Making Capitalism Fit For Society

Colin Crouch

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780745672236, 9780745672229
• eBook ISBN: 9780745688084
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

Capitalism is the only complex system known to us that can provide an efficient and innovative economy, but the financial crisis has brought out the pernicious side of capitalism and shown that it remains dependent on the state to rescue it from its own deficiencies. Can capitalism be reshaped so that it is fit for society, or must we acquiesce to the neoliberal view that society will be at its best when markets are given free rein in all areas of life?

The aim of this book is to show that the acceptance of capitalism and the market does not require us to accept the full neoliberal agenda of unrestrained markets, insecurity in our working lives, and neglect of the environment and of public services. In particular, it should not mean supporting the growing dominance of public life by corporate wealth. The world's most successful mature economies are those that fully embrace both the discipline of the market and the need for protection against its negative outcomes. Indeed, a continuing, unresolved clash between these two forces is itself a major source of vitality and innovation for economy and society. But maintenance of that tension depends on the enduring strength of trade unions and other critical groups in civil society - a strength that is threatened by neoliberalism's increasingly intolerant onward march.

Outlining the principles for a renewed and more assertive social democracy, this timely and important book shows that real possibilities exist to create a better world than that which is being offered by the wealthy elites who dominate our public and private lives.

1

From a Defensive to an Assertive Social Democracy

European social democracy needs to be shaken out of the defensive posture to which it has shrunk for several years now. It should not be in this position at all. Inequality is again becoming a major issue; the power of large corporations is producing a growing number of problems for consumers, workers and citizens; the neglect of collective needs is producing frightening problems of environmental damage. These are all areas where social democracy has strong positions, and where neoliberal capitalism is at its most vulnerable. We need to understand the paradox whereby, despite this, social democrats in most countries seem depressed, while neoliberals are triumphant; and to explore the changes that social democratic politics needs if it is to move out of defensiveness and reassert itself – alongside environmental and other cause groups – in a new alliance, more integrated than in mere red–green electoral coalitions.

Strictly speaking, the opposite of defensive is offensive; but to talk of an ‘offensive social democracy’ could well be misunderstood. The same would apply to ‘aggressive’. However, feminists have told us that, where men are aggressive, women are assertive. The ancient Greek word demokratia having been a feminine noun, she and her various adjectival sisters (social, Christian, liberal, democracy) can therefore claim only to be becoming assertive when they take an offensive position. Hence, I shall speak here of the need for assertive social democracy. If a political movement is to move from defensiveness to assertiveness, it has to find new, forward-looking interpretations of its historical vision, and has to demonstrate that it is the force most capable of bringing valuable innovation to society at large.

I am using ‘social democracy’ in its normal contemporary sense to describe political movements and parties that have as their historical mission the representation of normal working people, including, prominently, trade unions, by seeking major changes in the operation of a capitalist economy and the inequalities and social damage that they perceive it to produce. The parties are named variously Social Democratic, Labour or Socialist, but ‘social democracy’ has come to be used as something distinct from ‘socialist’. Socialist movements are usually seen as seeking entirely to replace the capitalist economy and markets by a system of common ownership, meaning either the state or a cooperative arrangement. Social democrats, in contrast, accept the market and private ownership as the best means of conducting most economic business, but are deeply sceptical of the market's capacity unaided to achieve certain fundamental social goals. These goals concern: first, the need for all people to be able to enjoy a decent life, even if they cannot be very successful in the market, and with limited inequalities; and second, the need for human beings to be able to manage successfully certain shared, collective tasks. Social democrats are those politically active people who are willing to place constraints on and to shape the market mainly, though not solely, through the use of state or local government power, and in particular through the provision of public services as rights of citizenship, in order to realize those ends.

To repeat the opening paragraph in more detail: modern Western society has extraordinary collective needs and interdependencies. Climate change and other environmental problems, many of them products of our way of life, are threatening that way of life itself, unless we can come together to find solutions. Our economies and societies are increasingly interdependent, bound together as we are through the globalized exchanges of goods, services and financial flows. These interdependencies appear as competitive national rivalries, but in trade the continued success of any one human group is usually improved by the success of everyone else. Sophisticated economies also need advanced infrastructures – transport and communications networks, resources of skilled labour, shared regulatory standards – that depend on collective effort. Western societies are also (in general) rich and can afford to do something about these collective issues while also leaving the great majority of individuals with well-provided private lives. But our societies are also becoming increasingly unequal, decreasingly willing to produce public goods or cover collective risks, while the products of increasing wealth reward an ever smaller minority.

Such a world might be expected to be highly receptive to the messages of social democracy. But, paradoxically, the dominant political ideology – neoliberalism – is leading public policy ever further in exactly the opposite direction: towards increasing attention to purely individual needs, especially those of a privileged elite, to the neglect of both collective ones and the concerns of the great majority. Further, still paradoxically but less surprisingly, our increasing global interdependence is accompanied by growing xenophobia and suspicion of strangers. Although in principle neoliberalism and xenophobia should be mutually incompatible, they appear as allies in many important right-of-centre individual parties or coalitions of parties in contemporary politics.

The answer to these paradoxes is found in the fact that the logic of politics is the logic of power, not that of the coherence of arguments. The contemporary logic of power has several components. I have written in more detail about this in my books Post-Democracy and The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. I shall here just summarize the argument. One of the first consequences of economic globalization was to give the investors of capital increased choice over the parts of the world in which they could place their investments. Workers in the existing industrial countries found themselves competing for work with those in far poorer ones, where labour and social costs, business taxation and the provision of public services were far lower, but where production could now be profitably coordinated from headquarters in the advanced world.

Similarly, governments in the industrial world found their countries competing as investment locations with those whose governments offered investors the attractive features of lower tax rates, less regulation and bad labour conditions. This problem is not as overwhelming as it initially seems. For some activities, firms need the high-quality infrastructures and skilled labour forces that only countries with strong collective policies and high tax rates can provide – as we shall later see, an important component of the case for a confident, assertive social democracy. Also, after a time globalization means that at least some people in poorer countries begin to earn enough to start buying goods and services from the existing wealthy parts of the world. This is a process that has already begun, as, for example, Chinese customers buy German capital goods, British cars and Italian shoes. Nevertheless, the initial shock of globalization was to shift the balance of bargaining power between international investors on the one hand and nationally rooted governments and working classes in the advanced world on the other. This is where the ostensibly illogical alliance of neoliberalism and xenophobia found its rationale: neoliberalism wants unfettered global markets; if mass populations are engaged in mutual suspicion and intolerance, they are also unlikely to accept the transnational regimes that are the only institutions that might regulate these markets.

Second, along with this kind of globalization came the deregulation of financial markets. As we now know, this led investment bankers to develop a range of highly risky investment strategies that made a very small number of people very rich indeed, but at the expense of destabilizing the entire global economy. The consequence was the Anglo-American financial crisis of 2008. This did not, however, bring the system of unregulated, high-risk finance to an end. So dependent have we become on the banking system that governments had to rescue banks from the difficulties in which they had put themselves, often meeting the costs by making cuts in social spending. Thus the poor were called upon to bail out the super-rich. Governments also encouraged banks to return to their earlier irresponsible behaviour, but with greater moderation, so that they might become solvent again. When it was being successful, the unregulated finance model was used to demonstrate that banks and markets together could resolve many of the world's economic problems, and that therefore social democracy's approach of regulated markets and strong social policy was not needed. Once the model had failed, the need to set it on its feet again was used to demonstrate that social democracy's approach could not be afforded. Heads, neoliberalism won; tails, social democracy lost.

Third, and pre-dating both these changes in contemporary capitalism, a major change had been taking place in the support base of social democracy. This had originally rested in the manual working class of manufacturing industry – in particular its male members. The entry into citizenship of this class represented the first moment in the history of organized societies when the mass of ordinary working people had been permitted to play such a role. It provided supporters for policies that recognized the limits of the free market if such people were to have a chance of having secure and decent lives. This class formed trade unions, cooperative movements, and socialist, social democratic and labour parties. But, starting in northern Europe and the USA from the early 1970s onwards, it started to decline in both absolute and relative size. Constantly improving productivity in manufacturing was reducing the need for large numbers of industrial workers; the early stages of globalization were shifting much manual work in manufacturing to the newly developing economies; and demand for various kinds of services increased, generating a different kind of work force. A major part of this new work force was engaged in producing public services: health and other forms of personal care, education, policing and security, public administration. These provided a new support base for social democracy, as the growth of public services was largely championed by social democrats. In particular it provided social democratic parties with female supporters, the majority of public-service jobs being held by women. The private services sectors proved more intractable, not because workers in those sectors were strongly attracted by other parties and forces, but because they have tended not to generate any strong political profile at all. This might seem to present an equal problem to all parties, but as the force that is challenging the main distribution of power in the economy, social democracy needs a positive, strongly identified support base. It is therefore affected asymmetrically by a general decline in political identity, compared with parties representing interests whose strength lies in the market and the economy themselves.

By the early twenty-first century both social democracy's support bases had been put on the defensive. The manual working class continued its irreversible decline, and public employees had been vilified by neoliberal politicians and publicists as parasites living off the taxes of hard-working people in the private sector. If money spent on public services can be portrayed (as it is in much neoliberal rhetoric) as money that might as well be placed in a hole in the ground, then what is to be said of the people who derive their income from putting it in the hole?

Conservative political interests face a major problem in democracies: how can forces which are designed mainly to protect the interests of the privileged attract the support that they need of a majority of people in the middle ranks of society? For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries part of the answer (alongside appeals to nationalism) was to point to the masses of property-less workers and paupers and argue that they would, in their envy, attack the property of the lower middle classes as much as they would that of the rich. By the late twentieth century the property-less masses had shrunk to a tiny group, communism had collapsed and the old fears were no longer plausible. Conservative demonology had to invent new menaces. It has done this partly by representing the welfare state as something that takes money from the pockets of all working people, rich and poor alike, in order to give it to those who refuse to work, particularly to foreigners who have come into a country to take the jobs of natives (which they seem to achieve while also refusing to work). Public employees are then an additional menace, working inefficiently and on excessive incomes and with excessive security while busily expediting these transfers to the undeserving. Where socialist and social democratic politicians had once been depicted as the people leading the attack on all property ownership, they are today seen as those who, for reasons that are never really explained, want to engage in this transfer of funds to the feckless and foreign.

In reality, many contemporary social democratic parties have been off on a different path. As their two key constituencies – manual workers and public employees, and the trade unions that flourished only in these sectors – became problematic, many began to suspect that core constituencies, or historically reliable support bases, were not such a good thing to have after all. This produced the ‘Third Way’ of the British Labour Party, the Neue Mitte of the German SPD, the US New Democrats and several others. Social democracy completed its journey to becoming a movement seeking electoral support from anywhere in the society, and financial support mainly from corporate donors, for a general, classless project of ‘progressive reform’. It also abandoned any attempt at changing the political culture of the wider society, just trying to fit in with what market research told it were the prejudices of the existing culture. ‘Progressive reform’ had been a rallying cry of the liberal and later socialist left of the nineteenth century facing the deeply entrenched and often incompetent institutions of those who had been privileged over the centuries. It now became interestingly ambiguous. It referred to a need to rebuild and improve public services that had been neglected by conservatives pursuing low-tax agendas, but the working habits of the public employees delivering and organizing those services were equally seen as problematic, and in particular the trade unions that represented them. Third Way social democratic parties therefore ceased to say anything problematic about concentrated corporate wealth or even inequality.

These social democrats became first embarrassed at their old supporters, and then disconnected from and increasingly cynical about them. Occasionally one hears social democratic politicians talking about a need to ‘reconnect’ with their ‘core constituency’. This rarely means returning to combating social inequalities; but is a code for a perceived need to be xenophobic, a need that their other constituency of public service professionals, they complain, tries to prevent them from meeting. They also feel themselves doomed to be curators of a political museum, protecting from the rude energies of the dynamic neoliberal world the decaying remains of exhibits labelled ‘trade unions’, ‘labour rights’, ‘universal health service’, ‘social citizenship’.

The Problems of Neoliberalism

The despondent state of social democracy does not mean that neoliberalism is enjoying great success – that is, in the real world of practice, as opposed to that of ideology. Not only has it experienced the great check of the 2008 crisis, but its absolutely central claim to popular appeal – that it replaces state command and control by consumers’ free choices in the market – is increasingly revealed to be a sham. It is this characteristic that is today leading to legitimate doubt whether capitalism can be made fit for society, or whether it will reshape society to meet its own demands. Actually existing political neoliberalism, as opposed to the models of economics textbooks, is about enhancing the power of great corporations and wealthy individuals. This problem is general across several sectors of the economy, as is explored in detail in a recent book by Stephen Wilks on The Political Power of the Business Corporation. It is, however, seen particularly clearly in the response to the financial crisis described above.

In addition, waves of privatization of public facilities and services that have been its central hallmark have similarly served corporate interests. Initially applying only to certain public utilities, privatization is today principally about outsourcing public services to private firms. The state usually remains the paymaster; and usually only a small number of firms is involved in the sub-contracting. Recipients of the services are therefore not customers in the true sense of the word, only users. There is therefore no true market here, just a series of deals between public officials and corporate representatives.

Outsourcing is justified on the grounds that it brings competition, the fundamental condition of a functioning market, but the amount of competition is usually very low. In the case of water supply it is virtually zero, as it has not yet been possible to find means of having more than one company provide water from a particular river basin. In other cases very small numbers of firms engage in very limited competition. It mainly takes place at the stage of winning contracts, the contract itself frequently entailing monopoly supply rights for a number of years. This is the case, for example, with contracting out school, health and social care services. To achieve stability of supply and avoid frequent disruption, contracts have to be set for long periods, often up to twenty-five years. During that prolonged interval there is no competition at all. When contracts are eventually re-tendered, there is a strong – though not universal – presumption in favour of renewal by the incumbent firm; its managers will have developed strong relations with public officials involved in the negotiations; and upheaval can be avoided by staying with an existing supplier.

Outsourcing is also justified on the grounds that private firms bring new expertise, but an examination of the expertise base of the main private contractors shows that the same firms ke...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1: From a Defensive to an Assertive Social Democracy
• 2: We Are All (Partly) Neoliberals Now
• 3: Marketization and Market Inadequacies
• 4: Capitalism and the Welfare State
• 5: The Welfare State of Assertive Social Democracy
• 6: Confronting Threats and Enemies
• 7: Social Democracy as the Highest Form of Liberalism
• 8: What About the Party?
• 9: A Feasible Prospectus?
• Index