Capitalism and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century

A Global Future Beyond Nationalism

Gavin Kitching

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000681352
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This short book makes a connection between recent 'tectonic shifts' in the world economy and the political problems currently confronted by western democracies.

The shift of manufacturing away from the West, allied to the pressure to keep costs down in an increasingly competitive global economy, has led to economic inequality, reliance on service industry employment and public sector austerity. All this has in turn produced large numbers of desperate citizens attracted to a populist economic nationalism accompanied by xenophobia. However, the originality of this text lies not in the above argument, but in the philosophical reflections which drive and derive from it. These include reflections on history as a supposed causal process; on the need to make ethical judgements of economic activities and the difficulties of doing so; and on the problems confronting modern citizens in understanding complex economic processes and their political implications.

Capitalism and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century endorses Wittgenstein's 'praxis' approach to human social life and its study. Accordingly, it not only analyses economic and political problems but suggests ways of solving or mitigating them. In doing so it relies on Marx's conviction that our capacity to see certain phenomena as problems is at least a priori evidence that they can be solved. This book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students of politics, comparative politics, political economy and international relations.

PART I

Philosophy

1

THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE

Introduction

The central thesis of this book is that we are living through a ‘world historical’ period in human history, to use a phrase of the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel.¹ That is, the structural shifts in the world economy which began some 30–40 years ago, are having momentous consequences for human material welfare, for politics in the western and non-western world, and for our planet’s environment. I concentrate on the effects that these ‘tectonic shifts’ in the world economy are having on western societies in general, and on democracy in particular. I argue that the shift of economic power away from the West is exposing a crucial weakness in the way modern or mass democracies operate, but that weakness is just a part of a much broader problem – the increasing disjunction between a globalised economics and a still overwhelmingly ‘national’ or ‘nation-state’ focused politics.

This argument is quite familiar and not, I think, particularly controversial. However, I go beyond these familiar assertions about what is happening in our world to some prescriptions about what should happen, both now and in the future. In particular, at the end of the book I put forward some proposals for the political regulation of a globalised capitalism. These proposals reflect my passionate conviction that the problems posed by that capitalism cannot be dealt with nationalistically, and that any attempt to do so is bound to fail and to be deeply humanly destructive while failing.

The above then is the general argument of this book. Analytically that argument falls in two distinct parts: a set of descriptive generalisations about what is happening in the world economy and to the politics of western societies now (Part II, Chapters 3–8) and a set of prescriptions about what should happen if human beings are to respond to these changes and challenges positively (Part III, Chapters 9–11).

So this is a book about what is happening and what I think should happen. It is not however a book about what will happen. It does not, that is to say, move from describing what is happening to predicting what will happen. Because, in contrast to many social scientists, I do not believe that one can do this. In fact I believe that all social scientific attempts at prediction are philosophically flawed – based on a deep philosophical confusion about how human social life (and thus human history) works. One aim of these first two chapters is to say why I believe that.

However, some people believe that not merely is the attempt to predict the human future philosophically flawed, so is any attempt to identify ‘world historical’ moments or periods in human history while they are happening. In particular historians have often argued that any attempt to assess the ‘world historical’ significance of what is happening ‘now’, is bound to fail. Such assessments can be made, if made at all, only with long-period hindsight (which is how indeed Hegel made them in his Philosophy of Right²). In short, one can perhaps, long after the fact, make assertions about which events were world-historically significant, but one can never make assertions about which events are so significant. And if that is true then the central argument of this book is itself a philosophical non-starter.

In the rest of this chapter and in the next one, I attempt to meet this objection. I suggest that it is unanswerable if understood as an objection to predicting the future by projecting from a supposed ‘world historical’ present. But it can be overcome if assertions about the long term or world historical significance of present events are used, not to predict the future ‘scientifically’, but to prescribe a future ethically. And that is precisely how I do use them in this book.

The Present as History

Toward the end of his life Eric Hobsbawm wrote a series of brilliant essays trying to situate our present world historically – to describe and explain how important features of that world had been historically created.³ But he never, at least in his published work, tried to envision the future, or speculated about which of the historical trends he identified might continue into the future. As he knew only too well, the hardest thing for any contemporary observer is to distinguish phenomena that will prove of lasting significance from those which, however passingly important, will, in retrospect, be judged of little consequence.

Many English monarchists who witnessed the execution of Charles I and the rise of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth may have thought that the English monarchy had perished forever, but they would have been wrong. French monarchists who drew the same conclusion after the revolution of 1789 would have been ‘wrong’ in 1815 (when the Bourbons were restored), but ‘right’ from 1848 onwards. Many people dismissed Robert Stephenson’s steam locomotive as a useless, and probably dangerous, piece of tomfoolery, and have been the subject of Edward Thompson’s ‘enormous condescension of posterity’⁴ ever since. But were those who thought the same thing about Charles Babbage’s ‘analytical engine’ equally wrong? Arguably they were ‘right’ for more than a century. But with the development of the modern computer (and the rediscovery of Babbage’s engine as its forerunner) we would presumably consider them wrong now.

So it is not only difficult to know which contemporary phenomena and trends will prove of lasting significance, but future developments may themselves change judgements of what is lasting and significant. After all, although the steam engine generally and the steam locomotive particularly, changed the world (so proving wrong those who dismissed them), they are now defunct forms of technology – their period of ‘lasting significance’ is over. And conversely, Babbage’s engine, rightly dismissed as ‘of no practical significance’ in its own day and for a long period afterwards, suddenly became significant when developments in electronics allowed its calculating functions to be carried out at speeds which had been impossible mechanically.

For all these reasons it is the conventional wisdom of historians that judgements about the ‘long-term significance’ of anything can only be retrospective and may even then be unstable depending on when the historian is writing, and thus on the ‘present’ that informs that writing. A historian of Britain writing in the mid-nineteenth century and one writing now would agree that the institution of monarchy has proved far more lasting than Charles Stuart and his supporters might have imagined as they fled to France in 1651, but they may still be divided on what it is that has ‘lasted’. For the British constitutional monarchy of the twenty-first century is not only completely different from the ‘absolute monarchy’ for which the Stuarts stood, it is rather different from the constitutional monarchy of the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.

As a result, I would regard Eric Hobsbawm’s and most other historians’ ‘self-denying ordinance’ about predicting the future as wise were it not for one complication: that judgements about which contemporary events and trends are of lasting significance are, by definition, judgements of contemporaries not of historians. They are the judgements of participants not of observers. Philosophically-speaking this makes a world of difference.

Contemporaries versus Historians

It means, for example, that the eighth paragraph of this chapter contains a crucial mis-statement. For those seventeenth-century English monarchists faced with defeat by Cromwell and Parliament would not merely have ‘thought that the English monarchy had perished forever’, they would have feared that it had, and, fearing that it had, been determined to do everything they could to see that fear was not realised, that the monarchy was restored as soon as possible. The same would have been true of the supporters of the Bourbon monarchy overthrown in France in 1789. Similarly, those people who dismissed the steam locomotive as a folly did not simply ‘dismiss’ it. They too probably feared it, felt that it presaged changes whose nature and significance were difficult or impossible to know and therefore frightening. Better therefore that they not be embarked upon.⁵ Conversely, Robert Stephenson, and those of his Victorian contemporaries who were ‘right’ about the steam locomotive, were supporters of it, makers of and investors in it, not simply observers of it. For them, saying that the steam locomotive was the transport of the future was part of making it the transport of the future. It was part of the making of history not the mere recording of it.

What is true of contemporaries in the past is true of me now. In attempting in this book to identify which trends and events in the present will be of lasting significance, I will, of necessity, be expressing my hopes and fears and not simply estimating probabilities. For even if I wanted to, I could not treat all the future possibilities I identify with equal indifference (in a way that the historian can treat past trends and events). I cannot do that just because there is a logical possibility, at least, of my influencing present events and future trends, a possibility that does not exist for the historian. In other words, both my hopes and fears may be realised, and that being the case I must do my best to see that my hopes are and that my fears are not.

Yet: all over the world there are people who professionally pursue a subject called social science, one of whose founding protocols is that contemporary social changes and trends can be simply ‘observed’, ‘measured’ (where appropriate) and their future implications ‘projected’ in exactly the same way that events and trends in the physical universe are observed, measured and projected. Built into this founding protocol (although not typically stated) is the belief that, in practice, the capacity of any individual social scientist to influence the phenomena s/he is observing is so minimal as to be discountable. Therefore, it makes just as much methodological sense for social scientists to be simple observers of social phenomena as for natural scientists to be simple observers of natural phenomena. And note, all that is required to accept this professional protocol is the belief that they – the social scientists – cannot significantly influence the phenomena they are observing, not that nobody can. One can, with perfect consistency, admit that all social events are the product of human action, and that all social trends are just ways of describing the ‘en masse’ results of such action, but think that, precisely because these are mass phenomena, ‘my’ influence on them as an individual social scientist, and even ‘our’ influence as a group of such scientists, is effectively nil.

That view might seem particularly apposite for this book. Because it is concerned with contemporary events and trends in the entire world, in the entire inhabited portion of planet earth. It is concerned with mass events and trends in the largest possible sense of ‘mass’ – those produced by the actions and interactions of hundreds of millions or even billions of people. In short, given the global and long-term foci of this book, it would seem especially plausible that I could write it simply as an observer, chronicling and analysing phenomena that are as much beyond my control or influence as the physio-chemical events of a far distant planet, star or galaxy are beyond the control or influence of the astronomer or astro-physicist.

Yet I cannot, because there is still a difference. While the phenomena with which I am concerned in this book are certainly beyond my capacity to significantly influence they are not ‘beyond’ my hopes and fears. As will be seen as the argument of this book unfolds, there are things I want to happen and things I desperately want not to. More than that, as the book’s references show, many of the things I want to happen, others also support, and many of the things I want not to happen others also oppose. However, those same references also show wide disagreement. For some of the things I support are opposed by some of my contemporaries, and some of the things I want to see avoided, others support and are even trying actively to bring about. In other words, what should happen in the future is the subject of political argument and disputation now (as it ‘always’ is) and this book is a contribution to that argument and takes sides in those disputes.

But astro-physicists do not dispute what ‘should’ happen in the future of a far-off galaxy as a result of what they observe to be happening there ‘now’ (not least because that ‘future’ has already happened!) although they may certainly fear that something will later be observed to have happened as a result of presently-observed events and trends. Similarly, no chemist can meaningfully ‘support’ or ‘oppose’ the outcome of a chemical reaction she is inducing (although she can predict what that outcome will be, and support or oppose some uses of the chemical compound the reaction produces.)

In short, although certain social events and trends may be as much beyond individual influence or control as any physical phenomena, they are not, by definition, beyond the control of masses of people. That is precisely why they are the subject of hopes and fears and the subject of political disputation in a way that physical phenomena are not. ‘I’ cannot bring about a social phenomenon of which I approve just by approving it or prevent a social phenomenon I disapprove just by disapproving it. But ‘we’ can, if that ‘we’ is on the scale and in the location or locations of the phenomenon itself. And one important role of politics is the creation of a ‘we’. Politics is about creating the masses of people who will make the economic, social and cultural future ‘we’ want to see. But there is no ‘we’ of atoms or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PART I: Philosophy
• 1. The Present and the Future
• 2. The Lasting Significance of Our Present
• PART II: The Present, Economic and Political
• 3. Contemporary Capitalism and Possible Futures
• 4. Globalisation
• 5. Globalisation, Austerity and the Intensification of Competition
• 6. Nationalist Democracy
• 7. Globalisation and Democratic Legitimacy
• 8. Democracy’s Achilles Heel
• PART III: Making the Future
• 9. Economic Growth: Dangers and Possibilities
• 10. Regulating a Globalised Capitalism
• 11. Conclusions: a Human Future
• PART IV: Appendices For Marx (and Hegel)
• Marx and the Contemporary Left
• Workers of the World Unite!
• Bibliography
• Index