundamental pre-condition for the success of capitalist democracy was the unprecedented post-war economic boom, reflecting the greatest wave of capital accumulation in history.
Political dynamics were crucially shaped by continuing capitalist profitability, because this made for the continued growth of income that provided the ultimate fiscal basis for government. In this respect, rapid growth during the Long Boom opened the way for a positive-sum game between capitalists and workers, premised on a growing economic pie. It made sense in this context for both capital and labour to forego hard-fought struggles in their own interests to keep the economy as a whole growing. The result, in the electoral realm, was a tendency to class compromise. In the us this expressed itself in the programmatic convergence of the two major parties, which underwrote the political stability of the post-war decades. In other words, during the Long Boom the maintenance of profitability was to an extent compatible with some redistribution towards workers in the form of public expenditures and social insurance programmes.
Capitalist profitability remained a determining factor of politics after the Long Boom ended, but in the era of low growth, its implications were reversed; the battle to maintain the rate of profit became incompatible with downward redistribution, leading to a sharp capitalist offensive. The initial reaction of labour in the 1960s and 70s was a ferocious round of working-class militancy to defend incomes, overlapping with an intensive wave of popular struggles to expand social rights. Subsequently, however, this gave way to new structures of working-class subordination to capital, emerging unevenly across the different national terrains. Within the political field, one segment of the working class turned towards the multicultural technocracy of the ‘third way’, while another embraced a politics of reactionary nationalism. With the Great Recession that set in after the crash of 2008, this segment came to constitute the mass base of the new far right.
The Long Downturn saw a shift in the relationship between capital and the state. The distribution of income and wealth shifted from a positive-sum to a zero-sum game, while wielding political power came to rival the pursuit of economic ‘efficiency’ as a factor determining distributional outcomes. In the absence of growth, no party could offer a credible programme capable of sustaining an electoral majority. Their inability to deliver the goods once in office opened the way for their adversaries to channel anti-incumbency sentiment, with economic promises increasingly replaced by appeals to cultural identities. These trends have been deeply corrosive of capitalist democracy. Those dependent on wage income saw their capacity to influence the state decline, while the state itself saw its capacity to pursue policies in the interest of the working class, however limited, decay. The outcome has been a new configuration of political struggle.
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