Introduction: Collective Self-Determination and Critical Social Theory
Critical Theory considers that the structure of capitalism limits the potential for collective self-determination and that this is a major source of injustice and domination. Of course, the possibility of collective self-determination presupposes that it already exists as a norm (Habermas, 2001a; Taylor, 2004; Wagner, 2012). Democratic political orders have typically sought to present themselves as embodying, to varying degrees, a principle of collective self-determination, such as in the form of popular sovereignty or public opinion. On the one hand, this is one reason why there is a considerable tension between capitalism and democracy. Capitalism is an economic system founded on private appropriation and an asymmetrical distribution of wealth and power. On the other hand, it is by no means the case that the existing institution of democracy satisfies the conditions of collective self-determination (Browne, 2006; Blokker, 2014). Critical Theory seeks to discern the conditions that would enable society to autonomously act upon itself. It considers, for this reason, that collective self-determination depends on broad social conditions and not just formally democratic political institutions. These social conditions include effective participation and social solidarity (Habermas, 1996a; Honneth, 2014). Moreover, Critical Theory equally considers that the existing norm of collective self-determination has been open to regressive ideological expression, and hence its distorted institution is an object of critique.
The aspiration of collective self-determination existed prior to the nation state system. It is part of what Castoriadis (1991) describes as the modern social imaginary of the project of individual and collective autonomy. Castoriadis considers that this project originated with the Ancient Greek institution of democracy and then reemerged around the twelfth century with the creation of self-governing city-states in Europe. This connection to the social imaginary of autonomy draws attention to how collective self-determination is open to different articulations (Domingues, 1995; 2006; Eisenstadt, 1999a). Marx believed that collective self-determination presupposed the transcendence of capitalism and the structuring of society according to radically different principles, including those of the abolition of class and the distribution of resources according to need (Marx, 1977b; Marx and Engels, 1977). Yet, the perspective of Critical Theory has developed through an apprehension of how Marx elided different dimensions of the problem of collective self-determination. Marx seemed to alternate between conceptions of socialism as defined by the free association of producers and that of the rational administration of things by the state. Marx once proposed a historical sequence in which the institution of the latter preceded and enabled the former (Marx, 1977b). In any event, Marx arguably lacked an adequate appreciation of the potential tension between these two conceptions of a self-determining collective and twentieth century developments would reveal the conflicts between them.
Contemporary Critical Theory has sought to systematically rethink two assumptions of Marxâs proposition concerning collective self-determination. It argues that collective self-determination should not be juxtaposed to individual autonomy and that it is important then to make explicit the institutional means of facilitating the integrity of individual and collective autonomy (Honneth, 2012; 2014). Critical Theory has sought to democratize the idea of collective self-determination through emphasizing its dependence on practices like public participation and democratic deliberation (Habermas, 1996a; Fraser, 2003a; 2003b). Indeed, Habermas (1998; 2009) considers that his model of deliberative democracy is an alternative to Republican notions of collective self-determination. Critical Theory contends that individual autonomy requires the autonomy of other individuals. In other words, it rejects the view of individual autonomy as something that can be achieved either at the expense of other individuals or by becoming independent of them (Anderson and Honneth, 2005; Browne, 2010).
For Critical Theory, the notion of collective self-determination is a historical category. It is a normative-political concept that has been reformulated and reinterpreted, and an explanatory-diagnostic notion that reveals the institutional limitations to social autonomy. Of particular significance, notions of collective self-determination presume social agency (Domingues, 1995; Eisenstadt, 2000; Wagner, 2012). The original Marxian vision equated social agency with the dialectic of class relations, hence this agency may itself represent a potential that is subordinated and oppressed. The Frankfurt School and Habermas argued that this class dialectic had been modified and consequently that class relations tended to be increasingly expressed in mediated forms (Marcuse, 1964; Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972; Habermas, 1976; 1984; 1987a; 1987b). For the Frankfurt School circle, these modifications were primarily due to the expansion of technological and instrumental rationality, the development of administrative systems of domination, and the intrusion of the commodity form into spheres beyond that of wage labour, such as through the mass media and consumerism, with the concomitant tendencies for reification and the eroding of the subjective capacity for agency.
By contrast, the Critical Theory of Habermas and Honneth highlights how the potential for collective self-determination expanded in capitalist societies with the extension of democratic rights to wider categories of persons and the institution of the welfare state (Habermas, 1987a; 1987b; 1996a; Honneth, 1995a; 2014). These social reforms equally demonstrate the extent to which the idea of collective self-determination became assimilated to the nation state formation. The welfare state reduced some of the injustices of capitalism that limit the potential for collective self-determination. However, Critical Theory has never considered the welfare state to be an institution capable of giving full-expression to the idea of collective self-determination (Habermas, 1976; 1987a). The resurgence of market capitalism reinforces this awareness of the welfare stateâs limitations and deficiencies in terms of collective self-determination, whilst enabling a renewed appreciation of its measures to reduce injustice and to underpin equal liberty.
In this chapter, I examine arguments about how the structural contradictions of capitalist modernity that limit collective self-determination have been reconfigured. The new nexus of social change is often depicted as deriving from the conflict between globalization and democracy. My analysis sketches some of the significant dimensions of this conflict and outlines aspects of influential interpretations of its central dynamics, including some of the relevant commentaries on the recent global financial crisis and austerity regimes. I find that changes associated with the contemporary phase of capitalist development precipitate revisions in Critical Theory and its conception of collective self-determination. In the âExcursusâ following the chapter, I draw attention to the political self-understanding of the broadly conceived alter-globalization (or global justice) movement. I suggest that two dimensions of this movementâs interpretation of its practices are particularly salient to the interest of Critical Theory in democratization and emancipatory social transformation.
Globalization and Democracy
A distinctive feature of recent versions of critical sociology is the assumption that the nexus between globalization and democracy supersedes the earlier class conflict between labour and capital. It is regularly suggested that the amelioration of class inequalities through the social rights of citizens is itself bound to national governance. Globalization threatens this dimension of the democratization of capitalist society, because the authoritative power of the state is anchored in its sovereign control over territory. Ulrich Beck presents a version of this argument in commenting that
globalization means one thing above all else: denationalization â that is, erosion of the national state, but also its possible transformation into a transnational state. (Beck, 2000a: 14)
Beckâs definition points to the democratic parameters of âfirstâ modernity; it is often the self-organizing capacity of civil society that is the point of reference for accounts of democracy in contemporary modernity. It is equally possible to contend that the earlier class conflict still underpins the tension between globalization and democracy, particularly by way of reference to the increasing inequality in the distribution of wealth in advanced capitalist societies and the neoliberal reforms of labour markets over the past decades (Harvey, 2005; Therborn, 2011; Piketty, 2014). Globalization is popularly considered the primary cause of the regeneration of class relations and its dynamic of anti-capitalist struggle, with highly visible landmark moments like the Seattle protests, the World Social Forum, and the Occupy movements contesting global capitalism and its legitimations (Browne and Susen, 2014; see Excursus below).
Nevertheless, the same structural changes inform the arguments for the resurgence of class antagonism and the assertion of a new dynamic associated with the polarity of globalization and democracy. Specifically, they each refer to the system integration of the capitalist economy having reached a critical threshold. This change compounds what Habermas (1976; 1987a) and Claus Offe (1984) described as the structural limitations of the welfare state, that is, the dependence of the state upon capital accumulation to obtain sufficient taxation revenue to fund compensatory and redistributive measures. In an attempted critical updating of Offe and Habermasâ thesis, Wolfgang Streeck (2011: 5) argues that over the past forty years the âbasic underlying tension in the political-economic configuration of advanced capitalist societiesâ has manifested itself in various institutional forms. Streeck defines this basic underlying tension as that between market determination in accordance with the supposed principle of marginal productivity and social rights that are largely contingent on the state and allocated according to need or the social justice criteria of equity. The âmigrationâ of this structural conflictâs manifestations is due to the transference that results in each case from addressing its specific institutional appearance and the perpetuation then of the tensionâs basic dynamic (Streeck, 2011). Its full detrimental social effects were basically delayed, Streeck claims, through âbuying timeâ, that is, the deleterious effects were deferred and partly concealed through public and private borrowing (Streeck, 2014).
Streeck argues that after the decades of the post-second world war consolidation of âdemocratic capitalismâ, which included major developments like expanding the welfare state, enacting rights to collective bargaining, guarantees of full employment and neo-Keynesian policies, the distributional conflict of labour and capital came to manifest itself in the late 1960s and 70s in the monetary form of inflation. Public expenditure initially moderated inflationâs deleterious consequences; however, as DumĂ©nil and LĂ©vy (2004; 2011) similarly argue, inflationâs depreciation of the value of existing capital and the perception promoted by neo-classical economics that public debt diminished private investment resulted in the neo-liberal reaction. Neoliberal responses typically included reductions in certain areas of public expenditure, prioritizing the limiting of inflation over commitments to full employment, and the undermining of labour market conditions and associated social protections, as well as restricting or reducing the social rights of citizenship that expanded with the institution of the welfare state (see Chapter 3). In many respects, the changes associated with the resurgence of market capitalism can be seen as mediated expressions of dialectics of control and the resistance of capital to the regulatory and redistributive âsocial contractâ of the welfare state (DumĂ©nil and LĂ©vy, 2004; Streeck, 2014). Streeck believes that Habermasâ and Offeâs model of the strains and tensions of late-capitalism did not foresee the changes that would actually come to pass because it treated capital âas an apparatus rather than an agency, as means of production rather than a classâ (Streeck, 2014: 13; see Habermas, 2015: 85).
The neo-liberal programmes brought the basic conflict of democratic capitalism to the surface again, but this struggle did not conform to prior expectations concerning capitalist crises. It had previously been presumed that mass âunemployment would undermine support, not just for the government of the day but also for democratic capitalism itselfâ (Streeck (2011: 14). Like Streeck, Craig Calhoun (2011: 26) highlights the paradoxical outcome of the negative implications of public austerity being responded to by increasing private debt. In many advanced capitalist societies, citizens used private debt to sustain, and in some cases increase, consumption patterns and to meet needs that had previously been met as a social entitlement, such as to health care or education (Crouch, 2009). Indeed, the financial liberalization of the last decades of the twentieth century promoted increasing private indebtedness. Although this is not a full explanation of the causes of the recent financial crisis and recession, the increasing provision of need through private debt proved to be a precipitating condition. Democratic capitalismâs structural tension became increasingly internationalized during this period and the financial crisis revealed some of the consequences of economic globalization. In many advanced nation states, public debt substantially increased as a result of the initial system preserving measures of refinancing banks and failing corporations and the subsequent increased social expenditure in response to the economic contraction and the simultaneous decline in taxation revenues (Calhoun, 2011; Schafer and Streeck, 2013). Streeck details the changing and perverse character of the ensuing struggles:
In the three years since 2008, distributional conflict under democratic capitalism has turned into a complicated tug-of-war between global financial investors and sovereign nation-states. Where in the past workers struggled with employers, citizens with finance ministers, and private debtors with private banks, it is now financial institutions wrestling with the very states that they had only recently blackmailed into saving them. (Streeck, 2011: 22)
The sequence of displacements of capitalismâs âbasic conflictâ modifies some of the dynamics of the relationship of the welfare state to market capitalism. The general tendency of this historical sequence is one that Peter Wagner rightly considers consists in âa relative decoupling of capitalist practices from their national institutional embedding, and, thus, an escape from the reach of democratically voiced demandsâ (Wagner, 2012: 98). The transnational policies of neo-liberal economic coordination and the development of a myriad of complex economic instruments, like leveraging and derivatives, not only transfigure the former distributional conflicts but also appear to increase the autonomy of capital. This is the case even though the economic coordination of the global system involves agreements between sovereign nation states, like the North American Free Trade Agreement, and nation states are the financiers, albeit unequally, of international agencies, like the International Monetary Fund. However, it is, a new kind of global economy, according to Colin Crouch (2005) and Saskia Sassen (2011),
one centred in global firms using national governments to make global space for them, rather than a global economy centred in international trade and capital flows governed in good part by states, no matter their unequal power to do so. (Sassen, 2011: 22)
In particular, transnational financeâs empowerment appears to qualify the stateâs capacity to underpin social rights, given that even minor increases in borrowing costs through rising interest rates have substantial implications for indebted nation states (Streeck, 2011; DumĂ©nil and LĂ©vy, 2011; Lapavitsas et al., 2012). There can be little doubt that this restraint extends to the capacity of labour to organize and mobilize in struggles over distribution, although globalization has involved more direct changes to the conditions of labour, including the relocating of production and the institutionalizing of the legal, as well as illegal, remuneration of migrant labour below those of national economic standards (Sassen, 2011; 2014).
The earlier dynamics of modern capitalist societies, particularly those of the dialectic of class relations and the structural tension between market determination and social rights underpinned by the state, have not so much been superseded as radically transformed. On the one hand, the processes of globalization have, to varying degrees, altered the dynamics of inequality and social conflict. On the other hand, the nexus between democracy and globalization increasingly modulates the dynamic of class conflict. These changes are consistent with Boltanski and Chiapelloâs (2005) depiction of the new spirit of capitalismâs displacement, rather than resolution, of the conflict between labour and capital. In Boltanski and Chiapelloâs opinion, displacement was originally a response to the industrial contestation of the period of the consolidation of welfare state capitalism. Focusing on the transformation of industrial and managerial practices and their justifications, Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) argue that the model of hierarchical authority was displaced by another sense of control, that is, of control as self-control and coordination through self-organization rather than managerial direction. However, new capitalismâs claim to have dissolved the alienating and authoritarian dimensions of the conflict between labour and capital was contradicted by the industrial reforms that it enacted. These produced greater insecurity and new versions of managerial authority, yet the paradigm change in capitalist managerial practices and the corresponding discourses served to fracture the class-based modes of collective solidarity (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Boltanski, 2011; Browne, 2014b).
Rather than adjudicating between a cosmopolitan and a national paradigm of critical sociology, I want to argue that the nexus between globalization and democracy should be understood as part of the process of the contested constitution of the social. It is a contestation that can give rise to different institutional configurations and the conflicts of the earlier phases of modernity can be perceived as implicated in those of its latest phase. Although the multiple modernities perspective has been subjected to significant criticisms (Bhambra, 2007; Domingues, 2012; Wagner, 2012), it illuminates important dimensions of this contested constitution of the social and the problem of collective self-determination (Arnason, 1991b; 2002; Eisenstadt, 1999a; 2000).
Multiple modernities highlights how collective self-determination is connected to the distinctively modernist understanding of the social order as something that is constructed through social action and amenable to transformation. This ontological standpoint informs a variety of cultural and political programmes, but the multiple modernities perspective has equally emphasized the degree to which these projects were shaped by historically long-term cultural understandings and the forms of political authority of different world-religions and civilizations. In other words, it emphasized the tensions that produced different institutionalized outcomes and how variations in modernity ensue from the intersection of various conflicts, like the competition between political centres and peripheries, the cleavages in the world economic system at different historical conjunctures, as well as the contrast between particularistic and universalistic collective identities which can appear within, as well as between, political or religious groups.
From the standpoint of Critical Social Theory, many of the movements that the multiple modernities perspective considers agencies of modernization and sources of its variation, such as authoritarian nationalist or communal religious movements, are not themselves committed to versions of collective self-determination that represent social progress and that are consistent with the implications of the social imaginary of the project of autonomy. Rather, many of these movements distort the emancipatory sense of collective self-determination through equating it with a vision of the social order that is contrary to its democratic implications, such as that of the ethnically homogeneous nation or even forced economic development. Indeed, the analyses of multiple modernities have shown, for example, how the background of Russian imperial domination influenced the Soviet model of socialist modernization and how politicized religious movements in different parts of the world became mobilized in response to other movements, like the feminist movement in the West and the perceived failures of Arab nationalism in the Middle East (Arnason, 1993; Eisen...
