Capitalism, Democracy, Socialism: Critical Debates
Edited by James Chamberlain and Albena Azmanova
This book, collectively authored by members of the Research Committee on Socialism, Capitalism and Democracy (part of the International Political Science Association) and co-edited by James Chamberlain and Albena Azmanova, critically analyzes the current historical conjuncture with an eye to its emergent alternatives.
Table of Contents
Synopsis of the Chapters:
Capitalism and Democracy: Complementarity, Complicity, Conflict, Compatibility (Brian Milstein)
Classical liberals maintain that democracy cannot exist without capitalism, arguing that the freedom democracy requires is compatible only with a competitive market system. In contrast, orthodox Marxists often claimed that democracy—at least in its received liberal and parliamentary forms—functions as little more than an instrument of bourgeois political and cultural hegemony. Such views see capitalism and democracy as somehow complementaryor complicitous, but others take them to be in fundamental conflict. A number of recent theorists have raised doubts that the two can coexist in the long term, viewing their relationship as unstable and prone to repeated political crises, with one able to prosper only at the expense of the other. Such claims have become especially commonplace about globalized, “neoliberal” capitalism, provoking questions about the effects of global corporations, financial markets, and international organizations on democratic self-determination and state capacity. But perhaps capitalism and democracy are neither inherently complementary nor inherently conflictual, and perhaps there are ways to make them compatiblewith each other. From the perspective of democratic theory, we can raise questions about the demands of a flourishing democratic society and how capitalist dynamics might promote or stifle them. What kinds of freedom and equality does democracy require, and what relations of production, allocation, and distribution are necessary to sustain them?
Privatization/Governance of the commons (Soledad Soza)
At least since Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s proposal for the ruling class of an ideal republic to share property in common, the debate has raged over whether goods should be held privately, publicly by the state, or in common by members of non-state communities. For some, like Thomas More’s fictional Raphael Hythloday in Utopia, private property makes justice and prosperity all but impossible; for others, like More himself, private property is needed for order, motivation and authority. Historically, the development of capitalism is inextricably linked with the enclosure of common land. This process continues to the present in the form of land grabbing in the developing world and the transformation of peasant into industrial agriculture. Broader conceptualizations of the commons that include knowledge, language, and culture, for instance, also highlight capitalism’s privatizing drive as more of these socially produced goods become commoditized. But how far can privatization go before undermining the basis of capitalism itself? If societies cannot be “commodities all the way down,” as Nancy Fraser has put it, which aspects of social life cannot or must not be privatized for capitalism to maintain itself? Is privatization positive for some goods but negative for others? This chapter takes up these questions with a particular focus on Latin America, whose reliance on the extraction of natural resources as a source of revenue clearly raises challenges for sustainability. Key questions that this chapter will address are as follows: to what extent can privatization be used as a tool to minimize environmental damage (to avoid the ‘tragedy of the commons’), or does privatization necessarily come at the cost of good governance? What explains Latin America’s history of lax environmental legislation? What constraints do contemporary international norms inscribed in free trade agreements place on the activities of transnational corporations? Why have leftist governments in Latin America failed to adopt stricter environmental standards and not attempted to bring environmental science into the democratic process?
Finance/ The financialization of capitalism (Steven Klein)
According to many accounts, we currently live in an era of “financialization,” in which financial instruments and institutions play an increasingly outsized role in capitalist economies. This financialization takes several forms: the increasing share of overall capitalist profits arising from banking and financial companies, the rise of systemic risks due to financial markets, and the rise of individual debt and involvement in the financial system. This chapter examines the recent empirical debates around financialization and situates them in a set of broader normative and political questions: What is finance? How should critical approaches to capitalism conceptualize money, debt, and credit? To what extent does financialization mark a break or transformation in the history of capitalism? How does the financial sector relate to other aspects of capitalism, such as the relationship between labor and capital? How are financial practices shaped by inequalities of gender and race? How are financial crises changing the nature of capitalism? To what extent are movements like Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) useful for thinking about emancipatory projects related to finance? Can finance be “regulated” and subordinated to democratic institutions? Or do we need a much more fundamental rethinking of the nature of finance so as to make it compatible with democracy and equality?
Technology and the future of work (James Chamberlain)
Analyses of the effects of previous technological innovation on employment reveal a mixed picture: the introduction of new technology ‘displaced’ workers but it also led to the creation of new jobs. Avoiding a deterministic view of technology, this suggests that the future of work in the context of technological change depends (at least in part) on who controls the (development of) technology as well as broader political debates about the meaning and value of work. Key questions and debates in this area include the following: what drives employment-related technological development and what determines whether the benefits accrue mainly to capitalists or mainly to workers? How does the adoption of technology create and maintain the contemporary class structure, and what measures would alleviate if not remove these divisions? What constraints does capitalism place on the use of technology for emancipatory goals? In what areas do humans still possess a “comparative advantage” over robots and artificial intelligence? Are there types of work that only humans can or should perform, such as certain aspects of care work, art, and intellectual pursuits? Can and should we use technology to create a post-work society? How has the development and use of technology shaped the meaning of work itself, and how might it do so in the future?
Sustainability: the pressures of the growth, jobs, and environmental protection agendas (Ebru Tekin)
The political economy of sustainability focuses on several key areas: environment (e.g., transportation, land management, waste management), management (e.g., with corporate social responsibility strategies), social justice (e.g. countering inequality and exclusion), economic efficiency (e.g. optimal use of resources in the pursuit of prosperity) and technology (e.g. by creating platform technologies). Academic and policy debates on sustainability encompass two sets of issues: (1) How to ensure the system’s continuity and maintenance; and (2) Whether there is a viable alternative to the existing system. Key questions that this chapter considers include: How does the sustainability agenda generate new tools of market making? Who gets what within these emerging areas of collaboration and divergence? How do these new intervention areas affect mobility? How do they contribute to job creation, social inclusion and civic engagement?
Alternative economics, radical social practices, and emancipatory transformations (Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo)
The failure of neoliberal globalization to produce wealth for all is accelerating the demands for different systems of economic development. Alternative economics involves innovation and transformations in production and consumption, policy,social practices, and world politics.This chapter examines the agencies, institutions, forums, schools of thought, and social and economic forces that have been defining these alternatives the world over. The focus is on new ways of thinking and analyzing, which can help guide new policy formulation aiming at emancipatory societal transformations. Important questions include: Why does the world need new alternative economics? What theories should be used to explain these alternatives? How are these alternatives reflected in real objective conditions at the class, ethnic, national, regional and international economic development levels? Who should control these alternatives? What kinds of international relations and power system can be projected as a result of these transformations?
International Development, human rights and cosmopolitanism (James Chamberlain)
Since the Millennium Development Goal of halving extreme poverty was met in 2010 (five years early), proponents of market liberalization have praised globally integrated capitalism for lifting nearly a billion people out of destitution. On the other hand, critics point to increasing inequality and the fact that global capitalism has decimated opportunities for living without money by replacing subsistence with market economies. In the area of human rights, economic growth might provide increased revenue with which countries can improve their human rights records, but the human rights movement itself has been largely ineffective at reducing inequality, while the actions of multinational corporations, often in collusion with governments, have resulted in countless human rights violations. Finally, neoliberal capitalism has been associated with cosmopolitanism and open borders, yet some critics of capitalism also espouse these positions. This chapter disentangles these knots by addressing the following questions. First, what are the particular forms that development, human rights, and cosmopolitanism take under the auspices of contemporary global capitalism? Can development and human rights both benefit fromand“tame” capitalism? Or do the constraints that capitalism places on states make development and human rights little more than legitimating ideology? What are viable alternative visions of development, human rights, and cosmopolitanism in the contemporary conjuncture?
Feminist Theory and the demands of social solidarity (Rochelle DuFord)
The popularity of social democratic reforms has sharply risen with the unexpected success of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labor Party and the quickly expanding membership in organizations such as Democratic Socialists of America. This has triggered a shift in the agenda of progressive politics from the focus on civil rights and identity recognition typical of the New Left to the classical considerations of economic and social justice. This has raised concerns about the compatibility of feminist thought and socialist solidarity. While these considerations once were configured as debates between culture and economics, or redistribution and recognition, they now appear as debates between two political goals: so-called identity politics, with the goal of representation, and universalizing materialist politics, with the goal of redistribution of wealth. Key questions and debates in this area include: What is social solidarity, and is it inherently democratic? Is feminist solidarity fundamentally different from social solidarity? How can considerations of recognition be synthesized with the need for wealth redistribution? Can feminist solidarity alone oppose structures of domination imposed by late-stage capitalism? Are universal programs a method of building social solidarity at the expense of representational concerns? What impact do relations of power have on social solidarity and what ought we to do about them? How can feminist theory help us identify domination within the sphere of social solidarity? Are certain forms of solidarity better suited to international and transnational people’s movements? Can building feminist solidarity influence general social solidarity?
Political ideologies, socialism, and leftist theory (María G. Navarro)
At present, capitalism has given rise to new forms of social antagonism that are crucial to understanding the development of leftist theory. The use of machines and of Artificial Intelligence in the field of industrial robotics contributes to a dramatic decrease in the number of employed human workers. At the time of the so-called fourth industrial revolution, one of the principal challenges faced by socialism and leftist theory is how to employ capital in a useful way in a society of work that abolishes work. Key questions and debates in this area include the following: What kind of socio-political and economic proposals are put forward by socialism in the 21st century? What is the relationship between leftist theory and the cooperative incentives that might induce individuals to work for the collective interest? In which ways could the traditional concept of class struggle be useful for political approaches to the phenomenon of precarity? Could and should information and communication technologies have an influence over socialist models for job balance and incentives? What kind of communitarian ideals does socialism sustain against social Darwinism? How have theories on social capital, socialism and leftist theory evolved?
Ideal’ v/s ‘real’ theory: on the nature of emancipatory critique (Albena Azmanova)
If social criticism and political mobilisation are to be grounded in intellectual critique, what type of conceptualization is to guide emancipatory action? How would we select the norms of justice and standards of evaluation and how would we explicate and justify the logic of that selection? Moreover, any critique that strives to be both politically salient and morally rigorous faces a challenge: The more we relax the normative criteria of justice for the sake of enhancing the theory’s political relevance, the weaker becomes its critical potential. Reversely, the more it increases its normative stringency for the sake of critical vigor, the less politically useful a theory becomes. In both cases, the objective of assisting social criticism and emancipatory political action is imperiled. This chapter will review how the main critiques of capitalism and visions of alternative social formations have responded to this challenge.
Edited by James Chamberlain and Albena Azmanova
This book, collectively authored by members of the Research Committee on Socialism, Capitalism and Democracy (part of the International Political Science Association) and co-edited by James Chamberlain and Albena Azmanova, critically analyzes the current historical conjuncture with an eye to its emergent alternatives.
Table of Contents
- Capitalism and Democracy: Complementarity, Complicity, Conflict, Compatibility
- Privatization/Governance of the commons
- Finance/ The financialization of capitalism
- Technology and the future of work
- Sustainability: the pressures of the growth, jobs, and environmental protection agendas
- Alternative economics, radical social practices, and emancipatory transformations
- International Development, human rights and cosmopolitanism
- Feminist Theory and the demands of social solidarity
- Political ideologies, socialism, and leftist theory
- ‘Ideal’ v/s ‘real’ theory: on the nature of emancipatory critique
Synopsis of the Chapters:
Capitalism and Democracy: Complementarity, Complicity, Conflict, Compatibility (Brian Milstein)
Classical liberals maintain that democracy cannot exist without capitalism, arguing that the freedom democracy requires is compatible only with a competitive market system. In contrast, orthodox Marxists often claimed that democracy—at least in its received liberal and parliamentary forms—functions as little more than an instrument of bourgeois political and cultural hegemony. Such views see capitalism and democracy as somehow complementaryor complicitous, but others take them to be in fundamental conflict. A number of recent theorists have raised doubts that the two can coexist in the long term, viewing their relationship as unstable and prone to repeated political crises, with one able to prosper only at the expense of the other. Such claims have become especially commonplace about globalized, “neoliberal” capitalism, provoking questions about the effects of global corporations, financial markets, and international organizations on democratic self-determination and state capacity. But perhaps capitalism and democracy are neither inherently complementary nor inherently conflictual, and perhaps there are ways to make them compatiblewith each other. From the perspective of democratic theory, we can raise questions about the demands of a flourishing democratic society and how capitalist dynamics might promote or stifle them. What kinds of freedom and equality does democracy require, and what relations of production, allocation, and distribution are necessary to sustain them?
Privatization/Governance of the commons (Soledad Soza)
At least since Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s proposal for the ruling class of an ideal republic to share property in common, the debate has raged over whether goods should be held privately, publicly by the state, or in common by members of non-state communities. For some, like Thomas More’s fictional Raphael Hythloday in Utopia, private property makes justice and prosperity all but impossible; for others, like More himself, private property is needed for order, motivation and authority. Historically, the development of capitalism is inextricably linked with the enclosure of common land. This process continues to the present in the form of land grabbing in the developing world and the transformation of peasant into industrial agriculture. Broader conceptualizations of the commons that include knowledge, language, and culture, for instance, also highlight capitalism’s privatizing drive as more of these socially produced goods become commoditized. But how far can privatization go before undermining the basis of capitalism itself? If societies cannot be “commodities all the way down,” as Nancy Fraser has put it, which aspects of social life cannot or must not be privatized for capitalism to maintain itself? Is privatization positive for some goods but negative for others? This chapter takes up these questions with a particular focus on Latin America, whose reliance on the extraction of natural resources as a source of revenue clearly raises challenges for sustainability. Key questions that this chapter will address are as follows: to what extent can privatization be used as a tool to minimize environmental damage (to avoid the ‘tragedy of the commons’), or does privatization necessarily come at the cost of good governance? What explains Latin America’s history of lax environmental legislation? What constraints do contemporary international norms inscribed in free trade agreements place on the activities of transnational corporations? Why have leftist governments in Latin America failed to adopt stricter environmental standards and not attempted to bring environmental science into the democratic process?
Finance/ The financialization of capitalism (Steven Klein)
According to many accounts, we currently live in an era of “financialization,” in which financial instruments and institutions play an increasingly outsized role in capitalist economies. This financialization takes several forms: the increasing share of overall capitalist profits arising from banking and financial companies, the rise of systemic risks due to financial markets, and the rise of individual debt and involvement in the financial system. This chapter examines the recent empirical debates around financialization and situates them in a set of broader normative and political questions: What is finance? How should critical approaches to capitalism conceptualize money, debt, and credit? To what extent does financialization mark a break or transformation in the history of capitalism? How does the financial sector relate to other aspects of capitalism, such as the relationship between labor and capital? How are financial practices shaped by inequalities of gender and race? How are financial crises changing the nature of capitalism? To what extent are movements like Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) useful for thinking about emancipatory projects related to finance? Can finance be “regulated” and subordinated to democratic institutions? Or do we need a much more fundamental rethinking of the nature of finance so as to make it compatible with democracy and equality?
Technology and the future of work (James Chamberlain)
Analyses of the effects of previous technological innovation on employment reveal a mixed picture: the introduction of new technology ‘displaced’ workers but it also led to the creation of new jobs. Avoiding a deterministic view of technology, this suggests that the future of work in the context of technological change depends (at least in part) on who controls the (development of) technology as well as broader political debates about the meaning and value of work. Key questions and debates in this area include the following: what drives employment-related technological development and what determines whether the benefits accrue mainly to capitalists or mainly to workers? How does the adoption of technology create and maintain the contemporary class structure, and what measures would alleviate if not remove these divisions? What constraints does capitalism place on the use of technology for emancipatory goals? In what areas do humans still possess a “comparative advantage” over robots and artificial intelligence? Are there types of work that only humans can or should perform, such as certain aspects of care work, art, and intellectual pursuits? Can and should we use technology to create a post-work society? How has the development and use of technology shaped the meaning of work itself, and how might it do so in the future?
Sustainability: the pressures of the growth, jobs, and environmental protection agendas (Ebru Tekin)
The political economy of sustainability focuses on several key areas: environment (e.g., transportation, land management, waste management), management (e.g., with corporate social responsibility strategies), social justice (e.g. countering inequality and exclusion), economic efficiency (e.g. optimal use of resources in the pursuit of prosperity) and technology (e.g. by creating platform technologies). Academic and policy debates on sustainability encompass two sets of issues: (1) How to ensure the system’s continuity and maintenance; and (2) Whether there is a viable alternative to the existing system. Key questions that this chapter considers include: How does the sustainability agenda generate new tools of market making? Who gets what within these emerging areas of collaboration and divergence? How do these new intervention areas affect mobility? How do they contribute to job creation, social inclusion and civic engagement?
Alternative economics, radical social practices, and emancipatory transformations (Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo)
The failure of neoliberal globalization to produce wealth for all is accelerating the demands for different systems of economic development. Alternative economics involves innovation and transformations in production and consumption, policy,social practices, and world politics.This chapter examines the agencies, institutions, forums, schools of thought, and social and economic forces that have been defining these alternatives the world over. The focus is on new ways of thinking and analyzing, which can help guide new policy formulation aiming at emancipatory societal transformations. Important questions include: Why does the world need new alternative economics? What theories should be used to explain these alternatives? How are these alternatives reflected in real objective conditions at the class, ethnic, national, regional and international economic development levels? Who should control these alternatives? What kinds of international relations and power system can be projected as a result of these transformations?
International Development, human rights and cosmopolitanism (James Chamberlain)
Since the Millennium Development Goal of halving extreme poverty was met in 2010 (five years early), proponents of market liberalization have praised globally integrated capitalism for lifting nearly a billion people out of destitution. On the other hand, critics point to increasing inequality and the fact that global capitalism has decimated opportunities for living without money by replacing subsistence with market economies. In the area of human rights, economic growth might provide increased revenue with which countries can improve their human rights records, but the human rights movement itself has been largely ineffective at reducing inequality, while the actions of multinational corporations, often in collusion with governments, have resulted in countless human rights violations. Finally, neoliberal capitalism has been associated with cosmopolitanism and open borders, yet some critics of capitalism also espouse these positions. This chapter disentangles these knots by addressing the following questions. First, what are the particular forms that development, human rights, and cosmopolitanism take under the auspices of contemporary global capitalism? Can development and human rights both benefit fromand“tame” capitalism? Or do the constraints that capitalism places on states make development and human rights little more than legitimating ideology? What are viable alternative visions of development, human rights, and cosmopolitanism in the contemporary conjuncture?
Feminist Theory and the demands of social solidarity (Rochelle DuFord)
The popularity of social democratic reforms has sharply risen with the unexpected success of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labor Party and the quickly expanding membership in organizations such as Democratic Socialists of America. This has triggered a shift in the agenda of progressive politics from the focus on civil rights and identity recognition typical of the New Left to the classical considerations of economic and social justice. This has raised concerns about the compatibility of feminist thought and socialist solidarity. While these considerations once were configured as debates between culture and economics, or redistribution and recognition, they now appear as debates between two political goals: so-called identity politics, with the goal of representation, and universalizing materialist politics, with the goal of redistribution of wealth. Key questions and debates in this area include: What is social solidarity, and is it inherently democratic? Is feminist solidarity fundamentally different from social solidarity? How can considerations of recognition be synthesized with the need for wealth redistribution? Can feminist solidarity alone oppose structures of domination imposed by late-stage capitalism? Are universal programs a method of building social solidarity at the expense of representational concerns? What impact do relations of power have on social solidarity and what ought we to do about them? How can feminist theory help us identify domination within the sphere of social solidarity? Are certain forms of solidarity better suited to international and transnational people’s movements? Can building feminist solidarity influence general social solidarity?
Political ideologies, socialism, and leftist theory (María G. Navarro)
At present, capitalism has given rise to new forms of social antagonism that are crucial to understanding the development of leftist theory. The use of machines and of Artificial Intelligence in the field of industrial robotics contributes to a dramatic decrease in the number of employed human workers. At the time of the so-called fourth industrial revolution, one of the principal challenges faced by socialism and leftist theory is how to employ capital in a useful way in a society of work that abolishes work. Key questions and debates in this area include the following: What kind of socio-political and economic proposals are put forward by socialism in the 21st century? What is the relationship between leftist theory and the cooperative incentives that might induce individuals to work for the collective interest? In which ways could the traditional concept of class struggle be useful for political approaches to the phenomenon of precarity? Could and should information and communication technologies have an influence over socialist models for job balance and incentives? What kind of communitarian ideals does socialism sustain against social Darwinism? How have theories on social capital, socialism and leftist theory evolved?
Ideal’ v/s ‘real’ theory: on the nature of emancipatory critique (Albena Azmanova)
If social criticism and political mobilisation are to be grounded in intellectual critique, what type of conceptualization is to guide emancipatory action? How would we select the norms of justice and standards of evaluation and how would we explicate and justify the logic of that selection? Moreover, any critique that strives to be both politically salient and morally rigorous faces a challenge: The more we relax the normative criteria of justice for the sake of enhancing the theory’s political relevance, the weaker becomes its critical potential. Reversely, the more it increases its normative stringency for the sake of critical vigor, the less politically useful a theory becomes. In both cases, the objective of assisting social criticism and emancipatory political action is imperiled. This chapter will review how the main critiques of capitalism and visions of alternative social formations have responded to this challenge.
