Inequality and the Labyrinths of Democracy

Göran Therborn

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781788738996
• eBook ISBN: 9781788739009
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Classical liberalism regarded universal suffrage as a mortal threat to property. So what explains the advent of liberal democracy, and how stable today is the marriage between representative government and the continued rule of capital?

Across every continent, people think inequality is a 'very big problem'. Even the Davos Economic Forum and the OECD say they are worried. And yet capitalist states don't respond. How has democracy been transformed from a popular demand for social justice into a professional power game?

To dispel our worsening political malaise, G?ran Therborn argues, requires a 'disruptive democracy' of radical social movements, such as the climate strike. Inequality and the Labyrinths of Democracy opens with a major new essay mapping the social fractures of the present era. There is also a compact historical survey of worldwide patterns of democratization and a landmark analysis of the OECD economies, 'The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy', originally published in New Left Review and collected here in book form for the first time.

1

Dysfunctional Democracies

Democracy emerged out of mass struggle against inequality, privilege and social injustice. But after a short period in which genuine progress was made, roughly between 1945 and 1980 (and in South America, in the first twelve to fifteen years of the present century) the share of life’s possibilities allocated to the descendants of the historical champions of democracy – the popular classes – has been shrinking. Why is this happening, and can the trend be reversed?

Inequality has increased, but not because ordinary people do not care about it. Inequality is in fact a common and persistent concern. Between 1987 and 2009 the International Social Survey programme asked people across the world what they thought of income differences in their country. On average, 79 per cent responded that they were too large.¹ Similarly, a 2014 survey of forty-four countries by the American Pew Research Center found that inequality was considered a ‘big problem’ by huge majorities.² It is, apparently, preoccupying the global elite as well. According to a survey by the World Economic Forum, ‘deepening economic inequality’ was the number one concern of its Global Agenda Council members.³

Table 1. ‘Inequality Is a Big Problem’: Median Percentages of World Regions

	Big problem	Very big problem
Africa	93	74
Europe^*	91	60
Latin America	82	60
Asia	82	43
US	78	46
Middle East	74	57

* East and West, but excluding Russia and Ukraine.
Source: American Pew Research Center, 8 November 2014.

Another Pew survey in 2018 found evidence of widespread political dissatisfaction. On average, 51 per cent of respondents across twenty-seven countries were unhappy with how their democracy was functioning. Popular anger was directed at politicians and the electoral process. Sixty per cent of respondents believed that ‘no matter who wins an election, things do not change very much’. The same proportion rejected the proposition that ‘elected officials care what ordinary people think’. In the US, seven out of ten respondents were convinced that ‘most politicians are corrupt’. In Greece and South Africa, the ratios were even higher.⁴

Discontent with democracy is clearly correlated with perceptions of the economic situation and of economic opportunity. According to Pew:

In 24 of 27 countries surveyed, people who say the national economy is in bad shape are more likely than those who say it is in good shape to be dissatisfied with the way democracy is working. In the other three countries surveyed, so few people say the economy is good that this relationship cannot be analyzed … In 26 of 27 nations, those who believe their country is one in which most people cannot improve their standard of living are more likely to be dissatisfied with the way democracy is working.⁵

In this way, discontent with actually existing democracy is associated with economic inequality – although people, of course, also have other reasons to be frustrated.

I. The Labyrinthine History of Democracy

Democracy means rule of the people, a simple, literal definition, which should never be lost sight of through the intricacies of political science or the mists of liberal ideology. Aristotle put it very well about 2,300 years ago: ‘A democracy exists whenever those who are free and not well-off, being in the majority, are in control of government.’⁶ It might well be objected that by this definition there is currently hardly any specimen in existence. But that is hardly the fault of Aristotle.

The development of what today is nevertheless called democracy has been a labyrinthine process with many complicated twists and unexpected dead-ends. The subsequent essays in this volume are contributions to that historiography. Here, I will draw out the contrast between the democracy that popular forces fought for (at the risk, and sometimes at the cost, of their lives) and the dysfunctional democracies we have ended up with today.

Modern beginnings

Popular rule was put on the modern political agenda by radical Jacobins aligned with the Parisian populace, the sans-culottes, in the French Revolution. Robespierre was the main spokesman for universal (male) suffrage, based not just on the equality of man but also on the social obligation of the state to provide ‘subsistence to all its members’ and to put education ‘within reach of all citizens’.⁷ The ‘section’ assemblies of the sans-culottes combined universal male suffrage with the principle of revocative popular representatives under popular scrutiny and control, and with broader social demands for equality of jouissances, the pleasures, the good things of life.⁸

The French Revolution ended in self-destructive Terror, capitalist corruption, the Napoleonic Empire, and a half-blown Restoration of the ancien régime. But its democratic legacy soon surfaced. Alphonse de Lamartine, the famous poet and future leader of the Second Republic, published a brochure in 1832 advocating universal suffrage, as well as free public education, public social assistance and the abolition of slavery.⁹ In the bourgeois ‘reform banquets’ preceding the 1848 revolution, toasts were raised to universal suffrage and admiration expressed for the radical leaders of the Revolution – Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just.¹⁰

By a decree of 5 March 1848, the provisional government of the February Revolution installed general male suffrage, swelling the number of voters from 250,000 to 9 million.¹¹ The ensuing election, called for Easter Sunday, was the first mass democratic poll in world history, fully and freely competitive and including all political currents, with their vastly different resources. After mass, voters trooped off in alphabetical order to the centre of the canton, often hours away, led by the local priest and the mayor. Turnout was 84 per cent, but higher in the countryside than in the cities – radical Paris in particular. The intelligent Right, which had pushed for rapid elections, had calculated correctly. In a still predominantly rural France, not a single peasant was elected, and only a few workers. Conservative republicans, including camouflaged monarchists, were in a modest majority among the 880 elected deputies, while clear monarchists outnumbered radical republicans.¹²

This lesson in how to manage the people within a democratic process was taken up by leading conservative politicians in the major European states, first by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte who turned the Second Republic into a personal empire, and later by Disraeli and Bismarck, although popular pressure ultimately overtook the schemes of these gentlemen, issuing into liberal democratic government: in France after the military defeat and the Paris Commune of 1871, in Germany after the military defeat and November Revolution of 1918, and in undefeated Britain by instalments.

Was the United States another democratic trailblazer? Jill Lepore’s recent history, These Truths, argues that by the 1830s, the US had developed into ‘the first largescale popular democracy in the history of the world’.¹³ Although it is true that something largescale and popular had developed in the US by this point, it fell short of Lepore’s billing. The aim of the American War of Independence had not been democracy at all, but a ‘republic’. According to James Madison the difference between democracy and a republic was representation, ‘the delegation of government to a small number of citizens elected by the rest’. A republic could govern a large state, whereas (direct) democracies were confined to smaller ones. In Madison’s eyes a republic also had another advantage, perhaps even more important: it could rein in the ‘ruling passions or interests’ of the majority.¹⁴

Racism is constitutive of all settler polities, to legitimate the appropriation of land belonging to other peoples. The US offers no exception to the rule. One illuminating piece of evidence is a letter by George Washington labelling the British governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, an ‘Arch Traitor to the Rights of Humanity’ who needed to be ‘instantly crushed’.¹⁵ Dunmore’s crime had been to proclaim that slaves and indentured servants who enrolled with the British would be emancipated. Washington was the owner of hundreds of slaves.¹⁶ ‘The decades after 1815 witnessed a deepening commitment to excluding all but free whites from membership in the American body politic’, observes Robert Parkinson in The Common Cause. ‘By the 1830s, the now-much-extended republic was strictly a nation for whites.’¹⁷

The competing historical claims of Lepore and Parkinson hinge on the figure of Andrew Jackson, the military man of the people elected president by popular vote in 1828. ‘The first principle of our system’, said Jackson, ‘is that the majority is to govern.’¹⁸ But as Lepore subsequently acknowledges, Jackson was also a genocidal racist, whose Indian clearances resemble the Ottoman removal of the Armenians in 1915. Liberal democracy in the sense of competitive elections under universal suffrage was achieved in the US only in the late 1960s.

One curious aspect of the twisted history of democracy is that formal democratic institutions have occasionally been ceded from above, prior to any popular demand. Forerunners in this respect were the oligarchs of the Japanese Meiji Restoration, who in 1890 provided their country with a Constitution, a restrictive electoral system and a powerless Diet. The intention was to rally the population for the defence and strengthening of the realm, threatened by encroaching imperial predators. The ‘reactive modernisers’ of Japan may therefore be counted among the conservative nineteenth-century pioneers of what today has become a mainstream notion of democracy: that elections are not for popular power and social change, but for political management of the status quo, and for facilitating the development of national power.

The meaning of democracy that people fought for

In other cases, democracy had to be won by the people, against ferocious opposition. There was a telling saying among the mid-nineteenth century German elite: ‘Gegen Demokraten helfen nur Soldaten’ (‘Against democrats, only soldiers help’). Or as the British historian and Whig cabinet minister Thomas Macaulay declared in the House of Commons on 3 May 1842: ‘I believe universal suffrage would be fatal to all purposes for which government exists, and for which aristocracies and all other things exist, and that it is utterly incompatible with civilization … I will oppose with every faculty I possess the proposition for universal suffrage.’¹⁹

Popular struggles for democracy had particular focal points in different parts of the world. Those in Europe were organized around class and class relations. Here, the foundational question was: ‘What rights are the people entitled to?’ The first mass mobilization for popular rule was the British Chartist movement against which Macaulay railed. It demanded universal male suffrage. The Second International broadened the demand to genuinely universal suffrage. Its 1893 Zürich congress unanimously adopted a resolution proclaiming ‘the right to vote for everybody of mature age, without consideration of sex or race’.

The British pro-democracy campaign began in the wake of a disappointingly narrow extension of the franchise in 1832. Popular anger at the shortcomings of the ‘Great Reform Act’ were compounded by a harsh new liberal Poor Law consigning the poor and the unemployed to a kind of imprisonment in ‘workhouses’. In February 1837 the London Working Men’s Association adopted a petition to Parliament which became known as the People’s Charter, with six demands: equal political representation of town and country, male suffrage, annual parliaments, no property qualifications for MPs, a secret ballot, regular sittings of Parliament throughout the year with attendance paid for. The Charter led to a nationwide, often militant mass campaign, mainly among skilled artisans and the working classes in general, though also attracting some radical middle-class support. It included a local insurrection (in Newport in southern Wales), and was imbricated, chaotically and without national leadership, in a large strike wave in 1842, which led to its defeat.

During the Chartist campaign, both the social democratic and the liberal-conservative conceptions of democracy got their early formulations. The former was expressed by one of the most prominent Chartist leaders, James Bronterre O’Brien: ‘to establish democracy not only in the Government but throughout every industrial department of society’.²⁰ A public address of 1839 by a Women’s Political Union in Newcastle put it more directly: ‘pass the People’s Charter into law and emancipate the white slaves of England’.²¹ Critically commenting on the Charter’s six points, the bourgeois Manchester Guardian stumbled on what has today become the standard view of liberal political science and journalism: the suffrage is ‘merely an expedient for obtaining good government; that, and not the franchise, it is to...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1. Dysfunctional Democracies
• 2. The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy
• 3. The Right to Vote and the Four World Routes to/through Modernity
• Notes
• Index