DEMOCRACY’S MID-LIFE CRISIS?

Dick Pountain/ Political Quarterly/ 28th November 2018 15:06:55

Book Review: ‘How Democracy Ends’ by David Runciman

Publisher: Profile Books 2018

Pages: 250

Bookshop shelves are groaning under the load of new apocalyptic works predicting the imminent demise of Western Civilisation from war, depression, epidemic, climate change, oriental, Islamic or robotic conquest. David Runciman’s is very much not one of these. It could have been called instead ‘How Democracies End’, though one sympathises with his publisher’s preference for the more dramatic singular. What he actually offers is a crystal-clear account of how some real democracies failed, an analysis of possible modes of failure and the kinds of state that may replace them. He then applies this analysis to the UK, USA and Europe, arriving at a best-guess as to how close our democracies really are to collapse.

He starts by using a simplified, functionalist definition of democracy – you have a democracy if you hold regular elections and the losers accept that they have lost – so on the opening page he is watching the 2017 Presidential Inauguration of Donald Trump with a group of his American students. Levity turns to horror at Trump’s Mussolini-style victory speech, and the obvious discomfort of Bush, Obama, Clinton and the military chiefs on the platform. But the speech was only rhetoric, however distasteful, the Democrats had accepted the election result, and Trump remains POTUS for now. Only once in US history had the losers refused, in 1861, and that started the Civil War. As Runciman pithily puts it “democracy is civil war without the fighting”.

Chapter 1 dissects the event that most frequently ends a democracy, the coup. Ancient Athens was the birthplace of democracy and also of the coup, with Peisistratos’ seizure of power in 561 BC. Runciman examines more recent Greek history as one of his test cases: the 1967 Colonels’ Coup was a classic coup d’etat with tanks in the street, marshal music on the TV and arrests of the government and opponents, and he contrast this with the events of 2015 during the country’s financial collapse, to illustrate that there’s more than one way to do coup.

Following a classification invented by US political scientist Nancy Bermeo, he identifies six types: the classic military coup d’etat; the Executive Coup where those already in power suspend elections; Election-day Fraud; the Promissory Coup that calls an election to legitimise its rule; Executive Aggrandisement that chips away democratic freedoms; and Strategic Manipulation via gerrymandering and voter suppression but short of actual fraud (very topical).

In July 2015 the left-leaning Syriza government held a referendum that granted them a popular mandate to defy the EU, demand debt relief and threaten default. The European Commission, Central Bank and IMF counter-attacked by threatening to close Greek banks – no government can survive the cash machines shutting down. Finance minister Varoufakis resigned and Syriza capitulated, introducing swingeing austerity. Both Varoufakis and Runciman describe this as an almost-coup, where governmental authority is subverted by financial pressure but democracy survives, after a fashion. Runciman draws an important observation from this 1967/2015 comparison: traditionally coup plotters needed to let everyone know the government had been deposed, but nowadays they will instead try to conceal the transfer of real power.

The examination of coups leads on naturally to a discussion of populism, which is coming to dominate democratic politics everywhere. Runciman asserts that the essence of populism, of both left and right, is a belief that democracy has been stolen from the people by elites, and that claiming it back means flushing these elites out from spider-like hiding places. Hence the logic of populism is the conspiracy theory, the promulgation of which has been greatly facilitated by the rise of social media. He identifies the 1890s (Gilded Age) and late-1940s/early-50s (start of Cold War) as previous periods when conspiracy theories were as rife as they are today, with a nod to Richard Hofstadter’s superb study ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’. As to the causes of rising populism, economic distress, too rapid technological change, rising economic inequality and the absence of war are the main factors.

Shocking as it may seem, war patently favours democratic patriotism over populism, by temporarily suppressing private economic interest, and Runciman examines the different ways that democracy fought off populism before WW1 and after WW2. The populist rage of the 1900s didn’t simply evaporate under Theodore Roosevelt, Lloyd George and Jaures but morphed into both social democracy and fascism in the interwar period. Back then democracy was quite limited, leaving plenty of headroom for its reform: taxes were low; welfare states had yet to be built; unions, political parties and the state were still trusted. None of those conditions apply today.

Runciman’s central thesis is that the appeal of modern democracies is twofold, to both personal dignity and public good. Citizens of a democracy have their views taken seriously (even if later thwarted), and they also reap material benefit from stability, prosperity and peace. However problems arise because dignity is an immediate individual benefit while the material benefits are public, shared (increasingly unequally) and long-term – we come to value our individual dignity higher than the long-term benefits, as witnessed in own-foot-shooting episodes like Trump and Brexit. In the chapter ‘Something Better?’ Runciman applies this thesis to alternatives to democratic government, asserting that the gap between what’s promised to individuals and what to society as a whole is what distinguishes these alternatives.

For example Marxism-Leninism promised to collapse the gap, making personal and political lives the same. Bolsheviks at first believed this would render state power and police force unnecessary, but the result, Stalinism, hardly bore out such a belief. 21st century authoritarian regimes promise instead collective, rather than personal, dignity through nationalism. Material rewards are delivered by economic growth, steered by the state in the case of the Chinese Communist Party, or by ‘trickle down’ in a free market (Trump’s magic MAGA spell). Runciman describes this as “pragmatic authoritarianism”, which also describes Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Hungary and more. It appears to be spreading as fast as was once hoped for democracy.

Another dangerously tempting alternative is epistocracy – rule by experts – which eliminates the personal dignity factor altogether by in effect saying “you’re too dumb to vote because modern societies are just too complex”. It may sometimes look as though we’re there already, since our career politicians are skilled only in political maneuvering and depend upon consultants and experts to run things. However, in what is perhaps the most important section of the book, Runciman carefully distinguishes between epistocracy and technocracy.

Epistocracy has been around ever since Plato complained that democracy meant rule by the ignorant. Versions of it predated most modern democracies, in the shape of limited suffrage. Runciman stresses that true democracy with universal suffrage imposes no conditions on the knowledge or skill of voters, only the condition that they stick around to suffer the consequences of their own mistakes. This is what, in principle if not always in fact, gives it the power to learn and adapt. Technocracy isn’t really rule at all but more of a service through which rulers call upon those experts – from economists to high-tech engineers – who built the machine that is society, to maintain and repair it. These experts can’t and shouldn’t decide whether the machine needs replacing (or even shutting down), and so technocracy can and does co-exist with either democracy or authoritarianism.

Maintaining its twofold benefit is, for Runciman, the positive virtue of democracy, but its equally important negative virtue is the power to (eventually) throw out politicians and governments who don’t deliver. Against the more alarmist commentators, he believes that the positive virtue is currently under more threat than the negative. Globalising digital technologies both enable and encourage divisive demands for personal respect, pushing towards ‘identity politics’ and anarchism, while simultaneously destroying jobs and demanding more and more technical expertise to solve social and economic problems.

Anarchy is therefore another alternative to democracy, perhaps arising after some disaster, nuclear or climatic, or else actively courted by libertarians of both right and left – though the Silicon Valley titans who rejoice in the power of their new technologies to disrupt traditional capitalism prefer to be called accelerationists rather than anarchists. Runciman is not a tech-utopian like Paul Mason or Yuval Noah Harari, but he deals fairly, intelligently and in some depth with potential tech futures, concluding that some will be “wondrous, some terrible, and most wholly unknowable. It is a spectrum of possibility as wide as any human experience has ever known.” All we do know is that the benefit gap grows ever wider, and that while Trump will eventually go, Zuckerberg and his ilk will carry on, precisely because they do not threaten democracy directly, but rather indirectly by sapping our attention.

So is this an optimistic, pessimistic or apocalyptic account? None of the above: if pressed I would have to call it ‘stoical’. Marxists will object to Runciman’s lack of emphasis on class, but the eclipse of class consciousness lies at the heart of his analysis. Social Democrats may object that a Keynesian refloat of the economy could defuse populist wrath, but in his discussion of Thomas Piketty, Runciman points out that inequality on our present scale has never before in history been dispelled without the large-scale violence of revolution or world war. In his conclusion he offers no solutions, but neither does he predict that democracy is going to end suddenly and soon. Gradual erosion is more likely, at a different pace in different countries, and to different degrees. His closing words are:

“Western democracy will survive its mid-life crisis. With luck it will be a little chastened by it. It is unlikely to be revived by it. This is not, after all, the end of democracy. But this is how democracy ends”.

SAME BOAT, BUT IN STEERAGE

Dick Pountain/ Political Quarterly/ 20th July 2018 13:56:24

Book Review: “A History Of The World In Seven Cheap Things”
Authors: Raj Patel And Jason W. Moore
Publisher: Verso 2018
Pages: 312
Price: £16.99

Consider the humble ant. Its ‘brain’ contains 40,000 times fewer neurons than our own, it lacks language and can’t reason, its repertoire of possible actions is finite and small – and yet it builds nests of great complexity, complete with highways spanning great distances and farms in which fungus is cultivated or aphids milked for food. Ethologists learned that these abilities result from the playing out of very simple ‘rules’, such as ‘move in the direction where the smell of formic acid is strongest’, rather than individual or collective calculation. Or perhaps consider those single-celled cyanobacteria which 2.45 billion years ago transformed the whole planet by replacing its carbon dioxide atmosphere with one rich in oxygen, thus permitting the evolution of the rest of plant and animal life.

What if Homo sapiens turned out to be more like these creatures than we like to believe? What if our own world isn’t the result of any philosophy, ideology, or political program but simply us playing out a simple rule called ‘maximise profit’? That, in a nutshell, is the thesis of Patel and Moore’s “A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things”. The intrinsic dynamic of capitalism, seeking ever greater profit, generates complex cycles of cheapening of some fundamental resources of the planet.

Patel and Moore call these resources Nature, Money, Work, Care, Food, Energy and Lives. You can increase profits by reducing wages, which means food has to become cheaper for workers to surviive: cheap energy is required to make the fertilisers to grow this cheaper food.The family maintains and reproduces workers for free (in the absence of wages for housework). Playing out the profit rule causes periodic crises, which have always been solved up until now by geographic expansion and colonisation, but eventually we’ve run out of planet. Disposal of wastes is undervalued by economists – treated as an unpriced ‘externality’ – so we now face environmental crises over global warming, plastic pollution and more.

The authors arrived here by combining the World-Systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein with the ‘ecological rift’ theory of the early Marx (as revived in recent times by John Bellamy Foster) to analyse capitalist ecology as a whole, closed system in which all resources are finite, not free, and all wastes have to go somewhere. Their analysis weaves together tightly several strands of Left activism that are at present separate, including labour rights and inequality, feminism, modern slavery, post-colonialism, and environmentalism. The distinctive ecological perspective which renders this interweaving possible is the book’s most important aspect, as these separate strands often clash in political practice: feminism versus male labour rights, immigration versus native labour rights etc. etc.

Inhabiting this novel viewpoint forces Patel and Moore to define their Seven Cheap Things in very particular ways – not entirely divorced from everyday usage but more abstract and far deeper. Tthey call them ‘real abstractions’, after Alberto Toscano. As with the ant, so with the human, everything that is produced – food, clothing, homes and workplaces, transport, communications, computers – must be co-produced with the rest of nature. When looking at a farm one can clearly see a connection between labour and soil, but when looking at a software developer there’s no such obvious link, which tempts us to think a distinction between ‘social’ and ‘natural’ processes, as though they were independent of one another.

The authors refuse and refute this distinction. They define ‘cheapness’ as “a set of strategies to manage the relations between capitalism and the web of life by temporarily fixing capitalism’s crises”, where ‘web of life’ refers to those myriad complex cycles of co-production. Cheapness means more than just low cost though: it’s a strategy for mobilising work – human, animal, botanical, geological work – for as little compensation as possible. Capitalism, as Marx saw, transmutes all the invisible relations of humans to nature into production and consumption at the lowest possible price, in a process whereby money flows through nature. Islands of cash exchange exist within oceans of potentially cheap natural resources like minerals, plants and labour, and these islands are bounded by frontiers through which capitalism continually expands in order to resolve its periodic crises.

Patel and Moore begin their historical analysis from the year 1419 when Portugese sailors first sighted the (literal) island that they called Madeira. When they first landed it was entirely covered with trees, but within 40 years half had been cut down for shipbuilding and land to grow wheat for export to Portugal. The rest were cut down later for space to grow sugar and fuel to refine it in the world’s first factories. The small native population were enslaved, then reinforced by more slaves from North Africa. The authors claim this process set in train a great change of mindset, from earlier Christian notions of Providence to a total split between Nature and Society and a relentless pursuit of profit in exploiting the former. This change affected, and indeed still mostly affects, a newly emerging class of capitalists rather than the whole population: “We may all be in the same boat when it comes to climate change, but most of us are in steerage”.

This Nature/Society split sanctioned not just the pursuit of profit but the creation of all the Seven Cheap Things. Illiterate indigenous peoples, being uncivilised, were relegated to the category of Nature, which sanctioned enslaving them. Women, who did not fight, sail or rule but cared for babies, could equally be relegated to Nature rather than Society. The colonial idea spread rapidly throughout Europe, and soon the discovery of the Americas found sources of cheap gold and silver (ie. cheap money) and later cheap guano to act as fertiliser for cheap food, the better to feed cheap factory workers driven from the land into cities. Marriage and the family ensured that these workers were maintained and reproduced, in effect for free, by unpaid wives: “Worker exploitation is bound together with the appropriation of extrahuman nature and the unpaid work of care... To ask for capitalism to pay for care is to ask for an end to capitalism”.

Each of the Seven Cheap Things receives a chapter to itself, which traces its changing relation to the others through history, using concrete examples. The levels of recursive influence involved may tax one’s power of visualisation, which suggests the book might reward a second reading (regrettably their Systems approach denies us solace from that old Marxist trick of merely intoning the magic word ‘dialectical’).

Occasionally their ‘real abstract’ view of a thing may feel over simplified – for example marriage among the aristocracy was always more about merging dynastic land-holdings than about the care or reproduction of labour – but that’s intentional, to abstract away from obscuring details. To risk a medical metaphor one might say that while Marx described the skeleton and musculature of capitalism, Patel and Moore expose its circulatory system and main organs, but it remains for many others to put flesh and skin onto its numerous limbs (think Vitruvian Man or the goddess Kali). The authors took a brave and wise decision to decant much of the detailed support for their arguments into copious references: the main book is only 212 pages long, with four to six references on most pages so that end-notes, bibliography and index fill another 100.

The book’s tone is radical but forensic – like a doctor describing a malignancy – and neither sentimental or moralising. The authors understand that capitalist states always in the end perpetrate forms of violence, whether on nature, on animals, or on human lives, during the resolution of their crises. Their chapter on Cheap Lives flaunts an excruciating list of the scientific racist taxonomy used to label possessed peoples under the Spanish sistema de castas in South America: negro, sambo, mestizo, mulato and worse.

In their concluding chapter Patel and Moore align themselves with various indigenous struggles provoked by resource theft or pollution like Standing Rock and Pan y Rosas; with Black Lives Matter; with Occupy and other recent grassroots campaigns. If frontiers are the motors of capitalism, then climate change marks the end of room for further expansion. They propose an agenda of resistance based on recognition (of the problems), reparation (not of money alone), redistribution (of land, energy and food), reimagination (of alternative futures), and recreation (liberation from drudgery by technology). It’s a distinctly anarchistic and anti-state stance, but rather tame given what went before, a flaw that might be fatal were it not shared by most similar commentaries, from Paul Mason's Post Capitalism to Wolfgang Streeck's How Will Capitalism End. The very vagueness tells us something about the daunting size of the task.

It struck me though how well their emphasis on ecology complements Jeffrey Sachs’ The Age Of Sustainable Development (about the UN’s Millenium Goals) which demands global coordination of state and non-state actors to combat simultaneously world poverty and the climate crisis. It also fits rather neatly with David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years as a critique of global finance. Read all three books and you may glimpse the outlines of a new vocabulary for social democrats, one that could prove more palatable to young people than the hermetic Marxist jargon still wielded by too many on the Left. An important book then, which deserves wide discussion.